Caught between fast fashion and brain drain, ready-to-wear is going through its most precarious period. The collaboration between Galliano and Zara has cemented a shift in power that drains creativity, value and identity. And the sector that once set the rules now struggles even to reflect reality. How do we get out of this?
by Domenico Casoria
If the first key issue to emerge at the European Designer Fashion Summit (Barcelona, 14–15 April) was the sustainability of desire, the second concerned its drift. What happens when desire ceases to be a cultural language and becomes an algorithm? This was one of the questions posed by experts during the two-day series of panels on designer fashion.
The decline of ready-to-wear
The results are plain for all to see: fast fashion is no longer a parallel sector; it attracts consumers, creatives, and even fragments of the luxury market. Following the ‘coup’ of John Galliano, the decline of ready-to-wear is increasingly visible. And it risks becoming even more mired, revealing all its fragility. A paradox that might seem geographical and symbolic, given that fast fashion was born in Spain. But one that is more real than ever. Collaborations between a giant like Zara and any designer from the luxury sector are nothing new.
Or at least, they have been the norm in recent years. When the Ortega decided to bring in Galliano, however, we had definitive proof that fast fashion is no longer merely replicating luxury. There is a clear strategy: to work around it, to incorporate it, to try to rewrite some of its code, perhaps to force it to do something more. And who has suffered as a result? Obviously, ready-to-wear, squeezed between issues of price and creativity, which once dictated the rules of dress, was the one being copied. Today, the roles have been reversed.
Lack of substance
Sabato De Sarno, former creative director at Gucci, echoed this sentiment. “Ready-to-wear is dead. As we know it, it is no longer sustainable.” A stance that highlights a systemic rift and a generational issue. Dana Thomas, an icon of American fashion journalism, also emphasises this point. “There are no more ‘young Gallianos’ because today’s emerging designers have plenty of resources, plenty of platforms. The economic constraints that once forced cultural enrichment – the very thing that transformed a collection into a manifesto – no longer exist.” Scarcity generates depth; abundance generates content, one might say. And so the big brands have abdicated their role.
According to Thomas, as early as 2004, Hubert de Givenchy had a clear view: fashion is dead because brands focus solely on accessories, leaving clothes in the background. Not fashion itself, of course, but that part of fashion that shaped silhouettes, languages and identities. Prêt-à-porter, stripped of its substance, has thus become a fragile territory, unable to compete. And it is precisely there that a void opened up, into which fast fashion slipped; so much so that one need only look back over the last decade to realise that when we think of fast fashion, we remember only T-shirts, a few sweatshirts and a few jackets, and never accessories. Ready-to-wear, in short, no longer produces imagery, and someone else is doing it in its place. All at a lower price.
Education
Here is one explanation for why so many young creatives (and not only they) are flocking to fast fashion. Not out of opportunism, but rather for survival. Because the education system, as Sara Sozzani Maino, Talent Ambassador and Creative Director of the Sozzani Foundation, has pointed out, no longer manages to connect them with the profound value of craftsmanship. “Too many schools, all offering the same courses.” Young people don’t know the hands that make a garment, they can’t read a business model, and they lack the tools to handle the complexity of a fashion house.
And if luxury has become too expensive to be democratic and too little iconic to be truly luxurious, fast fashion appears to be the only viable option. The problem, however, is not merely moral. Ready-to-wear has become impoverished because it has ceased to interpret real life. It has chased TikTok, chased virality, chased speed. But its strength has always lain elsewhere: in resembling the place where everyday life took shape, where reality was translated into a garment. If it is to survive, it must reinvent its own value model. It cannot compete with the prices of fast fashion nor with the aura of luxury. It can only compete with what belongs to it: the ability to read the present and transform it into credible stories.
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