No. 48
The current state of fashion, according to me
What the hell is going on in fashion right now? Why isn’t anyone truly innovating? Why don’t luxury items feel luxurious anymore? How does the fashion of today feel uniquely now, and not just a hollow reiteration of the past? What is anyone doing to get us out of this trend-driven death spiral? How do we consume less, but better, and maybe take a teensy tiny break from decimating the environment while we're at it?
These questions gnaw at me because I sense we're living through a profound crisis of taste—not just in what we wear, but in how we understand desire itself.
The Poverty of Fashion Language
Let’s start from the top - from a visualization perspective, we fundamentally lack the language to describe what it is we actually want fashion to do for us. The problem with a lack of language, generally speaking, is that if you can’t put to words what exists in your brain, you effectively can’t think coherently. Your mind is not empty, no - indeed it is filled with images, a jumble of emotions (never said you can’t feel!), and perhaps some words you know that feel almost right but never quite land. Much like a baby who can’t ask for caviar yet (they do not know the word for caviar, they don’t know what caviar is, they just want something salty and indulgent, and they don’t know what those words mean, either), the current fashion landscape leaves us without an ability to know what we want, let alone describe it. Yet we are all thirstily grasping for something indefinable, something that feels authentic in a sea of manufactured desire.
People watch enough videos on TikTok to think they know what they want. Maybe they pick up a few key phrases from someone who actually studied fashion, absorbing fragments of expertise like linguistic confetti. But much like the dangerous proximity to wealth we all feel with social media (the illusion of access without the reality of possession, just because you have seen a Birkin bag in your feed does not mean you should have one, or that you understand what ownership of such an object actually represents), we are simply miming mommy and daddy by making the same shapes with our mouths and sounding the words out. We’ve become fashion’s equivalent of cargo cult practitioners, replicating the forms without understanding the substance.
The Tyranny of the Negative Definition
When a baby doesn’t know what it is that they want (caviar, but salty chips or pickles will do), they focus on what they don’t want: they decidedly don’t want a nap, they don’t want mushy peas, they don’t want their favorite book read to them for the fifteenth time today. Sound familiar? In 2025, we have become more defined by what we hate than what we love. I am stylish because I do NOT wear skinny jeans, or because I think dressing old money without having old money is gauche, or because I won’t be caught dead carrying a Labubu. We are defining ourselves, instead of by this hunger we can’t put our finger on, by what we are not - because it is infinitely easier than the hard work of self-knowledge (ugh who wants to do THAT!).
Everything in contemporary fashion has become a rejection of what came before it, a perpetual adolescent rebellion against the previous moment’s aesthetic tyranny. You can read the tea leaves just by asking yourself what the opposite of the current trend might be: dainty gold jewelry yesterday? Chunky silver jewelry today. Skinny jeans yesterday? Baggy jeans today. Minimalism yesterday? Maximalist chaos today. It’s a very efficient flywheel for getting consumers to buy, buy, BUY, but an intellectual and creative dead end.
This binary thinking - this constant oscillation between polarities - has created what I can only describe as fashion whiplash. We lurch from one extreme to another, never pausing to ask whether either extreme actually serves us, whether either choice reflects genuine preference or merely reflexive contrarianism.
Lost in the Kaleidoscope
In this reactive ecosystem, we become profoundly lost. Lost in a kaleidoscope of references and vintages and nothing that feels created for its own sake, only for the sake of being different from what came before it. We’re living in an era of aesthetic archaeology, constantly excavating the past for inspiration but never quite building something that belongs to our present moment.
Defining oneself by what we are not (not to be overly dramatic, but bear with me) is a deep philosophical illness. If we are nothing except in opposition to something else, then when that something else ceases to exist, perhaps so do we. Our identities become dependent on the very things we claim to reject. We need skinny jeans to exist so we can perform our rejection of them. We need fast fashion to exist so we can signal our superiority by avoiding it. We’ve created a parasitic relationship with the trends we claim to transcend.
