Only the fashion industry could make partying while Rome burns (take your pick from global crises), look quite so fabulous. The night prior to the Olympic opening ceremony, Dame Anna Wintour jetted into Paris to host what felt like an extended version of June’s Vogue World event.
Just over a month ago, Wintour presided over Conde Nast’s show of imperial might with pop stars Sabrina Carpenter and Bad Bunny catwalking alongside Serena Williams and Kendall Jenner around the Place Vendôme “celebrating 100 years of fashion”, with a sportif element thrown in for Olympic optics — some 88 athletes took part, too.
The point was to cement Vogue’s ownership of the industry, and position it as a brand extension far beyond its traditional publishing arm. See also its new Disney+ series, In Vogue: The 90s, airing in September and featuring Edward Enninful alongside Wintour and other august Vogue editors talking up the decade which in their PR spiel “changed fashion forever”.
Telly is deep into its crusade to make fashion happen on its payroll. Witness this year’s blow out with AppleTV+’s The New Look, Disney+’s Cristóbal Balenciaga and recent Becoming Karl (Lagerfeld) series; while September will also see a new drama series based on a fictional haute couture house, “La Maison” (on AppleTV+).
We are in the latest iteration of fashion-tainment, where all are desperately hoping that the viral interest this world generates can be harnessed into lucrative content for providers eager to cash in on our obsession with ruminating over what we look like.
Everyone is desperately hoping that the viral interest fashion-tainment generates can be turned into cash
That’s one thing for publishers and production companies — what does all this mean for the core business of selling clothes? Currently, not much. Last week both LVMH and Kering — the two super conglomerates which between them own most of the fashion brands you’ve actually heard of — posted lacklustre financial results. Gucci-owner Kering was worse off than LVMH, which owns Louis Vuitton and Dior, but given Burberry’s nosedive, the much touted luxury slowdown is here.
Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group has closed Matches for good. Its landing page now redirects customers to Flannels, its existing designer chain (seen as a stack ‘em high offering, rather than the carefully chosen pieces Matches used to offer). Browns, once the jewel in London’s retail crown, has made more redundancies, shedding its branding and editorial teams, with job losses at beleaguered parent company FarFetch.
It is a desperate end to a period where we’ve been plied with endless stuff; where brands have unwittingly devalued their stock by churning out £500 T-shirts. They hoped to create desire based on an illusionary understanding of what that brand might say about our own personalities (or lack thereof).
We have hungrily swallowed the nonsense that fashion labels equal social currency. We are in such a clamour for creating any identity that we grasp desperately at transient materials. We are neck-deep in the idea that the “right” item can make you important, that we can shop our way to kudos, that what we buy makes us interesting.
Fashion loves nothing more than smoke and mirror marketing spend
Fashion brands have keenly and methodically exploited this, building core business not out of thrilling ideas, but on trainers and hoodies and interchangeable merch viciously marketed. Prices have been hiked up as they go, the so-called “aspirational” customer cynically ditched when the sums weren’t working and swapped for the off-shore bank accounts of the uber rich. Except, poof. Even they’ve become bored of it now.
Enter our collective hangover of overconsumption, where we remain unmoved (or just broke) by a new shoe which looks the same as every other £800+ shoe (see currently trending ballet pumps/loafers); even when these have been aggressively pushed by endless paid celebrities and influencers into our algorithms.
Yet, fashion loves nothing more than smoke and mirror marketing spend, fuelling lavish productions which poor decapitated Marie Antoinette could but dream of (side note, only the French could turn that cold-blooded murder into lolz vaudeville).
In spite of the bleak retail horizon, Friday night’s bonkers washout opening ceremony has been dubbed “the most fashionable of all time” (let’s gloss over the Alton Towers plastic ponchos). This is not in small part to the reported €150 million LVMH has spent to become a principal sponsor, and why both Lady Gaga and Celine Dion were fitted out by Dior, why giant Louis Vuitton trunks were paraded, and why the medals are being presented on Vuitton trays. The message: the world’s best athletes need the world’s best accessories, too.
The question is really whether all this branding bombardment can shift handbags. The industry is adept at hyping up hysteria and while we might be momentarily entertained can spending to shout the loudest really tempt its richly-heeled clientele back?
Feathers at dawn
Sharp-eyed Instagram scrollers might have seen a quickly removed old school designer tantrum reminiscent of halcyon days gone by, when creatives publicly slagged each other off (delivering more fun and richer gossip).
The tea? Anthony Vaccarello, Yves Saint Laurent’s current creative director, took umbrage at Lady Gaga’s Dior haute couture opening ceremony look. She was performing a Zizi Jeanmaire number, Mon Truc en Plumes, bedecked in fluffy pink feathers (announced via the house with the caveat, “the feathers used to make this Dior creation were collected during the birds’ moult” — a relief, no doubt, to us all). Vaccarello’s issue was historic, that Jeanmaire had, bien sûr, been a muse of Yves Saint Laurent, and it was his house which had created her original costumes.
Fashion nerds could point out that unfortunately it was Dior owner LVMH sponsoring the show, not Kering-owned YSL, which is why the Italian wasn’t called on to help. Feathers at dawn indeed. Or in Vaccarello’s hastily deleted words, “such a shame, there is no dignity anymore”. Sacré bleu, etc
