IN THE HISTORY OF Western dress, fashion has long been the predominant tool for creating ‘ideal’ bodily shapes by covering up, transcending and reshaping our ‘actual’ bodies.¹ In 2015, this practice is still very much alive – just think of the use of shapewear and push-up bras. Over the last century however, shape-shifting has moved from the cloth that covers the flesh to the flesh itself; we live in a ‘makeover culture’ where cosmetic surgery has become commonplace.²

Like fashion, the cosmetic surgery industry is fuelled by continuous change. What started out as mostly scalpel surgery has transformed into a wider practice that also includes the use of fillers to make more temporary adjustments to lips, cheeks, hips and bottoms. As cultural studies scholar Meredith Jones puts it, ‘It is the new affordable and impermanent nature of much contemporary cosmetic surgery that brings it into alignment, symbolically and practically, with fashion.’³

While this might be considered a technological success, discourses of cosmetic surgery are also tightly interwoven with ideas of failure. Both those who justify and those who critique the practice describe it in terms of failure, though their interpretations are poles apart. What sort of failure does cosmetic surgery instantiate? Who fails, and who or what fails them?

Cosmetic surgery is founded on the twin supposition that bodies, especially female bodies, must be beautiful, and that they regularly fail to be so. The medicalised beauty industry represents the female body as both falling short and deteriorating. Although in its ageist logic, every body will fail eventually, the first cosmetic surgeons focused on the exceptionally failed body. To justify their interventions, they relied heavily on categories of disease and deformity. To have drooping eyelids, uneven breasts or a receding chin was, in other words, deemed literally pathological. Such pathologies, surgeons argued, had deep psychological effects that could be ameliorated with physical repair.

But deformed, diseased bodies are by definition exceptional bodies, and a body no longer needs to be exceptional to demand intervention. The reigning idea now is that all bodies can – and perhaps even should – be enhanced. Only a few decades ago, cosmetic surgery was a rare and exclusive practice; it is now widespread. In the U.S. alone, there were fifteen million procedures in 2014 (roughly double from 2007), if one includes non-surgical practices such as laser peels and injections.

In a recent cover story for Time magazine, medical journalist Joel Stein argues that cosmetic procedures will soon become both ubiquitous and obligatory.⁴ He describes South Korea as heavily populated with surgically modified citizens, and sees Western countries following suit. Medical cosmetic technologies, he argues, will become merely another activity of maintenance, upkeep and self-responsibility within the competitive markets of labour, consumption and lifestyle. Cosmetic surgery will not only be a mode of fashioning a normatively ideal body, but also a performance of neoliberal citizenship.

Undergoing a cosmetic procedure may, however, involve capitulation. Writing in the second person (and constructing his reader as middle-class, Western and female), Stein argues that ‘you’ will give in eventually: ‘You’re going to have to do it. And not all that long from now. Not because you hate yourself, fear aging or are vain. You’re going to get a cosmetic procedure for the same reason you wear makeup: because every other woman is.’⁵

Stein invokes a decades-long debate in feminism. While some feminists have argued that cosmetic surgery is a more or less pragmatic negotiation of gender norms, others insist that the ‘need’ for cosmetic surgery represents psychic failures. In this view, cosmetic surgery patients hate their bodies, or experience a form of ‘false consciousness.’

The stereotype of the self-loathing cosmetic surgery patient can also be found in the annals of psychiatry. Lacking much in the way of critique of gender norms, the mid-twentieth century psychiatric discourse addressed women who underwent cosmetic surgery as neurotics, disordered personalities or otherwise pathological subjects. Contemporary discussions of Body Dysmorphic Disorder similarly scrutinise the female psyche as vulnerable to self-hatred and, in addition, claim that they are susceptible to addiction. Such discussions feed into the belief that women – vulnerable, self-loathing and easily addicted – are responsible for the recent upsurge of cosmetic surgeries, instead of the other way around. There are good reasons to be wary of identifying the ‘surgery junkie’ as a culprit of the cosmetic surgery boom. After all, this logic lays the burden of cosmetic surgery’s problems on the shoulders of individual, mostly female patients, and ignores the institutional forces that account for its vast expansion.⁶

Whether cosmetic surgery corrects a failed body or suggests a failed psyche is an irrelevant question; in my view, these assumptions are both flawed. Instead, the explosion of cosmetic surgery is a symptom of catastrophic structural failures. In the U.S. and globally, its mass expansion is part of a broader turn toward enhancement medicine, where the ‘maximisation of lifestyle, potential, health, and quality of life has become almost obligatory,’ as sociologist Nick Rose puts it.⁷

This maximisation, however, takes place in a context of deepening social and economic inequality, one in which there is unequal access to health care, medical technologies and life-saving drugs, as well as food and environmental security. On a global scale, these disparities are extreme, but even within the U.S. context, according to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, life expectancy and other measures of health vary greatly by socioeconomic status, race and geographic location.⁸

Whether ‘you’ get cosmetic surgery in the future is not necessarily a measure of whether and how your body or psyche have failed you. It may depend more on your status in neoliberal capitalism. Cosmetic surgery and other forms of elective medicine are fostered by the profit-driven stratification of medicine. This system confers biomedical citizenship on those who can oblige demands for self-care, wellness and enhancement, while denying it to those who cannot. You are not failing, but our systems may be failing you.

This article was first published in Vestoj On Failure.

Victoria Pitts-Taylor is a professor of Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University.

Cara Phillips is a Brooklyn-based photographer, curator, writer and lecturer.

1. A Hollander, Seeing through Clothes, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993 [orig. 1975] ↩

2. M Jones, ‘New Clothes, New Faces, New Bodies: Cosmetic Surgery and Fashion,’ in S Bruzzi and P Church Gibson (eds), Fashion Cultures Revisited: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, Routledge, New York, 2013, p.294 ↩

3. Ibid., p.289 ↩

4. J Stein, ‘Nip. Tuck. Or Else,’ Time, June 18 2015 ↩

5. Ibid. ↩

6. D Sullivan, Cosmetic Surgery: The Cutting Edge of Commercial Medicine, Rutgers Univerity Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 2001 ↩

7. N Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2006, p.25 ↩

8. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), ‘CDC Health Disparities and Inequalities Report – United States, 2013,’ Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Vol. 62, No. 3, 2013, pp.1-187 ↩

IN THE LOS ANGELES ‘Jobber Market,’ the hub for fast fashion within the U.S., the multitude of failures that arrives and presents itself at every turn is overwhelming. It comes with the disorienting sense that one will never possess enough information. Or that the predictions on colour, trim or trend, that provided some profit for today, will turn out quite differently for tomorrow. It’s the daily ‘not knowing’ – that one step away from risk, bankruptcy, failure – that manifests itself in paranoia or accumulates in the form of total exhaustion among all those who work in this garment district.

I’ve been coming to this neighbourhood in downtown L.A. for the last five years to carry out research on the fast fashion industry. Considered the nerve centre for fast fashion in the U.S., the Jobber Market consists of nearly six thousand clothing lines designed and distributed from small five hundred square feet showrooms that line the streets and alleyways of one square mile. Most of these labels are in actuality small-time clothing manufacturers, operated by Korean American and Korean Brazilian entrepreneurs, who produce clothing for the majority of American retailers and have fuelled the fast fashion industry within the U.S. Most of the cheap and trendy clothes are designed in L.A. among first and second generation Korean Americans, manufactured in China, then shipped back to L.A. to be distributed by retailers like Forever 21, the largest fast-fashion retailer in the U.S. which is also owned by Korean Americans. And even though this clothing market – within this small urban neighbourhood run by immigrants and their children – might just be a small blip of a place in the global universe of fashion, the risks taken and failures endured in its alleyways and narrow streets are the reverberations of fashion’s entire global supply chain. Like little filigree tremors, failures felt here reflect the ‘continuously-being-made’ global landscape of destruction in fashion in the twenty-first century, yet these spaces also serve as pockets of hope and possibility for all those who work within it.

It’s quite astonishing to play out all that could possibly go wrong in the making of a single piece of clothing. It may begin with news of a rusty button or a loose stitch, or that the grading of a shirt is off just by a quarter inch in an order of thousands of blouses or tops. You may have manufactured the top in horizontal stripes in red or black – those French boat-necked shirts always seem to come back into trend – only now your timing is off since all the showrooms in the district are beginning to sell them. You might be awake at night thinking about all those thousands of pleather jackets you have stuck sitting at the port, held captive until you can come up with the cash to pay. Or you’ve just gotten off the phone with your big American retail buyer who is going to fine you ten cents a piece for having the hang tags on your order pinned in the wrong place. The workers in China are on holiday or on strike or there is some kind of problem. One of the factories you use, the one that can produce so many different types of stitches, cannot do the kind of embroidery you are asking them to do. The department store buyer decides that your neighbour in the showroom next door will sell a similar product at a slightly cheaper cost – did your factory cut a better deal with her? Did your neighbour rip off your designs? Did they talk? Your employee, the godfather of your child, just took off one day and you learn many months later from all the gossip in the district that he had to cross the border into Mexico to see an ill relative but couldn’t tell anyone including you. Now he can’t get back across because the cost of the coyote has jumped since the last two times he crossed. On the worst days, you tell me about the closeout buyers who make their rounds throughout the district sniffing out fear and desperation. Like ‘rats stinking cheese,’ you tell me – your failure means a bargain to them, an easy load for resale in another market or continent. A copy of a cease and desist letter arrives from a powerful online company being threatened by Burberry because of a jacket you’ve manufactured for the company – its lining poorly resembling the signature Burberry plaid – never mind that you’ve only made and sold two hundred pieces, and that your profit margins are miniscule.

