There’s also the comfort (dangerous though it is because it feels so rational) of measuring the wrong thing with perfect precision. We measure impressions, reach, engagement, conversions, and time-on-page. We measure absolutely everything. The heat map has become the heartbeat. When a dress is judged primarily by its ability to generate a spike, the quality that wins is not depth but volatility. The image that lingers loses to the image that flickers the hardest. These are the perfect conditions under which art withers into “content.”

Fast fashion simply adopted this logic most honestly. The problem, though, isn’t confined to the obvious offenders. Even the rarefied corners have learned to stage themselves like channels. Even the houses with libraries have begun to speak in clips. And lately, with the rise of generative tools that can produce infinite variants in infinite moods, the temptation is stronger. If an image can be made in seconds, why spend months coaxing one true feeling into form? If a thousand looks can be conjured overnight, perhaps we can release ten of them tomorrow and let the tide do the talking. But in my eyes, the tide only drags.

I am not against generative tools at all. I have never been more excited about the emergence of a new medium in my life. They are not good or bad; they are not the killers of feeling. It is we (the humans behind them) who define how and what they are. It is the intent with which we use them that defines what can be done through them. If used the right way, you can coax one true feeling into form much faster than ever before. But few use them this way.

I also want to say this plainly: I don’t think velocity is evil. It’s thrilling to feel culture move. I love a sharp drop or a surprise release. Energy is part of fashion’s power. It always has been. What hurts me is the substitution of energy for essence. It’s like mistaking the spark for the fire, and congratulating ourselves on how bright the room feels for a second, never noticing the wood is still cold.

What I miss is the risk that isn’t performative, the risk of making less. The risk of refusing to explain a collection to the algorithm before it’s ready to be seen by a person. The risk of disappointing the calendar because the work isn’t honest yet. I miss garments that arrive as questions no one had the right words for until that sleeve, that shoulder, that strange pocket taught us how to ask them. I miss the long conversations between seasons, the way a motif could migrate and mature, how a silhouette could repent, how a color could return after years like a friend who had to leave to be loved. Sadly, we are living through an age of contentification, and as a consequence, the world is full of replication, iteration, and only reminders.

Maybe this is why I keep looking to the margins with such stubborn hope. When I see or meet (though rarely meet, because of where I live) young designers drafting on floors stained with chalk, I recognize a sincerity in creation that feels like oxygen. They are trying to say something that can hold them together. They speak about fabric the way poets speak about breath. They ask whether a garment can be a memory, not just a trend. And when they show their work, there’s a tremor in the room that no metric can register, one that most of us have felt when such a garment touched our skin.

This is what I want fashion to be again. I want it to go back to being art. It still is, though we’ve overshadowed its essence with a spectacle required to justify its cost, a constant push notification dressed as “culture.” What I desire is not something that moves mountains. I only want it to move us. To make it possible to feel more human in a T-shirt, not more visible in a story.

Fashion feels lost not because it has forgotten how to make, but because we have been taught to perform survival as visibility. The antidote will not be louder campaigns or newer tools. It will be intention returned to its rightful place at the center of the work. It will be slowness as respect. It will be designers allowed to vanish and come back with something that can hold. It will be the courage to treat a garment as a sentence again, one that doesn’t need to go viral to be true.

What I’m asking for is not a step backward, but a step inward, to remember that the point of all of this (the shows, the stores, the screens) is a moment in front of a mirror where someone recognizes themselves more clearly than they did the day before, and then walks out into their life carrying that clarity like light. Content cannot do that. Garments can, when we let them.

There’s a strange symmetry forming between what’s happening to fashion and what’s happening to everything else we make, mostly digitally. The algorithms that trained us to think in posts have also trained brands to think in drops. The same acceleration that floods our feeds with images now floods our wardrobes with garments. Creation itself has been flattened into output, regardless of what we may create. What matters is no longer what it means, but how long it stays visible before the next thing replaces it.

