In and Out of Fashion
What happens when the love is gone?
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Hello, and happy 2024! I won’t flatter myself by assuming anyone has noticed I haven’t written anything about fashion in this newsletter since the Phoebe Philo launch in early November of last year – but, if you did, my bad!
Explanation to follow, but first, a confession: Something I struggle with a lot, which is to say that it occupies a lot of brain space, is questioning whether I actually enjoy something or if I’m making myself think that I enjoy it because I believe that enjoying it would say something about me. Follow my meaning? The best example of this I can give is my decision to live in New York City these past twelve (!?) years: Do I truly love living here, or do I keep putting myself through the various little hells the city throws at us because I think living here makes me inherently more interesting?
(The palpable relief I feel whenever I come back to the city after some time away is enough to assure me that, yes, I do genuinely love living here.)
My therapist would likely argue I shouldn’t think about this as often as I do, but personally, I don’t think having the occasional check-in with yourself is a bad thing. We’re constantly growing and evolving as people (or, at least, we should be) and it’s easy to stick with old patterns instead of allowing ourselves the space to branch out and change our minds.
Which is to say: I recently hit this checkpoint with the fashion industry. This isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last, but this past fall, I just felt so meh about the whole thing. It’s not like there was lack of news; there were fashion shows, creative director appointments, the announcement of the next Met Gala theme. But every time I sat down to write about it, my brain went [tv static noise]. And, because I am my own boss and I do this newsletter largely for free, instead of pushing through and writing something, anything, I just…didn’t.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love fashion. I love the play of getting dressed. I love the people in the industry (to quote Ayo Edebiri’s hilarious Golden Globes speech, “unless you were mean or something”), both friends and those whose work I admire. I’ve been lucky to get fun stories to work on as a freelancer and I still get excited by an interesting pitch.
I’m just not currently in love with fashion. This has happened before, and I have no doubt that global events have something to do with the switch; as much admiration and respect as I have for fashion and the industry, it’s hard to feel any sense of urgency about it in the face of real global crises — like the 2016 presidential election, the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Israel-Hamas war.
Beyond that, though, I’ve felt so disappointed by fashion of late. Everything seems so algorithmically driven, campaigns and collections and products all made by a group of experts working from lists of data about what “sells,” spit out by computers. There’s no room for excitement, for discovery, when every decision comes down to the bottom line. Fashion is hardly unique in this predicament – see also: Hollywood – but damn, doesn’t it suck? Don’t we miss the days when a runway could surprise and delight us? When things weren’t copies of copies of copies of whoever was last crowned the quote-unquote tastemaker?
I’ve also been let down by the lack of care shown by most of the industry’s biggest power players. For a few years, there was so much lip-service paid to sustainability, racial diversity, body representation, and so much of it has proven to be empty. People are happy to sit on panels and serve up keynote speeches making big promises which are never delivered upon. I don’t say this to diminish the real work being done by so many people in the industry to make things better, but why, in 2024, does it still feel like the gains must be scraped out with our bare hands?
That’s always been true, too, and I’m typically able to celebrate the positives instead of getting discouraged by the negatives. Sometimes, though, it’s hard to keep my chin up about the whole thing. And I think that’s okay.
I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me a little sad not to feel that same spark, though. I miss it!
I’ll bounce back – I always do. There will be a particularly wonderful show during the upcoming fashion season, or a promising new talent emerging, stories about inspiring work from revolutionaries inside the industry. I’m still engaging with fashion, keeping up with news and reading magazines (print forever) and coming up with the story ideas that pay the bills. I’m just letting the fashion field lie fallow for a little bit so the soil can regenerate itself for the next crop.
Okay that analogy got away from me a little bit.
P.S.: I stole the idea for headline of this newsletter from Grace Mirabella’s excellent memoir In and Out of Vogue; you should read it if you haven’t and it appears you can still get a copy on Amazon.