by hharrissonn » Mon Jun 08, 2020 9:39 pm
Thinking a lot about the pending reinvention of the luxury fashion retail space as a way to distract myself from thinking about other more pressing things all the time.
I’m interested to see how people reacclimatize to being in retail spaces, and navigate the new social responsibilities placed on owners and consumers. Weirdly retail spaces like Supreme and Union and Maxfield Gallery and the Fear of God showroom in LA that were previously seen as needlessly stuffy and museum-like are now operating way ahead of the curve, being incredibly restrictive of the ways customers are allowed to interact with the space. It makes me wonder if most brick and mortar fashion retail spaces will make a shift to inventory free showrooms for special orders to be delivered to customers.
This could turn out to be super alienating and only further abstract the human costs of the industry, but it could also be an opportunity for these businesses, especially those operating in niche luxury markets, to really dig into the values of the people and communities that make up the majority of their patrons and interact with them on a more personal and (for lack of a better term) authentic level. It seems to me that it would democratize the industry to an extent for us to support designers and small retailers directly, while holding them accountable to the communities that are funding them. It’s much easier to exercise our influence as consumers on these sorts of smaller businesses than corporate giants, and the more targeted, community level acts of philanthropy and job creation these smaller businesses engage in have a more tangible affect on the lives of their patrons.
I think what I mean is things all seem much more real now and our expectations of the industry are going to be fundamentally changed and the stakes of spending a bunch of money on luxury clothes are only going to become more nuanced and important, whether we like it or not.
Edit: out of curiosity what did you not like about this I’d like to understand other perspectives on this because it’s how I’m trying to/would like to make my living
Last edited by
hharrissonn on Sun Aug 09, 2020 3:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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