Runway shows are awesome. Back in my fashion week era, nothing lit up my imagination like high-end clothes hurtling past me in an Italian palazzo (Gucci Cruise 2018) or the French national library (Givenchy FW17) or a slaughterhouse in Shanghai (Cornerstone FW17). That, and the bizarre spectacle of it all. Who are all these people? Is that a Youtuber? An Italian reality TV star?
Runway shows have been around forever, but the format has endured despite huge shifts in technology, clothes and the way we consume them. Designers still want to put on shows, and people still want to look at them, even as the industry has shapeshifted its way through macro-trends like sneakers, social media, fast fashion, influencers and streetwear. The combination of cool location, cool music and cool models is just a really good formula for making clothes feel real and exciting. It says that what you’re witnessing is fashion, not mere clothing.
And it’s expensive. A show might cost anything from €500k to €15 million, according to Alexandre de Betak, who’s been producing shows in Paris for as long as I’ve been alive. On top of all the hard costs — the location, the set, the lighting — you’ve got to pay models, stylists, hair and make up artists, as well as PRs to make sure that people actually see it. Then there’s the guests — it costs a lot of money to get all those NBA players, K pop stars, rappers and rich kids together in one place.
How do brands finance all of this? You, the customer, are paying for it.
Of course, the price for any piece you buy has other stuff factored into it — you’re not just paying for ideas and fabric, but also a warehouse, e-commerce platforms and the HR department’s salary. But the thing with luxury fashion specifically is that a huge, expensive runway show isn’t an operating cost — it’s an essential part of the brands’ price strategy.
Luxury execs have perfected the art of manufacturing status symbols: use the runway show, as well as fancy flagship stores and campaigns, to project a glossy sheen of desirability onto mass-produced bags, fragrances and accessories. The shows are fuel for high-margin pricing — i.e. making stuff way more expensive than it normally would be. And as income inequality has become turbocharged in the shadow of the pandemic, the markups have only gotten higher. The rich got richer, so luxury got more expensive.
We also know that a huge price tag doesn’t guarantee a product has been made ethically. Back in 2020, a New York Times investigation uncovered sweatshops in India embroidering pieces for some of the world’s biggest luxury brands. Earlier in the year, Bloomberg reported that workers in Peru were working unpaid to shear vicuna wool for Loro Piana, and more recently investigators discovered suppliers in Italy assembling €2,600 Dior bags for €53.
The maisons love to talk about how the industry is all about craftsmanship and creative visionaries, but peer behind the scenes and you’ll find a bunch of execs with spreadsheets who figured out that you can charge extremely high prices when you spend a lot of money on marketing (there’s tons about this in my book, btw). And marketing is more important than ever. When 99% of the stuff on the market is just a half-assed remix of someone else’s idea then you have to push really, really hard to keep people interested, otherwise they’ll spend their money on skincare or natural wine or fragrances instead.
You’ll still find cool, interesting ideas on the runway if you know where to look — top of my head, I’m thinking of Kiko Kostadinov, Lemaire, Martine Rose — and for smaller brands a show can be a really effective way of showing your ideas to the world. But personally, a brand not doing a show is a big green flag for me. Designers are much more able to give you value for money when they’re not dropping millions on a 3-minute long marketing event. It’s not a golden rule by any means — there’s awesome brands doing shows, and bad ones that don’t — but it’s a good indicator of where a brand’s intentions are, and where your money is going when you buy something from them.
Which brings us to the other problem with shows — they are the front end of the deeply unsustainable trend cycle which we urgently need to stop for the sake of the planet and everyone living on it. Not plugging into the never-ending carousel of trends and influencers and it-pieces is another sign that brands are serious about what really matters: the clothes.
So yes, runway shows are amazing and exciting and wonderful but also… don’t let them trick you into paying insane prices for very ordinary products.
Photo via Copenhagen Fashion Week
I recently wrote about NY fashion week and the purpose of it all, and you really nailed it with the point about who pay for these shows. Of course it’s the consumer, and is this what we really want?? Or do we want clean, pleasant store environments, well-made clothes with the right margins to pay fairly everyone in the supply chain, and investment in beautiful and inspiring brand imagery (art direction has really fallen off a cliff). I don’t want to pay for a brand’s click-through-rate, that’s for sure!
True Anon episode 401 is an excellent, well-researched conversation about this very bloated industrial complex. It’s even worse than you think.