I think you can have a 'healthy' business without all that support, all the involvement of the right players, if you‘re willing to break with the system entirely without doing the shows, selling directly to the end customer etc. - Perhaps that is the beauty of our times, that the right kind of concept can still be profitable if it reflects the needs of an audience that is willing to pay.
As much as my neuroatypical brain loves the satisfaction of the sequential single-file procedure of the runway format, I find everything around them to be so unnecessarily stupid and illogical.
We have designers jumping through hoops to impress the extremely fickle audience that attends these shows. A show (that isn't being modelled by "the community" and held in a moldy condemned building) comes up to 5 to 6 figures, their output is constantly being held to the standards of large corporate houses and the audience is NEVER on time. On top of that, the buyers and final clients, the actual supporters with real money, don't even go to these events anymore, preferring to see collections in showrooms.
The pandemic seasons has really shown me that the exact same effect could recreated much better digitally with only the film crew, models and "back of house" on set. The elimination of a physical audience obviously eliminates the costs needed to accommodate them (seating, security, beverages), but also removes that 15 minute time constraint.
You can retake shots, redo scenes from different angles, change the setting, touch-up the models hair and make-up and even film your collection in segments instead of as a whole (which significantly reduces the number of models one would need). I am FULLY CONVINCED that,
far-flung location and travel excluded, it was cheaper and simpler for Saint Laurent to produce those pandemic films than it was to do their season shows.
I am being flooded with brand concepts today that are being marketed almost exclusively on social networks. But for now we will yet have to see a 'famous' designer with a grounded mindset who doesn‘t care for the validation of the usual opinion makers.
I think that to create an "iconic" designer that is digitally native, we need someone with the same electricity of a typical industry designer. Lots of digitally native brands are mid-market operations that simply default to spoonfeeding bland, pretty product to their customer base with equally bland, pretty imagery, which does wonders for sales and growth but will definitely feel creatively unfulfilling for the typical high-fashion visionary.
To break that cycle, we'll need a designer that has a strong artistic vision, but who can figure out how to tailor that vision to suit numerous situations. They'll need to put more emphasis on knowing how to communicate that vision in photo, video, social media and e-commerce. They'll also need to know how to fully translate the depth of 3d experiences into the flat constraints of 2d media. On top of all of that, they also need to stand out by offering the sort a look and a feel that hasn't been done by this sort of designer/brand, AKA, no Jacquemus/Vetements/Alyx 2.0s and no Off White/Margiela/Céline 3.0s either.
