Haven't We Seen This All Before?
“Fashion’s problem isn’t the algorithm 'slop'. It’s us.”
Disclaimer: The following contains strong opinions, mild despair, industry in-jokes, and an unshakable love for fashion buried beneath layers of sarcasm. If you’re easily offended, work in PR, or recently paid $1,200 for a “quiet luxury” hoodie, proceed with caution. Then again, you’ve seen me say all this before.
In the $1.8 trillion fashion industry, everything looks the same now.
Not because we’ve run out of ideas, but because we’ve run out of incentives to do anything different. The silhouettes are oversized. The palettes are neutral. The mood is moody. The campaign features a model who looks like she’s just remembered she signed a five-year contract with no exit clause. The backdrop is either a field, a stairwell, or a brutalist playground that no child has ever touched.
At this point you could be looking at Zara or Loro Piana. The distinctions are aesthetic illusions.
We’re living through the reign of Template Chic: a global style consensus built on recycling the last thing that worked. Not because people don't care, but because the industry stopped asking them to.
This is not an outsider’s critique. I’ve been in the rooms. I’ve sat at the free dinners, worn the free clothes, flown out for previews, been briefed on “the vision.” And I’ve smiled through the same euphemisms every year: “We’re refining the DNA,” “elevating the proposition,” “tapping into the new wardrobe for the modern woman.”
Most of the time, they don’t know what they’re saying. The ones who do? Their vision gets watered down until it tastes like every other collection in Paris.
And yet, the best brands resist this erosion. They speak with clarity, even if softly. They don’t design for consensus. They design for conviction. They trust the audience to catch up, or not.
The System Is the Problem
If the aesthetics feel flat, it’s because the structure is hollow. The sameness we’re seeing isn’t just the fault of brands, PRs, or fashion magazines but the direct result of a business model that prioritizes speed, volume, and scale over originality.
The major conglomerates that now dominate fashion operate at the pace of the feed. The production schedule once reserved for ultra-fast fashion has been adopted by the very houses that used to define slow, deliberate luxury. Designers are no longer creators, they’re content engines.
It’s said that Jonathan Anderson may be expected to produce ten collections a year as the new Creative lead at Dior. That’s in addition to six for his own label, and two for Uniqlo. That isn’t creative direction. It’s creative exhaustion.
As a result, wholesale has collapsed into conservatism, retail is purely aesthetic theatre, and emerging designers are tasked with building an entire brand ecosystem from a laptop and a shared studio. The structure no longer protects creativity, it depletes it.
Still, the best independents continue. They make things that feel real. Clothes with an argument. Collections with thought behind the theme. They’re not here to chase margins, but are they forced to at this point?
As Eugene Rabkin, founder and editor of StyleZeitgeist and friend of Dot Dot Dot puts it: “The main reason for the current flatness we’re seeing is that fashion is now a mass market phenomenon. The masses require something that is familiar and digestible; anything complex will scare them off. The biggest misconception today is that big luxury fashion brands still make fashion for fashion enthusiasts. This couldn’t be further from the truth.”
PRs, Please Evolve
The PR ecosystem is now so insular and hierarchical it’s hard to tell where the job ends and the performance begins. Everyone’s a friend, or a client, or a “creative collaborator.” The same five stylists, the same twelve “multi-hyphenates,” the same passive-aggressive follow-ups about the embargo you never agreed to.
Invites go to the same social media “critics.” Coverage goes to the same publications. WE NEED PRINT, PLEEEEASE GIVE US COPY PASTE PRINT NO ONE READS TO ADVERTISE IN. If you critique anything, you’re cut off (lol, this happened to me back in the day at Bottega Veneta, look that one up). The illusion is that everyone’s included. The reality is that fashion PR is less about sharing culture, and more about protecting power. It’s access disguised as community.
And yet, the best PRs still do what they’re supposed to. They advocate for good work. They push editors to think, not just post. They don’t confuse exclusivity with elitism. And they build trust by championing what’s real, and always put the clients first.
Who Even Are All These People?
The fashion industry has become crowded in the most existential sense. There are simply too many people in this damn industry, and half the time, no one knows what anyone actually does. Brand consultants who “advise on vision.” Strategists who strategize nothing. Content advisors, digital storytellers, moodboard whisperers, vibe curators. Everyone is in fashion, very few are shaping it.
There are panels and podcasts and think pieces about innovation, but very little actual innovation. Everyone has a moodboard. No one has a plan.
As Eugene ,who I commissioned a few years ago for Highsnobiety, put in his Anthony Bourdain-esque essay ‘Read This Before You Decide to Work in Fashion’:
“The industry’s economic and cultural impact is vast, but behind its forward-looking veneer is an essentially conservative industry, slow to change, often paying lip service while doing its best to maintain the status quo.”
Meanwhile, the ones who are actually creating: the designers, the stylists, the photographers, and the craftspeople are squeezed out of the spotlight by people who speak better than they build.
But the best contributors (the editors who actually edit, the critics who still critique, the makers who make more than noise) give the work gravity. They don’t hide behind aesthetics or inflate their relevance. They bring clarity, friction, and cultural weight to the industry, reminding us that substance still exists, even if quietly.
The Myth of the Blueprint
Fashion is one of the only cultural industries that is reactive by design. It doesn’t create the blueprint. It waits to see what works, then copies it with a slightly different serif font.
Jacquemus posts a charming film campaign, and suddenly every brand wants to make content “like Jacquemus.” The drone shots, the pink fields, the giggling models in mini dresses, it’s everywhere. Everyone wants the same casting director. Everyone still wants to work with Vogue for some reason.