In the L.A. Jobber Market, it is the potential of failure at every fleeting second of the making of clothing that makes fast fashion within the U.S. possible. In such a volatile global market of clothing where consumer taste is finicky, every single decision has the potential to collapse a line of clothing like a house of cards. All relationships of trust are held with suspicion; they are fragile and attended to, performed and maintained. Bankruptcy is palpable and embodied in the quickly changing nature of store names. It’s no wonder then, that this community of fast fashion manufacturers, garment vendors and traders are all so highly religious. For all the times one fails, left in debt or with nothing, one needs to have something permanent to hold on to – family, salvation, faith, and God. The walls of showrooms are often adorned with crucifixes or bible verses. Printed on the bottom of every Forever 21 yellow shopping bag is the bible verse John 3:16: ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.’

I study these fragile ecologies of clothing that have sprung from our twenty-first century globalised fashion industry. New markets have emerged among the massive movements of mostly female migrant workers who today labour in the countless and anonymous garment factories around the world. These fleeting interstitial spaces are the meeting place for all kinds of risk takers, intermediaries and brokers: the buyers and sellers, nomads, and traders. Few make it big and most scrape by, making little profit while risking everything. Come to one of these markets and tug on a thread and it will inevitably lead you to the big name retailer or brand selling this stuff in your hometown store. Tug even more and it may lead you to the very bottom of the supply chain, to a migrant worker on a global assembly line of production. The Jobber Market in L.A. leads to Guangzhou market in China’s Pearl River Delta, Qipa Lu in Shanghai, or Bom Retiro in São Paulo. Keep following the supply chain and it will lead you to the ‘second’ or ‘third tier’ garment cities of the world, to industrial zones, manufacturing hubs, factories and sweatshops.

I am attracted to these interstitial spaces because failure and despair sit so intimately with aspiration and hope. These clothing markets, like the one in L.A., are a landscape of urban pastoral foraging – countless layers of ordinary people who are on a search to catch the next trend, or strike a deal with a fabric supplier, or unload dead stock. These men and women find gems in the rough and turn a profit out of nothing, all from the buying and selling of clothing. These are markets created out of almost nothing, often comprised of migrants who have had to move several times – back and forth between cities and across borders – often bringing with them nothing other than their entrepreneurial skill and creative minds, sets of experience, diasporic connections and knowledge from having worked years in the rag trade. This kind of work often permits one to be one’s own boss, to work outside of a wage system even if to make such small profit. And for me, the innovators and creative makers are among these traders, who emerge from the most tenuous spaces that global capitalism in fashion produces.

Failure sits closely with innovation and creativity. Walking through the wholesale market in Shanghai, a friend explains to me that the copies of the copies of the copies should actually be thought of as a game of Chinese whispers; the object that resembles Chanel, Prada and Michael Kors combined has gone through so many stages of becoming that it has, in the end, become its own entity. I marvel at all the different technologies and hand-sewn skills that are evident in that one copied object, from digital printing to hand dying or sequined embroidery. In the Los Angeles Jobber Market, the divisions of labour in skill and the networks of trust created among Korean family manufacturers have both innovated designs but also cut down on production time, subverting buying structures of traditional department stores that would not originally buy from them. From an Italian economist, I learn that second generation Chinese Italians, having grown up in the garment district in Prato though still denied Italian citizenship, are revitalising old Italian fashion manufacturing houses within the city by forming alliances with older generations of Italian makers. These second generation immigrants and industrialists are looking to find ways to create better designs and more sustainable ways of making. And I am convinced that the big companies whose names and symbols we seem to worship and who take claim in terms of creativity and profit, rely and draw on the failures and creativity that come from these anonymous risk takers from below. Fashion is less the result of corporate innovation or simple ‘trickle-down’ economics in some imagined fashion pyramid and more the result of the innovations made by those at the bottom of the supply chain – the unseen and vanishingly small with their atlases of experience – their successful decisions and sets of negotiations embodied in our everyday clothing.

The anthropologist Anna Tsing describes the blooming of a rare matsutake mushroom from the ashes of a nuclear war, a mushroom that is now foraged after by refugees, war vets, and the undocumented alike in the forests of the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. to sell on the black market for high prices. And in many ways, I have come to understand the global fashion industry in this way – among these landscapes of destruction that have exploited workers and cared little for the environment. These survivors of failure, who have failed over and over again, produce the successful clothing we all wear because they have had no other choice than to persist and change and adapt and innovate as much as the fashions themselves. These bubbling pockets of creativity occur alongside risk and failure, illegality and inequality, hidden and covert as evidenced in the banality of our wearable things.

Christina Moon is an assistant professor at the School of Art and Design History and Theory and director of the MA Fashion Studies at Parsons The New School for Design. 

This article was originally published in Vestoj: On Failure.

IN SEPTEMBER 2015, A New York Times article traced the rapid demise of the erstwhile popular fashion label Band of Outsiders, despite its having become ‘a darling of store buyers, fashion editors and Hollywood cool kids like Michelle Williams, Greta Gerwig and Jason Schwartzman.’ The reporter quotes fashion executive Nina Garduno: ‘Look, fashion wants to kill you… Fashion wants you to die so it can have a new birth. It’s vicious. It’s relentless.’¹

Garduno’s comments capture a basic, essential fact about fashion: it is a perpetual process of elimination as well as discovery. Since fashion by definition is a rate of change, variations in its content ultimately express nothing other than this cadence. Things that can’t go out of fashion cannot ever be fashionable, and ephemerality is the terms of success for any particular style. A particular fashion succeeds only when its eventual failure can be readily imagined, when the next iteration that will stem from it and invalidate it is already discernible.

Success in fashion is a matter of impelling a fashion cycle; it is a matter of sustaining change in and of itself. Creativity in fashion depends on figuring out how to assure change, if not accelerate it. Capturing an audience or a market with a particular design or idea is ultimately less important to the industry than making an audience reliably distractible, reliably discontent. Failed fashion prompts permanent attachments.

The inevitable failures of various designs and firms constitute the health of the fashion business overall; the financial failure of a particular company like Band of Outsiders testifies to the success of fashion more broadly as an economic force, demonstrating the industry’s overriding willingness to sacrifice individual designs and firms on the altar of innovation. Garduno’s description of fashion mirrors economist Joseph Schumpeter’s claim that ‘the process of creative destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.’² Echoing Marx and Engels’ declaration in the Communist Manifesto that ‘constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones,’³ Schumpeter argued that capitalism, itself also a vicious and relentless force, ‘is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary.’⁴New ways of making profit come at the expense of established old ways, without necessarily producing any material improvement for consumers or society, only change.

If fashion ‘wants to kill’ its practitioners, that’s because it epitomises capitalist innovation at its bare essence, consisting of the sort of change that is only for the sake of the system’s survival. Fashion is what is left when all pretence to consumer utility or social improvement is stripped away. The sacrifice of perfectly useful goods to the ever-shifting demands of fashion is a kind of corrective purge, an obliteration of what the philosopher and writer Georges Bataille called ‘the accursed share,’ clearing the field so that capitalism’s competitive mechanisms and requirements for endless growth can continue to function.⁵

Fashion, then, systematises this necessary destruction and wastefulness and allows us to experience it as pleasurable, generative. It enchants the experience of capitalism’s disruptive forces, turning them into a celebratory rolling potlatch. Within fashion, the impersonal, economically driven upheaval appears bounded and controlled, directed by individuals’ desires for novelty and creative self-display. Such desires require a vibrant fashion industry to even be conceived, however; their inducement provokes expanded possibilities for anxiety about and satisfaction in one’s identity. As fashion scholar Elizabeth Wilson points out, ‘although many individuals experience fashion as a form of bondage, as a punitive, compulsory way of falsely expressing an individuality that by its very gesture (in copying others) cancels itself out, the final twist to the contradiction that is fashion is that it often does successfully express the individual.’⁶

The fashion industry is premised on the ability to make money by managing the volatility of fashion cycles, and thereby assuaging its consumers’ incipient fears and desires regarding novelty and self-expression. It must methodically manufacture and evacuate ‘value’ from its products. Since the nineteenth century, this has typically been a matter of the industry’s releasing new goods on a seasonal schedule and guiding those with money to spend it in concert. This creates the illusion of what sociologist Herbert Blumer calls ‘collective taste,’ which in his view has the power to coordinate the behaviour of society into a recognisable Zeitgeist: ‘By establishing suitable models which carry the stamp of propriety and compel adherence, fashion narrowly limits the range of variability and so fosters uniformity and order, even though it be passing uniformity and order.’⁷

To sustain this appearance of order, industry experts manage the flow of fashion innovation by certifying only certain styles at certain times and disseminating this information through the media channels it sanctions. While some styles emerge from consumer innovations, the imprimatur of the system is necessary to convert them from local or subcultural idiosyncrasies into fashion proper – into a recognisable ‘collective taste’ ready for broader dissemination. The industry’s ability to certify fashionability – to create a cogent and persuasive field in which consumers can feel as though they are operating independently yet safely – depends on access control. Mechanisms of controlling the value of a design sometimes involve qualitative measures of cut, fabric, stitching and so on, but more often than not branding is pivotal. Branding is a reification of the cultural capital the fashion industry relies on in lieu of an explicit system of valuation.

Part of the utility of a system of cultural capital, as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu explains in Distinction, rests in cultural capital’s obscured origins.⁸ Fashion depends on a level of mystification to derive its value; if it could be deduced directly from social conditions or some other set of principles, it would become predictable and thus disqualified from providing the jolt of change that fashion exists to supply. Instead, fashion experts draw on their immersion in the milieus from which fashion emerges – on their unreplicable habitus, Bourdieu’s term for ‘the internalised form of class condition and of the conditionings it entails’ – to make confident and compelling pronouncements on eminently replicable styles as though they were self-evident.⁹ Tastemakers draw on an authority that they can never articulate as generalisable principles but only as immediate and concrete judgments. This authority is compelling to the extent that it comes across as intuitive and indubitable, a natural product of an unteachable fashion instinct. Consumers are free to believe that they too possess or have developed this instinct, even though it is conditioned by the industry and cannot exist independent of it. That is one of the benefits the industry affords; it facilitates fashion competence in consumers that they can enjoy directly as a form of mastery, even when it differs little from obedience in practice.

