Fewer Fashion Shows, Fewer Sales, More Common Sense: Here’s What the Fashion Industry Wants to Change—and What It Means For Your Wardrobe

Over the past few weeks, three different groups have come forward with proposals to re-envision the fashion industry: Dries Van Noten is heading up Forum Letter; the industry publication Business of Fashion is behind Rewiring Fashion; and the British Fashion Council and the Council of Fashion Designers of America announced a slate of reforms on Thursday morning. This doesn’t count the smattering of individual brand announcements of long-term responses to the coronavirus, like Armani’s decision to show his men’s and women’s collections together in Milan in the fall, or Saint Laurent’s decision to show on its own schedule, thank-you-very-much.

So: who is in these coalitions? What do they want? What will happen to your closet if they get it?

Most of these groups are making overlapping proposals to correct fashion’s skewed seasonality, so that winter coats will be shown on the runway shortly before they arrive in stores, which they will do when it’s actually winter, and won’t be marked down until the end of the season. No more Black Friday grails for you!

Most want to de-emphasize or even eliminate the pre-collection runway show bonanza that has made fashion week a global, nearly nonstop event over the past five years. As the BFC and CFDA puts it, these collections were not originally intended to be “sufficiently fashion-forward to warrant a show.” (Savage.) If any of these proposals are adopted in meaningful ways, it will mean less product, fewer capsules, and probably less whiz-bang high-octane interseasonal collaborations. But as one designer recently told me, “I’ve always thought that the excessive need of showing an overwhelming amount of collections and special capsules is responding more to a need from the system, rather than addressing a consumer request.”

The changes would also mean that you’ll be expected to pay full price more frequently, or to wait longer to get a discount. Designers and retailers have complained over the past decade that frequent markdowns and in-season sales like Cyber Monday and Singles Day have taught consumers to rely on discounts. Skeptics of the industry proposals wonder whether it’s feasible to expect consumers to break this habit when the global economy is in a pandemic-fueled contraction, and excess inventory has led a number of brands and retailers to steeply discount their merchandise in mid-season sales. In other words: perhaps you’ve scored a few epic deals over the past month or so. Are you really in a position, psychologically and economically, to start paying full price again?

There would also be major changes to the fashion show, an outdated institution that’s been mired in an existential dilemma for over a decade. As Rewiring Fashion lays out explicitly, the fashion show has become a consumer-facing event rather than an industry one—which, ideally, should take place shortly before clothes arrive in stores to drum up consumer (your!) excitement. This discounts the power that celebrity street style, as well as Instagram and magazines (good morning!), have on consumers: the cycle of fashion desire isn’t simply runway to your wardrobe. In between seeing an asymmetrical Loewe button-up made of clashing handkerchiefs on a runway and on the rack in your local luxury boutique, you’ve likely seen it on A$AP Rocky, on a handful of fancy, connected guys you follow on Instagram, and in the pages of a magazine. The fashion show can also be a major storytelling tool for brands, from the pathos of Craig Green’s shows to Undercover’s cinematic productions, and these sometimes need more than a few weeks, or a few key interlocutors, like celebrities and fashion editorials, to interpret their full impact. Under the new model, you’ll need to decide whether that Raf collection was one of his most epic pretty quickly after you see it for the first time.

It’s notable that the majority of the grievances these coalitions address are pre-pandemic ones: sustainability was 2019’s buzzword, and many designers, editors, and industry leaders were already talking about making fewer collections and traveling less frequently for shows. Designers have been experimenting for the past five years with showing on different schedules: showing less (like Pyer Moss’s Kerby-Jean Raymond, who shows once a year), or with showing not at all (all praise Acronym’s Errolson Hugh!). In other words, these proposals are less a radical shift than they are reforms that would take the industry back to an earlier, smaller scale.

That sounds good from a business perspective, but consumers are more suspicious of brands than they’ve ever been before, a trend that awkward pandemic marketing has accelerated. Have consumers been trained to hunt for discounts, or is it also possible that they’ve found an inferior product going hand-in-hand with a culture of constant novelty? Are the products that designers are making the stuff of lifelong wardrobes, or are they the flotsam of the hype machine? Ideally, a slower pace and fewer collections would allow designers to make stronger and more compelling collections. (Marine Serre and Acronym, for example, make just two collections annually, and you can see it in the strength of their statements.) Many designers need a creative reawakening as well as a business one: I am one of those freaks who loves fashion shows, but I will admit to having afternoons in Europe and New York where I go from show to show with little understanding of what I’m seeing and why it matters. I hate feeling that way—but too many designers remain attached to an outdated mode of pseudo-European fantasies of Margiela and John Galliano fumes, like having a fancy fashion show and a weird-looking fanny pack means they are legitimate and their insecurities will be squashed forever. (Spoiler: they aren’t.)

