Katharina Kolbjun was shopping in Paris recently when the creative director, who has worked for fashion brands such as Chloe, Schiaparelli and Tod’s, spotted a pair of Puma sneakers she’d never seen before. When she asked to try them on, she was told she couldn’t buy them. They were only available to influencers, and would be offered for free to anyone who wanted them.
“The fashion industry is so crazy,” she said in a phone interview. “They could have hit their target right away without advertising” — a shoe shopper — “but they’ll never get there, because I’ll probably never know where these shoes actually are.”
“We’re basically selling selling things,” she said with a laugh. “We’re not selling things, we’re selling selling.”
Fashion brands are increasingly producing less products and ideas that tell consumers what to wear or buy. Instead, fashion has become a system that, at best, values story and content over clothing, and, at worst, a spectacle meant to provoke, distract or shield us from reality.
Of course, fashion has worked with celebrities for decades to bring its niche and often perplexing ideas to a wide audience (remember Catherine Deneuve promoting Chanel No. 5?) And through their clothes, celebrities have been able to impart something personal to the world—a sense of style, or something like it—without actually revealing anything.
But the fashion industry is no longer content to infest Hollywood’s skin. Kering owner François-Henri Pinault (husband of actress Salma Hayek) bought the Creative Artists Agency last year, while LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault launched his own entertainment studio, 22 Montaigne. Last summer, fashion executive Ana Angélique told me that the brand is like a Marvel movie. She was in the midst of reinventing Esprit, a colorful 1980s shopping-mall brand, with piles of bright, crayon-toned clothes. “You incorporate the ‘characters’ – the clothes – into different stories, or marketing moments,” she said. “You create a lot of excitement, just like you would market a movie,” she elaborated in a recent interview.
Gap Inc.’s new CEO, Richard Dixon, has the daunting task of saving the failing fashion giant, as well as Banana Republic, Old Navy and Athleta. Dixon comes from Mattel, where he successfully transformed Barbie from an outdated toy into a sassy, semi-feminist pop-culture Hollywood phenomenon.
He put it more bluntly: “Fashion is entertainment,” he said in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal. “The story behind a brand and what it represents is more powerful than any product.”
Meanwhile, the seemingly simple task of finding a T-shirt, a button-up shirt, or stylish pants has become impossible. (If you want the flowy khaki pants and T-shirts that Gap was once famous for, you’ll have better luck finding them at The Row for $1,150 and $350, respectively.) Clothing seems almost irrelevant.
Jacquemus’ latest show drew more attention for its inventive memes (a man ironing a paddleboard over sparkling water, a woman riding a lift piled high with Jacquemus shopping bags and boxes) than for the clothes. One of LVMH’s star designers is musician Pharrell Williams, but can you close your eyes and picture him designing? One of fashion’s most talked-about moments this year was Jeremy Allen White disrobing in a Calvin Klein ad.
Fashion is now dinner and a movie, but you leave without having eaten a single course.
In May, Zac Posen, whom Dixon recently appointed executive vice president and creative director of Gap’s portfolio, which includes Gap, Banana Republic, and Old Navy, designed the white cotton shirtdress that Anne Hathaway wore to an event for jewelry house Bvlgari. Posen also designed the denim dress worn by Da’Vine Joy Randolph to the Met Gala a few weeks earlier, but Hathaway’s dress had a twist: it was available to order online for $158.
“Gap brands are committed to celebrating originality through unique, individual style,” Posen said in an email. “Now is an exciting time to tell product stories across all of the brands in the Gap Inc. portfolio, as we are committed to the accessibility of these timeless staples while embedding our brands in important cultural conversations.”
The dress sold out online within hours, and the company’s inventory has more than doubled since Dixon joined the company in 2023.
The idea of celebrities driving customers into stores may seem old-fashioned, but such stunts may not be about sales. “This is about an accelerated relationship that actually moves faster than the buying process,” says Tom Bettridge, vice president of creative and content at Ssense. “Just interacting with someone in terms of buying a product is not enough engagement. You need to interact with your core audience 365 days a year.”
Bettridge wrote about the beginnings of this moment after Balenciaga’s red carpet show in 2021, which he called “marchtainment.”
“Marchtainment is the fashion industry’s gobbling up of entertainment at a time when no one cared about the Grammys or the Oscars and most teenagers could name a creative director rather than a film’s director,” he wrote for Highsnobiety, where he was editor-in-chief at the time. “Marchtainment is fashion’s evolution from a specific week into a year-round spectacle, where consumers follow brands as much as they buy from them.”
But three years later, we have entertainment without the goods. Angelique said that while she liked Gap’s Hathaway moment, “they really need to focus on the business. They just need to improve their product and their inventory and their merchandising. All the basics.”
Film is synonymous with escapism and fantasy, and fashion has always been its theme. But Kolbün feels that in the pursuit of financial entertainment, film is becoming increasingly irrelevant. “I never thought of my clothes as entertainment. I thought of them as fantasy. I can imagine all those other lives that I haven’t yet lived. But now it seems like film barely penetrates my life. I can only imitate film. I can only imitate it. I know that film is never going to change my life. In that sense, clothes have lost their power.”
In the 20th century, cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer wrote about the development of cinemas in Berlin, calling them “palaces of diversion” and “temples of pleasure.” Indeed, our mobile phones now have their place in culture, and we understand fashion through them. Clothing is three-dimensional, moving, experienced in reality. So the mobile phone has become more intimate, always in our hands. At the same time, it has become more limited, more remote from our lives and the world at large.
This content production is merely poking fun at what should be a challenge. Rick Owens’ recent menswear show, for example, celebrated unity and solidarity through clothing in a time marked by male isolation and political division. “The fashion industry’s indifference to the horrors unfolding before our eyes will likely continue until the industry dies,” Business of Fashion critic Tim Blanks wrote in a recent review.
If all this seems almost creatively or ethically innocuous, the truth is that few companies are as astute as Jacquemus and Marc Jacobs, whose TikTok pages are chock-full of quirky videos from viral creators who rework their methods to suit Jacobs’s whims. (Jacobs may be the rare designer who can do both; his shows are consistently wildly creative.) Do people really want to see Timothée Chalamet’s Chanel fragrance ad? The ad, which has garnered more than nine million views since its release in May (and was teased for months, starting with Chalamet’s lengthy announcement and interview in Vogue), reads like a hilarious update to Martin Scorsese’s hit After Hours. But if you did, have you thought about it since?
So does that mean designers who can’t appoint a celebrity as their designer, like making a Paul Mescal-narrated documentary (Gucci) or a titillating film about Brad Pitt and Penélope Cruz vacationing on a French beach (Chanel), are out of luck?
While these brands strive to create the next great superhero (or villain), they have also made room for much smaller brands to thrive. A show at Pratt’s Manhattan gallery earlier this year featured designers in the vein of Bernadette Corporation and Vivienne Westwood, including SC103, All In and Echoes Latta. That is, they recognize fashion’s pitfalls and worst impulses, and disrupt or defy them through the very mediums that big brands cynically employ: runway shows, art-world collaborations or magazine production. The designers of SC103 recently had an art show at the TriBeCa gallery Theta. “It’s interesting because it’s really about the creative process,” said Theta’s director Jordan Barth.
Mr. Kolbjung, who said watching the “Barbie” movies was “like getting a philosophy lecture from Ryan Gosling with face fillers,” also spent the past few years working on a limited-run fashion magazine called Paradigm Trilogy, whose final issue, released this spring, was about the movie.
