Is Fashion Becoming Lazy?
Watching the last fashion month was a weird experience. While shows from Chloe and Balmain filled my eyes with beauty, I did see some fashion triggers for anyone my age. Better than explaining it, I can show you:
If you are anything close to my age: I know. It hurts. I’ve been working in fashion for years, so I heard the old ‘everything comes back’ motto. But common!
Skinny jeans stopped being cool in 2020, only four years ago. Gladiators were a thing ten years ago. Those sneakers, or whatever you want to call that atrocity, were in fashion in the 2010s. That’s not even 15 years since we let them go. And the same can be said for the whole “keep calm and move on” moment. The low-rise jeans are probably the oldest among these. Old meaning not even 20 years since we stopped wearing them.
Was it ever that fast? Did we always bring fashion trends back this fast, or are we just running out of ideas? Is vintage shopping popularity responsible for it? Or are fashion conglomerates’ focus on growth to blame?
Let’s try to understand it together, shall we?
What Are Fashion Trends?
Let’s start with the basics. We can’t talk about recycling fashion without understanding fashion trends and their stages.
Fashion trends encompass styles, designs, and preferences dictating clothing, accessories, and aesthetics within a period and context. They’re usually influenced by culture, societal norms, economics, media, and celebrities. Fashion trends often emerge from runways, street styles, social media, or any other culturally relevant event. They reflect societal movements, historical references, or reactions to events. Designers, retailers, and influencers shape and promote trends across the market.
Dynamic and evolving, some trends endure while others fade quickly. To better understand this constant cycle, it is interesting to see the five stages of the evolution of fashion trends:
· Introduction: New trends begin with designers, influencers, or cultural innovators showcasing novel styles. This stage is marked by experimentation and the attraction of newness.
· Rise: Trends gain traction, becoming more widely adopted and gaining attention from mainstream media and retailers.
· Peak: Trends reach their greatest popularity and saturation, becoming ubiquitous in fashion. However, they may also start to show signs of overexposure.
· Decline: Trends start to wane in popularity as consumer interest diminishes, leading to discounts by retailers.
· Obsolescence/Rejection: Trends either become obsolete or face rejection, influenced by cultural shifts, changing preferences, or a new rising trend.
There’s no major information here. Trends rise, become popular, people get tired of them, and finally stop using them. But what changes for these trends to come back one day?
The Continuous Cycle of Fashion Trends Coming Back
The Cycle of Old Fashion Trends Coming Back
Recycling fashion is not a new thing. Even in Napoleon’s time, the French statesman’s wife was seen wearing white dresses that referred to classical Greece and Rome. Thus, the comeback of trends can be seen for a long time. Yet, they became more prominent in the 19th century, when almost every decade had some sort of previous trend being brought back. It was also in the 19th century that the pace of recycling fashion became much faster.
In the 1800s, designers would pull inspiration back from pieces of a century before. In contrast, in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, retro revivals cycled within about 30 years between the original trend and revisited fashion. Since the late ’90s, however, the pace has gotten much faster. Fashion trends started going from in, to outdated, to in again in less than 20 years.
So, things are clearly becoming faster. But when did we get to the level seeing in a Miu Miu show a trend we let go only four years ago?
Why Are Fashion Trends Returning So Fast?
To be honest, I don’t have a fully correct answer. But I do have a few assumptions that, in my opinion, together made fashion trends come back faster than ever.
Everything Became Faster, Including Fashion
Yeah, fast fashion is the one to blame once again. Sometimes feels like everything is their fault. But wait. I see fast fashion as a product of an even larger behavior change since the 90s. Everything became faster. Blame it on technology, the internet, and globalization, but the fact is:
The world is moving faster.
We have access to things faster than ever, and there is so much available for us, regardless of what that is, that we get tired of what we just had access to so fast. If accessing sometimes is so easy and you have the option to keep accessing new things again, and again, why wouldn’t you? That’s how we probably see so many things now. From movies, series, social media, public personalities, and, yes, fashion!
Then, if you get tired of a fashion trend faster than ever, it makes sense that for brands to keep being interesting, they bring old fashion trends faster than ever. I just wonder when we will run out of trends from the past to bring back. Because, if we are already looking at skinny jeans again, which were still popular 4 years ago, what is next? Lounge clothes from the pandemic?
Brands Pressure from Stakeholders
In the past few years, we’ve seen fewer independent luxury brands around. That’s because the big players like LVMH, Kering, Richemont, and to some extent Capri Holdings, have been joining forces and consolidating their grip on the luxury scene. This was even further intensified during the pandemic. And, liking it or not, luxury fashion brands are great agents when it comes to dictating fashion trends. But what does that have to do with recycling fashion trends? Well, conglomerates deal with a lot of pressure from stakeholders to constantly show growth. After all, if the company grows, so do its stock prices.
Thus, the pressure on fashion companies to satisfy shareholders often leads to creating strategies to streamline operations and enhance profitability. Based on that, it doesn’t take much to understand that the recycling of past trends is an efficient strategy. By revisiting and reinterpreting established styles, brands can sprint the design process, reduce production costs, and mitigate the risks associated with introducing entirely new concepts.