Notably, neither LVMH nor Kering, the industry’s two largest conglomerates, have signed on to any of these pacts—but they have also not outlined any changes themselves, and one presumes that may be in the cards. The conglomerates are essentially the wind gods of the luxury industry, so they are poised to lead, whether they decide to make their own series of proposals themselves or not.

Take a look at what the three major proposals are outlining below. Are they enough to get you excited about fashion again?

Forum Letter

Who: Led by designer Dries Van Noten, Altuzarra CEO Shira Sue Carmi, and the president of Hong Kong luxury retailer Lane Crawford, Andrew Keith, the group also includes designers like Marine Serre, Eckhaus Latta, Paco Rabanne, Caroline Herrera, and Nina Ricci (the latter three are all owned by Puig, the Spanish conglomerate that also owns a majority share in Van Noten’s business). Chloe, the insouciant French girl brand designed by Natacha Ramsay-Levi, signed on last week. The group has strategically partnered with retailers, as well, including British department store Selfridge’s, Nordstrom, and Mytheresa.

What: The group’s efforts, organized across a series of Zoom calls and circulated through an online petition, are primarily focused on recalibrating the selling season and setting parameters for when and how retailers can discount clothing. Under their proposal, stores would sell Fall/Winter merchandise from August to January, and Spring/Summer from February to July, which would align with seasonal weather patterns. (What happens when global warming expands or contracts seasons?) Retailers would agree not to discount collections until January, for Fall/Winter, and July, for Spring/Summer. (France already regulates sales in this way by law.)

Ramifications: Because of frequent markdowns and seasonal events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Singles Day, consumers have been trained to expect hefty discounts. This proposal hopes to right that imbalance, but it’s a tough moment to expect consumers to start paying full price again. Plus: what happens when global warming causes seasons to expand or contract?

Rewiring Fashion

Who: Lead by the Business of Fashion, this coalition (also organized by Zoom!) gathered 64 founding signatories including menswear heavyweights like 1017 Alyx 9SM, Amiri, Fear of God, and Craig Green as well as major American womenswear designers like Oscar de La Renta, Proenza Schouler, Rachel Comey, and Rosie Assoulin. Stores include specialty boutiques like New York’s Kirna Zabete and The Webster, and the full list of 1,600+ signatories includes business school professors, executives at stores like JC Penney, consultants, and the creative director of 032c magazine.

What: Rewiring fashion is focused on three recommendations: 1. Changing the fashion show calendar to better better serve its intended audience of buyers and press, and create a more designer- and customer-friendly selling schedule; 2. Changing fashion show formats, shifting away from the closed-door industry-oriented setup first created half a century ago to something that can “better target a consumer audience”; and 3. Set markdown season to January and July, as the Forum also suggests, and banned in-season discounting (which would mean, they say explicitly, the end of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Singles Day).

Ramifications: In short, Rewiring Fashion’s proposal aligns with the Forum’s, but offers more detailed ideas—including a proposal to combine men’s and women’s fashion weeks, which could be a blessing and a curse.

Also notable is its vague second clause about fashion shows. Rewiring Fashion wants fashion shows to take place at the outset of the buying season—that much ballyhooed concept called see-now-buy-now. Some industry insiders—especially fashion editors and journalists—I’ve spoken to have actually said they want a less consumer-oriented fashion show model, where influencers would have less real estate and celebrities would be in attendance as true friends of the brand rather than paid guests, and where perhaps many shows would take place in the same complex of spaces (a la the Bryant Park tents of New York Fashion Weeks of yore.). One imagines that this would even enhance the mystique of the flagging fashion show concept, thus fueling a vibrant livestream system for the folks at home. But the most important takeaway from that second clause seems to be the emphasis on not showing every season—a flexibility that would save designers money likely better spent elsewhere.

The British Fashion Council and Council of Fashion Designers of America: The Fashion Industry’s Reset

Who: Well...the British Fashion Council and the Council of Fashion Designers of America. France’s Fédération française de la couture, which oversees mens- and womenswear as well as couture, and Italy’s Pitti Uomo and Camera Nazionale della Moda, were not included here, though they certainly hold more global sway.

What: Echoing calls for a more sustainable and streamlined production output and a delivery schedule that aligns product delivery with the seasons, the BFC and CFDA emphasize that designers should focus on two collections a year. Pre-collections should be shared in showrooms as they once were, since they “are not sufficiently fashion forward to warrant a show.” They also suggest that brands show within the scheduling parameters set by the trade organizations, bucking a trend for, say, women’s ready-to-wear designers to show during couture week, or womenswear designers to show resort collections during men’s fashion week.

Ramifications: Calling for fewer fashion shows is a major relief—a righting of the over-expansion of fashion shows, many of which have little purpose and happen at great expense. But French and Italian brands—including many owned by the mega-conglomerates LVMH and Kering—need to sign on to make a major impact, especially for menswear.

Originally Appeared on GQ