The lack of a clear logic for fashion judgments allows such judgments to be modified or reversed as necessary, while protecting the status of those who make them. Part of the surprise of seeing a line like Band of Outsiders suddenly disappear is the apparent vaporisation of this ineffable cultural capital. But in fact the mismanagement of financial capital serves as an alibi for the inscrutable persistence of the underlying cultural capital. And no one appears to doubt that designer Scott Sternberg will re-emerge somewhere else in the industry. That’s not to say that specific fashion insiders are indispensable. Brands named for designers can concretise the cultural capital of those they are named for and render the people themselves expendable.¹⁰ Their names have become directly monetisable as investment properties, so their judgment becomes superfluous to the process. The brand is able to confer value and relevance by virtue of its prominence regardless of the identity of the tastemakers operating in its name.

Fast fashion too has made industry experts less relevant; instead the industry promulgates a less differentiated mass of goods embodying contradictory or confusing meanings. In order to stabilise these meanings for themselves, individuals have to spend money. Their choices consolidate the cultural capital dispersed among them in the sales data the companies are able to collect.

The nature of cultural capital makes the specific factors that drive fashion’s evolution necessarily vague. In seeming respect for that obfuscation, social scientists have argued that the evolution of fashion is basically arbitrary, motivated not by exogenous social forces but by intrinsic and impersonal mechanisms internal to the system itself. According to the 2004 paper ‘Random Drift and Culture Change,’ fashion cycles are a matter of ‘random copying,’ and fashion choices have no particular significance whatsoever.¹¹ Here fashion is a language in which all the words mean nothing forever. As sociologist Stanley Lieberson maintains somewhat tautologically in A Matter of Taste, ‘some changes have no meaning other than that they are changes in fashion.’¹²

This offers a model of fashion that replaces aesthetic and historical development – the aspects that directly affect how individuals experience and understand their place in time – with seemingly value-neutral epidemiology. From this point of view, there are no good or bad fashions, no successes or failures in aesthetic or ethical terms that aren’t reducible to sheer fortune. Fashion is a self-sustaining process that can’t be stopped, and periods of fashion are only superficially different – it’s a matter of little concern to this perspective that some periods and cultures promote, say, androgynous garments while others promote female foot-binding.

This view also proposes that fashion is not complicit with any particular economic arrangement. Lieberson, for instance, balks at ascribing fashion’s otherwise meaningless series of changes to capitalism’s requirements for survival, calling it a ‘big mistake’ to assume that ‘organisations with an economic interest in getting us to change – designers, manufacturers, retailers, and advertisers’ are in fact responsible for making change happen. ‘Rather, they take advantage of the fact that a certain subset of the population wants something new simply because it is new, or because the old has become boring or merely commonplace.’¹³ In other words, Lieberson believes that the human demand for novelty drives fashion, and that capitalism (along with its metonym, fashion) has merely emerged, finally, after centuries of darkness and frustration, to accommodate that intrinsic human demand.

It seems far more likely that the human demand for novel commodities emerged with the conditions that made it possible to supply them. That is, fashion as we experience it is an epiphenomenon of capitalism and manifests its imperatives. Historian Fernand Braudel, in The Structures of Everyday Life, makes the widely cited claim that ‘one cannot really talk of fashion becoming all-powerful before about 1700.’¹⁴ It rose to prominence with the development of mass consumer markets and the erosion of feudal social hierarchies. ‘Fashionability’ marks out a conceptual space in which consumer demand can be infinitely expanded, creating the endless opportunity for profit in the instability and continual churning of needs. Fashion is a form of institutionalised insecurity. At the same time, fashion channels capitalism’s demand for novelty and turns it into a compensatory creativity, playfulness. As Elizabeth Wilson writes, ‘Capitalism maims, kills, appropriates, lays waste. It also creates great wealth and beauty, together with a yearning for lives and opportunities that remain just beyond our reach.’¹⁵

If fashion is a matter of capitalist expansion, then a successful fashion innovator is not one who comes up with popular designs in fields already subject to profitable change. In fact, designs must cease to be desirable on a fairly predictable schedule to suit fashion’s requirements; going out of style betokens not a weakness in a design but its culminating achievement. The best innovators instigate otherwise meaningless change in new areas of experience that hadn’t been subject to it before, giving ersatz expressiveness to goods that were once semiotically inert. The systemic subjection of more and more aspects of everyday life to the whims of fashion is the price of capitalist prosperity.

Critic Roland Barthes’ assessment of fashion’s fecundity in the foreword to his 1967 book The Fashion System seems more plausible than the accounts of Lieberson and other like-minded social scientists. Barthes does not regard what clothing communicates as an essentially irrelevant and dismissible variable; instead he asks, ‘Why does Fashion utter clothing so abundantly? Why does it interpose, between the object and its user, such a luxury of words (not to mention images), such a network of meaning? The reason is, of course an economic one. Calculating, industrial society is obliged to form consumers who don’t calculate; if clothing’s producers and consumers had the same consciousness, clothing would be bought (and produced) only at the very slow rate of its dilapidation.’¹⁶

This need for instigated obsolescence was recognised early in the history of capitalism: Braudel cites pioneering speculator Nicholas Barbon, who in 1690 wrote in A Discourse of Trade that ‘fashion or the alteration of dress, is a great promoter of trade, because it occasions the expense of clothes, before the old ones are worn out: it is the spirit and life of trade; it makes a circulation, and gives a value by turns, to all sorts of commodities; keeps the great body of trade in motion.’¹⁷

These statements suggest that fashion’s communicative richness is not generated by a pre-existing popular demand for a more elaborate means of personal expression but out of the economic need to make possible limitless consumer demand. Capitalism orients consumers away from practicality and toward expressiveness. As Barthes explains, ‘In order to blunt the buyer’s calculating consciousness, a veil must be drawn around the object – a veil of images, of reasons, of meanings.’¹⁸ Fashion allows consumers to communicate more thoroughly with clothes, insisting on user creativity to propel itself. When we seize on fashion’s creative potential, we veil ourselves in the logic of capital. We imagine our tastes and desires can grow and expand without limitation, and that we would die if we couldn’t continually want more.

The alchemy of fashion translates the upheaval necessary to sustain capitalism into something understood as socially desirable, something that can be assimilated by individuals as a matter of personal choice. As sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky argues in The Empire of Fashion, fashion allows the chaos of creative destruction to appear as expressive potential, in part because the industry limits the field and gives it coherent, easily apprehensible form. The language of fashion became, as Lipovetsky notes, ‘the first major mechanism for the consistent social production of personality’ – that is, our first reflexive sense of self, an identity not foisted upon us by birth and tradition but one for which we must hold ourselves personally responsible.¹⁹

Styles of dress once expressed a more static identity, but the increased potential for social mobility that capitalism brought threw those styles into increasing disarray. This prompted sociologists Thorstein Veblen and Georg Simmel in the early twentieth century to argue that status anxiety and the desire for distinction drove changes in fashion. As the lower classes adopted fashions of the higher classes, the higher classes would find something new to wear. By this logic, nothing truly fashionable could ever be universally popular. Successful fashion is that which permits class discrimination, not free communication. A style that is widely adopted is, by these terms, a failure.

In the status-driven model of fashion, fashion change is propelled by those it threatens and is fundamentally conservative. It posits that the innovative energy released by fashion is automatically contained within pre-existing hierarchies, dissipated in a fruitless chase for prestige. ‘It is peculiarly characteristic of fashion that it renders possible a social obedience, which at the same time is a form of individual differentiation,’ Simmel writes.²⁰ One of fashion’s (and capitalism’s) great psychological coups is that it allows us to be creative conformists. Conformity itself appears creative.

But conformity need not be a matter of feudal servility toward the upper classes. By this ideology of fashion, the only significant motive is to climb an existing social ladder; it is incapable of expressing a wish for a different sort of society. The aristocratic elite’s passively inherited privilege is transmuted, by this fashion ideology, into something that is flatteringly dynamic. They appear to be innovators simply by being born. That may be reason enough to suspect this ideology, which may say less about fashion than it does about a certain nostalgia for a more overtly structured social hierarchy.

Lipovetsky, by contrast, emphasises the expressive over the emulative aspect of fashion. The incentives fashion supplies are not a matter of copying the rich but of being able to express a seemingly unique self. Rather than put a spirit of classdriven aspiration into broader play, fashion, he argues, democratises the latitude in personal expression and the taste for novelty that the rich have always enjoyed. According to Lipovetsky, ‘the fashion economy has engendered a social agent in its own image: the fashion person who has no deep attachments, a mobile individual with a fluctuating personality and tastes.’²¹

In other words, fashion systematically produces a person in a permanent state of identity crisis (or a permanent state of personal ‘growth’). Their ‘individuality’ becomes something dynamic and disposable, in need of continual reassertion in the terms the fashion industry supplies. The success of the industry rests precisely in convincing people to express themselves in its ever-fluctuating terms over and over again, saying nothing new or genuinely risky about themselves. This can be a relief for many, a haven of safety within a regime of perpetual change. This is not so different from Simmel’s view that ‘fashion furnishes an ideal field for individuals with dependent natures, whose self-consciousness, however, requires a certain amount of prominence, attention, and singularity.’²² Fashion’s primary achievement is muddling subservience with assertiveness, so that imitation of class-inflected role models can appear to fashion adopters to be an autonomous choice expressing their independence, or as a manifestation of their liberated curiosity and inherent demand for novelty.

The success of fashion then is contingent on a specific failure on the part of consumers to recognise their dependency on it. The most successful practitioners of fashion are able to secure allegiance that feels unearned, voluntary. The fashion cycle is propelled by this mystification, the need to make designers appear subservient to consumers even as they continue to lead them. Fashion allows people to feel creative without having to venture beyond an already rigidly structured field of possibility. But this is not a curtailment of consumer liberty. This structured form of personal expression likely affords us more creativity than we would experience without it.

