On the Death of Culture and the Failure of Our Branded Revolution

Text by Jacopo Bedussi

This text is not, and does not wish to be, an attack on any particular designer. Yet if we truly want to treat fashion—a beloved, complicated, and often exasperating discipline—with the seriousness and standing it deserves, we must also find the courage to examine it deeply, even when the conclusions turn out to be uncomfortable. Or at least, try to.

On January 15, 2015, Alessandro Michele unexpectedly unveiled his first menswear show for Gucci.

A tired refrain, repeated with the monotony of a funeral chant, claims that fashion criticism—especially runway reviews—has become an intellectual relic, a decorative fossil of criticism. Words piled upon words, obscure formulations to be deciphered like coffee grounds. A jumble of scraps for the modern reader, who can make sense of it only after years of studying the secret language of whichever critic wrote it. A ritual where the writer flaunts their knowledge, eccentricities, and fixations, hiding—because honesty isn’t allowed—a bias and favouritism that reeks of conflict of interest.

The truth is, most of the time you can’t understand a thing. Everything is described as beautiful, interesting, or somehow meaningful—and you’ll rarely see someone write, plainly, that a show was just bullshit. Obvious, over-discussed, and yet mostly genuine.

Still, traditional fashion reviews do something useful: they let us cross-check our memories and the way we romanticise the past with what was actually written at the time, by a professional who saw it and reacted in the moment. Not precisely a reporter, but close: someone writing fast, under pressure, turning first impressions into formal opinions. These reviews were written before anyone knew if a collection would sell, be loved, or even matter. In other words, before hindsight could rewrite the story.

That hindsight we carry inside us like original sin—the urge to romanticise everything when we look back. Because things were better then, because we were younger, because… well, you know. In this present, in these so-called uncertain times (as if there ever were times that weren’t called uncertain, if not by journalists on some dictator’s payroll), how could we not see the past as a lost paradise, ruined by… whatever you want to blame: finance, capitalism, neoliberalism, social media, the rise of the right, communists, Greta Thunberg, functional illiteracy (good grief), attention deficit, TikTok, American soft power, Chinese soft power, the fall of print, the newspapers—on and on it goes. The list, obviously, never ends.

But getting back to the point, more than ten years have passed since Alessandro Michele’s debut. And with the benefit of hindsight, it’s now widely agreed that that moment marked one of fashion’s great turning points; the start of something vast, something that came to embody, or at least to dress, a genuinely historical shift. A time defined by progressive ideals, by a particular aesthetic and language—by the deliberate choice of words—and by the collective conversation those words sparked. It was the era that tied together fourth-wave feminism, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and—without invoking that cursed W-word (‘woke’)—let’s just say it was, in retrospect, the lost revolution we millennials could afford to have.

In his Vogue Runway review of Michele’s first show, Tim Blanks was remarkably cautious about the possibility of lasting success for Gucci’s new direction. He described the “droopy, androgynous languor of the show and its blurred gender divide,” and a “very deliberate sissiness [that] seemed a glaringly obvious way to distance this collection from its immediate past.” Then he wondered aloud: “Was it enough? The women’s show in a few weeks will undoubtedly provide more of an answer to that question.”

Here, by synecdoche, Blanks stands as the official voice of the entire fashion press. And in his words, there’s no sign of any cultural or political revolution—indeed, no talk of a new messiah. What’s missing, above all, is any link to a broader cultural context. There’s no attempt to situate the show within a subcultural system or in the lineage of fashion movements that had openly used clothing as a political or progressive statement—think, to name only two, of Vivienne Westwood or Katharine Hamnett.

Of course, no one could have predicted much from that first, still tentative attempt. And again, we know how the story turned out. But how is it that no one saw it coming, as they say—this massive shift in the paradigm?

This is where the most interesting questions begin to emerge about that moment we’re only now starting to historicise, a moment that goes far beyond Alessandro Michele and Gucci. The phenomenon included the entire wave of multimillion-dollar ‘progressive’ fashion houses, from Demna at Balenciaga, to the coronation of Virgil Abloh at Louis Vuitton. The question is: would that revolution have happened at all if fashion hadn’t so massively fed on and appropriated other cultural worlds—art, applied arts, philosophy, literature, film, poetry, music, design, architecture—to tell its own story?

