Hi ,
Have you been keeping up with Fashion Month? When I first started out, attending fashion week was the biggest perk of the job. Sacrificing every weekend to work for months on end was so worth the thrill of squeezing into Charles Jeffrey's extravagant shows at LFW, frantically navigating Paris' metro system to make appointments that were booked at opposite ends of the city, or cycling across Copenhagen because some cool brand decided they wanted to show their collection in a desolate barn on the outskirts of town. One season, Anna Wintour & her security elbowed me out of the way at a Richard Quinn show and honestly, I bragged about it for a week.
In the last two years, so much has changed. But fashion month ploughs on business-as-usual like a chic travelling circus, and I can't help but feel increasingly disenfranchised by it all. What happened to all the talk of a fresh start for fashion post-Covid? A slower pace for the industry? A less wasteful way to showcase new design? In the context of the climate crisis, the spiralling cost of living, an ongoing pandemic, and now a devastating war in Ukraine, fashion week feels so pointless, so excessive, so out of touch.
Don't get me wrong. I love fashion shows, I love designers, the creativity, the glamour, the free champagne, you name it. Who wouldn't? But the space between fashion week and reality is widening. I don't want to read gushing reviews that spend one line mentioning that recycled fabrics are in this season or see which influencers sitting front row at Versace. Honestly, who cares? It feels like in our haste to get back to some semblance of normality, we forgot that the good old pre-pandemic days weren't actually that good – for us or for the planet.
When you boil it down, who is fashion week really for? And why can't we seem to redesign it into something that serves the world we live in now? One of my favourite podcasts, Wardrobe Crisis, dived into this question with the CEO of Copenhagen Fashion Week this month – you can find the link below.
As always, I love to hear your thoughts. Hit me up with the reply button at the bottom of the newsletter.
Until next month,
Meg X