Many people say that the new general currency is attention. On the same note, I like to say that the new aesthetic currency is frequency and that attention has become the raw material from which both influence and profit are extracted. The design of a garment (like the design of a post) is now measured by its ability to stop the scroll. Somewhere along the line, the feed became the runway. Shows are no longer attended but refreshed. A look is successful not when it moves the room, but when it moves the timeline. The runway image, divorced from the garment’s tactile life, performs infinitely better than the garment itself.

And so the cycle continues:

Fashion becomes Image. Image becomes Data. Data becomes Strategy.

When the feed hungers for novelty, brands feed it fabric. Every collection is an algorithmic offering, a way to keep the rhythm going. It doesn’t matter whether you’re Zara releasing thousands of SKUs a month or a heritage house dropping capsules between collections, as the tempo is identical, and only the price of entry differs. Both are caught in the same gravitational pull toward endless visibility.

Even the words we use echo the digital world: drops, releases, archives, capsules, collaborations. They’ve always been part of the fashion dialect, but what’s happening now has given them new meaning. Fashion speaks like an app now. Every moment is framed as an event, and every event is designed to generate engagement. It’s no coincidence that the fastest-growing fashion brands are the ones that mastered content production first. They replaced the act of selling a garment with the act of selling pace. They sell the feeling of being current, of not missing out on the next post or the next look. The product becomes a portal into belonging, a way to say: I am here. I am updated. I still exist.

But from my experience, existence that depends on visibility is exhausting, and fashion is showing the same fatigue that social media creators have shown for years. The burnout is everywhere, not only among designers but among consumers. We’ve designed a system where the audience and the artist are trapped in the same loop, each refreshing the other. Consumers demand more because brands taught them to. Brands produce more because consumers expect them to. The algorithm keeps whispering: If you slow down, you’ll disappear. (This isn’t true for all consumers or brands, but for most.)

It’s hard not to see the parallels between this and what’s happening in the digital world. The rise of AI image and video generation tools has only intensified the flood, and this is the worst it will ever be. Suddenly, anyone can produce infinite, polished, fast content. And the fashion world mirrors this with its own machine of replication. Fast fashion, to me, is the physical embodiment of generative output: infinite iterations of existing ideas, made to mimic authenticity while costing almost nothing to produce. Novelty has been automated. We’re drowning in variations of what once felt alive.

I don’t mean that technology itself is the enemy, as to me, it never is or will be. The problem is the absence of intention behind both the input and the output. In both digital and physical spaces, we’ve started to confuse abundance with creativity. The faster we can make something, the less time we give it to mean something. The same logic that produces infinite AI images of “avant-garde couture gowns” is the logic that produces racks of cheap dresses inspired by last week’s runway. Both are simulations of imagination. Both trade the soul of craft for the illusion of constant evolution.

What was once a conversation between the hand and the fabric has become a negotiation between the feed and the algorithm. What was once about touch is now about reach. Even the act of wearing has been reprogrammed as we no longer dress for the mirror but for the camera. Our closets have turned into archives of content, and the outfit we choose is often the one that photographs best, not the one that feels most like us. The private intimacy of style has been replaced by the public performance of aesthetic identity.

Even though it’s a subtle shift, I believe it matters. When fashion becomes content, it loses its capacity for mystery. Content must explain itself instantly to capture, retain, and perform. But fashion, at its best, was always a form of slow revelation. You had to see it move, to touch it, to live with it, to let it breathe. Now, it’s compressed into pixels and distributed at the speed of relevance. We look, we like, we scroll, and somewhere in that chain, the garment never gets a chance to become real.

It’s eerie how seamlessly the philosophies of content creation have merged with those of fashion. We now talk about drops the way influencers talk about uploads, about engagement, the way marketers talk about views. Even creative directors are treated like content creators, expected to “build their brand” and post BTS moments to maintain the feed. The studio has become the set. The atelier has become the content room.

