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A few days into Paris Fashion Week, a friend and fellow editor texted me: “The return of business casual to the club is a recession indicator.” Is it true? Can we deduce the state of the US economy based on the return of blazers to bar life? Online, signs of a recession are everywhere if the commentariat is to be believed — peplum tops, indie sleaze, skinny jeans and skinny scarves apparently all indicate an economic slump.
As is common with internet speak, it might have gone too far. Can everything from Lady Gaga’s return to form on Mayhem to boho chic and an upcoming Suits reboot really be recession indicators? Or is it just the latest spin on our ongoing obsession with nostalgia, a social media quip to show one’s commentary is more high brow and informed than the next? In fashion, what actually indicates a recession?
Non-starters
One could argue — if one is imaginative and humorous enough, that is — that slim silhouettes like the skinny jean can mark a looming recession due to the mere fact that they use less fabric. Or that the style cognoscenti re-embracing indie sleaze elements is a brand of nostalgia that indeed takes us back to the times before and immediately following the 2008 financial crisis. But for the most part, these are mere examples of fashion cyclicality.
Slim silhouettes being back on the runways are a classic case of a swinging pendulum — things got too wide, as oversized as they could (designers, take this not as a challenge) so now we must go elsewhere. And indie sleaze? That’s just the case of a generation of fashion lovers who were too young to partake in its first wave having the opportunity to do so now. (Another instance of this would be the enthusiasm for boho chic, fuelled by Chemena Kamali’s Chloé debut last year.)
Rather, what happens when we take these popular internet phrases and shoehorn them into describing today’s trends is that we more often than not lose valuable hindsight — the kind that makes trend reporting such an alchemical yet accurate science. We used to be able to look back at fashion and recognise its patterns as either nothing more than a returning trend or as markers of broader cultural stories when the evidence presented them as such.
It’s almost as if now we are unable — or uninterested — in taking in the big picture. The quick hits of discussing fashion based on internet talking points du jour make for entertaining social media discourse, but calling anything and everything a ‘recession indicator’ or, to look at last week’s column, a case of ‘nacho reheating’ flattens much of the cultural and historical context attached to fashion. Take the case of peplums — we could call them a recession indicator to be funny, surely, but they actually tend to come back in style after moments of crisis (one of the most famous peplum shapes in fashion history is Christian Dior’s New Look jacket, which came after World War II).
And yes, most fashion conversations — including this one — happen online, but that doesn’t mean we should forego fashion literacy for the sake of a fun joke.
The real markers
What we can’t ignore, however, is that some economic indicators are indeed raising red flags at the moment — a recent Deutsche Bank survey points to a 43 per cent chance that the United States is headed for a recession. The last time the US entered a recession period, other than in the aftermath of the pandemic, was once again in 2008; an era in fashion collectively remembered primarily for two things.
For insiders, there was the arrival of Phoebe Philo at Celine, which swiftly became a dominating, agenda-setting force that defined much of the past decade and a half in fashion, whether by designers emulating her aesthetic or by her acolytes going on to design for major labels (Daniel Lee, first at Bottega Veneta and now at Burberry; Peter Do; and Rok Hwang of Rokh are a few that spring to mind). Philo’s singular brand of minimalism was appropriate for the moment, a time in which luxury went quiet as affluent consumers embraced a more subdued look attune to the economic hardships of the time. Glaring and unabashed displays of wealth were a swift no-go.
Sound familiar? Quiet luxury as an aesthetic online and in pop-culture (see the well-timed final season of Succession) would in hindsight be more of an early harbinger for a possible impending recession than, say, Chalamet’s skinny scarf. What quiet luxury promotes is a homogenised look that is subtle, logoless and easy to partake in. That its styling components could be The Row and Loro Piana or Cos and Uniqlo was the commercial effect of this consumer trend on TikTok that made way for the return of mall brands, as I outlined late last year.
More broadly, what this era in fashion is remembered for is the popularisation of business casual as the look to wear both to the office and to the club. Ding ding ding! The first half of the 2010s were, after all, the time in which millennials would step into the party scene wearing tailored vests, peplum tops, blazers and slacks. That this was the ‘going out look’ trend then had much to do with the fact that, during and immediately after the recession, people were less willing to invest in clothes for different occasions and rather spent on a more versatile wardrobe. That the 10am meeting outfit became the 10pm club look is, in hindsight, a hilarious consequence of recession-era consumer trends that is now immortalised in many Facebook photo albums. Pretty Little Thing rebranding from a youthful party brand to a business casual label? Recession indicator.
Earlier this month in Paris, Stella McCartney said the theme of her Autumn/Winter 2025 collection was “from laptop to lap dance”. McCartney was making a point about women existing both in the workplace and outside of it, timed to the reacquisition of her own name and label. Yet the look on the runway, an ’80s Working Girl meets 2020s oversized blazer-wearing millennial office worker, revived this same ‘business casual to the club’ look from 15 years ago. McCartney wasn’t alone. Iterations of corporate garb were one of the season’s biggest trends, according to my Vogue colleague Laird Borrelli-Persson. Dylan Cao and Jin Kay of Commission were also thinking of both the corporate office and the underground rave as settings for their collection, and designers from Ashlynn Park in New York to Simone Bellotti at Bally in Milan reconsidered the peplum as both a sophisticated sportswear element and a subversive — yet equally dressy — punkish wardrobe twist.
The jury is still out on whether we will or will not reach a recession in 2025, but fashion is, perhaps even inadvertently, preparing itself for its effects on consumer habits. Brands have also been dealing with the consequences of the luxury downturn. The takeaway is that even if these shifts in collective style are not always indicative of macroeconomic tendencies, they do indicate what happens in the industry. The rise of TikTok’s office siren aesthetic may not say much about the future of the US economy, but it certainly contextualises a collective sartorial anxiety in regards to how to dress and what to spend money on.
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
More from this author:
Was Autumn/Winter 2025 the season of ‘reheating nachos’?
Old dogs, new tricks: How the fashion establishment embraced online virality
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