
Sweatpants Forever: How the Fashion Industry Collapsed - prostoalex
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/06/magazine/fashion-sweatpants.html
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dang
Comments moved to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24080715](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24080715),
which was posted earlier.

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motohagiography
As a former fashion writer, the "fashion industry," reduces to a spectacle for
selling perfume and cosmetics. Fashion itself is an expression of beliefs,
power, and alignment that people buy clothes to participate in.

In this sense, fashion is to clothing what live music is to alcohol, or what
journalism is to advertising. There is an underlying high-margin business that
you use a spectacle to attract people into to sell them stuff. The talent for
the spectacle exists in a local equilibrium that is largely oblivious to the
economics that make it viable. Journalists are a great example of people who
thought they were the money maker and remain in denial about the economics of
their role of bringing readers to advertisers.

Fashion designers (like Jacobs in the article) appear to have the same
conceit, where their role as the spectacle that draws in punters who buy super
high margin smelly water, face paint, and snake oil lotions has been
displaced. Covid has just been the coup de gras, where the fashion business
has been steadily being polarized and dis-intermediated for at least a decade.
A business that promised and re-sold proximity to fame was really taken out
much earlier by Instagram and its influencer economy, where now everyone is
famous for Warhol's 15 minutes, and the returns on investment in fame schemes
are now much more diffuse.

The dynamic described in the article about luxury clothing in the end
resembles the book and publishing business, where you are in effect consigning
product to retailers, who make massive orders for their big box shops, then
destroy you with returns. It's like how movies spent almost 100 years in in
the popcorn and concessions business, and they've found totally new economics
in the streaming game. Fixing fashion is the same class of problem as fixing
journalism, publishing, music, movies, and arts in general, where the
economics of getting people together to sell them complimentary high margin
goods in the moment and place was decimated by social media, and now finished
off by covid. These markets aren't dead, but they are now polarized, where the
super high end is fine, and the absolute bottom will persist, but the
lucrative middle is hollowed out. These fashion design brands made most of
their money on middle market goods backed by over leveraged private equity
investments and sunk costs in conglomerates, and that's why they're getting
killed by this.

Fashion is the business of symbols and signifiers and there is infinite human
demand for these (just as there is for stories, conflict/news, spectacle,
etc), so future businesses using totally different modalities will pick up the
slack to meet it, but reading fashion talent hand wringing about their market
is like listening to journalists talk about the economics of publishing,
hockey players discussing team ownership, or perhaps even us hackers talking
about venture capital. What we think is meaningful and decisive, it's not
meaningful and decisive.

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Animats
The mall industry is going down with the fashion industry.

Fashion will make a comeback, but not until the epidemic is so over that bars,
nightclubs, restaurants, and entertainment venues can reopen fully. That's a
long way off in the US.

