Remember when Mathieu Blazy’s first collection for Chanel dropped and there were lines around the block at every store? I sent my dad to the Munich boutique to put himself on a waitlist because I couldn’t stand in line in New York (most things were already unavailable). I had a friend scoping out Tokyo, hoping I could score a pair of shoes. That kind of hunger, the coordinated, almost conspiratorial effort to get your hands on something , felt genuinely exciting. And in a moment where everyone keeps talking about a luxury slump, it didn’t look like a slump to me. It looked like consumerism, at its peak, alive and well.

But of course, it’s Chanel. There will never be a day we don’t want Chanel. So let’s zoom out.

The deeper question isn’t really about one house or one debut collection. It’s about what happens to desire itself when everything moves so fast. Does the allure of a “hard to get” shoe survive the moment it appears on every TikTok feed, worn by every influencer in a haul video? The scarcity that made you want it, is that still the case? Or does visibility at scale quietly kill the thing that made it special?

And here’s where it gets genuinely tricky, because this isn’t just a cultural problem, it’s a structural one. To survive as a business, fashion brands must scale. To scale, they must sell more product. To sell more, the product must reach an increasingly wider market, and the moment it reaches that market, the exclusivity that justified the desire (and frankly, the price tag) starts to erode. It’s a trap built into the industry’s own logic. It’s Birkin 101.

Luca de Meo, Kering’s relatively new C.E.O., is grappling with exactly this. His “ReconKering“ strategy, pronounced reconquering, tries to thread this needle by prioritizing operational efficiency and free cash flow over chasing top-line growth. Budget cuts of 20% across the board, a willingness to shed underperforming brands, and a sharper interrogation of what luxury actually has to justify charging what it charges. It’s a very auto-industry way of thinking about fashion: steady margins, disciplined cash flow, fewer bets placed more carefully. The skeptics, though, have a point; creativity doesn’t love a spreadsheet, and the houses that survive long-term are the ones that can still surprise you.

So where does that leave us? Fashion exists in this permanently uncomfortable space between art and commerce, between the handmade and the mass-produced, between the coat that makes you feel like the only person in the room and the coat that three thousand other people pre-ordered. The tension isn’t new, but it feels more acute now; when newness comes so fast that nothing has time to become iconic before it’s already been replaced, when the next debut is already being teased before you’ve processed the last one.

How does anything matter in a world where there is always something new? Maybe that’s exactly why those Chanel lines felt so meaningful. Not because the shoes were perfect, but because for a moment, people waited, and wanting something you can’t immediately have is increasingly rare.

And yet, maybe the industry knows this. Maybe that’s why pre-marketing has become its own art form.

Think about how Jacquemus built an entire aesthetic universe on Instagram for years before most of his pieces were accessible outside of France - the flower fields, the tiny bags, the surreal runway locations - so that by the time something was actually available to buy, you already felt like you’d been living inside the brand for months. Or how Bottega Veneta famously went dark on social media entirely in 2021, deleting every post, creating a void so loud it became its own campaign. Or the way Supreme turned a weekly Thursday drop into a cultural ritual so ironclad that people built their schedules around it, not because the product changed, but because the cadence became the point. The wait was the product.

None of this is accidental. In a world where something new drops every single day, brands have figured out that the only antidote to the noise is anticipation. Scarcity of information works the same way scarcity of product used to. Withhold just enough, and people lean in. Give them a puzzle to solve, a waitlist to join, a mystery to unravel, and suddenly they’re not passive consumers scrolling past another launch, they’re participants.

It’s a smart fix. But it also raises a question: if engineered anticipation is now the mechanism through which things feel meaningful, what does that say about meaning itself? We used to wait for things because we had no choice, the collection came when it came, the shoes were allocated when they were allocated, and desire built naturally in the gap between wanting and having. Now the waiting is manufactured. The scarcity is a strategy. The lines around the block are, at least in part, the result of a carefully timed content rollout.

Which doesn’t make them fake, exactly. Those Chanel lines were real. The Supreme queues are real. The Bottega blackout worked — it generated more press than most campaigns with actual content. But there’s something worth sitting with in the idea that the fashion industry, an industry built on the promise of genuine creative vision, is increasingly relying on the same psychological levers as a product drop or a limited-edition sneaker. The feeling of specialness is being designed upstream, before anything is even available to buy.

And the tipping point is razor thin. Balenciaga has spent years engineering controversy as currency — each provocative campaign calculated to generate outrage, discourse, and ultimately clicks, until it went too far and the backlash became genuinely damaging rather than brand-building. Too much mystery and people feel toyed with. Too much provocation and the conversation stops being about the clothes entirely. Too little buildup and no one notices. The window in which something feels genuinely exciting, not manufactured, not overexposed, not like a marketing deck brought to life, is vanishingly small, and it’s getting smaller.