This article was first published in Vestoj On Failure.

Rob Horning is an editor at The New Inquiry.

1. S Kurutz, ‘Band of Outsiders: Fast Rise, Faster Fall,’ New York Times, September 3rd, 2015, D1 ↩

2. J Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy, Harper Perennial, New York, 2008 [orig. 1942], p.83 ↩

3. K Marx and F Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848 ↩

4. J Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy, Harper Perennial, New York, 2008 [orig. 1942], p.83 ↩

5. For a discussion of Bataille and fashion, see ‘The Conquest of Fashion,’ notes from an Auckland University of Technology workshop, selfpassage.org/CoF/CoF.htm ↩

6. E Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, University of California Press, Oakland, 1987, p.12 ↩

7. H Blumer, ‘Fashion: From Class Differentiation to Collective Selection,’ The Sociological Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 3, 1969, pp.275–291 ↩

8. P Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1984, pp.70–73 ↩

9. Ibid, p.101 ↩

10. For a recent example, see J D Stern, ‘How Simon Spurr, One of the World’s Top Designers Lost His Name,’ Esquire, August 27th, 2015 ↩

11. R A Bentley, M W Hahn and S J Shennan, ‘Random Drift and Culture Change,’ Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, Vol. 271, 2004, pp.1443-1450 ↩

12. 12 S Lieberson, A Matter of Taste, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2000, p.31 ↩

13. Ibid, p.92 ↩

14. F Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life, Harper & Row, New York, 1979, p.316 ↩

15. E Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, University of California Press, Oakland, 1987, p.14 ↩

16. R Barthes, The Fashion System, University of California Press, Oakland, 1990, p. xi  ↩

17. Cited in F Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life, Harper & Row, New York, 1979, p. 324 ↩

18. G Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2002, p.29 ↩

19. Ibid, p.149 ↩

20. G Simmel, ‘Fashion,’ International Quarterly Vol. 10, 1904, p.142 ↩

21. G Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2002, p.149 ↩

22. G Simmel, ‘Fashion,’ International Quarterly Vol. 10, 1904, p.140 ↩

With:

Tim Blanks, editor-at-large at Business of Fashion

Thom Browne, founder & head of design at Thom Browne

Jean-Jacques Picart, fashion and luxury goods consultant

Glenn O’Brien, editor-at-large at Maxim

Steven Kolb, president & CEO at Council of Fashion Designers of America

Nicole Phelps, director at Vogue Runway

Nathalie Ours, partner at PR Consulting Paris

Robin Schulié, brand manager & buying director at Maria Luisa

Camille Bidault-Waddington, freelance stylist

Andy Spade, co-founder of Partners & Spade, co-founder of Kate Spade, founder of Jack Spade, founder of Sleepy Jones

***

Camille Bidault-Waddington: I’ve worked a lot with Another Magazine over the years. Every time they give me a very specific list of credits – all the brands that advertise with them and that need to be featured in the shoot. That’s so common now that nobody reacts anymore. But something has changed lately, and it’s taken me a while to get used to it. In a roundabout way, Another has started telling stylists how many centimetres we should feature of each advertiser in our shoots. If we have an Armani credit for instance, it’s no longer okay to just feature a beautiful silhouette on the page or a portrait where you only see the neck of the model. No, you have to make sure that enough of the garment is seen so that the magazine can satisfy the advertiser. As far as I’m concerned, that’s not fashion – it’s an invasion of the page. Advertisers just want coverage, and more coverage equals more power.

Nicole Phelps: We know that if we write a really bad review about an advertiser we’re going to get a phone call. It’s just a fact of life.

Glenn O’Brien: One of the differences between art and fashion is that, though it has relatively little effect, there still is such a thing as art criticism. Fashion criticism on the other hand is nonexistent because anyone who would dare to write something against a major advertiser would be immediately not just fired but thrown into the East River.

Robin Schulié: When people ask me what I do for a living I tell them, ‘I work in the worst industry in the world.’ I bet even the weapons industry has more watchdogs than we do in fashion. Sometimes I think of the fashion industry as close to the pharmaceutical industry in the sense that they pay doctors to promote their products to patients. Fashion companies essentially do the same with journalists today. It takes years to reveal a scandal.

Glenn O’Brien: As an industry, fashion today represents all the worst values: sheer egoism, lack of conscience, instant gratification, mental laziness. I was watching ’Funny Face’ the other night and there was a very nice side to fashion once. There still is. I mean, there’s a nice side to aviation too – but the stealth bomber isn’t it.

Tim Blanks: We are all cynics in fashion now. That’s how we justify writing press releases for fashion brands, and then turning around and giving the same brand a good review in a newspaper. Artistic integrity be damned – I’m making a living here.

Nicole Phelps: It’s absolutely seductive to go to Seoul or to the south of France for a show. But in the end those shows are not put on to woo us editors. The big fashion houses are doing it to create experiences for clients with more money than God. The women who fly to these exotic locations to see a show expect to be treated to something spectacular. For them buying a $5000 dress is like buying a $5 cup of coffee for the rest of us. Literally. That’s how much money they have. They can buy an expensive dress any day, but going to a four-day party with all the most glamorous models and actresses makes them feel special.

Robin Schulié: Nobody gives a shit about Dior right now. LVMH doesn’t care that the clothes Raf Simons shows on the catwalk are uninteresting because the company will just continue making money with watered-down versions of old Galliano outfits and cocoon coats. It’s the same with Chanel. When you really start looking at the clothes, not even your granny would want to wear it. Then you stick the Chanel label on and suddenly everyone loves it. The industry is so fucked up now. It’s made up of people making clothes they don’t like for people who won’t buy them. It’s all a vast illusion. No big company makes money from clothes anymore; they make money from their accessories, their perfumes, their make-up lines. To me, that makes the whole industry a big failure. I mean, any other industry where the actual money comes, not from the product you purport to sell, but from a peripheral one, would surely be deemed a failed industry. As far as I’m concerned what we’re in now isn’t the ‘fashion industry’ – it’s more like the ‘illusion industry.’

Andy Spade: The good thing about fashion is that it’s a way of getting your ideas into the world. The art world is very rarefied. Only like one percent of the public really go to gallery shows, so if you’re an artist you’re really just talking to your peers – unless you’re in the Met or the MoMA, but they’re hard to get into apparently. With fashion you can have a subversive idea hanging in a Target store. I have this shirt that’ll be in a store like Target soon; it says ‘Champ’ in big collegiate letters on it. Just above ‘Champ’ it says ‘Du’ much smaller. You know, like ‘Duchamp.’ The buyers who bought it didn’t even notice what it actually said, and anyway they don’t know who Duchamp is. They were just thinking, ‘Oh we love Champ, my child would wear that.’ So now there will be children wearing Duchamp T-shirts in Kansas City, Missouri. That’s funny to me. Or I just did a T-shirt saying ‘Bacon and Eggleston’ and no one buying it will know who Eggleston is, and they won’t get the ‘Bacon’ reference. They’ll be like, ‘Oh it’s bacon and eggs,’ and that’s kind of funny too. Maybe they’ll Google ‘Eggleston’ and see something they haven’t seen before.

Nicole Phelps: Social media has changed fashion in so many ways. We Instagrammers are essentially giving billion-dollar companies advertising for free. Everybody wants to be where the action is, and wants their friends to know where the action is. There is power in that; the more images of this type that you post, the more followers you get. And the more followers you get, the more money you can potentially make from these corporations. Some might say that you can’t escape the corporation today and that we are all cogs in the machine that propels the system forward.

Camille Bidault-Waddington: Nobody gives a shit about Balmain today, but Olivier Rousteing has become an Instagram It-boy and that gives the house a reason to go on existing. Nobody talks about Balmain clothes anymore – all people talk about is the image of the brand. The Kardashians. The parties. Olivier Rousteing.

Glenn O’Brien: What I want to know is where the poets are, the artists, the philosophers? I mean, do we really need to know the philosophy of Ralph Lauren or Karl Lagerfeld?

Nathalie Ours: It’s very rare now to find poetry in fashion. Everybody is so tired. I mean, how can you see one thousand outfits in one season and not be tired? C’est pas possible. The ready-to-wear season is always difficult; you can feel the weariness in the air. People are exhausted: they’re stressed and they’re sending you bad energy. There’s so little pleasure nowadays. But then, eventually, a show comes along that makes the audience gasp. And for a moment we collectively relax. And then we go back to the grind.

Jean-Jacques Picart: One thing that really frustrates me today is when fashion professionals go to shows and just look blasé. Where is the enthusiasm? I see all these young journalists and buyers, much younger than me, lost on their phones while models parade past them – what have they got to be blasé about?

Nathalie Ours: I got my education at Yohji Yamamoto, where poetry was extremely important so I find shows with models looking bored or as if they don’t know what they’re doing really frustrating. Watching a bored model coming down the catwalk in a piece of shit can make me sad – really, really sad. And then, afterwards, to read a review that celebrates the designer as if they’re excellent can make me wonder what’s going on. So I look out for those moments of poetry because you can still find them. And when I do, it reminds me why I’m still in this business.

Thom Browne: Putting on shows is absolutely exhausting, you know – sometimes I think I’ve created a monster. Why do I bother? Maybe this sounds selfish, but I keep doing shows because I love to see how they come together myself. I love my more classic pieces, I really do, but by now that part of my business basically runs itself. I don’t even need to be involved – we could just keep making these more classic pieces in different fabrics season after season. I need the shows to stay creatively stimulated. Sometimes I think I’d prefer designing museum pieces than clothes for sale in stores.

Ralph Toledano: For a small designer, a Haider Ackermann say, the fashion show is a billion times more important than it is for a company like Louis Vuitton. For a small designer, how a fashion show is received can make or break you. For a business like Vuitton the show is the cherry on the cake. The cake is what’s important. That’s not to say that the cherry doesn’t matter, but it’s only one component of the whole. It’s an ingredient.

