Op-Ed: FASHION IN 2025 IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THERE IS NOTHING LEFT TO COPY

 

In his 2010 book Retromania, the music critic Simon Reynolds deftly sketched out how recent pop music had descended into pastiche by endless recombination of past styles. Whereas virtually every decade of the 20th Century until the 2000s had its musical movements, even though they began referencing the past as early as the 1970s, he saw an alarming lack of innovation in the 2000s. The question Reynolds posed at the end of the book was even more alarming; what happens when enough time passes from the time when culture stopped innovating? What will be left to copy when all we have is pastiche? Though Reynolds talked about music and touched upon fashion only cursorily, his analysis could also be applied to fashion. It’s the end of 2025 and I think enough time has passed for us to provide one possible answer – what happens is overwhelming blandness.

Reynolds, of course, was not the first – or last – to ask such a question. Jean Baudrillard already provided the model and one answer in 1980 through his four stages of the simulacrum that showed how image-based culture ends up as one in which signifiers become fully untethered from referents and flow autonomously, without any connection to reality,  ready for any recombination by the private sector. But do this enough and the populace becomes listless and utterly bored. The result of this boredom is a general sense of apathy we witness in our culture today, including fashion.

Look back at 2025 and we can characterize it as the year of “nice clothes.” This is what people want today, from the whole “quiet luxury” trend, to the tens of thousands of rich acolytes of The Row to the sudden popularity of brands like Auralee, to critics like Vanessa Friedman saying in her Fall / Winter 2026 review that “the most successful collections of the season were the ones that focused definitively on clothes to wear,” touting Micheal Rider’s exercises in banality at Celine as the paragon. And the issue is not limited to womenswear; in menswear the obsession with streetwear, which was still rooted in the possibility of transgression that the street used to promise, has shifted to the obsession with nice clothes (Studio Nicholson, Our Legacy (where LVMH is now an investor), Comoli, etc.).

The most successful stores and brands today are also in the business of offering nice clothes. It seems that people no longer want fashion – innovation, spectacle, emotion, food for thought. What they want is a nice sweater. And there is nothing wrong with a nice sweater (for the record, I think Auralee is great with fabrication, color, and fit). The issue is that people who want a nice sweater also want to call it fashion.

Few seem alarmed. Susanna Lau (a.k.a. Susie Bubble) wrote a retort to Friedman’s assessment of the last women’s season, alarmed that “conservatism is stifling our industry as so-called well-mannered good taste ‘forward momentum’ clothes are lauded.” And she is right to think so. But the point is this – it doesn’t feel like there is a concerted effort from some secret fashion cabal to get us to buy beige cashmere. What it does feel like is that this is just what people want. It feels like people are done making an effort, an effort to stand out, an effort at individuality, an effort at making a sartorial statement in order to… what? Well, in order to elicit a reaction, and at the end of the day in order to think. Because an emotional reaction is the beginning of a thought process (best case scenario, of course). This is what Alexander McQueen meant when he said, “I don’t want to do a show where you come out feeling like you just had Sunday lunch. I want you to come out either repulsed or exhilarated, as long as it’s an emotion. If you don’t feel an emotion, I’m not doing my job.” He talked about emotion, but for those of us into thinking, we know that emotion is often the locomotive in the train of thought.

What do nice clothes make us think? Not much. They are kind of just there. They exist to comfort us, like a sartorial tranquilizer. But perhaps the industry itself is to blame for this turn to blandness. For the past fifteen years it has been suffering from a lack of innovation, pastiche being its main mode of production. And quite possibly what we are seeing now is the industry that has run out of things to copy, and a sedate, polite public that has turned away from it in favor of nice clothes.