And in that strange, symbiotic, and sometimes perverse relationship between fashion and the arts—classical, modern, and contemporary—who really benefited? The luxury conglomerates? The artists whose work fashion borrowed from? Or us, the privileged and perhaps slightly cynical spectators, who got to witness the erosion of boundaries between specialised worlds and enjoy hybrid experiences, discovering new ways of belonging, finally possible even without buying what fashion was selling?

How did a generation fall in love with brands without needing to own their products? How did a generation come to believe in those brands? And how sincere, how authentic could that emotional bond between people and billion-dollar companies really be, in a capitalist system already in decline? How did we end up believing that brands could be progressive forces, champions of a new ethics? In the end, did we witness the failure of a branded revolution?

Of course, it seems funny now to think about it. We feel so naïve, so idealistic, it’s almost embarrassing, a kind of historical blush. Yet, even if that revolution has failed—regardless of how sincere the intentions of the brands involved may have been—the fact that we can now ask why those same brands stay silent on the most urgent political crises of our time shows that something did change. It left behind a residue: a moral filter, a set of expectations we now apply to fashion, whether real or just projections, is hard to tell, especially as that world has since crumbled.

There’s something irresistibly suspect about the way creative directors use the word ‘culture.’ 

Postmodernism blurred the very notion of culture itself, dismantling centuries of hierarchy in the process. High and low, highbrow, lowbrow, middlebrow—and then those newer, quirkier terms: masscult, midcult, and so on, all kneaded together with sociology and canons. In the endless combinations of postmodernism—where fashion thrived like never before—everything became possible, and the scales that once measured value or quality collapsed. Freedom became thrilling and dizzying, but eventually everything started to mean everything, everyone to be counted as everyone else, and the virus of populism slipped quietly into even the most well-intentioned aesthetics.

What is culture, in this context? A kind of semantic balm, a universal pass that gives any operation—even the most elegantly commercial—an aura of depth and gravitas? A transparent anti-mould varnish that sanitises the love, or the need, for money? Is it enough to invoke a lofty reference that few have actually read—Pasolini, Nietzsche, Benjamin, whoever comes to hand—to earn a certificate of seriousness, a badge of intellectual good conduct?

And yet, behind this overused, sometimes awkwardly liturgical invocation of culture lies a more profound shift: culture turned from a space of doubt and critique into one of conformity and polite consensus.

Still, some exceptions prove the rule and reveal its complexity. There are a few fetish authors who have haunted runway references and press releases for decades. It would be fascinating, for instance, to trace how many shows over the past forty years have drawn inspiration from Rainer Werner Fassbinder—Querelle de Brest above all, but not only—and map their influence. At the front of that line stands Miuccia Prada, someone who has long embodied the German director’s ethos. She is perhaps the only designer—a doubting, twentieth-century leftist in pure form—who has consistently questioned the role of fashion in public, grappling with its tension between making clothes and having a social function, between commerce and conscience. The historical compromise, so to speak, between culture and frivolity. Her way of giving back—or rather, redistributing—her success and wealth to society through art and the Fondazione Prada.

In her September 2025 interview with Charlie Porter for Interview, she said: “I think fashion is for when you’re happy, when you have no problems, because when someone is facing illness or war, fashion is certainly not relevant.” And again: “The only thing I find correct and decent is intellectual honesty. We’re a company that has to sell clothes, so we try to make things that make sense for people, in the most creative way possible. But this isn’t a good moment for creativity. It’s an important time for other fields, like science.”

Prada doesn’t cite Fassbinder to legitimise herself, but because she shares his tragic, complex view of desire, power, and identity. In her case, culture isn’t an accessory but a lens. And that’s why her aesthetic, though rooted in what we now call—horribly—‘luxury,’ never feels entirely settled. There’s always something unsettling in it, an intellectually misaligned, uncomfortable edge.

However, the most recent case involving Pasolini is emblematic, almost paradigmatic—to use a word fashion now adores—ever since, during our failed cultural revolution, it discovered the philosophy of language and began plundering linguistics and semiotics. Again, it’s hard to measure precisely how much, but the thread clearly runs through Valentino. First came Pierpaolo Piccioli, who distilled and rephrased Pasolini’s poetic vision into a capsule form, quoting from the Postscript in Verse to the Lutheran Letters for his 2020 Haute Couture show, Of Grace and Light:

We are tired of becoming serious young men, or of being happy by compulsion, or criminals, or neurotics: we want to laugh, to be innocent, to expect something from life, to ask, to ignore. We don’t want to be so sure of ourselves, so soon. We don’t want to be so soon without dreams.

