A Guide to Building Your Own Ecosystem

Text by Eugene Rabkin

The first twenty-five years of this century have been marked by luxury conglomerates’ corporate takeover of fashion. Their grip on the industry has become so firm that one can be forgiven for feeling disheartened with the fashion landscape as a whole. How can an independent brand compete against the Goliaths with unlimited marketing budgets? They clog up our airways with their ads, our social media feeds with their celebrity tie-ups, and our streets with their stores. They latch onto culture via sponsorships and built-in museums to further elevate their profiles and shift the attention away from smaller brands. 

Now, though, cracks in the fashion system are beginning to show. For years, luxury fashion brands have been taking advantage of their customers by increasing prices while lowering quality, and it seems that one too many people have finally had enough of this corrupt system. Luxury fashion is now verging on being offensive for how much they’re doubting our mental capacities and this is opening up an opportunity for smaller brands to step in and offer something better. However, they can only do so by understanding that they operate in an ecosystem that includes brands, stores, and the media.

For decades, the fashion system has perpetuated the myth of the fashion designer as a lone genius—a concept borrowed from the art world. This myth has to go. Young brands need to collaborate together and present their work collectively if they want to make a bigger impact. There is a reason why people still remember the Antwerp Six, even though the six designers have different aesthetic directions. There is a reason why the fashion industry began to talk about the Japanese fashion revolution after Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo decided to show in Paris together. Alexander McQueen and John Galliano may have had different trajectories, but their parallels earned London a reputation for producing great young designers that it still enjoys today.

Presenting together is the first step. The next one is to develop symbiotic relationships with independent stores. It’s a hard one, as retail today is increasingly risk-averse. In the past, stores were seen as tastemakers. When I began shopping for designer clothing in the late ‘90s in New York, Barneys was not just a temple of retail fashion but a trailblazer that one rushed to at the start of each season to discover what’s new. Nowadays, stores are increasingly seen as mere merchants rather than curators, as people tend to discover new brands online and through social media. Nevertheless, independent boutiques remain important, especially as the pendulum is swinging back to physical shopping. E-commerce and department stores have been weakened, and now is the time for well-curated independent retail stores to shine. And these stores may increasingly be found on the periphery, as major city centres have become exorbitantly expensive. But they will come, and it will be a job for young designers to seek them out and work with them.

There is also an opportunity for new media to arise now. Fewer and fewer people today seem to believe what the mainstream fashion media tells them. Another fawning review, another puff piece about a major brand’s creative director; we can all see through them now. And with democratised means of media production, one no longer needs to start a print magazine. New media is showing up and will continue to do so, from places like Instagram and Substack. And there will continue to be independent fashion magazines, such as this one. Young designers need to recognise this shift and build relationships with these new forms of media.

But none of this will be enough if young designers don’t make exciting work. This must be your first and foremost priority. Without great ideas, compelling story-telling, and excellent product, your chance at success is slim. You will need to think hard about what it is that you want to do and how you want to translate that into words and images. By and large, I have stopped interviewing young designers because “I am just expressing myself” is not a story anymore; it’s a given.

Becoming successful will be harder than before. So much has been done that it’s hard to present a radically new aesthetic, as fashion has descended into the postmodernist pastiche of reworking and remixing past styles. But it’s not impossible, as designers like Craig Green, Chitose Abe, and Kei Ninomiya have shown us.

The cost of making a collection has also skyrocketed, but consider this a challenge and let your imagination overcome these obstacles and run wild. Look closely at the early work of Martin Margiela, and you will see how much of it has been built on flea market finds and pedestrian-inspired models. It was the strength of Margiela’s imagination that turned the mundane into the brilliant. Galliano’s F/W 94 collection – a last desperate ditch attempt – was made with a few bolts of the same fabric, but his mastery in cutting and constructing made it a triumphant success.

There will be other obstacles. Fashion is overly saturated. Too many fashion schools are producing too many fashion graduates, and too many brands chasing too few selected customers. The prohibitive costs of starting and running a brand favour the kids of rich parents. You will need to ask yourself twice whether you want to launch a brand today, and if you decide to go for it, the next question you will need to ask yourself is what it is that you can bring to the table that’s not already there. But whatever happens, you will need to stop looking up and start looking around. Fashion is an ecosystem, and the path forward is to learn how to build your own.