Repairing cognitive function fall
Brain cells are the new Birkins and other ins/outs this autumn/winter
OUT: Community as a marketing buzzword. IN: Craft as a marketing buzzword. Remember when every brand was “building community”? Safe to say that era has been euthanised. The new incantation is craft, I’m talking painstaking process videos, moody shots of artisans at work, endless odes to stitching. It’s probably due to this terrifying graph floating around showing luxury prices skyrocketing over the past five years. I guess you’ve got to justify the markup somehow.
OUT: Clothing that makes noise online. IN: Clothing that actually sells. The last few years of fashion overdosed on dopamine, viral gimmick and runway stunts. Good for headlines, bad for sales. Turns out you can’t pay rent in likes. This season the mood has shifted: brands don’t want you to consume the hot take, they want you to consume the product. So goodbye spray-painted dresses, hello things you might actually wear out of the store.
OUT: The SSENSE sale. IN: Paying full price for emerging, young designers (as you should). SSENSE built its empire on two things: betting early on indie designers and training us all to wait for the markdown email. Guilty as charged - in six years of shopping there, I never once paid full price. Which is why, in light of SSENSE filing for bankruptcy protection (more on that in a piece I wrote here), I can’t stop thinking about how unsustainable that model really was. I know nobody wants to be told to spend more in the middle of a global squeeze. (Yes, I hear myself after last week’s frugal chic sermon.) But if you want young designers to survive, the best thing you can do is buy their clothes (at retail, not clearance).
OUT: Hyped creative director debuts. IN: Follow through. 15 creative director debuts in a single season. 15! The fashion industry loves nothing more than treating a new appointment like the second coming of Christ. But hype burns fast. The real test isn’t the first collection, it’s the third, fourth and fifth (a privilege not all recent previous debuts were given, mind you). You should read Ana Andjelic in The Sociology of Business’s take on hype versus halo here, which explains how to “slowly building halo” through “repeated delivery of excellence in a single domain, be it product or cultural.”
OUT: Quiet luxury and tradwife fashion. IN: Literally anything else. I have no more words to waste on the former.
OUT: Making content. IN: World building. Say what you want about Demna’s Gucci, but the man is world building. It’s a trend on the rise. More and more brands are spinning out their own IP, launching branded TV shows, setting up in-house studios, even producing Oscar-winning films. Thom Bettridge has a great Substack post on the phenomenon if you want to go deeper.
OUT: Brain rot summer. IN: Repairing cognitive function fall. It was the summer even Jia Tolentino’s brain broke. We’ve been reduced to goldfish with Wi-Fi. Please, I beg, let this be the bottom. This fall, can we make brain cells the new Birkin?
OUT: Doing something in the easiest, fastest way possible. IN: Friction. The modern success metric has been speed and efficiency, which has resulted in a cultural landscape where Facebook is rolling out an AI matchmaking service and young people are using Chat GPT to write their applications; HR is using AI to read them; no one is getting hired. Kyla Scanlon was right, we need more friction.
OUT: Raging baiting. IN: Nervous system regulation. Attention for attention’s sake has got to go. I cannot endure another mass-manufactured rage-bait moment. At some point we have to stop letting ourselves get triggered by random strangers online, or worse, by consumer brands.
OUT: Little treat culture. IN: Affordability and access as the baseline. Instead of asking if you want a little treat (i.e a £20 smoothie) you should ask yourself “Why is this even priced like a luxury”. As usual, Eugene Healy has the best analysis on how “in the absence of being able to buy a house we created whole categories as aspirational lifestyle brands for people to spend money on” and that “as the world gets more expensive ironically, it opens up aspirational brand narratives for smaller and smaller purchases.”
OUT: Protein-maxxing. In: Fibre-maxxing and gut health. Stop with the whey powder and eat some broccoli.
OUT: Monitoring spirits. IN: “You can’t outcompete someone having fun.” Social media isn’t social anymore, it’s just media, which makes posting feel absurdly high-stakes. Wild how much people see without ever interacting or use as a yardstick to measure you against themselves. Remember, constant comparison is the lowest vibe of all and having fun is the highest.