The Hunger for Authenticity
What we all hunger for - what I believe drives this restless scrolling and endless shopping - is something real, something true to our individual taste, something that transcends the tyranny of time and trend. With no creation, just reaction, nothing feels truly original anymore. We have done the “90s are back” (which was itself a reference to the 60s), the “70s are back” (also a reference to the 20s and Edwardian era), and now it feels like the 2010s are somehow back (but why? We were barely done living through them the first time).
I’m not fighting the spirit of history-based inspiration; fashion has always been a conversation across time, designers have always pulled from the archive of human creativity. But perhaps we’ve leaned into historical referencing as our sole organizing principle, missing the forest for the trees when it comes to anything that might propel us into an authentic future rather than a curated past.
The problem with living entirely in reference is that references become references of references. We’re not drawing from primary sources anymore—we’re copying copies of copies, like a fashion game of telephone where the original message has been completely lost. A contemporary “70s-inspired” piece is probably inspired by a 2019 piece that was inspired by a 1990s piece that was inspired by something from 1973. We’re several generations removed from any authentic engagement with the original aesthetic impulse.
The Comfort of Nostalgia in Uncertain Times
Perhaps a bearish market and profoundly uncertain times push consumers toward the comfortable and familiar. I find myself reminiscing about a childhood filled with soft, warm light filtering through my parents’ sunroom, the smell of pine and bug spray as I arrive at summer camp, the musty embrace of an attic on a summer day where we hide among genuine antiques - objects that have survived not because they were trendy, but because they were built to last.
These deeply visceral memories, among many others, form some of my most time-tested sources of inspiration. They feel authentic because they are mine, unmediated by algorithms or influencers or market research. We all want to return to a simpler time, especially when times are decidedly not simple. Perhaps this is why we can’t tear ourselves away from the death loop that is references within references - nostalgia feels safer than innovation, imitation feels less risky than creation.
But there’s a difference between drawing inspiration from the past and being trapped by it. True inspiration transforms what it touches; mere referencing just reproduces it in a different context.
The Democratization Paradox
On top of our trend-cycle-driven reference culture, it feels like even expensive items have become Shein dupes of themselves. If you bought a cashmere sweater in 2005, you would still have a gorgeous cashmere sweater today - it would have aged beautifully, developed character, become softer with wear. If you bought a cashmere sweater in 2023, you’ve probably already donated it because of the pilling, the stretching, the general degradation that comes from cutting corners in production to hit price points that make luxury “accessible.”
The race toward accessibility has left us wondering: does everything need to be accessible if it's a poor imitation of what it seeks to represent? In the last 50 years alone, advanced agricultural practices have reduced the percentage of people who die from starvation from 24% to 9%, which is obviously and unequivocally GOOD. But why does everyone need a goddamn cashmere sweater? These are fundamentally different problems requiring different solutions.
I think, generally speaking, it’s okay to want things you can’t have. It’s okay not to be able to afford luxury if you’re struggling to pay rent - these are reasonable priorities, and luxury is not necessity. The American obsession with “more” and “better,” amplified by technology and social media that shows us that “everyone” seems to have access to luxury items, has caused us to forget this basic truth. You do not need luxury just because you know it exists. The mere awareness of something doesn’t create an entitlement to it.
Social media has led us down a particularly dangerous path in this regard. Many people who now crave luxury goods were never going to witness them in their natural habitat if not for Instagram and TikTok. This manufactured longing isn’t inspiring - it’s deeply harmful to the psyche. Most humans did not evolve to see Jeff Bezos’s wedding, or to scroll through endless images of wealth they'll never possess. We’re psychologically equipped to handle the social hierarchies of maybe 150 people, not the global display of inequality that social media provides.
Breaking the Death Spiral
So what can we do to extract ourselves from this death spiral? How do we begin to define ourselves and our style by what we love, instead of what we hate? How do we cultivate wardrobes filled with items that reflect our personal taste so completely that they become sustainable through sheer love - pieces we can’t bear to discard because they feel like extensions of ourselves?
How do we step away from trend forecasting and toward trend setting, or better yet, toward trend irrelevance? How do founders create fashion technology products that aren’t solely aimed at increasing consumption? And who will fund such ventures if they don’t, in fact, encourage the endless buying that drives our current economic model?
These are not merely aesthetic questions - they’re existential ones. They require us to fundamentally rethink our relationship not just with clothing, but with desire, identity, and self-expression.