Jean-Jacques Picart: There are times when the elitism in fashion drives me crazy. For example, why do big brands go to such great expense to put on a show for only 250 people when they could easily afford to show it to 600 instead? Why does every designer think that only the Anna Wintours, Suzy Menkeses or Stefano Tonchis of this world matter? What about the young Japanese journalist or the Korean buyer who has come to Paris for the first time, full of enthusiasm and expectation? Why would you want to exclude her? After all, she’s the one who will be on fire after the show, telling all her friends about it. If we only invite the front row set of this world, the way we view fashion will never change. Those people are set in their opinions, and they’re blasé. They spend their time at the shows looking at their phones. I remember Céline renting a show space that could easily have fit 1000 people, and then putting artificial walls in to reduce the space to fit 250. It really bothers me. I mean, if you have gone to great expense to create something emotionally powerful, why would you not want to share that with as many as you can? That to me is just snobbery.

Nicole Phelps: At Céline they could easily add another couple of rows to their shows. But they’re letting us know that they can afford to say ‘no.’ There’s a huge amount of power in limiting the access to a fashion show – in being able to say no. It’s a strategy; they are creating demand.

Nathalie Ours: There was a time when people would show up to fashion shows without invites and go crazy outside the venue, trying to get in. That doesn’t happen anymore. There are too many shows today – people who don’t get invited to one don’t care, they just go somewhere else. The people who show up to our shows are there because they have been invited, and we try to receive them as if we had invited them to our home. We welcome them. We smile and show them to their seats. I like the moment just before a show is about to start, when we get to greet our guests. Before that moment though, it can be tense. The designer is stressed, there might be models missing – there are always twenty things happening at once. But when people start filing in, you forget about all the stress and problems and just focus on the task at hand.

Hirofumi Kurino: We recently closed many of our stores in railway stations and airports across Japan. When we opened them we thought it would give the impression that United Arrows is global, but what we found is that our customers don’t like things that are too ubiquitous. They don’t want us to be like Starbucks. Ten years ago people loved Starbucks, but today we see it everywhere so it’s not special anymore. Over-exposure is not a good thing in fashion.

Glenn O’Brien: Don’t believe the hype.

This article was published in Vestoj On Failure.

Erwin Wurm is an Austrian artist. These images are from his ‘One Minute Sculpture’ series.

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg is Vestoj‘s Editor-in-Chief and Publisher.

With:

Tim Blanks, editor-at-large at Business of Fashion

Thom Browne, founder & head of design at Thom Browne

Ralph Toledano, president of the Fédération Française de la Couture, du Prêt-à-Porter des Couturiers et des Créateurs de Mode, president of the fashion division at Puig, CEO at Nina Ricci

Jean-Jacques Picart, fashion and luxury goods consultant

Adrian Joffe, president of Comme des Garçons International

Glenn O’Brien, editor-at-large at Maxim

Hirofumi Kurino, co-founder & senior adviser for creative direction at United Arrows

Steven Kolb, president & CEO at Council of Fashion Designers of America

Nicole Phelps, director at Vogue Runway

Nathalie Ours, partner at PR Consulting Paris

Robin Schulié, brand manager & buying director at Maria Luisa

Andy Spade, co-founder of Partners & Spade, co-founder of Kate Spade, founder of Jack Spade, founder of Sleepy Jones

Camille Bidault-Waddington, freelance stylist

***

Camille Bidault-Waddington: About ten years ago people in fashion started to really understand the importance of money. It was like a wave that rolled over the whole industry. There were rumours that fashion editors were asking to be paid in shares in the companies they consulted for. I just thought the fixation with money was a kind of monstrosity, so I never played that game. But once I realised what was really happening, I felt like such a naïve kid. Then people started getting into power. Everyone got a thrill out of being more powerful than each other.

Tim Blanks: The fame machine has rolled over everybody. Your persona becomes your identity. If you’re insecure, success builds you an impermeable edifice of confidence and material wellbeing. People get used to that, to the point where they can’t imagine being taken away from it.

Steven Kolb: In my opinion, you can’t have success in fashion, unless it’s commercial. Fashion is a business, and as a designer, you’re getting into the business of fashion. That isn’t to say it can’t also be artistic and creative, but at the end of the day the success of a fashion creation comes down to, ‘Does it sell? Does somebody want to buy it?’

Tim Blanks: How masochistic would you have to be to go on and on and on doing something and never making a living from it. How many years can you live on the smell of an oil rag and a handful of sawdust swept up from your studio floor? Being Boudicca isn’t for everybody. You can’t eat your clothes. You’d just end up like Charles James.

Hirofumi Kurino: Fashion is a result of creation, and creation doesn’t belong to a vocabulary of success or failure. I know that commercial success has become incredibly important in fashion today, but fashion is about so much more than just selling. The standard of fashion is slipping with the focus that we have on money now. People think that being successful is about having your photo taken by Scott Schuman or Tommy Ton, or that a good collection is one that is iconic or instantly recognisable. We’ve stopped looking at the actual design of the garments, and we need tastemakers and opinion-leaders to remind us about the importance of innovation and quality.

Andy Spade: People always talk about fashion being too commercial, or they say that there isn’t enough artistry in the business. But there are artists in fashion – the problem is that the consumer doesn’t want what they produce. I’ve collaborated with my friends at threeASFOUR many times. I love their work, but I’d never wear it and my wife would never wear it. But it’s still relevant because it inspires me to be more creative. Some designers exist to inspire other designers. The avant-garde is important to the system – even designers at the Gap are trying to sneak something creative into their work.

Jean-Jacques Picart: Fashion is like a banana. No, don’t laugh. I’ll tell you what I mean. Sometimes designers complain to me that a competitor has copied one of their ideas and is making a killing with it. I tell them, tant pis! If you presented that idea two seasons ago and nobody noticed, it’s because the world wasn’t ready. That was your mistake. An idea in fashion is like a banana; if you eat it too soon, it’s green and tastes bad. And if you eat it too late, it’s brown and the taste is still bad. It has to be just perfect. That’s your job as a designer – to put your ideas out there when they’re ripe.

Tim Blanks: That’s a real theme for Hussein Chalayan. He says other designers rip him off. I think he feels he just hasn’t done well, but the reason he hasn’t is not because of that. I was looking to do a perfume with him once and I think he’s just a very difficult person. Hard to work with. I love him but he can say the most inappropriate thing at the worst possible time.

Robin Schulié: People think of Hussein Chalayan as a ‘conceptual designer’ but to me that’s bullshit. Nobody ever wore his clothes. To me Chalayan is just a typical London designer who managed to make a bit of a name for himself when he was showing on his home turf. Then he met Alexandre de Betak. De Betak started using Chalayan’s shows as a way of showcasing his own talent. That’s not to say that the inspiration didn’t come from Chalayan, but what made his shows so noteworthy when he started showing in Paris was his set design. The catwalk collection and the showroom collection were completely different. That kind of separation between what you show press and what you show buyers is what’s led to the industry losing the plot in my opinion.

Thom Browne: I create two collections every season: one for the catwalk and one for our showroom. I look at them totally separately. One is for show, and one is for wear.

Jean-Jacques Picart: The fashion business changed an awful lot with Tom Ford’s arrival at Gucci in 1994. That’s when we developed two separate parts to fashion –business and spectacle, catalogues and editorial. We got two different fashion languages, or two separate ways of looking at fashion. The red carpet became very important; fashion became entertainment for the masses in a way that it hadn’t been before.

Ralph Toledano: It shocks me when designers make clothes for the catwalk that they don’t sell in stores. I think it makes the customer feel cheated; they will end up not trusting the brand. If there is a wide gap between the catwalk collection and the store collection, to me it’s a big sign of weakness on the part of the brand. It shows that the complicity that should exist between the management and designer isn’t there. The attitude to fashion changed fifteen years ago, when certain brands decided that the container was more important than the content. That’s when catwalk shows became about generating buzz in order to sell other products. At some point fashion shows turned into extravagant competitions between the big fashion conglomerates. But the tide is turning again.

Robin Schulié: Up until the 1990s, when the fashion industry was smaller and designers themselves owned their businesses, it all made more sense to me. That was before people decided to do one thing for their image and something else to make money. When this line got blurred the whole industry became much more impure – that’s when everything started getting clouded by smoke and mirrors.

Nathalie Ours: Today the marketing often matters more than the designer. That’s when the product becomes boring. The products made by all the big conglomerates are often produced in the same factories and that means that the hand of the maker is in danger of being overpowered by the industrial process. And what is a designer after all, if not his hand?

Camille Bidault-Waddington: Everybody in fashion wants to be a brand now. We’re not just selling our creativity: we’re selling our faces.

Nathalie Ours: Fashion is about selling a dream.

Andy Spade: At store openings for Jack Spade, I’d put a fake movie camera without film in it in front of the store and add a director’s chair. The chair would say ‘Spielberg’ or ‘Renck’ or something like that on it. It never failed. People would gather thinking, ‘Spielberg must be around the corner.’ And I’d have a crowd for my event. I’d get a kick out of that.

Adrian Joffe: Marketing. I don’t even know what that word means. Merchandising? Same thing. I really hate those terms. It’s the age of marketing I’ve been told. You package something by hiding the truth of what it is. That is precisely what is wrong with the fashion business today. Marketing. It’s the biggest failure of our age. It just doesn’t ring true anymore.

Hirofumi Kurino: Most managers and CEOs come from business schools today. They are smart, they have strategy, they can make money but they have no love for fashion. They aren’t in touch with what goes on on the street. That’s why they need young designers like Humberto Leon and Carol Lim from Opening Ceremony to take over an LVMH-owned brand like Kenzo. They represent the younger generation. But all they do is create a buzz; the collections themselves very quickly become boring and meaningless. You can’t generate emotion from strategy.

