Our Investment in Seasons
“Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.” — Francis Bacon
There are many changes afoot in the world of how, and why, we wear clothes. This has a few layers to it, if I may. Let’s start, first, with what we buy.
What we buy.
“We’re not against rap. We’re not against rappers…”
The first inflection point, for me, in how fashion changed forever, was Run-DMC’s Adidas tracksuits. Hip-hop was just emerging as the art form which would come to dominate the next 35 years of global culture. It was, I rate, more dynamic and subversive than its predecessors: more collaborative, openly competitive — it was epigrammic and visual, accompanied by graffiti and break dancing, rule-bending and brimming with confidence from those populations who had been left out. Vogue ballrooms in Harlem are probably the true spiritual predecessor to hip-hop, in a funny way. Q.E.D.
Why we buy.
Values are valuable.
Fast-forward 30 years, and streetwear is the past, present, and future of high fashion. It is androgynous, colorful, confident, conscientious and irreverent at once. It rejects the “high/low” paradigm of a stratified culture. It is cool. When we first met Regy Perlera and Luc Succès of Seasons over a year ago, they were cool. They had worked at Nike on SNKRS, Spotify on Discover Weekly, StockX on user experience. They were Latino and Black. Sweatshirts were a uniform, long before COVID declared them essential wear.
They told us a story about value and values in culture. These values start with essentialism in a culture of excess. How do you create focus, simplicity, and efficiency in artistic expression? For the last 20 years, the fashion industry chose to never ask that question. It simply added more runway shows, funded more lines and labels, churned out more items whose shelf life got shorter and shorter.
Nearly 20% of global waste water is produced by the fashion industry (2nd largest wastewater producing industry). The fashion industry produces 10% of all humanity’s carbon emissions.
How We Buy.
Fashion as-a-Service
But the rest of the world was slowly leaving them behind. The discerning shopper today values values. He cares more about access to means of expression than accumulation for its own sake. More consumers realize one of my favorite quotations: “ownership is the hack humanity uses because of imperfect information”. We want to express ourselves, we want to be memorable, we want to be cool. But we want to be sustainable, we want to be cost-effective, we want to be efficient. Rent The Runway showed this could work for women’s couture, but stumbled into an even bigger opportunity: could it work for clothing more broadly? A few months ago, The New York Times asked Seasons will men rent? The answer has been a startling, resounding yes.
The retail apocalypse began long before COVID. Mid-size and big box retailers were finding that the fundamental premises of how consumers shopped were changing in ways that made their models impossible: Barney’s, Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, Lord & Taylor, Neiman Marcus, J.C. Penney, Sears–– ghosts of culture past. The internet’s distribution model pushes for variance. The big get bigger, the small get more varied, niche, and defensible. The fashion show seasonal model was designed for the traditional wholesale buyer. Today, those buyers are gone. Brands must go direct, go boutique, or pay the tax to stand-out among the great aggregators. Seasons has created a new data-driven method for brands to sell product, measure consumer sentiment, build relationship. Algorithms are personalizing experiences across commerce, and brands are succeeding through both superior storytelling, and sophisticated relationship with their consumer data. The product learns who likes what, where they are, why the like it, and they leave it to the brand to figure out what to do about that. It’s working.
Seasons is an access platform for fashion. It anchors fashion around streetwear, and allows you to rent Dries Van Noten and Jacquemus, Rhude and Prada (and beyond). You cycle clothes by the mood or the season. You can access the latest drops from exclusive collections in Paris and Milan, or shop vintage archives from your favorites. We were thrilled to lead their seed round of financing at the beginning of the year, and are astounded by the growth of the platform since then. They work with the best brands in business, period. They launch nationally this holiday season, so apply for a membership, and get fitted.