So here we are. In a world where there is always something new, the solution the industry has landed on is to make the waiting for the new thing feel like an event in itself. Which buys a little more time, creates a little more meaning, but doesn’t actually answer the question. It just delays it.

How does anything matter? Maybe it matters the most the moment you’re in the waitlist, refreshing your inbox. Maybe it matters when your dad texts you from Munich saying he got on the list. Maybe meaning was always this fleeting, and fashion has just always been honest about that in a way other industries aren’t.

Or maybe we’re just very good at tricking ourselves into caring, and the industry is getting better at helping us do it.

Yet the internet hated it.

Lazy, sexist, weak, boring. Really, I thought? How? Well, plenty of influencers will provide an answer. It made me realize...why do we have to ruin everything? Why must every unifying event be marred by a thousand critiques that are only tangentially related? Has our culture lost the ability to enjoy something, all at once? Is nostalgia becoming taboo in a culture that affords no one grace?

Long ago (the 20th century), we consumed the same media. The songs that hit the radio were the same for everyone. The television shows we loved hit every TV screen at once. We lacked a social media algorithm that sorted us all into distinct tribes.

Today, the world is different. We consume entirely different media diets. You may live in a completely different world from your neighbor, purely as a result of your algorithm. This is a problem, but there’s something even worse at play.

The moral high ground has become a weapon. We don’t punch up; we punch down. Constantly.

Nothing can be enjoyed because there will be a cultural critic on TikTok to explain why it’s problematic. Frankly, most of the time, these people are spewing nonsense. Yet everyone is so desperate to be the most correct, the most intellectual, the mostbestperfectamazing person to have ever lived, that they create an echo chamber in the comments. Researchers have coined a term for the process of this moral contagion online: MAD, for Motivation, Attention, Design. People are motivated to share content that confirms prior beliefs they’ve held; angry moralization demands their attention and that of others, intoxicating the user; and the design of these platforms encourages a cascade effect. I’ve never left a hate comment on anything, yet millions of people seem to do it every day in the lonely pursuit of perfection for an audience that isn’t watching.

No one is watching you and patting you on the back for tearing down events or cultural moments that attracted popularity. No one deserves a Nobel prize for hate comments on an influencer’s post because they did a brand deal you didn’t like. Yet that’s how people seem to be acting. It’s a collective psychosis. We need to practice empathy, yet it is conspicuously and stunningly absent from the internet age. If you want to actually advance the ball on issues you care about, shame and grandstanding are not the way. Empathy and compassion convince people. It’s like that viral saying: “You don’t want power; you want to endlessly critique power.” Internet hate armies don’t actually want to advance a movement; they want to prove they’re better than everyone else with moral shame. But this doesn’t help any of us. It’s selfish, even, to want to make yourself appear morally superior. Constantly, people only harp: “It’s not my job to educate you.” But shouldn’t we all want to educate others? We need to empathize more if we actually care about progress because a shame scolding from an online bot army has never convinced anyone of anything.

The most common targets of those addicted to online praise appear to be things that most people love. Everyone I know who saw the Bieber performance loved it. Everyone on the internet? Not so much. This makes our cultural crisis all the more concerning. This behavior– demanding perfection of public figures, hating on the things people love, constant, insatiable critiques that are only vaguely related to the subject at hand– worsens our tribalism. Intense moral advocacy leads to greater polarization, according to a study in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology.

Our addiction to rage is not limited to the internet; the internet is just gasoline on the house fire. Our politics have disintegrated into outrage all the time. 24-hour news channels arose to feed this beast. Talk radio became a sensation because it could be even angrier. We’ve fallen into a post-truth society– the most popular podcasts in America now (Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens) push lies and mistruths designed to make their audiences mad.

The madder they are, the more people listen.

I’m hard to anger. I always have been. I don’t think it’s because I’m special or extra-good. I think it’s because I think the opposite. I find my morality profoundly ordinary: the desire to think about others as people, who, like me, make dozens of mistakes every day before lunch. The accumulation of mistakes I’ve made is hard to fathom– it is for all of us. Why would I be outraged at someone’s mistake if I am in a glass house? More so, though, why choose outrage when it’s such a negative emotion?

The Justin Bieber performance was intimate and moving. I choose to view it that way. I think that’s also the most accurate view. It requires contortions and leaps to make it miserable and upsetting, yet that’s a choice many of us make. Our cultural sickness cannot be solved unless we start granting people grace, and it’s not just for others; it’s for the individual, too.