However, while this approach offers short-term efficiency gains, it often comes at the expense of long-term creative vitality. Relying heavily on recycled trends limits opportunities for genuine innovation and originality. It also diminishes the distinctiveness of brands. Ultimately, this strategy erodes brands’ ability to resonate with consumers seeking fresh, forward-thinking designs.
As a result, given how much these conglomerate-owned brands influence fashion, the trends will keep being something already done in the past. But how close can we get? If this pressure keeps mounting, brands will run out of past to bring back without feeling repetitive.
The Rise of Vintage Fashion
We can also look at things from a more positive point of view. The rise of secondhand fashion shopping could be a factor bringing old but fairly recent trends back.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably noticed that shopping for vintage clothing has surged in the past few years. During the pandemic, it became even more popular. To give you some examples of how big secondhand fashion has become, 67% of millennials in the UK shop vintage clothing, while two out of five items in Gen Z’s closets are pre-owned. That is a lot.
With the rise of pre-owned fashion in mind, what are the products most available and in better condition to be purchased secondhand? If you stop to think about it, they are the products that were recently discarded by a previous generation because — shock — they went out of fashion not that long ago.
So, could the fast-paced comeback of trends be linked to what’s available in vintage shops? Maybe a little. I believe it might share a small responsibility in the scenario as a whole. However, I find it hard to believe it is the only factor. After all, fashion brands wouldn’t purposefully want to compete with yet another sector of the fashion market, and luxury brands — as we’ve seen — are attempting to bring these trends back themselves.
Research and Development Is Only Going Towards Sustainability
I can appreciate that a large share of the research and development (R&D) budget is going towards sustainability efforts. That is indeed a substantial issue in the fashion industry. However, this budget might be eating part of the budget that could be going to visual innovation in design. Sustainability solutions are the most of what has been innovated in the fashion industry, and that is amazing. But we might be forgetting such a fun side of fashion, the visual, the creating something new to look at, to wear.
Ultimately, I don’t believe this is a major reason why fashion is becoming so repetitive, and I do see a good side to making sustainability one of the priorities of R&D. But let’s be honest and less politically correct for one second. Many of us would probably love to see less recycled styles and more newness in the industry.
We Ran Out of Ideas
Fashion is a creative industry, but not an innovative one. While the fashion industry obviously works with creativity and needs a large and hardworking creative force, innovation is not its forte.
Time and time again, the fashion industry tends to be the last one to join in innovative changes, be that technological, cultural, political, and so on. While fashion does a great job at seeming like an innovative industry, to its core, most is done very similar to how it has been done for a long time. But it’s not only about not being able to join innovation, the fashion industry often rejects innovation. It tends to join change and innovation only after it has been tested in other industries. Then, when fashion companies can’t avoid the switch anymore, they finally give in, which begs the question: Can it still be called innovation?
E-commerce is a great example of this. E-commerce has been a selling tool since 1994, getting traction in the early 2000s. However, it only became slightly representative in fashion around 2008. Still, at that time, most major fashion brands didn’t have e-commerce platforms. In fact, for some brands, it took the pandemic for them to finally give in to e-commerce.
But what does that have to do with anything? Well. I do believe there was a time when fashion could be innovative, from when we created zippers and jeans, to when we made pants a women’s clothes. Yet, I do have a feeling we just don’t know how to innovate anymore. Yes, collections can be creative, but are they innovative? When was the last time you saw something truly impactful being created in fashion? Something that shifted the industry and changed how everything is done. From the pineapple and other fruits leathers that don’t last to the fabrics that change color but are not scalable, these didn’t truly have an impact on fashion design.
Maybe the truth is that we created everything that had to be created when it came to apparel. It’s sad to think that, and I refuse to believe in it. But what if it is true? Maybe we ran out of ideas and that’s why we are recycling old ideas faster and faster.
Designers Just Became Lazy
Yeah. We had to say it. Maybe designers became lazy? But I don’t believe in this. If you ever worked in fashion or met a fashion designer, you know. If there’s one thing you can’t be as a fashion designer is lazy. Designing fashion items is A LOT of work. Crazy hours. Crazy company culture. It is not a lazy person’s job. So, I doubt that’s the issue.
However, the rhythm of fashion has become so fast and demanding that even the far from lazy designers can’t find the energy to finish everything on time while also innovating. Maybe even recycling old trends is a lot of work. And in a way, this does link to everything we said so far. Fast-paced everything and focus on profitability are overworking the minds that should be delivering the new. it doesn’t matter how much designers want to innovate, without the environment for it, how can they?
Thus, the final answer to this article’s major question is: no, fashion is not becoming lazy, but it is becoming so fast, but so fast, that it got boring. We keep scrolling through fashion so quickly that we forget how exciting it used to be to see something truly new. Something so new and so surprising that you stop moving so fast for a moment to appreciate it.
If you liked the content, don’t forget to leave a clap :)