Robin Schulié: The moment the people investing in fashion started coming from outside of the garment industry, things took a turn for the worse. Now we have businessmen essentially trying to sell you yoghurt. There is nothing glamorous about it anymore, it’s just men in suits selling yoghurt. I mean, when the executives of a fashion company come from Procter & Gamble, you know creativity is in trouble.

Ralph Toledano: I remember when I hired Alber Elbaz for Guy Laroche in 1996, I originally said, ‘I want an American.’ At that time French designers still thought that fashion was art. I had to be very clear in my stance: I don’t care about fashion as art – fashion has to be functional, it has to be worn, it has to be cleaned. I was struggling to explain to designers that a fashion company has to turn a profit. Today the situation is completely different. Twenty-five-year-old French designers have gone to business school; they have no problem talking to you about marketing.

Tim Blanks: Most designers today are just figureheads. Think of Riccardo Tisci for instance. He’s considered a benchmark figure at the moment, but he’s basically just doing jeans and T-shirts because that’s what sells. He’s not doing couture anymore. If you spoke to him I imagine you’d find that he was deeply frustrated. But he loves going out and having fun. He’s bankrolled to a ludicrous degree and he’s just a simple boy from Italy who grew up with absolutely nothing.

Ralph Toledano: Between 1985 and 1995 I worked with Mr Lagerfeld at Lagerfeld. It was the only time the company was making money. But even though Lagerfeld never interfered in my work, it was always clear that he was the boss. When I later became the CEO of Guy Laroche, it was the most difficult job in town. I fired the designer, and had to hire a new one. Suddenly I became the boss of the designer. That was a tremendous change in the power dynamics of fashion. Ever since, I have been the boss of every designer I’ve worked with – from Alber at Guy Laroche to Stella and Phoebe at Chloé and then Peter and now Guillaume at Nina Ricci.

Steven Kolb: The fashion system is constantly changing. It happens gradually and in every aspect of the industry, from how you classify clothes – what is couture, what is ready-to-wear – to how you do business. I think of it as herding cattle. When the fence breaks down and the cows decide to move, you can’t just move them from here to there in an instant. You have to herd them gently. Change can be instigated, but it’s never a coordinated collective shift. For example, New York was once the last of the fashion weeks; today the calendar starts with us. If we had tried to move all designers simultaneously to the start of the season, it would never have worked. What happened instead was that in the Nineties Helmut Lang decided to move his show up. He broke the fence. Then Calvin Klein decided that if Lang could do it, so could he. And then all the other cows followed.

Nathalie Ours: I’m aware of how quickly fashion is moving now, and I have my role in the system. In a way I’m just one of the sheep. I don’t know how I could do anything to change the way things are. I know the catwalk schedule is too crowded today, but what can I do? It’s not like you can forbid people to exist.

Jean-Jacques Picart: Fashion shows are intended for fashion people. When non-industry people – ordinary consumers – see a fashion show, they are frightened. It’s too much. It’s like giving a very hot dish to someone who isn’t used to spices. Fashion shows speak the language of the fashion industry – they cater to people who see too much, who are blasé. These blasé professionals know how to decode the messages that the designer puts on the catwalk, our job is to transmit what we’ve seen to ordinary women and men. If you make fashion shows available to the public, most people will wonder where they are supposed to wear what they see on the catwalk. Where is the restaurant or party where I can wear this dress? They would panic. They wouldn’t understand.

Glenn O’Brien: Fashion week is ridiculous but I like going because I like seeing all the people that hate each other in the same room, pretending that they don’t hate each other. But until people are not only applauding but booing too, then what fun is it?

Thom Browne: Once I had an editor walk out of my show. To me, that’s so disrespectful and unfair. I took a risk with that show – it was twenty minutes long. But still! Everybody knows how much work goes into a collection so to not be able to sit still for twenty minutes is unbelievable. I didn’t invite him back the season after.

Camille Bidault-Waddington: Going to shows now gives me an anxiety attack. Have you seen the amount of photographers outside? It freaks me out. There are scores of people at the shows basically doing nothing but parade around in bunny ears to be photographed. When street style photographers first started coming to the shows, I quite liked having my picture taken. It was flattering. Now I find the experience totally frightening. When I go to shows, I make sure I’m dressed in the most boring way imaginable so that no one pays attention to me. I walk on the opposite side of the street so the photographers won’t see me. Or I stay away all together. It’s a shame really because I love fashion shows. Going to shows is so important if you want to understand a designer’s point of view. The music, the lights, the casting – everything. But I just find the whole experience too frightening now. Even going backstage after the show to say ‘bravo’ to someone I like: there are so many people jostling for attention. I can’t stand it. Most of the people there are just faking it to be seen air kissing someone important.

Hirofumi Kurino: The last few seasons Kenzo T-shirts have been really popular at the shows. All the street style photographers have been shooting people in Kenzo T-shirts. I would never wear that, and my team wouldn’t either. We don’t want all the street style photographers to take our picture anymore. You know, when street style photographers started coming to fashion week it was exciting, but today there are so many photographers and they take pictures of everybody so it’s not interesting anymore. The centre of Florence during Pitti Uomo has turned into a place to show off. Now I stay away from the routes where I know that street style photographers will be waiting: I take alternative ones. I used to dress more conspicuously and enjoy being photographed, but now I dress much more subtly. Having said that, if Scott Schuman or Tommy Ton want to take my picture, I’d say yes.

Glenn O’Brien: I remember walking around Washington D.C. in 1969 or 70 and seeing an Yves Saint Laurent coat in the window of a store and it had a big YSL logo on it. I remember thinking, ’How is that possible?’ ’Who would want that?’ That was my glimpse of the new world. Today people look like race car drivers.

Adrian Joffe: People look at pretty images in magazines today and get duped. So many designers lack an artistic vision, but they somehow manage to fool people into thinking that they have an original point of view. You can get away with a lot in fashion – it’s an easy business to be taken along with. But I don’t think it matters. It’s fine to be duped. Or if you think you’re being duped, turn away. Just go somewhere else. Not everyone is duping you.

Nicole Phelps: Rei Kawakubo is untouchable. No one is ever going to come out and say that what she shows is batshit crazy. Which it sort of is. But no one ever says that.

Robin Schulié: I’d say that what Comme des Garçons has been doing on the catwalk these last few years is an extreme reaction against a bland fashion landscape. It’s a comment on the status quo rather than a commercial proposition, and because of their position in the industry they can allow themselves to do it.

Camille Bidault-Waddington: Once, ten years ago I accidentally put a Comme des Garçons dress upside down in a shoot for Dazed & Confused. They never lent me another garment.

Nathalie Ours: I remember about twenty years ago when I was still working with Yohji Yamamoto. An English stylist mixed a Yohji jacket with some pieces from other designers, and it made Yohji really take note. It inspired him. Today things are different; designers insist on stylists shooting total looks. It’s as if they don’t trust the stylist anymore. They want to be in control, to impose their vision.

Andy Spade: They tell you you need a Birkin bag, and if you’re naïve enough to believe it – you’re wrong. I think it would be embarrassing to have one, don’t you? You have to pay the equivalent of a mortgage, and be on a waiting list. It’s ridiculous.

Glenn O’Brien: When I was young nobody wore designer clothes. People had their own personal style. Today fashion has taken over what style once was. Style is what makes you different to others. Fashion is what makes you the same. I think it’s very important not to be fashionable.

This article was originally published in Vestoj On Failure.

Erwin Wurm is an Austrian artist. These images are from the artist’s series ‘One Minute Sculptures’, ongoing since the 1980s.

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg is Vestoj‘s Editor-in-Chief and Publisher.

This is a response to the article ‘Renzo Rosso: ‘Galliano, Elbaz and Me’’ by Colin McDowall, published in Colin’s Column for The Business of Fashion, January 21, 2016.

COLIN MCDOWELL’S GUSHING RECENT profile on Renzo Rosso, president of the fashion conglomerate, Only The Brave (OTB), for The Business of Fashion presents Rosso as a passionate, but ultimately down-to-earth family man-cum-businessman. Filled with mentions of Rosso’s personal relationships with political and religious figures (the Dalai Lama and Shimon Peres, for instance, are both ‘proud to call Renzo as a friend’), sartorial anecdotes (Rosso’s home-made pair of bell-bottom jeans) and charity philanthropy (‘He helps people help themselves.’) that supposedly serve as evidence to this, instead leave the probing reader with the distinct feeling of the ensuing text having a hidden agenda.

Rosso has been portrayed as a boisterous, unpretentious and at times provocative figure before,¹ a one-sided persona meant to evoke a contrast with his French counterparts, and McDowell appears content to build on this stereotype. However, the fawning over Rosso blindsides the broader financial context of his company, and his powerful role within the fashion industry.

The personal affection we’re encouraged to have towards Rosso diverts our attention from his financial dealings as CEO of the OTB Group, the fashion conglomerate Rosso founded in 2000 which now overarches Diesel, DSquared2, Maison Margiela, Viktor & Rolf and recently Marni in its portfolio alongside the manufacturing and distribution company, Staff International. The OTB group’s total earnings exceeds €1.5 billion ($US1.6 billion) and, according to WWD, at the end of 2014 the group reported net profits of €5.5 million, ($US7.3 million), nearly four times the previous year,² pitching him in the arena of the major players in terms of fashion conglomerates.

An earlier, and much more candid article on The Business of Fashion went deeper with Rosso,³ with the platform’s Editor-in-Chief Imran Amed observing, ‘Let’s talk about Viktor & Rolf. If I’m honest, I find this brand a little bit confusing.’ Amed goes on to point out that, ‘[…] there are many other Italian brands that are now for sale. In a way, the difficult economic situation has been advantageous to you because it’s given you opportunities to seize…’ Both his comments raise pressing issues facing the industry, and the willingness of The Business of Fashion to ask them elsewhere on their site makes this toadying text all the more confounding.