And, akin to content, fashion now lives in the rhythm of disposability. What is posted must soon be replaced; what is worn must soon be forgotten. The same dopamine cycle drives both. Each new garment or post is a promise of significance that dissolves the moment it arrives. The archives of the internet and of fashion are both built on the same paradox: the desire to preserve what we’ve already designed to be forgotten.

We used to create to express something internal. Now we create to maintain an external pulse. The question has changed from What do I want to say? to What do I need to release today? The rhythm dictates the meaning. The schedule dictates the soul. And when creation becomes a schedule, it is no longer creation. It becomes maintenance.

Fashion mirrors the internet now, not just in its output but in its ontology. Both are infinite scrolls. Both are haunted by the fear of irrelevance. Both are powered by an economy that thrives on acceleration and anxiety. Both reward noise over nuance. And both, ironically, began as acts of human expression, before expression was rebranded as content.

And this is what hurts the most: they were both born from the same desire to show who we are. But the more we try to show it, the more we forget how to feel it.

How did we get here? How did something built on meaning become machinery for metrics? The answer isn’t simple, but to me, it is painfully human. We designed systems to help us be seen, and then forgot to ask whether visibility was ever the same as value.

Being perceived became synonymous with being alive. This is the subtle confusion with which the transformation began. Proof of existence became the reaction it received. Likes, follows, and views have become tiny affirmations that we are still here, that someone out there is still looking. Fashion, too, fell under this spell: the belief that artistry could be replaced by performance. And this happened because the world rewards what it can measure, and the immeasurable (taste, intuition, sincerity, significance) slowly fell out of currency.

Capitalism did the rest (I don’t want to get political here at all, but I can’t deny its impact). Once visibility became value, scale became virtue. The more visible, the more viable. The system began rewarding speed, replication, and predictability, which, to me, are the very “qualities” that kill originality. Fast fashion became not a symptom, but the logical outcome of an attention economy translated into cloth. The cheaper the garment, the faster it could circulate; the faster it circulated, the more it sustained the illusion of cultural presence. Virality became the business model.

Patience started to disappear as well. The kind of patience that allows an idea to mature before it is shown. The patience that lets a seam be undone and redone until it speaks. The patience that protects a vision from being exposed too early. All of that began to look inefficient and unprofitable. “Momentum” became the sacred word, and momentum has no loyalty to meaning, as it only cares about motion. The very silence needed to make something true was reinterpreted as failure.

There’s also this psychological exhaustion of perpetual performance. When your work, your image, and your identity are fused into one stream, there’s no room left for the unknown. The algorithm hates ambiguity. It wants clarity, category, and consistency. It punishes the experimental. Fashion, which once thrived on ambiguity and evolution, has learned to speak in perfect captions. You can’t be misunderstood if you don’t say anything that hasn’t been said before. So brands began repeating themselves (aesthetically, conceptually, and eventually even emotionally) because repetition guarantees recognition, and recognition guarantees engagement. It feels like we’ve domesticated creativity.

We’ve also inherited a culture that confuses immediacy with intimacy. To feel close to something, we now believe we must have access to it. We want the BTS, the drop preview, the live stream, the process shots. Every mystery must be transparent, every thought pre-explained, every collection documented before it’s even finished. But the result is an absolute paradox: the more access we have, the less we wonder. What was once sacred has become just another post in the feed. The mystery that once nourished fashion has been traded for the convenience of familiarity.

Technology only amplified these tendencies. It revealed our hunger to fill every silence with something. The same way we refresh timelines to avoid stillness, brands refresh collections to avoid irrelevance. Both are terrified of the pause. Yet the pause, to me, is where meaning gathers, where culture catches its breath, where depth and emotion are found and turned into form. Without it, everything blurs. Everything just exists instead of living.