You will be happier if you choose to be less angry, I promise. Unfortunately, our country has become addicted. It’s time for everyone to stop hate-watching, stop hate-listening, and don’t like an angry comment just because it confirms your priors. Breathe. Go outside. It’s okay to just like something, I promise.

At a time when most fashion shows are engineered for Instagram virality, The Row continues to do the opposite. Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen once again banned phones at their Paris Fashion Week show, turning what is normally a content factory into something closer to a private viewing. No livestreams, no front-row selfies - just clothes, atmosphere, and the rare experience of actually watching a runway show unfold. I can’t tell you how many Instagram stories of fashion shows I have seen, where everyone is just holding a phone up. I really value The Row’s plea for presence.

Of course, the internet still finds clues, in fact we dig for them; we all want what we can’t have after all. Editors posted cryptic glimpses afterward: perfectly ripe cherries and blackberries served in small white boxes, chocolates from Parisian chocolatier PLAQ, fresh orange juice, sparkling water. The fruit was out of season in Europe, making the offering feel almost absurdly luxurious (AGAIN so subtly on brand I can’t help but think the Olsen twins are masterminds)

Food has quietly become part of The Row’s show language. Previous seasons have included madeleines, pears with shards of dark chocolate, artisanal water ( a monthly supply of that water costing $400), or even warm chicken broth and baguette sandwiches. Like the clothes themselves, the offerings are simple but deliberate, objects meant to be savored rather than documented. This restraint is precisely what has made The Row one of the most powerful brands in fashion right now. Founded in 2006, the label has achieved a level of devotion typically reserved for heritage houses like Hermès. Its Margaux bag has become one of the most coveted accessories of the past few years, climbing to a status similar to a Birkin bag. The Row has built such a cult around the brand that it can get away with almost anything, and I love them for it. $750 flip-flops, $620 rubber slides, $220 socks, $500 long-sleeve T-shirts. At some point you have to wonder: do they know how absurd this is? Is the joke on us for buying them? Or is this the ultimate expression of quiet luxury — the kind that grants you entry into the exclusive country club that is The Row. I would honestly love to sit down for coffee with someone who bought the rubber slides.

The Row recently secured funding from Mousse Partners (the investment arm of Chanel’s Wertheimer family), L’Oréal heiress Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, and Imaginary Ventures, valuing the company at $1 billion, a rare milestone for an independent luxury brand. But unlike many modern fashion successes, The Row’s appeal isn’t driven by hype cycles or aggressive expansion. The brand maintains limited distribution, just a handful of stores globally, and an obsessive focus on materials, cut, and longevity. Its customers treat the pieces less like seasonal fashion and more like wardrobe infrastructure.

In many ways, the phone ban captures the brand’s entire philosophy. The Row is not interested in spectacle or instant visibility. It operates on the opposite principle: discretion creates desire. There’s an instinct, reading all of this, to simply applaud the Olsens for resisting the noise. And on one level, they deserve it. In an industry addicted to content, building a billion-dollar brand on silence is a genuine achievement. But if you sit with the strategy a little longer, it starts to reveal something more complicated about us, the consumers, than it does about them. The phone ban, the out-of-season fruit, the limited distribution, none of this is accidental. It’s a carefully constructed scarcity loop. The Row doesn’t restrict access because it’s indifferent to attention. It restricts access because restriction is the product. Every detail that leaks out,the cherries, the chocolates, the whispered descriptions of the collection, functions as a kind of secondhand mythology. You weren’t there, but you heard about it. That gap between experience and information is where desire lives. The Row doesn’t sell clothes so much as it sells the feeling of being close to something exclusive. The garments themselves become proof of membership.

Nothing crystallizes this more than the flip-flops. A flip-flop is, by design, the most democratic piece of footwear in existence. It’s rubber. It’s flat. It costs four dollars at Old Navy. When The Row prices one at $690 and people buy it, what’s actually being purchased isn’t the object, it’s the incongruity. The thrill is in the absurdity of spending that much on something that simple, and having the taste (and the means) to do it anyway. This is luxury’s oldest trick, but The Row executes it with unusual discipline. There’s no logo. No obvious signifier for the uninitiated. The flip-flop only works as a status symbol if the people around you already know what The Row is, which means it functions as a filter. It separates those who know from those who don’t, and it does so silently.