Everyone refuses to build a real team, refuses to hire thoughtfully, but will drop $80,000 minimum to show at fashion week, and pray, pray, that one day, they’ll be hired by a big house without having even worked a day at an actual business before. Dream on I guess.
And it’s not just brands. The media is no better. The magazine model is broken and everyone knows it. There’s the quiet 70/20/10 rule: 70% of featured product is from advertisers, 20% from local clients (if you're lucky), and 10% “editorial freedom.” Shoots shaped by placement obligations, not taste. Features run through marketing. And we still pretend the coverage is earned and the numbers we tell advertisers are real.
So yes, the work all looks the same, because the incentives are the same.
This isn't unique to fashion. Kyle Chayka, in his 2016 essay Airspace Redux, explores how the same aesthetic flattening has overtaken interior design and urban culture. A seamless loop of Scandinavian chairs, exposed bulbs, and reclaimed wood. Fashion now finds itself in its own version of Airspace: curated sameness, globally deployed, algorithmically reinforced. The visual language is everywhere and nowhere. It doesn't localize or express, it optimizes.
As Ana Andjelic, brand expert and founder of The Sociology of Business, notes: “I believe that the sameness in our taste choices has less to do with the algorithm that makes everything flat and more with us. We are, as humans, wired to make snap judgments. Faulty as they may be, snap judgements overpower our decision-making. No one has time to assess the entirety of culture. Snap judgements simplify culture.”
This tendency, to simplify, to flatten, to reduce complexity into something instantly consumable, has recently been examined in the New York Times under the term “slop,” a phrase used to describe the glut of algorithm-optimized, low-effort, mass content that dominates everything from food to fast fashion to AI-generated media.
In the piece, slop is defined not as a glitch in culture, but the culture itself, an endless feed of aesthetic mush designed for scale, not substance. It’s this focus on the internet’s tendency to auto-generate sameness: slop bowls, slop hauls, slop fits. But it might as well be about fashion. The outputs are different, but the formula is the same: mood over meaning, familiarity over risk, surface over depth.
Rabkin echoes the cultural shift: “Slop is the result of the way we live, which isn’t in any real tangible, immediate reality, but in an image-driven simulacrum. People will adapt and welcome slop; we already have done so in many aspects of our lives. We just call it ‘culture.’”
Andjelic offers a different view. “Blaming slop is naive. The problem is our obsession with popularity. We’ve been imbued with popularity contests since the beginning of our social lives. We’ve been primed to assess cultural output by how many others liked it. This fatal coupling of taste and popularity gave us a landscape where creativity is not the goal, but a passive, omnipresent backdrop.”
That backdrop, she explains, is everywhere: “It is all-enveloping, familiar and comforting, like fast food. And, like fast food, it tastes good, even if it doesn’t have any nutritional value. Cheetos Pizza, Scandi-aesthetics, all the TikTok-cores are passive signals of taste, coveted because they are popular, and popular because they are coveted.”
Where This Is Going
If fashion continues as it is, it won’t collapse. It will evaporate. Slowly. Quietly. Into sameness. Into content. Into cultural irrelevance.
There are too many heads, too few ideas, and a system that rewards volume over voice. The press repeats PR lines. Buyers follow data. Creatives are overworked and underfunded. Brands are too scared to be first. Everyone wants to be early. No one wants to lead.
But the future won’t be built on polish. It’ll be built on relevance. It won’t be driven by mood. It’ll be shaped by meaning, right?
The smartest brands already know this. They don’t market to you, they talk with you. They don’t chase culture but build it at their own speed. They don’t need to explain their moodboards, because their work says it better than the BTS inspiration ever could.
Fashion needs more conviction. God I hope people read that line again, believe it and act on it.
As Andjelic reminds us: “The obvious solution against blandness is to create something surprising, unexpected, and different. The obvious problem is that something that’s different won’t make it into the mainstream.”
She concludes with the heart of the matter: “The problem isn’t slop, the problem is scale. No one wants to make things that only a handful of people want, so everyone makes things that a lot of people already ask for. Scale is created by formulas. So if you want to change fashion, you have to change the industry that makes it.”
What We Still Believe In
This is a shout out to the few we’ve always believed (including the next gen we can find here and here).
We like Rick Owens for building a Brand Universe, not just a brand. The same way we like Ralph Lauren, Issey Miyake, Miuccia Prada, and Yohji Yamamoto. Designers who understand that clothing is part of a more expansive reality, real, not just a product.
We like UVU for keeping its circle tight and its purpose tighter. For staying close to its cinematic roots without asking for applause, like District Vision and Satisfy, built slowly and precisely. We like Auralee for doing one thing well, the way we like Lemaire or Comme des Garçons. There’s a certain power in staying clear.
We like Holiday Magazine, Fantastic Man, and Outlander for having a point of view, at the very least. We like Jonathan Anderson, Louise Trotter, and Giorgio Armani for pulling us into new terrain, for knowing when to disrupt and when to hold still. For making ideas tangible: commercially, culturally, and creatively.
We like fashion that thinks without pandering, that listens without mirroring. Fashion that speaks with intention, and knows the power of restraint.
We haven’t stepped back. We just expect more, and critique because we remember what fashion can do. Not just decorate, but define. Not just perform, but expose. To move us, occasionally, beyond a double tap and into something that actually lands.
So we stay. Not for the nostalgia or the drama. But because there are those who still decide to make it matter. Risk saying something new. Or at the very least, something true.
And when they do, we’ll notice.
Wow.
Ouch.
True.
So well said, Cristopher. Fashion today is flat, except for a few exceptions, designed for screen viewing and distracted buyers.