The industry traded designers for pure spectacle. The market noticed.
Designer or image maker: fashion spent a decade pretending that was a false choice. The market made it real: growth slowed in Europe; luxury sales in China remain deeply depressed.
These days, watching shows from New York to Milan to Paris, we can’t help but wonder: has fashion become pure entertainment? And if so, does the industry still need designers, or just image makers?
The industry has always been partly entertainment. Now it is almost nothing but spectacle. Impressive runway shows, campaigns, and viral moments now matter more than the clothes themselves. The industry doesn’t want designers for their design skills anymore. It wants people who can create an image around fashion.
Designer or image maker. The distinction matters.
A designer’s job is to design clothes: to understand proportion, construction, fabric, silhouette, technique and how all those things come together on a body. An image maker’s job is different. It is to create desire, attention and a world people want to look at — and, ideally, belong to.
The fashion industry has increasingly rewarded the second.
It wants creative directors who can generate images, buzz, and viral moments. Creative directors are expected to build worlds. Celebrities bring their audiences with them. Influencers become the campaign. The clothes are almost secondary to the universe built around them.
Attention is the scarcest resource, and image makers are very good at attracting it.
For a while, this worked.
But where does the spectacle end and the clothes begin to speak?
Because when the show ends, that is what we are interested in: clothes. Not their social-media representation. Not the celebrity wearing them. And not the campaign. The garments themselves — the things we can actually wear, and want to wear.
And perhaps this is where fashion has lost something important: the ability to recognise value in design.
A beautifully designed garment does not necessarily produce a viral moment. Its value can be quiet. It can live in the cut, the fabric, the construction, the proportion, the way it moves on the body. It requires looking. Sometimes it requires knowledge.
Spectacle requires none of that.
It tells us what to look at.
And when an industry becomes increasingly dependent on attention, what can be seen easily starts to matter more than what requires understanding.
That question used to be philosophical. Now it is economic.
Luxury brands have spent years raising prices in the name of exclusivity, with runway shows growing bigger than ever. Yet demand has cooled. Perhaps consumers haven’t stopped wanting luxury. Perhaps they are becoming more selective about where luxury feels real. They grew less willing to pay luxury prices for products whose value they no longer recognise.
Because luxury hasn’t disappeared.
People still spend on exceptional experiences, craftsmanship, jewellery, hospitality, travel and objects that feel genuinely valuable.
The customers didn’t leave luxury. They left fashion’s version of it.
And that should worry fashion. What does the spectacle say when consumer desire falls? What happens when the attention machine keeps growing, but people become less willing to buy what they see? Ultimately, what’s the point of these huge shows, and who are they for?
Because an image can create desire. It can create excitement, status and conversation. In the short run. But an image cannot replace the thing itself. And that is where fashion’s spectacle collides with the market: consumers want less and less of what is selling. Quality has plummeted; exclusivity and scarcity, once the industry’s selling points, now read as artificial.
Fashion doesn’t need fewer designers. It needs to remember why it needed them in the first place.
Image makers can create attention.
Designers create the reason to look.
Fashion needs image. It just can’t survive on image alone.