In the art world, lack of capital has always led to alternatives such as artist residencies, collaborative workshops, and merchandise sales. Fashion can learn from this model. While corporate luxury continues to grow, recessions may create space for independent companies, brands that grow with neighborhood networks, local networks, and minimal but targeted investment. Realities like Sarabande in London, which offers residencies and financial support to young creators, and Café Forgot in New York, which reinvented retail as a fluid and sustainable space for independent designers, show that another way is possible.
Like the fashion world, the art world is going through difficult times. In fact, according to the Artnet Intelligence Report (September 2025), auction sales in the first half of this year amounted to just $4.72 billion, down 8.8% compared to the same period in 2024 and more than 40% compared to 2022 levels, showing signs that the market is in a structural crisis. However, as history teaches us, this is not necessarily an insurmountable problem. It takes time and new strategies. It may sound paradoxical, but every crisis brings innovation. If the crisis in manufacturing and online retail is evident in the fashion industry, art is also going through difficult times, but both worlds still have the potential for reinvention.
Exhibition on the art of depression in London
The current exhibition Don’t Look Back at London’s UNIT Gallery therefore deals with precisely this theme, offering a glimpse of the positivity that begins with the principles that connect the Great Recession and the birth of fundamental cultural movements in its aftermath. For example, in the UK, Black Wednesday in 1992 coincided with the peak of the YBA (Young British Artists) movement, which included key figures such as Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. In a recent interview with the Financial Times on the occasion of the exhibition, co-curator Sigrid Kirk pointed to parallels with today: “The recession hit the market, but it also created new space for artists, and today artists are starting to collaborate again.” She, along with co-curator Beth Greenacre, will emphasize this message at the exhibition’s entrance. There, products created by the artists themselves (pottery, clothing, posters) are displayed in lively kiosks.
Saraband Foundation, London
Fashion can respond by turning products into tools of openness and communities into systems of mutually beneficial and important exchange. On the other hand, through artist residencies, a true nomadic community has been born in which fashion creators also participate. Remaining in the UK and founded in 2006 thanks to Lee Alexander McQueen, the Sarabande Foundation was born as a natural extension of his unique sensibility to transform pain into form. Founded to support a new generation of radical creators, the Foundation currently offers a rare model of support in London’s cultural scene. It is a program of highly subsidized residencies, where spaces ranging from 10sqm to 35sqm are rented at a symbolic cost of £1 per square meter per month. For 2024/25, Saraband has selected 15 designers across its two sites in Haggerston and Tottenham High Road, for a total of around 30 active residencies. In a recent event, the Foundation hosted a pop-up at Selfridges with around 280 alumni. Italy is also starting to move in this direction, with fashion designer residencies emerging thanks to initiatives such as the ITS Arcade in Trieste, which combines the training and support of international talent with free courses.
Cafe Forgot in New York
While residency is an important step, stores must also foster this environmental-economic relationship through building strong communities. Such is the case with Café Forgot in New York, which embodies all of these elements. Founded in 2017 by art history-trained Vita Haas and Lucy Weisner, Café Forgot started as a thesis project and defined itself from the beginning as a community-based shop where the act of selling and sharing coincided. Their practice unfolds between Ludlow Street’s stable physical spaces and networks of temporary activation.
The store hosts book clubs, film screenings, performances and shared moments of sociability, linking sales with an extensive cultural program. These activations return a collective dimension to fashion, where the act of purchase coincides with an act of participation, where value derives from relationships rather than production, and maintains a DIY, almost punk aesthetic that rejects minimal orders and production standards. Each object—a dress, a pottery, a piece of jewelry—becomes part of an emotional microcommunity, where its value is relational rather than quantitative. In this sense, Café Forgot functions as a form of eco-social activism and a laboratory for reshaping the fashion system through collaboration. As the founders proclaim, “We provide a space where you can sell your work without feeling the pressure of producing an entire collection.” Today’s manifesto sounds like a manifesto.
fashion subject group
Being frustrated is the price you pay for your community.
It means having guests over when you want to be alone. It means letting the other person live with you, even if it annoys you. It means attending events you don’t want to go to. It means turning the other cheek.
— Divya Venn (@divya_venn) March 1, 2025
In situations of crisis, Café Forgot and Sarabande represent two examples of what the French philosopher Félix Guattari would call “subject groups.” In other words, it is a community that can sustain itself and create cultural value outside of traditional economic circuits. Café Forgot and the Sarabande Foundation demonstrate that creative communities can still create cultural and relational value beyond dominant logics. This is where the present can evolve. Support independent reality, choose nearness over distance, and consideration over accumulation. In times of recession, the true luxury is to invest in realizing creativity, rather than after it has already been turned into capital.
