just a thought – fashionabubble
This post came to me over the course of the past few weeks. During that time, I went to fashion week. After fashion week, a number of discussions came up, as they usually do – whether fashion week is useful or successful, and so on. The argument for fashion week is about exposure – is it enough, is it the right kind, is it worth it? I just received the LGFW wrap-up in my inbox – already they are promising a “bigger and better” event next season. Well, I think its fair to say that things could get better. But how long can they continue getting bigger? Fashion week was at its apex of greatness just a couple seasons ago, when it was in Nathan Philips Square. Now it has gotten too big for that ideal space. The idea of an even bigger fashion week boggles me.
There is surely a lot of exposure happening, though I can’t help but feel that as the exposure multiplies, the value of it decreases. A few years ago there were just a handful of fashion bloggers in town – just enough to fill a table for eight at brunch. Now there’s more than I can count, all busily tweeting and posting about the same events. How does LGFW figure out which bloggers are worth accrediting? As it has been pointed out, it doesn’t. Its pretty much a free-for-all. Measured in “impressions”, the numbers for fashion week in Toronto seem awfully impressive, but others argue that there was only one man in town – for just a day or so – whose impressions really mattered. He attended a breakfast event at Holt Renfrew, which I was also invited to attend (!), among just a handful of people in the tiny Holt’s Cafe. It felt like a very special place to be, even though I admit at the time I was wholly ignorant of who the VIP was.
Its not just about fashion week obesity either. Its about the scope creep that has allowed adult unpaid internships to become normalized within the fashion industry to the point that the industry is becoming dependent on them. Fashion editors say “we couldn’t produce the magazine without them”, and fashion designers (even those who are backed by corporations) often count more than half their staff as unpaid interns. Corporations have been getting very bottom-heavy – sure the man at the top could well afford to pay a measly wage to its entry-level workers – but they don’t – and worse, they trick people into thinking that their tight-fisted employer is doing THEM a favour, just for the experience. Or maybe they can’t pay – which begs the question, should they really be in business? Perhaps there are too many fashion magazines and fashion designers already, and the use of intern labour is artificially keeping them all on life support. If suddenly all of these for-profit companies had to pay or get rid of all their unpaid interns, how many would fail?
As I see it, the only way the whole fashion juggernaut is going to get better is by getting smaller. This will be an inevitable, unpredictable, and painful experience. I agree with Clay Shirky (in his discussion of the media industry) that when it comes to downsizing, human beings are incapable of doing it in an orderly fashion. They will wait until things get so bad, and then it will be all chaos and hell for a while, until some sort of simpler, smaller system can emerge.
Presently, we find ourselves in a “fashionabubble”. Its much like any other bubble – an ephemeral thing (exposure, experience or asset-backed securities) has its value greatly expanded by speculators (public relations, internet, universities – or investment bankers), to some point where it becomes so ridiculous the bubble gets popped by mere logic and the whole unwholesome system is left in shambles. Many have offered their prescription for how to fix the fashion system – and here’s mine. Let it fail. If there was something I could do to make it fail faster, I would, but its probably a good thing that there really isn’t anything to do but hang on.
Something that bothers me about young people today – both myself (I’m 27) and those younger than me, is that we are complacent. We don’t question authority. We don’t reject the past. We don’t rebel. For all the rhetoric about user-generated media, most of that stuff is chronicling our chronic consumerism, not our creativity. We idolize punks past by buying their albums and their t-shirts and their vestigial media, but we don’t imitate the way The Clash made their own onstage costumes with spraypaint and scissors, and some out-of-work kids created magazines like The Face with a xerox machine and a stapler, full of profanity and protest, and they won success on their own terms, even against their own terms. With all the tools and advantages we have, you’d think we could create some original, compelling culture of our own. But we rarely do. Punk is dead now, isn’t it? Or maybe it is just sleeping.
In the meantime, I think its important for those of us who want to accurately assess the value of things to focus on what fashion is really about: clothing and images. Be creative, be daring. Make things with your own hands, and whenever possible, buy things directly from the creators who made them. When it comes to business, focus on people. Make sure your time and money is going directly to real people, not some shareholders, or website impressions. Focus on what really matters.
Dare to dream small.
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Kudos! A strong statement about the real value and potential success of the fashion industry in an otherwise cacophonous roar of party voices, clinking glasses, back-slapping, and camera flashes.
Let it fail!
Awesome post Danielle – exactly what I needed to read today.
my work here is done. ;)
sure, let it fail. start thinking like belgium, or settle it like milan did w/rome.
but reject the past? disagree. we continue to think that this thing called ‘fashion week’ began w/fdcc, but the fact of the matter is that it stretches way back, like fashion-designers-association-of-canada way back.
i’m not suggesting we fetishize the past — it’d be silly now to gather our best designers and force them to do a gov’t sponsored cross-canadian fashion show tour for the regional socialite sets. but it would be advantageous to realize that we’ve struggle since then (& even earlier!) w/this ‘official’ concept of ~spectacle~, and we somehow still haven’t rly figured it for ourselves what that is.
therein lies the complacency — we’re talking in google caches, when we really should be figuring it out with a wayback machine.
Insightful post Danielle, one that dares to inspire.