Another layer beneath this is fear, particularly the fear of being left behind. It’s a collective anxiety that shapes both creators and audiences. Designers fear irrelevance while audiences fear exclusion. The industry has weaponized this fear through scarcity (which is 100% fake). Scarcity was once created to mean care. Now scarcity means panic. We no longer cherish what is rare; we chase it. We no longer preserve what we love; we consume it before it disappears. The very mechanisms that were meant to make fashion special now make it frantic.

And yet, underneath this noise, beneath the surface layers, I sense that this fatigue is masquerading as fascination. We are fascinated by how fast things move, but deep down, I believe we are tired. We scroll through collections we’ll never touch, through images that dissolve as soon as they appear, through lives that seem full but feel hollow. The same ache exists inside fashion, a hunger for depth that the system cannot provide. You can see it in designers’ eyes when they talk about their tenth (exaggeration) collection of the year. You can see it in the way garments try so hard to impress and rarely invite. You can see it in the way audiences cheer and then forget by morning.

This is the new cultural mechanism: a cycle that feeds on its own anxiety. Fashion and content creation have become coping mechanisms for a society terrified of silence. We make to prove we exist, and in doing so, we lose the very intimacy that made creation worth doing in the first place. And it’s all momentum that drives it. No one person invented it, but everyone sustains it. The algorithm doesn’t even need to be coded anymore; we’ve internalized it. It runs in our instincts now, disguised as ambition, relevance, or care.

And yet, there is still a possibility of reversal, not a revolution of tools, but a revolution of intention. Because what brought fashion here is not technology or commerce alone, but the forgetting of why we make. And that forgetting can be undone, because the human spirit, when it remembers what it loves, has always been capable of pausing the machine.

Somewhere, and at the same time everywhere, there’s a new generation of designers who are creating for reasons that have nothing to do with algorithms. They are not trying to dominate the culture; they are trying to understand it. They speak in textures, in gestures, in experiments that might never scale, and they seem entirely at peace with that. They don’t give a fuck about marketing decks or engagement metrics.

Their work doesn’t emerge from the fear of missing out, but from the curiosity of finding in. There’s a humility to it, a willingness to fail in public if it means remaining honest. Many of them don’t have access to factories or PR budgets. What they have instead is intimacy, which, paradoxically, is what makes their work so expansive. It feels human. It feels alive. It feels like a campaign.

Some of them use technology as another form of fabric, something pliable, something that can hold emotion if handled with care. They blend physical garments with digital layers to explore what memory looks like in code. They collaborate with AI to test the edges of imagination. Their collections look like essays written in thread. Each piece feels like a paragraph from a private language, something you might not fully understand, but instantly feel.

This gives me plenty of hope, because it proves that meaning is something that migrates, not disappears. When the mainstream forgets, the margins always remember. This is where I see the pulse of fashion returning. Not in the noise of global campaigns, but in the whispers of individuals designing micro-worlds of sincerity.

What I love most about these designers is that they treat garments not as products, but as companions. They talk about clothes as if they were stories. They ask who will wear them, not how many will buy them. They wonder what memories will cling to the fabric, what seasons will leave traces on the sleeve. They design for continuity, not consumption. You can sense it when you see their work. Their collections aren’t meant to flood the feed as they’re meant to find their people slowly, organically, maybe even accidentally.

And they do find them. It may take longer (which is normal), but they do find them eventually. You can see it in the small communities forming around these brands, which bring together people who collect not because of price or prestige, but because something in the work mirrors them back to themselves. This is the kind of ecosystem fashion has always deserved: one where value isn’t manufactured through scarcity, but discovered through resonance.

This new wave doesn’t need to (and it won’t) overthrow the industry. It only needs (and it will) to remind us what love looks like. They will be the ones re-rooting the “old.” They will be the ones bringing fashion back to its human scale. They will be the ones proving, once again, that relevance doesn’t require speed and that intention can be its own kind of innovation.