The Row arrived at the center of the “quiet luxury” conversation, which we arguably are moving away from ( all eyes on Jonathen Anderson’s Dior and Mathieu Blazy’s Chanel), at exactly the right moment, but it’s worth questioning the premise. Quiet luxury isn’t the absence of conspicuous consumption. It’s conspicuous consumption that requires a more specialized audience to decode. A Gucci logo bag announces itself to everyone. A Row Margaux bag announces itself only to people who already move in certain circles. The message isn’t “I don’t care about status.” The message is “My status doesn’t need your recognition.” That’s not modesty. It’s a higher-frequency form of the same signal. This isn’t a critique of the clothes, which by most accounts are beautifully made. It’s an observation about what we’re really responding to when we call this kind of brand “authentic” or “anti-marketing.” The Row markets relentlessly, it just markets through absence. They buy a full page in W magazine or Vogue that depicts a white piece of paper and the words “The Row”, and we find that more persuasive, because we’ve learned to distrust anything that looks like it’s trying.

So maybe, the real story here isn’t The Row’s strategy. It’s the consumer psychology that makes the strategy work.

We’re living through a moment of profound content fatigue. The average person encounters thousands of branded messages a day. Every product launch has a campaign, every campaign has an influencer, every influencer has a discount code. In that environment, the brand that refuses to participate starts to look like the only one telling the truth. The Row’s phone ban works because we’ve been so oversaturated with access that inaccessibility now feels like integrity. We’re not just buying cashmere and leather. We’re buying the idea that some things still exist outside the feed. That there’s a version of luxury that isn’t performing for us. Whether that’s real or just the most sophisticated performance of all is, I think, the most interesting question The Row raises.

Here’s where it gets genuinely paradoxical: The Row’s no-phone policy only works because we live in a phone-first world. The scarcity only feels meaningful against the backdrop of infinite content. The cherries are only luxurious because we know they’ll be posted about. Discretion only creates desire in a culture that has forgotten what discretion looks like. The Row needs the very system it appears to reject. And we need The Row to reject it, so we can feel like opting out is still possible, even if our version of opting out is spending $690 on flip flops. In a fashion system increasingly designed for the camera, The Row’s shows remind you that clothes can still be experienced rather than consumed and that sometimes the most powerful luxury statement is simply choosing not to be seen. But it’s worth holding both truths at once: The Row is making genuinely beautiful things with genuine craft. And The Row is also proof that in 2026, the most effective marketing strategy is convincing people you’re not marketing to them at all.

Welcome to TikTok.

Thousands of accounts, likely fueled by artificial intelligence, abuse government transparency laws as they comb through public records databases to extract police body cam footage. An 18-year old college student being pulled over for a DWI. A mother having a panic attack after being told her son was murdered. An altercation between a homeless man and a cop descending into violence. The videos are extracted, clipped, and posted. The videos are shocking and personal– the images are both jarring and feel wrong to watch. It’s a twisted reality show with high stakes because it’s real life, yet simultaneously void of any human empathy because of the impersonal nature of the internet. It’s dark. It feels reminiscent of a specific Black Mirror episode titled “Joan is Awful,” where a woman lives in a tortured state because all of her actions are broadcast as a Netflix series that everyone in the world watches. It sounds horrifying, yet our internet culture constantly makes this a reality for many.

Just this week, a group of fraternity boys has gone viral for their interactions with police after a hazing incident. I refused to watch it, despite it becoming a cultural sensation and my general opposition to hazing. Let me explain why.

I am no stranger to getting sucked into one of these viral videos’ enticing allure. When I first saw these accounts, I was infatuated by their siren song filled with drama and intrigue. The video I saw was posted as “Part 3,” entrancing me to look for Parts 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, etc. But when I went to the account, I saw hundreds of videos and thousands of parts. Some were boring and innocent; others (the ones that get millions of views) are violent, disturbing, and painful to watch. People like, comment, and share each one. They descend in the comments of a girl getting a DUI, saying “she had it coming” as the girl cries. Other comments objectify her appearance. Others justify her dangerous act of drinking and driving. This entire industrial complex of police body cam footage spreading online sparked an epiphany: our morality appears to dissolve the second we go online.

Philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote that we should all “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.”

I fear that the second we get behind a screen, we wall ourselves off and close up our hearts. Everything we encounter online becomes merely a means to an end. The scale can appear hopeless. Internet culture is far too Machiavellian or Nietzschean. Everything on the internet is for you. We are enabled by a perfectly curated feed algorithmically designed to keep you addicted and attentive while feeding you content at a breakneck pace. We have no time to empathize with the faces that come across our screen because they dissipate before we can contextualize. Often, there is no face at all. Everything becomes a means to an end. Everything we see is for our engagement, sometimes our education, or, most commonly, our entertainment.

But this is morally wrong. And we should be better.

It’s hard to translate in-person morality directly into online interaction. I think about the oft-cited definition of character as “what you do when no one is watching.” The definition for good moral fortitude on the internet could be sardonically referred to as “what you do when everyone’s watching, but no one cares.” The internet demands that we tug our own heartstrings, while in-person interactions do the heavy lifting for us. Even more than that, it requires critical thinking to make logical jumps about what is right and wrong. Then, we must have set principles and courage to stand upon them.