Clearly, the Fashion Industry is getting caught up in its own hype, forgetting its true reason of being: Inspiring.
People shouldn’t be so reluctant to take risks, stop playing it safe, instead start something new.
Danielle, thank you very much for addressing the hoopla that surrounds fashion. There are an overwhelming number of bloggers now and it makes me question if it’s a short lived trend for some. From experience, it’s difficult to measure the value of a blog, impressions/unique views are often the deciding factor. But what about timeliness of posts, content and quality of writing? These are often not considered.
That aside, there were an overwhelming number of people let into the LG Fashion Week tents this season due to the larger venue (Allstream Centre) which likely translated into profitability of bringing consumers who will pay for tickets. Fashion Week in Toronto was at its apex when located at Nathan Philips Square, because the site was accessible by TTC, had numerous amenities around and is a high traffic pedestrian area. It’s unfortunate that a better means bigger in many people’s eyes.
Hey, thanks all for reading and commenting! It wasn’t meant to be just about LGFW. Its everything – its all of these businesses that try and get stuff for free, people who want to pay for illustrations with “exposure”, retailers that try and squeeze small designers, etc. etc. etc. Its all one and the same problem – its like there is an actual teeny tiny fashion economy based on real people and things and then there is this huge bubble of BS all around it – the fashionabubble.
reeraw -
I think you’re right, we need to remember the more distant past, when fashion was a much smaller world, at least when it comes to the business end.
But when it comes to fashion’s life-blood, ideas, I think we’re dangerously hooked on recycling the same stagnant stuff. It has something to do with hardship – without real hardship youth culture has nothing to reject – kids don’t try hard to be different than their parents – and what you get is this leftover culture where we fetishize Sassy magazine and even the BEATLES, instead of creating something new and fresh and yet unnamed (like Rap, or Grunge, or Punk, or whatever). Young people today know that their own culture is just regurgitated – no wonder they won’t even admit that they’re hipsters. Maybe if we weren’t all so hooked on our iCrap and convinced by education and corporations that it’s all about good marks and slavish behavior, there would actually be something NEW both in culture and in due course, fashion. But (thankfully?) it hasn’t gotten that bad yet.
Miss SLY (TM) -
Yes! I gotta say, LGFW as far as the collections were concerned was awfully timid.
Kimberly -
I do think that people do appreciate the more nuanced value of blogs – that’s why there is sponsorship money out there even for small sites – but you’re right there is no numerical way to measure it. I’m of the opinion is that a great blog, like a great business, is only as good as the people who consider it worthwhile. Its not even the content so much, as the identities of the people who write, read, and interact. So yeah, in blogs as in fashion weeks, bigger is not always better. But a follow up press release from the FDCC saying “fashion week will be even better and tinier next year” feels like its breaking some kind of PR law or something.
Love ya, as always. Good post!
Great post Danielle! Youth in revolt, fuck yeah!
I would love to see you pick up your scissors, get to a kinkos, and put all of your art and writing in magazine form. I could provide the jokey investigative features…think on it.
Great post, Danielle. I’m not going to comment on all of it, because, frankly, you are much more articulate, insightful, and just “in the industry” than I am, but I will say this: You’ve never written a truer statement than “Fashion week was at its apex of greatness just a couple seasons ago, when it was in Nathan Philips Square. Now it has gotten too big for that ideal space.”
It doesn’t need to be bigger. It just needs to be good. It’s about quality, and being able to reach out and (almost) touch that quality–that’s what makes Toronto Fashion Week special, and that’s what sets us apart from all New York, Paris, etc. Above all, I think accessibility is what will make the most difference in keeping a very small industry alive in Toronto/Canada.
Alexandra -
I don’t know if imitating the punks so slavishly is what I want to do. I never wanted to have a magazine – if anything, I already do have a magazine in the sense that I have built a platform for what-i-say and what-i-make. But you’re right, this post is a clarion call to myself more than anyone else – what can I make that is new and worthwhile? I’m trying to figure that out.
Tiff –
I do think that we didn’t realize how great we had it at NPS at the time. But it really did in retrospect seem like a magic moment – with just a few bloggers, the whole tweeting thing was brand new – and the venue seemed to galvanize and inspire the designers to deliver more definitive statements.
Its not just Toronto’s fashion week that suffers from overgrowth – NYC’s fashion week is just NUTS. Its overgrown its home in the tents and is switching venues too. Its just impossibly noisy down there, with upwards of 300 shows in just a week or so. Crazy. How to downsize, how to make fashion something special again? “Democratization” sure was exciting but it seems to have bred chaos. What’s next?
I’ve privately poked fun at some Toronto designers whose over reliance on unpaid interns makes me wonder if they should just declare themselves a non-profit charitable organisation for the designers’ ego.
Granted, I know some people who had great experience during their internship, learn tons of things and met everyone worth meeting in the Toronto Fashion scene. But I’m also reminded of a particular designer who had so badly mistreated her interns that students at my school (and other schools too) were told explicitly to stay away from her… Last time I check she’s still in business.
I think there should be a bottom line somewhere that says if you can’t pay minimum wage then there’s something fundamentally wrong with your business model otherwise like you post implied… it’s a big f-ing bubble (Too bad, you can’t short it).
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