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This article is part of The Luxury Slowdown Survival Guide, a collection of articles that examines the recent industry downturn and the strategies brands may employ to come out of it unscathed.
There’s a fashion vibe shift coming. Can you feel it?
First, quickly, let’s take stock of what happened in the creative director world in 2024: Matthieu Blazy is the new artistic director of fashion at Chanel, succeeded by Louise Trotter at Bottega Veneta. Hedi Slimane is out at Celine, and Michael Rider is in. Peter Copping will present his debut collection for Lanvin later this month; also this month, Alessandro Michele will show his first couture collection for Valentino following his debut in September. Sarah Burton and Haider Ackermann will show their first collections for Givenchy and Tom Ford, respectively, at the Autumn/Winter shows, and Kim Jones has left Fendi, which will celebrate its centennial this year. His role is still open.
The common denominator between these designers and the aesthetics ascribed to their work is that their clothes, for lack of a better word, are mature. These are designers’ designers. Why does that matter? Before this wave of hires, the industry was laser-focused on youth: hiring the unknown second-in-command to inject novelty and a youthful new perspective into these labels. (See, most significantly, Seán McGirr’s appointment at McQueen and Sabato De Sarno’s at Gucci.) Or a label might hire a personality to oversee the creative direction, less so design, like when Lanvin tapped Future for a capsule after Bruno Sialelli’s exit. Not so with the latest moves. Copping, Burton and Ackermann, in particular, are heralding a shift towards a tried and tested idea of luxury and sophistication.
Their aesthetics are all different — Ackermann’s is sharper and slim, Burton is a true romantic, Copping moody and more classic — yet they, together with Michele’s ornate and flounce and Blazy’s sophisticated hand, paint a picture of where fashion is headed in 2025. As Nick Tran, the head of buying and merchandising at Dover Street Market Paris, says, “It’s the return of individualism.”
A small, big idea
Every so often, culture and fashion converge to give way to a new era-defining style. There was Y2K at the turn of the century, which returned as the epitomisation of pre-social media nostalgia in 2022. There was streetwear, which came to luxury fashion by the hand of Virgil Abloh and dominated style until the pandemic, which in turn saw the rise of athleisure. While yoga pants and workout clothes-as-outside-clothes had been in fashion already, it wasn’t until the post-pandemic times that they became part of our everyday wear — from the office to the dinner table. It also took until then for high fashion — Miu Miu, Gucci, Balenciaga, and others — to welcome it into its runways.
The past two years, then, saw the rise of quiet luxury as an overwhelming aesthetic trend. Characterised by its understated minimalism — there’s nothing new under the sun, as they say — the term itself came to prominence by way of TikTok. There was Sofia Richie Grainge’s viral wedding in April 2023, with her Gen Z peers dubbing her the face of this pseudo-simplistic, ‘old money’ look. Then came the final season of Succession, the hit HBO Max show with all of its Loro Piana, Brioni, Armani, in various shades of grey, navy and beige and its disgust for a ‘ludicrously capacious’ Burberry handbag — a tell of someone’s social and economic standing. In 2024, the idea of quiet luxury reached new, mainstream heights, shifting dupe culture entirely with mid-market labels from Uniqlo to J.Crew taking a piece of the pie.
What quiet luxury has done as an overwhelming aesthetic is homogenise style. Almost everyone dresses the same now, and you can probably picture it: a navy, grey or red crewneck sweater, white T-shirt underneath, a pair of slacks, some simple black shoes or perhaps Adidas Sambas. And as we know, when fashion goes too far in one direction, the pendulum swings in the opposite.
“I think people want to feel something as we are exposed to so much information and we are told what to like and what other people like,” Tran continues, “and that has pushed us to react and a return to individual style.” “I think people want to make it up for themselves,” he says.
Algorithmic fatigue
If the algorithm killed personal style, it’s going to take effort to claw it back. “The problem with old definitions of fashion relevancy is that people were taught that to be in fashion everything had to be new,” says stylist and consultant Julie Ragolia, who styles stars like Pedro Pascal and counts Zegna as one of her brand clients. “So, in that sense, no one dressed for themselves, only for others. Hence the speed at which people consumed to keep up, or why logos became a thing.” This is why quiet luxury gained momentum, as a sort of countercultural reaction to the way fashion had been operating with -cores and micro-trends and viral moments — a sartorial palette cleanser.
“We’ve been trained by the internet and social media to have a sense of sameness because of what is in our algorithm,” Ragolia says, explaining that, for her, what promotes a sense of sameness is marketing, which packages ideas such as quiet luxury and uniforms them in order to sell them. A slowdown in purchases, argues Ragolia, also means that people buy less but better — it helps that doing so is also trending.
