Where does a brand’s value come from: designers, garments, or celebrities?
The front row used to be the place to witness fashion. Now, it is the fashion.
When a celebrity generates more headlines than the collection they are seated in front of, the question becomes inevitable: who is really selling—and who is being sold?
Before the shows even begin, cameras, more than angled at garments, focus on faces. The new collection about to be presented becomes almost a backdrop. The identities in the front row take centre stage.
Clearly, this is intentional. However, it increasingly resembles a carnival, where everything centres on marketing and advertising. And the risk of over-saturation is real.
Lately, in the aftermath of Ferragni’s “pandoro gate”, a de-influencing trend has surfaced — though it has quickly migrated from influencers to celebrities.
Nevertheless, a certain exhaustion is growing with celebrity marketing.
The attention economy
The front row is no longer about proximity to design, but proximity to visibility.
Social media has rewired fashion’s priorities. A single Instagram story can generate more reach than an entire runway show. As a result, brands now curate their front rows as carefully as they design their collections or cast their campaigns.
Visibility has become the value.
Celebrity marketing is increasingly seen as a key driver of luxury fatigue — and more broadly, of consumer exhaustion with advertising. The relentless flood of celebrity endorsements, coupled with rising prices and, at times, declining quality, has led many consumers to feel alienated and sceptical towards luxury brands.
And in this system, celebrities are not just guests — they are amplifiers. They validate, extend, and monetise a brand’s presence in real time. The front row generates headlines before the first look even appears. See the strategic placement of K-pop stars and the relentless pursuit of younger audiences.
So the question emerges naturally: are clothes still the centre of fashion?
Where identity resides
If identity was the underlying theme of the latest Fashion Weeks, then the industry faces a more fundamental question: where does that identity truly reside?
In the clothes. Or in the spectacle surrounding them.
If a celebrity wears one brand for a single show and another the next, what does their endorsement actually signify? Is a garment valued for its design, or for who was seen wearing it?
And ultimately: whose identity are we really buying into?
Front row: authorship vs amplification
Fashion has traditionally been rooted in authorship — the designer’s vision expressed through garments.
But today, that authorship is increasingly filtered through amplification. Who defines value now: the designer and the work itself, or the celebrity whose visibility transforms that work into relevance?
Because — most importantly — the same celebrity who legitimises one brand in the morning may endorse another in the afternoon. These associations are not rooted in continuity, in genuine support, but in circulation. They are transactional, immediate, and temporary.
In short, we have shifted from an era of authorship to an era of amplification.
Final thoughts
Ultimately, a counter-movement is quietly asserting itself. Some designers, particularly those outside the celebrity-driven machinery, deliberately eschew the carnival of front-row dressing and photo opportunities. For many independent designers, this is not merely a philosophical stance but a practical reality: lacking the massive marketing budgets required for celebrity booking and styling, they must rely instead on the quality of their work and the support of local press.
In doing so, they inadvertently pose a pointed question to the industry: isn’t good design and quality the true point of a collection? And in fact, isn’t that what designers need to show?
Amid all the frenzy over front-row attendance and the relentless pursuit of visibility, the game has grown cloying. There exists, however, a different perspective: one uninterested in celebrities, indifferent to who wears what, and intent on returning to something closer to old-school fashion.
What remains, in the end, is a simple desire: to see beautiful clothes—
in a fashion show where the intensity returns to the clothes themselves.