McDowell goes to every effort to highlight Rosso’s benevolence and charity work with descriptions of his cultural and political clout (‘He is of a status that ensures when he calls, the call is taken — or returned in double quick time, regardless of what high level the recipient is positioned.’) offset by the story of his honest and hard-working upbringing in rural Italy. The stories build into an awkwardly rose-coloured narrative of Rosso: ‘When he is not travelling, which takes up quite a lot of his year, Rosso is essentially a family man who likes to go home at the end of the working day, be greeted by his kids and have a barbecue.’ Or more awkward still: ‘Rosso is not like other exceedingly wealthy men. He is, underneath it all, a man who accepts the responsibility that a lot of money brings.’ According to the article, Rosso the philanthropist works tirelessly to save the cultural heritage of his country: ‘Yes, there are tax breaks but the act was done for the glory of the country he loves.’

In McDowell’s description of OTB’s controversial acquisition of Maison Martin Margiela in 2002, Rosso is recast as the saviour of a flailing company: ‘Martin knocked on my door. […] Will you help me?’ We’re lead to believe that Rosso’s subsequent hiring of Galliano at Maison Margiela was a gesture of compassion to the fashion industry, the re-instating of a much-maligned design genius. The scenario, like many other elements in the piece, conveniently skims over Martin Margiela renouncing his company as well as the messy references to Galliano’s prior fall from grace. Instead we are offered the PR version of the story, with Galliano, as paraphrased by his boss, claiming to be just ­‘working for a dream of beauty.’

As with much fashion writing, what is most illuminating about this article is what isn’t said: the shifting roles and forces of power of CEOs and designers that face the high fashion system today, and the financial decision-making behind it. The article also strikes the question of what we should expect from journalistic coverage of the fashion industry. What level of rigour should media platforms have in order to deliver transparent and informative journalism on these issues? In his research, social anthropologist Brian Moeran writes of the economic paradox between cultural commodity and product facing fashion publications and journalism in delivering ‘independent’ editorial content in such close proximity to brands.⁴ In Vestoj ‘On Failure,’ fashion critic Angelo Flaccavento also comments on the manoeuvrings a fashion reporter is required to undertake in order to do his job without souring the relationship he has with the fashion brands on whose cooperation he depends for continued access.

As Flaccavento points out in Vestoj, the often-blurred boundaries between the press and the companies they are covering can lead to an insidious intertwining of professional gain and journalistic integrity. Reporters are invited on lavish press trips, and often made to feel as if they are an integral part of the inner circle surrounding any given powerful industry industrialist or creative. In an additional blurring of boundaries, fashion insiders know that writers often supplement their income from magazines and newspapers with the penning of press releases and other brand-related content for the very same fashion houses they are, supposedly impartially, reporting on in their day job. We can only speculate on the relationship between Colin McDowell and Renzo Rosso, or between The Business of Fashion and OTB, but considering the show of transparency that the platform otherwise prides itself on,⁵ and the investigative and impartial journalism that the site appears to encourage elsewhere, this article is particularly baffling.

It isn’t uncommon however for high profile fashion companies or personalities to demand a vetting of articles written about them, or to place additional voice recorders or silent PR agents in the room with the journalist in a tacit reminder that certain topics are off-limits. It also isn’t uncommon for publications or online platforms to have ulterior motives, or to implicitly agree to be the mouthpiece for a certain company in return for advertising revenue or other advantages. That the power dynamics between the fashion press and the corporations that control the majority of the established fashion houses are skewed has become an accepted truism, but articles such as this nevertheless raise broader questions about what we expect from media platforms covering the industry. In other words, progress where ‘Renzo Rosso: ‘Galliano, Elbaz and Me’’ fails.

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg is Vestoj’s Editor-in-Chief and Founder.

Laura Gardner is Vestoj’s former Online Editor and a writer in Melbourne.

1. ‘Renzo Rosso: Rags to Riches’ by Lauren Collins for W Magazine, August 22, 2013. http://www.wmagazine.com/fashion/features/2013/08/renzo-rosso-diesel/ ↩

2. ‘Marni, Margiela Parent OTB Sees Strong Profits’ by Luisa Zargani for WWD, April 30, 2015. https://www.otb.net/data/press_42993/fiche/90/11.apr_2015_wwd_otb_sees_strong_profits_9bedb.pdf ↩

3. ‘CEO Talk – Renzo Rosso, Chairman, Only The Brave’ by Imran Amed for The Business of Fashion, April 4, 2013. http://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/ceo-talk/ceo-talk-renzo-rosso-chairman-only-the-brave ↩

4. ‘Economic and Cultural Production as Structural Paradox: the case of the international fashion publication’ by Brian Moeran in International Review of Sociology, 2008. ↩

5. For instance, the site typically follows articles written about LVMH with ‘Disclosure: LVMH is part of a consortium of investors which has a minority stake in The Business of Fashion’ ↩

With:

Tim Blanks, editor-at-large at Business of Fashion

Thom Browne, founder & head of design at Thom Browne

Ralph Toledano, president of the Fédération Française de la Couture, du Prêt-à-Porter des Couturiers et des Créateurs de Mode, president of the fashion division at Puig, CEO at Nina Ricci

Jean-Jacques Picart, fashion and luxury goods consultant

Adrian Joffe, president of Comme des Garçons International

Glenn O’Brien, editor-at-large at Maxim

Hirofumi Kurino, co-founder & senior adviser for creative direction at United Arrows

Steven Kolb, president & CEO at Council of Fashion Designers of America

Nicole Phelps, director at Vogue Runway

Nathalie Ours, partner at PR Consulting Paris

Robin Schulié, brand manager & buying director at Maria Luisa

Andy Spade, co-founder of Partners & Spade, co-founder of Kate Spade, founder of Jack Spade, founder of Sleepy Jones

Tim Walker, freelance photographer

***

Glenn O’Brien: Do you know who the ‘pharmakoi’ were? They were the scapegoats in Ancient Greece. They were sacrificed annually, driven out of Athens or thrown off a cliff, in a purification ritual. That’s what we do to people who fail today. Drug addicts, criminals, people on ’entitlements’ – we ostracise them. In America we can’t accept failure; we can’t say that we’ve failed. Instead it’s the system that’s failed, the president that’s failed, the congress that’s failed – we never fail. I’m not a failure, I’m on the chamber of commerce for god’s sake! In fashion it’s the same thing: people are in denial about failure. The game is about how to transform failure into a perceived success.

Robin Schulié: The press release that was put out after Alexander Wang was fired from Balenciaga was pure propaganda. It was your typical statement where everyone praises each other to the sky. There was no reason given for the ‘separation’. And then Alexander Wang started giving interviews about his new store opening in London and none of them mentioned what had happened at Balenciaga – it was all airbrushed out of the success story that is Alexander Wang. Hilarious!

Jean-Jacques Picart: In fashion we treat failure as if it was a disease.

Steven Kolb: There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors in this industry. It’s hard to tell how well a fashion business is doing: whether people are getting paid, what a company’s cash flow is like.

Ralph Toledano: Failure in fashion is not selling.

Steven Kolb: Look at Band of Outsiders. It was a ten-year business, critically acclaimed, on the radar of major editors; they’d won prizes and had a point of view. They grew from zero to seventeen million in a decade, and they just folded. Why? They just didn’t have the resources to take their business to the next level. You know, it’s easier to take your business from zero to ten million in a relatively short time span, but once you hit ten million it becomes much harder to grow. You need an influx of capital to really start investing in expansion, in distribution and stores, in control of inventory and wholesale – all those things are expensive. Lots of fashion companies take outside investment at this point, and most of those investors aren’t fashion people. That leads to conflict because people have different expectations.

Jean-Jacques Picart: Success or failure in fashion isn’t a measure of how talented you are as a designer. You can be the most talented designer in the world and still fail. There are so many incredibly talented designers who had to close their brands because they weren’t commercially successful. That they were the darlings of the press doesn’t matter in the long run. If you don’t know how to translate your creative vision into commercially viable products, this industry will spit you out.

Steven Kolb: Often designers get stuck on whether they get a bad review or no review for a collection, on what Suzy Menkes thinks. To me, that’s not failure. Going out of business, that’s failure. Not being able to deliver what you promise, not being able to pay your employees, not being able to feed the infrastructure you’ve created – that’s failure.

Nicole Phelps: Success in fashion today is about how many $5000 handbags you sell. That’s what determines if a designer stays at the head of a brand. How many bags a brand sells matters infinitely more than what I, Vanessa Friedman or Suzy Menkes might think.

Adrian Joffe: I’d say there’s a blueprint for success today – a certain path you need to tread. And an important part of it is being charming to reporters. Do the blah blah blah. Some people who are successful today are brilliant at it. They can charm the pants off anyone.

Tim Blanks: Look at who makes it today. Look at Proenza Schouler for instance; I find them banal but they’re cute and charismatic. Then again, there are designers like Joseph Altuzarra, who’s a genius in my book, so I’m glad that he’s so telegenic and gets a leg-up because of it. On the other hand, there are designers like Anna Sui who have forged ahead for years doing absolutely amazing work. Her shows now have a much better calibre of audience than they used to, but she never quite manages to hit the big time because Anna Wintour doesn’t like her.

Nicole Phelps: If you look at someone like Frida Giannini who was fired from Gucci recently, it’s very hard to see what her next act might be. She was always a bit aloof with the press, and that didn’t make her many friends in the business. That might affect her chances to get another high profile job. Let’s just say that she doesn’t have the world’s most powerful editor in her court.

Adrian Joffe: Rei has always said that she doesn’t think she has succeeded at all. She believes that if she was successful, she wouldn’t have to think about next week’s cash flow, she wouldn’t have to worry. Sometimes I ask her, ‘Can’t you just be happy? Just for one instant?’ One time she didn’t want to come to Paris at all, she wanted to cancel the whole show. She said, ‘This is no good, no one is going to like it, it’s not good enough.’ In fact, she says that every time, and every time I remind her that she’s always wrong. It’s getting worse though, the suffering and torture she puts herself through. I’m constantly reassuring her. I try to protect her and make things easier but it just gets too hard sometimes. But that’s what drives her, this dissatisfaction. For her, one instant of self-satisfaction would mean the end.