The most disturbing video I saw on one of these police body cam accounts was that of a mother as she was told by police that her son had been murdered. She was inconsolable. I couldn’t get through the video. This was not something that required my moral heartstrings to be pulled manually– they naturally were. But the morality of this post did require critical thinking. I thought, who posted this and why? How would I feel if my mother were in this situation and her grief was being broadcast to everyone to see? The video was early in the morning, and the woman appeared to have just woken up– that felt not only wrong but invasive. I know I would never want to be seen publicly in such vulnerability and on such a scale. That mother got ready to answer the door, not dressed to be seen by millions all over the world. The entirety of the police body cam apparatus is disturbing in itself. I thought about the reasoning behind body cams: to protect the public. This video, being publicly shared, did not seem to protect the public. In fact, it seemed to hurt the public, particularly this poor woman and her grieving family. And now too, such footage only makes those who witness such content that much more numb to these experiences. We ought to be at the very least feeling. Kant posited a test about whether something is ethical or not. I thought of that test: If everyone did this, would it ruin everything?

I think it would, so I reported the video and blocked the account.

There’s nothing particularly noble about this. It was easy, as seamless as watching the video. I don’t think I’m a better person than someone else who commented on it or shared the video with a friend. I just think it’s wrong to do things online that we wouldn’t do in person. I even think it can be dangerous to allow separation between our offline and online empathy. We should be thinking while we are on the internet, and we have to make ourselves think about more than just how we can achieve more dopamine rushes or entertain ourselves for hours. We should be thinking about what is right and what is wrong. In our present online world of escapism, we must find the power to tether ourselves back to our shared humanity and reject a world where the internet plays by its own set of dangerously lax rules.

It might be cliché, but simply put: The internet is a great power, and that means great responsibility. Welcome to a series I’m calling: INTERNET RULES. Because yeah, the internet freaking rules. But we also need to philosophize our way to an ethical usage, together.

So, I guess here’s Rule 1:

A human being exists for more than our entertainment, even online.

AKA, we all have to stop watching strangers being recorded at their worst moments. There are a lot more rules, and I hope we can all find them together. Our culture online can be better. The internet doesn’t have to be a cesspool. We can all make the world nicer with each of our individual actions. I’m hopeful.

New York Fashion Week has evolved. Unlike Paris or Milan, it feels more inviting, shoppable, wearable, and relatable. NYFW largely spotlights emerging brands and independent talent, with a few legacy anchors like Ralph Lauren, Michael Kors, and Tory Burch. Still, every season I find myself questioning the ROI of large-scale runway productions, especially as more brands step away from the traditional fashion calendar and its rigid show structure. This season made one thing clear to me: fashion shows are fun and glamorous. They allow people to immerse themselves in the brand’s world. However, they are not essential, and many brands seem to recognize that. There were far more presentations rather than runway shows this season, including Colleen Allen, newcomer Ossu, Chan Luu, Greys Studios, among others. Think less IMAX premiere, more intimate artist studio visit. The runway isn’t as central as it once was. And that raises a bigger question: who should be doing it, and why? And zooming out even further, if we think about what fashion means culturally right now, is the traditional runway starting to feel a little out of touch?

The runway today functions more as high-stakes marketing than a pure showcase of craft. For brands with the infrastructure and financial gravity to sustain it, the spectacle can reinforce strength. It celebrates the brand, gets people excited, and invites them to talk about and interact with the brand. It is also an incredible resource for content - eg, Khaite will be using their runway show for content for the next few months. For mid-sized labels caught between scrappy cool and global scale, attempting a high-caliber runway show risks exposing their fragility rather than projecting power.

Nevertheless, I am not dismissing the runway as superfluous or unnecessary- fashion week is my Super Bowl and there were flashes of brilliance. Tory Burch’s fall show at the Sotheby’s Breuer Building was beautiful. She is at the peak of her career. I love the Toryssanse. The collection and show felt intentional, fresh, but still undeniably Tory. The show drew on her father and Bunny Mellon as touchstones, reworking classic American archetypes, corduroy tailoring, Shetland knits, and gilded embroideries into something distinctly modern. In doing so, she’s carved out her own archetype of the contemporary American woman. The runway didn’t compensate for the brand; it amplified it. This is a mature business operating at full strength and having fun while doing it (Just listen to the playlist).

Catherine Holstein of Khaite operates in a similar realm. Her technologically ambitious presentation, as Lauren Sherman noted, nods to the grand Marc Jacobs-era Armory productions. Product-driven or conceptual, Khaite knows who it is. The runway becomes an extension of identity, not a bid for validation. I stand by the fact that Khaite perfectly exemplifies the New York woman, or at least the woman I want to be - cool, effortless, sexy but not too sexy, sometimes girly, but never cringe. My favorites were these dresses, and I loved the leather pants with the grey hoodie.