This micro-trend saturation and fragmentation has led to customer fatigue, which in turn promotes a blank slate attitude that translates to a sort of sameness on the product level. The trend forecaster WGSN has named ‘Therapeutic Laziness’ as one of its top incoming trends for 2025.
“The idea of minimising complications and embracing a form of radical simplification is really important from a fashion POV,” says Sara Maggioni, head of womenswear at WGSN. “When you are surrounded by abundance and overloads (of product, info, social media trends, etc.), there is a need for a bit of a “palate cleanser”, for products that feel calm and reassuring and that also transcend micro-trends,” she continues, noting the macro factors also fueling this moment, like the cost-of-living crisis and consumers’ updated spending priorities. “We are bombarded by -cores/microtrends on a daily basis,” Maggiano adds. “From a product perspective, you can see how stripped back, unfussy, familiar design resonates.”
If quiet luxury wiped the slate clean to the point of sameness, where does individualism fit in?
A jumbled industry
That’s still to be determined. As Tran has been visiting brands for pre-fall market appointments, he mentions that “it all kind of jumbled”. “I think everyone is kind of confused right now and trying to find a direction to go into,” he said about the contingent of designers he’s visited. “Because of everything going on culturally, what is going to stand out the most is something that looks the most original, but also what is going to evoke emotion and going to excite.”
Tran mentions brands like Hermès, Bottega Veneta and The Row as sitting on the more minimal end of the spectrum, and Rick Owens and Comme des Garçons on the more concept-driven end. All are equally shining examples of what is working at the moment. “It’s about being ideas-focused, about things feeling intentional and mindful as opposed to putting out so many things all the time,” he said. “I’m also seeing it resonate with smaller emerging brands too. People who are doing things with their hands, with intention.”
The reason why these labels have circumvented, for the most part, the luxury slowdown, argues Tran, is because they serve a niche. They’re specific and individual and become an antithesis of the sameness in the market: think of Rick Owens’s viral inflatable boots or Apple Martin as a debutante in Valentino by Michele, standing out from her fellow debs.
What is coming down the pipeline this 2025 is an amalgamation of the ‘quiet luxury’ look we all know at the high street and this shifting of priorities at the luxury level. “While the term ‘quiet luxury’ per se will take a bit of a backseat because it has definitely been overexposed,” explains Maggioni, “the concept of stripped back, timeless, seasonless design isn’t going to disappear.” She chalks this up to a few factors, one crucial one within the umbrella of shifting shopping and spending habits being overconsumption. “The idea of producing less but better, of championing long-lasting design and durable products as well as reductive design approaches is still a key consideration.”
Maggioni says that fulfilling this does not mean buying only minimalist pieces that supersede trends — and that personal style will begin to find its place again. “Familiarity and comfort will remain important, but we are also going to see more crafted looks, more historical references, more optimistic colour, a renewed interest in more ‘maximalist’ looks and products that promote self-expression and individualism,” she says. “In the same vein as Ragolia and Tran, Maggioni remarks that craft and quality will come first as the slowdown continues, but what that looks like is, in fact, more individual.
A silver lining
Last year was a complicated one for luxury, but 2025 is shaping up to offer a silver lining, with what Maggioni and her team refer to as “glimmers” or “micro-moments of joy”. “This doesn’t mean novelty, throwaway product and irresponsible dopamine-boosting impulse purchases,” Maggioni explains. “The key here is to really channel that long-lasting design idea I mentioned and keep a conscious and responsible approach throughout.”
Tran points to John Galliano’s spring 2024 Maison Margiela Artisanal show in January last year as the first signal of this incoming change in direction. “I think everyone was starved for something that was so intentional and worked into and considered from every single angle,” he says. “That’s why the world was so enamoured and why it resonated so widely.” The show was also quite specific aesthetically — nothing like what had been on the menswear runways in January or what was shown for the rest of the year. When Vogue Runway polled industry insiders on their top collections of the year, it was this Galliano tour de force which took the top spot 11 months after it was first shown.
The incoming luxury fashion vibe shift portends a prioritisation of craft, quality, and timelessness, but above all, individuality. Tran and Ragolia have framed it as a return to a truly singular personal style. Chalk it up to algorithmic fatigue, the post-quiet luxury pendulum swing or simply attribute it to designers shaking up formerly staid houses.
As for what that means for trends, we may need to let go of our idea of trends altogether. Fashion’s next big idea may be an avalanche of individual “glimmers.” The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
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