The new fashion creativity

To save fashion, we need to radically reimagine its creativity.

Aside of Phoebe Philo, who doesn’t believe in brand storytelling (and can afford not to), the fashion creativity has increasingly been distributed from product design across other areas of business. Marketing, merchandising, cultural influence, collaborations, and PR and events all create the context for the product to be discovered, embraced, and propagated, and need to be managed accordingly.

Fashion creativity is today a matter of organizational design. Product alone cannot win, and neither can just the brand or the business. Bringing them all together is a challenge of creative production.?

Consider Gucci: Sabato De Sarno’s new designs started trickling into stores only in mid-February of 2024, nearly six months after his first presentation and only two of Gucci’s flagships have been transformed into De Sarno’s new creative direction. Gucci’s Q1 (and Q2) results are not the failure of design only; they are a failure of production.

Just like an entertainment company pulls in the different talent to deliver a movie or a television show, fashion companies need to do the same - to produce not just their seasonal collections, but their entire creative and business output.

Pharrell is an exceptional producer who understands entertainment and the need for ongoing content, events, and drops. His Louis Vuitton work doesn’t only adhere to the fashion calendar, but also creates moments in-between, like store openings, launches, new product drops, and exclusive capsules (most recently with Tyler, The Creator).

Jacquemus creative production unifies fun products (double heeled strappy sandals), fun bits of content (Instagram), fun art direction, fun retail experience, fun stunts. Casablanca similarly produces an upbeat and joyful world, where brand products are part of the experience and a lifestyle.

More than world-building, these examples point to the transformation of the fashion business.

Traditional fashion business model revolves around designers staging presentations of their work for buyers and media. With the increasing number of annual presentations, this model has been stretched to its limits. The solution has so far been to make this model more efficient, and the shows more spectacular and expensive, with diminishing returns. This winners-take-all scenario makes the already big fashion players bigger, at the expense of smaller, emerging and new designers and brands. (An often-quoted example of this kind of obliviousness is Kodak, which kept making the process of manufacturing and distributing chemical-based film more efficient, instead of figuring out how to adapt to digital photography. Blockbuster is another example, and the entire media industry is yet another).

Instead of making the current fashion business model more efficient, better is to spread the pressure for innovation, novelty, and profit from designers, and design departments, to everyone else.?When designers are not given enough time to develop constant innovation, then making the innovation process more distributed among functions can help.

Instead of a single product, innovation in fashion is now a matter of producing a creative stack. Just like entertainment companies produce an entertainment stack around their creative output (including marketing, distribution, events, PR, activations, merch…), fashion’s creative stack consists of the product and the innovative ways of bringing it to market.

Read the rest of this analysis on The Sociology of Business.