Ralph Lauren doesn’t use the runway to prove relevance; he uses it to reinforce brand identity and storytelling. Ralph Lauren has always felt distinctly American. He was recently named Women’s Wear Designer of the Year at the 2025 CFDA Awards, while also equipping Team USA uniforms for the Milan-Cortina Olympics. The show was held inside Lower Manhattan’s Clock Tower Building as a woodland retreat. Oriental rugs covered the floors, hand-painted forests, tapestry jackets, velvet gowns, and roughed-up riding boots. Some of it revisited familiar tropes, but in a moment dominated by flashyishness, his sanded-edge Americana reads almost subversive. Nearly 60 years in, that consistency is its own power. The runway works because the RL universe already exists.

However, not every designer has that universe.

Maria McManus’s collection was shown in a gallery space rather than in a 12-minute show. It underscored the idea I’m trying to get at here: beautiful, well-made clothes do not automatically require a runway. In some cases, they are better served in a showroom or gallery setting, where buyers can focus on fabrication and cut rather than production value.

Beyond that, NYFW raised questions such as who should design which house next, whether brands like Calvin Klein should continue staging shows, and whether creative reshuffling can fix structural weaknesses ( Maybe Kering’s declining sales are an indicator of that). Creative directors increasingly resemble chess pieces in a broader corporate strategy game, becoming poster children for the brand rather than the quieter behind-the-scenes mastermind (e.g., the Tory Burch buyer ultimately wants to be just like Tory Burch). But good collections alone do not stabilize a business. Critical acclaim has never guaranteed financial health.

That’s what makes the runway such a fraught proposition now. It is expensive, high-risk marketing. It makes sense for houses at peak commercial strength. But for others, participation can feel automatic rather than strategic. Younger designers like Zane Li of Lii and consistently elegant players like TWP put on beautiful yet still minimalist shows. Likewise, the Kallmeyer show, which showcased truly beautiful designs, is strategic as it continues to position Daniella Kallmeyer as a fashion powerhouse.

What NYFW ultimately exposed is an industry recalibrating. Wholesale is strained (eg. Saks). Executive turnover is constant. Budgets are scrutinized. Fashion’s center of gravity is shifting toward sharper identity, healthier economics, and strategic storytelling rather than reflexive adherence to the show calendar.

I’m not saying fashion week and the runway are dead; it’s just no longer necessary. In a city where cultural and financial pressures are impossible to ignore, the brands that deserve the runway are the ones that don’t need it to prove they belong.

The chasm between rich and poor continues to grow, and we fetishize the frictionless lives the wealthiest appear to possess. The root of cringe culture is the belief that to work is to admit that you have not yet made it. Trying is the admission that you want, and if you want, that must mean that you don’t yet have. Our culture regards the exertion of effort with skepticism, even disdain. It’s a social phenomenon dating back to the Gilded Age– and it’s something you should reject emphatically. The nepotism baby should not be your idol; the entrepreneur who rose from poverty should. But how did our values get so crossed?

“Work” being embarrassing dates back to the 1880s. During the Gilded Age, opulence was everywhere, but so was poverty. It marked one of the first periods of serious social mobility as industrialism rushed people to cities and businessmen to new leagues of wealth. In this era of extremes, leisure became a symbol of wealth. Sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class in 1899, a commentary about the income stratification combined with higher social mobility, which created entirely new symbols of class. Work became a signal that you had not always been wealthy. If you had to work, surely you couldn’t be the wealthiest. Mrs. Astor’s social register in NYC is the ultimate example of this exclusivity. Society as I Have Found It (1890) by Ward McAllister revealed that Mrs. Astor’s social register was not merely an unspoken concept: it was a documented rule. Caroline Astor was the matriarch of Gilded Age society in NYC; no one would be accepted without her approval. Her list (yes, a literal physical list) excluded even the wealthiest New Yorkers if they were new money. Only 400 families were deemed to matter by Mrs. Astor, and none of them had ever tried to prove themselves simply because they had been wealthy since what appeared to be the beginning of time. No one had a memory of any of them trying. How horrible it would be to have to make your money, was her thought. Robber barons and their spawn needed generations to be accepted, despite being able to buy and sell the old monied crowd many times over. Meanwhile, society continued to urbanize. Working people rushed into cities, where they finally could glimpse the easy, breezy lives of the wealthiest, who had also become increasingly concentrated in urban areas.

