Here’s how things used to work: You landed your first job out of college and headed to the mall to cobble together a serviceable office-friendly wardrobe. After a few months of earning adult money for the first time in your life, you started to save up for something you’ve always yearned for—something that telegraphs your social and financial ascendence. Maybe it’s a Chanel bag, or a Cartier watch, or a pair of Gucci shoes. Sure, it’s expensive—and maybe you’re punching above your weight a little—but it’s a sign to yourself that you’ve made it.
“When I was in my twenties, buying a handbag was like $700—still really expensive, but I felt it was somewhat near my range,” says Uniqlo’s creative director Clare Waight Keller, who previously served as artistic director at Chloé and Givenchy. “Now an object like that feels very, very unattainable for a young person.”
I’m 26, and when I was offered my job as a fashion writer at Vogue a year and a half ago, I was a part-time dance teacher who’d just emptied her savings to move across the country. For my interview, I picked out a pastoral white cotton mock-neck dress with floral embroidery and ruffled sleeves from Banana Republic ($43.79—down from $180!)—and I trotted it out again for my first-ever day of New York Fashion Week, where a very famous young woman complimented it at a party. “I love Banana Republic,” she said solemnly when I told her where I’d gotten it.
In fashion, a kind of paradigm shift is taking place, with the old markers—exclusivity, luxury, aspiration—now being joined by ingenuity, affordability, and accessibility: It’s the democratization of fashion. There’s Waight Keller taking the reins at Uniqlo, while Zac Posen is ushering in a new era at the Gap. Meanwhile, the come-up of not-inexpensive labels like Toteme and The Frankie Shop is making chic clothes somewhat more attainable. (The pieces you see here—a mix of classic Americana, young designer conceptualism, and athletic flourishes—range from $7 to the still-substantial, gotta-sleep-on-it $1,000.)
By 2020, Waight Keller had begun to grow restless at Givenchy. “There was a dramatic shift for me in terms of where fashion was going,” she says. Last September, she joined the Japanese brand Uniqlo as creative director. “I thought, well: This is an opportunity to work with a company that is globally recognized to be hugely innovative and qualitative, even though they are catering to a really large audience. That was something that felt right,” she says. “Maybe,” she adds, “I was seeing something ahead of the curve.”
Waight Keller’s Uniqlo: C Collection offers a variety of classic pieces, from cashmere cardigans to puffers, at a price so reasonable it’s almost baffling. “That, for me, meant almost as much as when I was designing for luxury brands,” she says. “If anything, my impact as a designer is far greater here than anywhere else.”
Of course, she isn’t the only esteemed designer with a high-fashion background to join a ubiquitous brand. In February 2024, Posen arrived at Gap Inc. as creative director, where he has already set about rebranding the mall juggernaut as cool, fresh, and modern—while staying true to its price point. While Posen’s Gap is beloved in the Vogue office, it’s gotten social media’s seal of approval, too: A scroll on TikTok shows videos of users’ Gap purchases, with comments like “Gap is that girl” and “whoever is designing for Gap deserves a raise.”
On a recent Saturday afternoon, I visited Manhattan’s touristy Flatiron District to return a pair of jeans at the Gap. What I found was unrecognizable from the musty, fluorescent-lit storefront I remember from back-to-school shopping of yore. Instead I found a bright, lively space staffed by hip employees in baggy denim and button-ups and twentysomething shoppers dressed in jeans, white tees, and trench coats. Over the hypnotic snare of an Anderson .Paak track, one young woman inquired about a mesh going-out top she’d seen online. Another shopper held a Fair Isle sweater to her chest, asking her friends, “Do I need it?” As I sought out a pair of baggy, low-slung indigo jeans, I overheard two employees chatting about how they couldn’t keep that exact pair in stock. Then I spotted a sumptuous chocolate brown turtleneck sweater, which I instantly decided to exchange for my pants—and for the first time in God knows how long, from my place in the back of the (very long) line, I felt unburdened from the guilt that sometimes comes with shopping. Not only was I buying something with longevity, both in terms of quality and timelessness; this was also something that wouldn’t break the bank—a combination that has long felt all too rare.
My generation of Millennial-Gen-Z cuspers grew up in the post-normcore era and entered the workforce around the onset of quiet luxury. While many of us like to follow fashion and most of us appreciate the kind of ethereal beauty it can offer (nobody loves a poetic, impractical top more than me), we also place value on long-lasting pieces that still leave room for us to nurture our personal style. I was nine years old when the Great Recession began and my mother, our family’s breadwinner, lost her job at an advertising agency. Just before I started middle school, my mom bought me a pair of brown suede fringed Minnetonka boots, which I coveted after seeing Miley Cyrus wear them in the pages of some teeny-bopper magazine. They cost $100 and were probably the most expensive thing she’d ever bought for me. My mom told me years later that, while we really couldn’t afford them at the time, she didn’t want me to know she was worried about money. As an adult, I’ve since come to accept that $100 doesn’t actually get you very far, but that doesn’t change the simple fact that, for my 10-year-old self, these suede boots were my aspirations, now finally in my grasp.
