By Oliver Leone [ @yourfashionarchive ]

The landscape of the fashion industry has radically shifted due to the ever-growing omnipotence of social media. Scrolling your feed has replaced flipping through the latest issue of Vogue, Influencers and Instagram campaigns have rendered supermodel endorsements and billboards obsolete, and runway live-streams are more practical than attending them.

With Facebook revealing earlier this year that the average user’s attention span per post is under 2 seconds, designers are being forced to create shareable content rather than wearable clothing. 

According to Instagram analytics in 2017, there were an average of 95 million photos and videos posted daily, and that average is rapidly increasing. With an overabundance of posts to compete with and a diminishing attention span among consumers, designers are constantly battling to stay relevant. 

It’s difficult to translate the texture of a garment or its construction through a screen, so successful brands must opt for overt designs and campaigns that stimulate consumers’ dopamine receptors in that 2-second window. Some products that seem to have been born out of this predicament include Jacquemus “le Chiquito” bag and almost anything Balenciaga has put out since Demna Gvsalia took the helm at the label. 

Demna is a master of harnessing social media’s marketing capabilities; through collaborations such as Fortnite x Balenciaga, reactionary products like the $1000 double shirt, and pop-culture-tinged campaigns such as his Simpsons runway, he monopolizes headlines designed for the media algorithm. Demna seems to have cracked the code of floating above (whilst others drown under) the oversaturation of content constantly being dumped into our social streams. 

Belgian Designers Ann Vandevorst and Filip Avirex spoke on the recent closure of their long-standing avant-garde label AF Vandevorst, partially blaming its downfall on the digital age. They explained, their brand “created atmospheres where you really had to be present at the moment to get into [their] world, to see and feel what [they] wanted to tell. With all the digital evolution, a lot of things [have] changed. Not only the perception of [concepts] but also the commercialization. The exclusivity, the intimacy, is gone.” 

When buying a garment from artists like Vandevorst, you would become an active character in their story, not just an owner of their product. Especially for independent fashion, the relationship between designer and consumer has always been integral. The clothing comes with a sense of belonging to something special, an artist’s message, a movement. Designers made organic expressions that weren’t just statements, but conversations between them and the audience. It’s nearly impossible to convey this level of humanism through a live stream or a video campaign. Feelings can’t be reposted; they can’t be shared. 

No matter how shareable the content is, designers are still limited by the algorithm, which dooms their work to a very short life. According to Facebook metadata, an Instagram post has a 19-hour window of exposure before it loses buzz, dies, and is replaced with something else. This will create a system where iconic moments like the finale of Mcqueen’s “No.13” show won’t have the longevity they would have in the past.

The robot arms that sprayed Harlow’s dress in 1999 have been superseded by smartphones and software. Moments once immortalized by photographs and videos are instantly burdened with a relevancy timer if their first home is a social network. Obviously, the fashion cycle is accelerating faster and faster, but will it ever crash?  

No, it won’t. 

The future of fashion isn’t as abysmal as I’m making it seem. A decade after McQueen’s 1999 runway, Lee tweeted a link to a live stream of what would be his final show “Plato's Atlantis.” There was subsequently so much traffic to his website that it froze. This was a pivotal moment for the industry, Nick Knight who worked with Lee to make this moment possible spoke with Dazed and described its impact saying “I think everybody realized, ‘Hold on, wait a minute. Instead of showing this show to three hundred people, we can show it to six million?’ It was like a bomb going off.” The explosion from Plato’s Atlantis created a domino effect where today in 2022, every single big runway show is live-streamed.

For the consumer, this allows access to a once veiled part of high-fashion, only shown to a privileged few. For the designer, social media offers an opportunity to get eyes on their brand without buying their way into fashion week. The playing field has leveled, becoming a member of the high fashion circle is attainable, becoming a designer doesn’t have a price wall, but of course, there is a cost.

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