Maintaining exclusivity required praising the leisurely. The wealthiest imitated European nobility, with servants and protocols. A hidden language emerged: one of leisure and consumption. “Conspicuous consumption” is the term coined by Veblen: the desire and necessity to be seen consuming as a symbol of status. Today, think influencer Erewhon hauls, Becca Bloom’s conspicuous Hermes gluttony, or how you just have to spend New Year’s in St Barth’s, lest you be forgotten. We idolize the trust-fund darling and the celebrity spawn. In the Gilded Age, those who casually summered in Newport were popular; those who lacked an occupation were well-regarded, not criticized. Your last name was everything as a modern aristocracy arose. Think of modern equivalents: the European holiday v. a summer internship; the “creative” vs. the “banker.” In the Gilded Age, new couture gowns were constantly needed, only to be thrown after one wear. Today, we have “fast fashion” and constantly expanding runway shows and luxury goods empires. We have regressed to an old, aristocratic style of prioritization: one that praises leisure and criticizes work, despite work being the only way to achieve wealth if you were not born into it. Our consumption is documented. Our work is hidden.

We cringe when we see someone posting on TikTok: “How embarrassing to see someone try!” Modern equivalents of “leisure” jobs, like those that dominated the Gilded Age society, continue growing in popularity. In the 1880s, these jobs were primarily philanthropic and casual; no society woman would have ever been caught dead with a 9-5. Social philanthropy was essentially the only acceptable “occupation” if you wanted to be among the upper crust. Today, the culture has become so incensed by our obsession with ease that even prestigious office jobs have become rife with titles that mask actual labor. We praise jobs like “venture capitalist” and “creative director,” while laughing about being unsure what they actually do. Obscuring work with nonsensical titles and lexicon is exactly the point. Society has become enmeshed with the concept of the “nepobaby” because we worship the concept of being rich and famous through birth, not ability. Many of the most famous next-generation celebrities are considered chic because of the effortlessness of their life. Kylie Jenner, Hailey Bieber, and Zoe Kravitz are talented, hard-working, and smart individuals, but that’s not why they’re famous. Let’s just be real. At the end of the day, our culture worships the way the ‘born-elite’ move through the world without the burden of having to prove themself or make it. The social register accepted them by birthright, and their lives lack friction. Nobody seems to question the social order, but that only serves to entrench modern inequality.

The lack of fiction is something we cannot help but desire. If you work, you face limitations: time, income, and flexibility. If you have the financial freedom to choose whenever and whatever to do, life opens up to you. The wealthiest among us, like the wealthiest in the Gilded Age, have employees and servants. It’s a modern aristocracy. Personal trainers and chefs keep the modern lords and ladies (tech billionaires, financial titans, celebrities by birthright) fit with minimal time and effort. Assistants coordinate their entire schedules, and nannies handle the monotony of changing diapers and carpool pickups so they can focus on other matters. Meanwhile, the concept of trying becomes increasingly taboo. How could you be seen trying? You’ll be removed from the social register!!! People will cringe. Phrases like “I don’t even care” and “I didn’t even try” dominate our vernacular to our collective detriment.

The absurd obsession with a frictionless lifestyle, all while obsessively attempting to mimic the habits of the rich and famous, is only further entrenching our inequality. Work is the only way the middle class or working class can become rich— sorry, it’s true. If you want to live a life with less friction, first, things are going to have to be hard. Yet, the culture continues to cringe. TikTok is minting millionaires, just like the industrial revolution did with oil and railroads. Just like our past, society regards these new monied individuals who took risks with the modern technologies of the time as lesser. How could they go through improper channels to achieve their wealth? How could they put themselves out there publicly in such fashion and gasp, ADMIT that they were not already wealthy? People put themselves into credit card debt to keep up with the Joneses; meanwhile, they ignore the friend posting Instagram reels about her small business.

Work is actually sexy. Passion and effort should be cool. Work reflects drive, ambition, and strong resolve. Leisure is warranted, but it’s not a virtue in itself. Our society has fallen into the same traps that resulted in the rampant inequality that dominated the 1880s and ultimately led to further concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the wealthiest. John D. Rockefeller controlled 2% of the US economy at his apex; Elon Musk controls nearly 4%. We live amongst modern-day giants– and yet we bow down in awe at the accumulation of generational wealth, rather than question its morality or seek success for ourselves.

My message to you: stop cringing, start trying. Wealth inequality creates a world of angst. It would be criminal to place that angst upon those trying to better themselves and their future while showering praise upon those who flowed through life with ease, wheels greased by every advantage wealth and access had to offer. I’m not advocating for the politics of envy, just the redirection of our praise. Your role model should be someone who worked hard and climbed upwards, not someone who began at the mountaintop and never moved.