Thom Browne: Without sounding self-congratulatory, I’d define myself as someone successful.

Andy Spade: For me success means getting respect from my peers for the work I do. If Glenn O’Brien writes about what I do, if he likes it and thinks it’s brilliant, that to me is a success. Because he gets it. Success for me isn’t financial. I mean, I know how to do things that sell. That’s not a challenge. Success to me is doing something highly conceptual that sells. Then I feel like I’m fooling the public. I like the idea of pulling the wool over the consumer’s eyes.

Glenn O’Brien: A lot of times I’ve been distracted from what I should have been doing by doing stuff just to make money. I’m a family man: I have kids and I want to live well. By many people’s standards I guess I’m a brilliant failure. But navigating this corporate colossus world is hard. You exist only through benign neglect. Like, please don’t crush me, I just want to have a hot dog stand – I promise!

Adrian Joffe: The system is what it is and fashion can’t change that. Are you going to change the world with fashion? I don’t think so. Fashion is just a reflection of society at large. We live in a culture where poor people can dress up in nice things for cheap, and where rich people want to know that they’re the only ones to have what they have. That’s not new. Some people have yachts in the Caribbean; others have a shack to sleep in if they’re lucky. My point is that we need everything – ultimately it’s about balance. In fashion, we need Uniqlo, Louis Vuitton and Comme des Garçons. Nature is about balance, and culture is too. And the fact that that balance is never achieved is what keeps things moving. If we were to somehow achieve absolute balance, the world would end. And still that’s what we keep striving for. That’s the Tree of Life.

Tim Blanks: Everything moves forward according to a dialectic of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. We go through smooth and rough patches – that’s just progress. We don’t know what our world will look like in twenty years’ time. Maybe we’ll all be living in another Fascist regime. Or in Utopia. Though I doubt it – human beings are incapable of Utopia.

Thom Browne: If you want to fight the system – good luck! A lot of people complain about the fashion industry today, but the way I see it, there’s no use complaining. I prefer to live my life according to the way things are.

Andy Spade: Look, if you choose to ignore the system, if you’re just like, I want to do my own thing, fuck the world, I hate everybody – then you shouldn’t live in a capitalist society. You should leave. Where would you go? I don’t care – but get out of America! I hate it when people whine about the system. Figure it out! I didn’t have any backing when I started; no one paid for my samples. I didn’t have any patrons; I took two jobs to pay for it all. I think the system is working fine.

Glenn O’Brien: Fashion and the big time art world have been corrupted. The only space noncommercial culture has today, is a little temporary space that nobody notices. Like the space for cheap buildings in big cities, you can fill them until they get knocked down in order to put something expensive in its place. It’s nothing new; it’s been this way since Veblen wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class. But today we’ve reached this whole new level of stupidity orchestrated mainly by the mass media. Everywhere you look you see Caitlyn, Kim and Kanye. If people spend all their time thinking about ’The Real Housewives’ or ’Dancing with the Stars,’ they’re not thinking about poverty, police brutality or the exploitation of workers in Abu Dhabi.

Tim Blanks: The whole process of fashion has become fascinating to ordinary people. It’s a whole fallow area of escapism that hadn’t yet been exploited. Bread and circuses. The world has gone further and further down the toilet and fashion is glorious window-dressing. Nobody buys the clothes, but they sure like looking at them or reading about the people who make them or wear them.

Glenn O’Brien: Fashion is one of the main things that distract people from thinking about what’s important today: ecology and politics. It’s a manipulation machine. The celebrity system we have now doesn’t make people think bigger or question anything. It’s the opposite actually – it makes people think more and more shallowly.

Hirofumi Kurino: Money and politics have conquered fashion. In the press for instance, nobody dares saying anything critical anymore. To me, that shows a lack of love. If you really care about fashion, you should be able to say critical things when it’s warranted. Recently I had dinner with the editor-in-chief of GQ Japan, Masafumi Suzuki. It was just after LVMH’s Berluti presentation, and afterwards all the PR people were asking him, ‘Mr Suzuki, how did you like the show?’ I’m sure they expected the usual niceties, but instead he said, ‘It was the worst show I ever saw!’ He told them they were cheating the customer and ruining the heritage of the brand by making expensive, uninteresting clothes. The PRs were shocked, but what he said came from a place of love. He cares about the brand. And because he’s important, people listen and invite him back to see the next collection.

Nicole Phelps: The corporations are getting stronger all the time in fashion. I see new brands coming up all the time; they stay underground for a season and then they too move towards the corporations. Partly it’s because it’s too expensive and too difficult to develop a fashion line without support. But it’s also because the glamour that the corporations represent is irresistible.

Robin Schulié: When Bernard Arnault bought Christian Lacroix in 1987, it marked the beginning of a new era. Arnault was interested in building a fashion house in the traditional way – starting with haute couture, moving on to ready-to-wear and then diversifying into accessories and perfume. But Lacroix was extremely reactionary in terms of design, for the time I mean. Alaïa, Mugler, Montana and Gaultier were already huge by that point. But they were all kind of scary – too advanced for most consumers. Lacroix with his charisma, and his organza and puff skirts, could appeal to grannies. Instead of growing the business organically, Arnault invested a lot of money in Lacroix. Still, it never worked. No one wanted what he was selling.

Ralph Toledano: People who look down their noses at LVMH or Kering are just jealous. They envy their power and money. Look, the CEOs of these companies might wear grey suits and white shirts, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t get it. They do. François-Henri Pinault had the guts to hire Hedi Slimane even though everybody was sceptical and look at where Saint Laurent is now, so don’t tell me he doesn’t get it. As the president of the Fédération, I know that we need people like Pinault or Arnault to achieve our goals. They have the money.

Glenn O’Brien: The people who cooperate the most are the ones who are rewarded so there are always willing participants.

Robin Schulié: Is there any other way to play the game? If you want to compete with the big guys, do you have to do it on their terms? That’s the million-dollar question. Young designers today are often competitive. They want to prove themselves and play the game. But the market today is too fragmented, and the big brands have already honed their skills for several decades. How can a young brand compete with that? And anyway, is there really just one way to be successful? Young designers need to ask themselves if they would be satisfied with another model. Why does every designer seem to follow the same blueprint for success? Why do you need to please everybody? I can understand that Dior needs to, but Christopher Kane? What will happen to his vision once he starts making long dresses for the Middle East, short cutesy ones for Asia and conservative tailoring for Middle America?

Nathalie Ours: A designer with an independent brand needs money to develop his company. The big problem for young designers is that buyers might love what they do and order it, but to produce it they have to be able to pay their manufacturer. Bear in mind that buyers pay designers six months after they have delivered the goods, so there’s a gap in the timeline. If the designer doesn’t have a good banker or partner, how do they manage that gap? That’s the big issue. Every designer I know has the same problem. Sometimes with very new designers, a buyer accepts paying, say, thirty percent in advance. But after three or four years, the buyer says, ’Okay, we’ve supported you – enough already.’ So now what do you do? Can you afford to lose this buyer? Most designers can’t. That’s one of the reasons why many young designers are so happy to have a conglomerate behind them. It’s a way to survive.

Tim Walker: As a creative you have to work out how to direct the money into projects where you can capitalise on it. You have to know how to take your vision to a level that wouldn’t have been possible without the financial support available. That’s my tuppence worth.

Ralph Toledano: Big corporate monsters need to have a creative vision and a genius designer at the top. The public wants someone they can identify by name, someone with a recognisable face. They want a hero. That’s why fashion companies stage fashion shows – the public needs to dream. But this aspect of fashion is only partially important to the success of a business today. What really matters is the rest of the machine: the marketing, the supply chain, the location of the shop, the communication campaign. That’s where you make your billions. In this sense fashion is a commodity business. As the CEO of a company you go to the show, but in the end the quality of the show is much less important than currency fluctuations or the economic situation in China.

Nicole Phelps: The fashion industry has a knack for turning designers into stars. Look at someone like Alessandro Michele at Gucci; your typical backroom guy thrust into the limelight because of his position. We editors are storytellers by necessity – we need to create stars. We have pages to fill.

Adrian Joffe: Do multinational corporations abuse power? I’m not sure they do. They just do what they do, that’s all. They have power because they’re rich and because that lets them spend a million dollars a month in advertising budget on some magazine. And if they then expect the magazine to write nicely about them because of it, is that abuse of power? I’m not sure it is. They just do what they feel they have to do.

Glenn O’Brien: We live in a time where corporations are seen as individuals. But if you work for a corporation, are you allowed to have an individual opinion? Not really. You have to follow the company voice and the company line. It’s destructive to human beings. Me, I believe in a freelance world. Working for a company only for money is what Marx called ’alienated labour.’ Today we live in a world of alienated labour where people sell out – they sell themselves, their minds, their integrity. They become liars for money.

Andy Spade: Glenn respects commercialism just like Andy Warhol did. If I just did my work in some small corner of the world, I don’t think Glenn would respect it as much. What he respects is the fact that I built a business while still being subversive, working on two levels. I’m not claiming to be a designer or an artist or anything – I just like having good ideas that sell.

Adrian Joffe: Long live the one percent; they are the ones that change things.

Tim Walker: There’s been an incredible explosion of money and power in the industry. Today there are countless forces polluting the innocence of play and experimentation, and the impact on true creativity has been damning. From my point of view that’s a failure and a betrayal of sorts.

Ralph Toledano: Life is about power. It’s always been like that – it’s nothing new.

This article was published in Vestoj On Failure.

Erwin Wurm is an Austrian artist. These images are from his ‘Indoor Sculpture’ series, 2002.

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg is Vestoj‘s Editor-in-Chief and Publisher.