The Future of Fashion? Good Clothes
Conversation about the future of fashion has always seemed misguided. Wearable tech? AI outfits? Shopping in the metaverse? Who cares — tech will reshape our lives in all kinds of insidious ways in the coming years. But bots and algorithms don’t really represent the future of fashion.
I just got back from Paris Fashion Week, where I spent six days sitting at runway shows watching the literal future of fashion pass by. I didn’t see any technological whizbang in the Fall/Winter 2025 collections. No, what I saw was a promising future for good clothes and those of us who want to wear them.
This isn’t great news for everyone. Many brands and designers have found a tremendous amount of success over the last few years without making good clothes. Some of them are marketing geniuses, world-builders with powerful, persuasive visions and sexy, famous friends. They don’t worry too much about making good clothes because they don’t have to. But that’s shifting. Designers focused more on the actual garments than the marketing of them are rising up, building significant, loyal followings and hearty businesses. I felt it in the air while I was in Paris. Buyers and editors are bored of the luxury hype cycle, and they’re craving good clothes.
Here’s what I noticed.
The most powerful collections on the runway came from designers with a strong, singular vision. Designers who are in their own lane, who aren’t derivative or trendy, and who make clothes that are instantly recognizable as their own. So many major luxury brands are basically interchangeable. You could swap the labels and logos around and no one would know any better. But designers like Kiko Kostadinov, Rick Owens, and Lemaire resist that kind of homogeny and lean into fearless originality.
And as it turns out, that way of working in fashion is key to success and longevity. Just look at Comme des Garçons, Walter Van Beirendonck, and Yohji Yamamoto, all labels that have been around for over 40 years. Their tribes are still as strong as ever. And by “tribe,” I mean the hordes of fans and acolytes wearing the designers’ clothes — new and from deep in the archive — who pack the shows. They’re a group entirely distinct from a brand’s client base, wealthy shoppers who buy for status, paid endorsers who get dressed by the brand. These tribes are growing and evolving, getting stronger each season. CdG’s tribe adds new members every year — there are always young Rei disciples clogging the sidewalks outside of the show — and I can see Willy Chavarria, who showed in Paris for the first time this season, establishing a tribe of his own.
Most of us have moved on from the notion that celebrities, by virtue of their wealth and status, are beacons of good style. They’re nice to have around when you need to draw a crowd and boost the metrics, but very few of them can actually move the needle when it comes to what people wear and think is cool. What fashion really needs right now is a point of view, an independent spirit, and, most of all, (that’s right, say it with me) good clothes. That’s what the brands with the most buzz — Auralee, A. Presse, Comoli — are up to. This trio of Japanese labels is cleaning up on the upper echelons of tasteful, high-end style right now. Go into those showrooms, and you’ll leave disappointed with what you have on.
To be clear, it certainly never gets old to see a famous person sitting across the runway. I was genuinely pumped to see Solange (stunning) roll into the Lemaire show minutes before it started and sit a few seats down from me. At Rick Owens I sat across from Dave Chappelle. And at Hermès I was eye to eye with Peter Sarsgaard. Of course Louis Vuitton was packed with Pharrell’s Phamous Phriends. But I can’t think of a celebrity who has made a brand seem cooler or more interesting by wearing the clothes and appearing at the show this season. Tribes are cool; clients — even notable ones — are not.
In fact, I think we’ll soon see a full-blown reversal of the celebrity endorsement paradigm. I’ve seen a lot of chatter about the return of the gatekeepers. Awareness of a brand or a designer being motivated by the wrong things — Instagram engagement versus good clothes — is increasing. No one wants to look like a paid brand mark (except maybe the influencers who make a living that way, bless their hearts). We want good clothes from brands with integrity.
So what makes clothing “good?” As you might have guessed, it’s different for everyone. It’s not necessarily about how something fits or feels, it’s about whether or not something has real value and isn’t just a prop for a brand’s marketing scheme. When you buy good clothes, you pay for what you get, not for the campaign that sold it to you.
Price isn’t be an indicator of quality — that is, expensive clothes are not inherently good. And a logo isn’t a point of view. Those points may sound painfully obvious, but they aren’t necessarily given in the luxury sector. Good clothes can certainly be expensive and they can even have logos on them, but that isn’t what makes them good. What makes them good is that there is no discrepancy between their function and their form — a good sweater is a good sweater because it is a good sweater.
Another thing I noticed while in Paris last week is independence for designers and brands is no longer something to escape. The allure of luxury abundance is fading fast for small and emerging labels, and the power of being creatively boundless and untethered is increasingly obvious. Which is unsurprisingly, really, when you see how quickly the industry shuffles through creative directors at the top level. Sure, a big check and global platform will always be compelling to a designer who may be struggling to run their own small business, but as the demand for good clothes grows, so too will the opportunity for those who remain independent.
Which brings us back to the future of fashion. The real future of fashion — the stuff we’re going to see, buy, and wear when all this stuff hits the stores. Just because something was on a runway or in a Paris showroom doesn’t mean it’s going to matter eight months from now.
A few things I saw in my crystal ball: Perfect flat-front pants in sumi ink-dyed corduroy at Evan Kinori (the future of fashion: fewer pleats!); a rich navy moleskin chore coat at Man-tle (chore coats are cool again?); a glorious Loro Piana wool track jacket made by the Spanish designer Gabriela Coll; about 15 different hoodies and T-shirts I need from Lady White; and sturdy knits in sheep-colored wool handmade in England by Sono.
And I was encouraged to see how the good clothes era and the bolstering of the independent spirit factored prominently into some of the big luxury collections. Kim Jones’ latest collection for Dior was a striking display of good clothes executed at the highest possible level. Almost defiantly so. You felt like this was a designer who answered to no one but the haute couture gods. And Hermès creative director Véronique Nichanian (the longest tenured creative director in the game, last I checked) proved that her 35-year commitment to good clothes has been no mistake. These are good clothes for the Bombardier class made by the greatest independent brand of them all.
The thing about the future of fashion is that it’s actually pretty easy to predict — anyone can look at photos of a brand’s runway show and see it in plain view. The clothes we saw last week will begin infiltrating our lives. Samples will go into mass production. The racks and e-comm pages will be replenished. What remains uncertain is similarly straightforward: What do you want to wear?