Sometimes I think the most radical thing a designer can do today is to make less. To refuse the calendar. To release when it feels ready. To stand by a piece long enough for it to evolve in the hands of those who wear it. To let a garment gather years the way stories gather meaning. To treat fashion as a dialogue between the living and the made.

Even though it may not feel like such (or we aren’t there YET), people are, or will be, hungry for that again. They will be tired of the feed. They will be tired of clothes that expire faster than the trends they chase. They will want to feel something when they get dressed. They will want their garments to hold stories. And slowly, they will find the creators and designers who can give them that.

I think about this often when I walk past someone wearing something that looks lived-in, not styled, something that looks like it belongs to them, not the brand. It’s the kind of moment that reminds me that fashion, at its best, has never been about being seen first, but about being seen truly.

I believe that the new generation of designers understands that instinctively. They know that to create something real in an unreal time is an act of resistance, that to make beauty in an economy of distraction is a form of rebellion.

Maybe what fashion needs most right now isn’t another disruption, but a return. A return to why it ever mattered. Before fashion was an industry, it was an impulse: to adorn, to express, to connect, to feel. That impulse still lives beneath everything (the algorithms, the business models, and so on), and it’s just waiting to be remembered.

Sometimes I believe we forget that fashion began as one of the earliest human languages. Long before we wrote or built cities, we dressed (to protect, to belong, to declare something.) Every garment was a sentence, and every thread was a thought about how we wanted to exist in the world. And somewhere along the journey, we started to dress not to reveal who we are, but to prove that we still matter.

But mattering is not the same as meaning. Mattering is external (granted by others), while meaning is internal (built through care, memory, and intention). Fashion used to operate in the realm of meaning. It told stories about who we were at that moment in time and who we were becoming. It chronicled shifts in emotion, in class, in culture, in longing. It reflected our private evolutions in public form. When it functioned as art, it held the same responsibility that art holds: to make us more conscious of ourselves. To make us see the invisible threads between us.

That’s what I want for it again. I want a fashion that moves at the rhythm of life, not the rhythm of content. A fashion that allows for silence. One that doesn’t demand constant explanation. One that gives space for a collection to simply exist.

Because in the end, that’s what fashion has always done best: hold time. Every piece we’ve ever loved carries traces of where we were, who we were, and what we hoped to become. A worn collar, a faded print, or a repaired seam are all signs of life continuing.

The future of fashion, if it’s to mean anything, won’t be built on constant novelty. It will be built on attention, on the way we attend to what we already have, to the stories embedded in our clothes, to the makers who still believe in the quiet craft of care. It will ask us to dress for the moment: for this moment, this body, this day. To wear something because it feels like us, not because it looks like a trend.

And maybe, when we begin to live like that (choosing presence over performance) fashion will remember its original soul. It won’t need to shout to be seen. It will breathe again. It will hold us the way it used to: gently, meaningfully, like a second skin that doesn’t try to define us, only to remind us that we’re still here.

Because fashion, at its core, was never about the garment. It was always about the person inside it, about the human desire to turn feeling into form, to make something visible of what lives within. When that feeling returns to the center, fashion becomes what it was always meant to be (and what it is at its core): art that we can inhabit. Art that walks, breathes, and listens.

I want that world again. I don’t want a quieter industry; I want a more conscious one. I don’t want fewer clothes; I want deeper stories. I don’t want faster cycles; I want longer lives.

Fashion needs to move closer. To meaning, to emotion, to us. It doesn’t need to be louder to be alive. It only needs to be true. And maybe the simplest way to begin is by asking, every time we create or choose to wear something:

Does it make me feel more present?

If the answer is yes, then fashion is still alive.

Thank you!🌹

Eduard🌹

The Hidden I🌹 (Pronounced “Eye” or “I.” For the Seer. And the Seen.)

Why Did We Make It Content?🌹

Let Fashion Be Art Again.