The collapse of Saks Global is less of an isolated failure than it is a signal that the traditional multi-brand retail model might just be broken. Years of margin erosion, newly implemented tariffs, brands becoming less inclined to outsource distribution, and weakened customer relationships have pushed wholesale to a breaking point. E-commerce outpaces physical retail, and the next era of multi-brand retail is needed. As Emma from All Things Fashion Tech (a substack I love btw) notes, shopping is becoming social and selective. Creators now drive trust and discovery, while data indicates what sells and what doesn’t, which avoids overstocking items. Emma’s reference to platforms like The Mall and CAKE points to what comes next: consumer-facing tools paired with real buyer intelligence, reducing overbuying while allowing brands to retain ownership of their customers and data. That same logic underpins a broader push to “AI-ify” e-commerce—an evolution I’ve been watching but don’t think has been done quite right yet.

For example, Doji offers digital avatars you can dress and shop through; ShopMy, while not AI, reframed discovery around creator curation; Daydream wants to be the ChatGPT of shopping (close, but not quite stylish enough yet); Phia focuses on smarter, more sustainable purchasing. Phia just raised a $35 million Series A led by Notable Capital just three months after an $8 million celebrity-backed round, bringing total funding to $43 million in under a year. The company has seen 11x revenue growth since launching and, using the new capital, hopes to build out a fully personalized AI shopping agent - stay tuned. Then there’s whatever Meta is planning with smart glasses—Zuckerberg, I beg, explain the vision, because I don’t see myself wearing them. Then again, I am not sure I am his target customer, as I have not raised a Series B recently and don’t plan on going on any rants about AI in the near future.

The takeaway is simple: traditional retail isn’t working. Physical stores are browsed, not bought from, while online shopping has become bloated and overwhelming. We don’t want to lose physical retail stores, but they need to find a way to be profitable again. What matters now is which of these models actually stick—and how fashion meaningfully integrates with technology in a way that improves, rather than complicates, the consumer experience.

Following an oversubscribed bond offering, a missed $100 million interest payment, and a series of failed debt negotiations, this week Saks Global formally entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, confirming what many in the industry had anticipated for months. The company has secured $1.75 billion in financing, including $1.5 billion from senior secured bondholders, allowing stores and e-commerce operations to remain during the ongoing restructuring. Longtime executive Marc Metrick exited earlier this month, with new leadership installed to guide the process. Even in what management describes as a period of stabilization, significant retrenchment is expected, with likely dozens of store closures.

The filing follows a prolonged cash-flow crisis that left Saks unable to consistently pay vendors or fund normal operations, prompting its primary factor, Hilldun Group, to halt shipments and destabilize spring inventory across Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, and Bergdorf Goodman. As assortments thinned, traffic weakened, and sales declined, reinforcing a cycle of lower revenue, tighter liquidity, and eroding vendor trust. Designers, particularly independent brands, now face the reality of collecting outstanding balances through the bankruptcy process, where they sit near the back of the creditor hierarchy and may recover little, if anything.

While Saks Global may ultimately emerge from Chapter 11 with a lighter debt load, the damage to the luxury wholesale ecosystem is significant. The situation underscores Saks’s outsized, systemic role in U.S. luxury retail and highlights the fragility of a department-store model in an increasingly digital world.

It’s a fascinating problem, really - how does the multibrand retailer operate and succeed and avoid a fate à la Barneys? The stores are unprofitable, yet people still seek and appreciate an in-person shopping experience. So the question is, why? Why are department stores failing? Why has nobody even attempted to start a new Barney’s if many, myself included, are still mourning its closing? The truth is a sad reality: rent prices are too high, and consumers seem to prefer pulling the purchasing trigger online (easier search engines/better deals) rather than at Saks. Which leads me to my next question: what makes a good e-commerce platform? Mytheresa is the clear leader in this sense (obviously disagreement is welcome and would love to hear other opinions) - but why? What are they doing differently to say an SSENSE, which is also in a critical financial situation? A 2024 BOF article cited the following: Mytheresa dominates luxury e-commerce because it has rejected discount-driven scale in favor of a highly curated, profitable, and loyalty-led model. While peers like Matches and Farfetch faltered, Mytheresa focused on full-price selling, disciplined inventory, and high-value customer retention powered by sophisticated lifetime-value analytics. Under Mytheresa CEO Michael Kliger, luxury is defined as efficiency, inspiration, and trust, delivering fast service, personalization, and flawless execution rather than endless choice. Its operational excellence and proprietary technology have earned long-term brand and consumer confidence, while the acquisition of Yoox-Net-a-Porter further strengthens its market leadership without diluting its core positioning.

Anyway, I’ll be browsing the Saks sale section, but I will keep you posted on where Saks is headed.