From other thread: As a former fashion writer, the "fashion industry," reduces to a spectacle for selling perfume and cosmetics. Fashion itself is an expression of beliefs, power, and alignment that people buy clothes to participate in.<p>In this sense, fashion is to clothing what live music is to alcohol, or what journalism is to advertising. There is an underlying high-margin business that you use a spectacle to attract people into to sell them stuff. The talent for the spectacle exists in a local equilibrium that is largely oblivious to the economics that make it viable. Journalists are a great example of people who thought they were the money maker and remain in denial about the economics of their role of bringing readers to advertisers.<p>Fashion designers (like Jacobs in the article) appear to have the same conceit, where their role as the spectacle that draws in punters who buy super high margin smelly water, face paint, and snake oil lotions has been displaced. Covid has just been the coup de gras, where the fashion business has been steadily being polarized and dis-intermediated for at least a decade. A business that promised and re-sold proximity to fame was really taken out much earlier by Instagram and its influencer economy, where now everyone is famous for Warhol's 15 minutes, and the returns on investment in fame schemes are now much more diffuse.<p>The dynamic described in the article about luxury clothing in the end resembles the book and publishing business, where you are in effect consigning product to retailers, who make massive orders for their big box shops, then destroy you with returns. It's like how movies spent almost 100 years in in the popcorn and concessions business, and they've found totally new economics in the streaming game. Fixing fashion is the same class of problem as fixing journalism, publishing, music, movies, and arts in general, where the economics of getting people together to sell them complimentary high margin goods in the moment and place was decimated by social media, and now finished off by covid. These markets aren't dead, but they are now polarized, where the super high end is fine, and the absolute bottom will persist, but the lucrative middle is hollowed out. These fashion design brands made most of their money on middle market goods backed by over leveraged private equity investments and sunk costs in conglomerates, and that's why they're getting killed by this.<p>Fashion is the business of symbols and signifiers and there is infinite human demand for these (just as there is for stories, conflict/news, spectacle, etc), so future businesses using totally different modalities will pick up the slack to meet it, but reading fashion talent hand wringing about their market is like listening to journalists talk about the economics of publishing, hockey players discussing team ownership, or perhaps even us hackers talking about venture capital. What we think is meaningful and decisive, it's not meaningful and decisive.