As you may have heard during the recent campaign season, the United States is not in a recession—consumer spending is actually growing—but to many Americans, especially young ones, it can feel like it. Some more recently emerging brands have built thriving businesses by appealing directly to this fashion-loving yet financially cautious customer. Since founding The Frankie Shop in 2014, Gaëlle Drevet has sought to make elevated versions of everyday pieces. “Why is it that we call a brand a luxury brand—just because the price tag is, like, $800 for socks?” she asks. “I mean, it’s so silly. It’s not about being cheap, or affordable—it’s about being fair.”
Drevet has been able to serve a previously overlooked clientele: people (she specifically cites fashion industry employees) who can’t afford to spend four figures on every new piece they buy but still want to partake in “a little slice of what was bold and fun and modern without compromising your wallet.” Now, 10 years in, The Frankie Shop has graduated to using the same factories as major luxury brands. “The quality we had at the beginning has improved thousands of times—I’m able to have bigger minimums; I use the same factory, I use the same fabric.”
Stuart Vevers, the creative director of Coach, says he’s no longer interested in engaging with the long-held meaning of luxury. “It feels a little outdated, at least in the way that we used to define it as something very polished, very perfect, and very unobtainable,” Vevers says. Instead, there is a prevailing sense that consumers are craving authenticity. Over the past few seasons, Coach’s profile has grown, particularly among younger shoppers, and the Brooklyn bag—a leather hobo that comes in at under $500—is emblematic of that success. “It’s an honest piece—its simplicity is its appeal,” he says. “I come from a working-class family, and I’ve never lost that fact. I know that, to most people, this is a really big deal.”
This search for authenticity is also coming through in recent designer collaborations with global brands. In 2024 alone, Stefano Pilati and Kate Moss launched capsules at Zara, Gap partnered with Dôen, and J.Crew tapped Christopher John Rogers and Maryam Nasser Zadeh—and in 2025 we can expect an H&M collaboration with Glenn Martens, who has just departed from Y/Project after 11 years. In a crowded luxury field, these collaborations mean smaller brands have access to a behemoth’s resources and audience, with a lower barrier to entry for customers. “Our price point’s quite high for many fans of the brand, so being able to give them access is always exciting,” says Rogers, whose recent J.Crew collection offered his signature use of color, volume, and stripes for under $500. “That was worth it for me.”
Like many young people today, Willy Chavarria, the two-time CFDA Menswear Designer of the Year winner, aspires not to status pieces but to meaningful clothing and objects—whether that meaning comes through quality construction or in the statements they make. “There are people who carry a Telfar bag because they want to show that they identify with this brand that is queer, Black, super creative,” says Chavarria, who has centered his own brand’s ethos around Chicano culture, race, class, and sexuality. “That’s so much more exciting than a bag that anyone who gets rich can own.” Rogers, who created a capsule collection for Target in 2021, recalls the retailer’s 2009 partnership with Rodarte as an early introduction to what he calls “avant-garde” fashion. “That was my first time seeing a more advanced label in my face, even though it was at a Target in Baton Rouge, Louisiana,” he says.
Growing up in the suburbs of Los Angeles, I certainly remember seeing the Missoni and Proenza Schouler Target collections while out on errands, though it wasn’t until I was out of college that I began turning to them to build out my own post-grad wardrobe. I was especially fond of Sandy Liang’s work with Target and Simone Rocha’s collaboration with H&M, and did mental gymnastics to justify purchasing a frilly tulle dress or a Peter Pan collared sweater. (In a show of great restraint, I held off.) When I got to Vogue, though, I wondered if collaborations would be looked down upon as diluted versions of a brand. As I quickly learned, no: The Maryam Nasser Zadeh for J.Crew and Gap x Dôen capsules were some of the most buzzed-about collections of the past year in our office.
Of course, these more accessible price points aren’t an act of charity—they’re an effective business strategy. Chavarria has seen a tangible impact on his business. “When I don’t offer price points that people can actually afford, I’m losing people—and the last thing in the world that I want is for anyone to get turned away because they can’t afford it.”
Chavarria announced a new collaboration with Adidas during his spring 2025 runway show, and soon, for the first time, he will also offer a lower range of pricing on his website, bypassing wholesalers for direct-to-consumer sales. He’s more certain than ever that it’s the way of the future.
“Inclusivity,” he says, “is the new exclusivity.”
In this story: hair by Mustafa Yanaz; makeup, by Fulvia Farolfi; manicurist, Gina Edwards; tailor, Lars Nordensten for Lars Nord Studio.