The Cool Girl Industrial Complex
Luckily, the world remains filled with genuine inspiration: in places, memories, people, ideas that exist outside the fashion-industrial complex. One particularly troubling trend that exemplifies our problem, however, is the current “cool girl” obsession that has taken over social media. One cursory search on TikTok reveals hundreds of videos of well-meaning women spreading the “cool girl” gospel. Cool girls wear this specific perfume and that particular brand and these exact rings and those precise shoes. Cool girls never slow down, they always consume, and in many ways, they have become defined entirely by their patterns of consumption.
The cool girl has become a brand unto herself, a carefully curated aesthetic that can be purchased and performed rather than lived. She’s been commodified, packaged, and sold back to us as a lifestyle we can buy our way into.
It’s not the consumption of any particular item that will make you a cool girl. The fact that you are buying something based solely on the recommendations of someone who evokes an image of the elusive cool girl means you are (sorry) not cool. Are you offended? But being cool isn't really the point, is it? Was it ever?
Confidence as the True Currency
Confidence is the point, and confidence is the closest stand-in for coolness that actually matters. Real confidence comes from knowing what you want and knowing who you are - not from performing an identity based on consumption patterns recommended by strangers on the internet.
You could ask 100 women to describe the first genuinely cool girl they ever knew (whether they encountered her in kindergarten, third grade, maybe college if they grew up somewhere with no cool people, which would really suck) and there likely wouldn't be a single common thread in the brands they wore, the items they consumed, their hobbies, or their lifestyle choices. What they probably had in common was (shiny hair and) genuine confidence - confidence that came from somewhere internal, not from external validation or brand affiliation.
Their coolness wasn’t based on consumption then, and it shouldn’t be based on consumption now. The cool girls of our youth were cool because they seemed to know something the rest of us didn’t—not about products to buy, but about how to move through the world with ease and authenticity.
Technology for Authentic Self-Expression
So how do we use fashion technology - this powerful tool for connection and discovery - to teach women how to fish rather than simply selling them fish? How do we create platforms and products that help people find things that express genuine individuality, that feel unique and special and timeless? How do we break the cycle of perpetually copying every skinny, confident girl with shiny hair who appears in our feeds?
The only people who win in the current system are the brands selling us the promise of borrowed coolness. What actually makes the cool girl cool is how she selects things - her curatorial sensibility, her ability to combine elements in unexpected ways, her confidence in her own taste. Once you develop your own selection methodology, your own aesthetic philosophy, you can break away from the hamster wheel of trending lip balms and designer mirrors and tiny sunglasses that will look dated in six months.
We need technology that helps people develop taste, not just follow it. We need platforms that encourage experimentation and personal style development rather than mimicry. We need tools that help people understand their own preferences deeply enough to make choices that will satisfy them for years, not just until the next trend cycle.
A Different Kind of Winning
Listen, I don’t have all the answers - I’m just profoundly tired of watching everyone lose at an impossible game that was rigged from the start. I want to see something new, something bold and uncompromising. I want to see women embracing personal style that reflects their actual personalities, their real lives, their genuine preferences. I want to see people spending their hard-earned money on items they will actually wear for decades, pieces that will age beautifully alongside their owners.
I love consumption, don't get me wrong - I love beautiful things, I love the craftsmanship that goes into exceptional pieces. I just want everyone to stop doing it so badly, so unconsciously, so reactively.
What if we could create a different relationship with fashion entirely? What if instead of consuming to fill a void or perform an identity, we consumed thoughtfully, selectively, with full awareness of what we’re doing and why? What if our closets became curated collections of pieces we genuinely love, rather than archives of impulse purchases and trend experiments we’re already tired of?
The path forward isn't to stop consuming - it’s to consume better, with intention and wisdom and an understanding of what truly serves us. It’s to develop the language to describe what we actually want, the confidence to trust our own taste, and the patience to build something authentic rather than copying something trendy.
The future of fashion lies not in the endless cycle of trend and counter-trend, but in the cultivation of individual taste sophisticated enough to transcend trends entirely. It’s time to stop playing a game where the only winning move is to keep playing, and start creating something that actually belongs to us.