Puck
Fashionās Villain of the Year Isā¦
The demanding, annoying, and increasingly necessary āclientāāfrom the desperate poseur buying the Louis Vuitton money clip to the oil heiress dropping $500,000 on a custom couture look. Like entertainment, politics, and media, the fashion industry has been laid low by the depths of post-monoculture influencer economics.
In retrospect, 2025 was the year that the client truly became a nightmare, but this dynamic also reflects a larger, often unspoken reality: Despite their desire to be ahead of the trends, fashion people are lemmings who will typically buy whatever bill of goods they are sold. Photo: Hippolyte Petit/BFA.com
December 22, 2025
Late last week, the influencer-editor
Bryan Yambao, better known to his ~900,000 followers as Bryanboy, sent me a playful D.M. on Instagram: āAm I fashionās villain of the year?ā
āYou wish!ā I joked. But then I started thinking about itā¦
Yambao, who got his start writing a travel diary on LiveJournal in the early 2000s, is a sycophant-critic hybrid. He has one of the most influential and ubiquitous social media presences in the industry, plus direct relationships with designers and industry executives who care about his perspective. But most importantly, he is a
client: Yambao regularly spends a fortune on head-to-toe looks from HermĆØs, Saint Laurent, etcetera. (Yes, thereās a Swedish software developer husband, but Iām sure Yambao does fine on his own, too.)
And the industry increasingly relies on people like Yambao to buy things, lots of things, and then tell followers what they are buying, in order to perpetuate the spending cycle.
The Bryanboys of the world have followed a fairly simple trajectory. Beginning in the late aughts, the industry started passing over traditional authorities for more pliant voices and hangers-on who could allow them to communicate more directly with their customer, sans a journalistic filter. You know what happened next, of course:
The rise of influencer culture, which has upended media and politics, would eventually come for fashion. Provo housewives became powersellers; the
Kardashians arrived; and people like Bryanboy, who once upon a time would have never been permitted into a runway show, had platforms brimming with impactful, often facile opinions about the industry. Worse, after the post-Covid correction, the business needed them more than ever.
This was all well and good, or at least manageable, until Yambao and his peers started growing disillusioned with various failings of the industry, and became increasingly vocal about it this year. There are plenty of factors at play here: a handful of less-than-stellar collections, sure, and an industry in a generally defensive crouch.
At Dior, for instance, Delphine Arnault and Anderson have waxed on about āquality,ā even though that should be a given in a $4,000 cotton dress. Luca de Meo is openly endeavoring a turnaround effort at Kering.
Marc Jacobs nearly sacrificed his brand to ABG. Meanwhile, fair or not, the Yambaos of the world helped elevate a collective client-side disenchantment that the industry couldnāt ignore.
For the past few months, I simply couldnāt escape a litany of client complaints of various levels of validity. Iāve received notes from Dior diehards who aver that they hated Jonathan Andersonās Pre-Fall womenswear more than the debut. (Really? Okay.)
There are the rage-filled Chanel collectors who missed the whimsy of the previous regime. (My eyes are bulging.)
This morning, a major client messaged me that Michael Riderās fabulous first collection at Celineāprobably the most universally well-received debut this fallāsomehow didnāt look great in person. āThe scarves are cute, the small leather goods are cute,
but the key items are not as compelling,ā this person said.
And so, yes, Bryanboy, you and your ilk of engaged and enraged ornery clients are the industryās villains of the year.
When Things Were Gucci
The final quarter of 2025 should offer some clues about whatās to come in the new year, but the high-spending customer revolt will affect more than the performance of a single quarter. Social media has made it
much harder for designers and brands to generate bona fide, across-the-board hits, especially at multibrand retailāa challenge that has been exacerbated by the rise of the secondhand market, especially in the U.S.,
and the fact that Chinese customers became more sophisticated and less reflexively brand-conscious and spend-happy. Indeed, in the wake of the pandemic fluke, itās clear that the industry has changed for good: Sales at some of the biggest brands in the world plummeted as much as 40 percent from record highs; customers stopped going to Saks Fifth Avenue.
Perhaps the most instructive example of āwhat happened to fashionā is the career of Alessandro Michele, whose early designs as creative director of Gucci, in 2015, were a commercial phenomenon. Even those uninterested in Micheleās fancy dress-trunk wares probably still had a pair of fur-lined loafers in their closet.
Micheleās first few seasons at Valentino, however, have been a case study in the fraying brand-client dynamic. True, heās had to navigate some well-documented personnel issues, but the ultimate challenge facing the brand is that so much has changed in the decade since he began his run at Gucci. His Spring/Summer 2026 collection, shown in October during Paris Fashion Week, was pretty phenomenal, reflecting the way real women are dressingāor want to dress. But these days, prospective clients buy vintage Valentino onlineāand maybe Gucci from his era, too.
With seemingly endless options, they also donāt want to be told what to do.
So, in retrospect, 2025 was the year that the client truly became a nightmare. But this dynamic also reflects a larger, often unspoken reality: Despite their desire to be ahead of the trends,
fashion people are lemmings who will typically buy whatever bill of goods they are sold.
Over the past few years, though, customers have made it clear that they donāt want to be treated that way anymore, and the era of groupthink is ending. The industry is praying the clients will relent. But, of course, they wonāt.
so great for margins and production lead time.