Then, at Valentino again, in the October 2025 shows, Alessandro Michele resurrected Pasolini, this time with the famous “article of the fireflies,” published in Corriere della Sera in 1975, shortly before his murder.

Without venturing into amateur psychoanalysis, it’s curious that from Pasolini’s vast body of work, two creative directors—years apart and stylistically worlds away—chose pieces that fiercely interrogate the relationship between development and progress. And how telling that such critiques resurface through fashion, one of the largest commercial and industrial systems on the planet, which now channels—in homeopathic doses and reduced to slogans—the words of an intellectual who saw those very systems as the root of all evil.

Yet even in this apparent contradiction, so glaring that no one seems to notice it—like the emperor’s new clothes—we rarely go deep enough to understand what’s actually at stake. It can’t simply be dismissed as hypocrisy, frivolity, or the congenital ignorance of the fashion world.

In both cases, Pasolini—or rather his shadow—was mobilised to lend meaning and depth to the mise-en-scène (a term used without judgment) of contemporary fashion, reduced into a piece of cultural merchandising. But the point isn’t to accuse—that would be too easy, too pompous, too stupid—but to understand what it really means when fashion decides to ‘quote’ culture. What happens when a thinker who denounced consumerism becomes an asset to increase consumption, or rather, to cleanse it of its ethical and moral implications, attempting to redeem it?

The fireflies are an image that works; they’re instantly Instagrammable. No one today has the time or patience to ask whether that cry against the destruction of the peasant world, against the rise of industry and consumption as new forms of alienation, doesn’t also contain a conservative, idealised core. But that’s fine.

Still, how can Pasolini’s closing line sit comfortably in the context where it was quoted? “I, even if I were a multinational, would trade the entire Montedison [an Italian chemical and energy conglomerate] for a single firefly.”

Legitimate questions arise: are we invoking Pasolini as an intellectual, or has that part been completely cut off from his broader thought? The quote has become a fetish, an act of aesthetic appropriation that neutralises the text’s original force. It creates a kind of (ir)reality effect: the cultural reference serves only to simulate depth. We quote not to think, but to appear thoughtful. In the symbolic gentrification that fashion performs on the worlds it seeks to absorb, the quote ultimately consumes even its own critique.

Alessandro Michele, first at Gucci and then at Valentino, has been the great alchemist of this process. He constructed a language characterised by erudite eclecticism, incorporating citations, cross-references, and layers of art history and pop philosophy. Nietzsche in the looks, Pasolini in the press notes. Yet, as often happens in fashion, depth dissolves into the surface. It’s not a matter of intent, but of context: is fashion today a language that, by nature, cannot afford the ambiguity of thought? Must it now be clear, legible, shareable, and immediate?

When fashion quotes philosophy, it does so like a collector displaying a rare object without ever using it: the value lies in visibility, not in function. And so Pasolini, Benjamin, Nietzsche become mere ‘prints’ on the fabric of the media discourse, from the real to the simulacrum: no longer Pasolini, but fashion’s Pasolini. His conflict perfectly hollowed out.

In some cases, the covers of famous books have literally become prints on handbags, as in Dior’s new J.W. Anderson era with Dracula, The Flowers of Evil, or Dangerous Liaisons. And, naturally, the internet didn’t miss the chance to post-ironically memify the whole thing, producing fakes where, instead of the classics, you get titles that would ideally revolt against the mechanism itself—or, more bluntly, books widely perceived today as markers of assholes and wannabes: Michel Foucault or Mark Fisher.

The aestheticisation of culture is not unique to fashion.

This appropriation is a broader symptom of an age that has turned engagement into spectacle and complexity into style. Fashion holds both the privilege and the guilt of doing so visibly, tangibly, glamorously. The appropriation of culture becomes a form of symbolic gentrification: it takes ‘other’ disciplines—literature, philosophy, politics—and refashions them into a language compatible with luxury, as if fashion were doing to culture what real estate speculation does to working-class neighbourhoods: preserving the façade while sterilising the content.

And yet, in this austere, well-mannered present—where quiet luxury has imposed years of aesthetic emptiness and mortal boredom—perhaps we are the ones, with our hindsight, over-glorifying that recent past. Isn’t it possible that the cultural washing of brands, though an obvious strategy even then, now appears to us, by contrast, as an intellectual golden age? After all, saying that fashion is in decline is hardly new, and the sales figures say it first.

If we’re being rigorous, we might even play with the terms: rather than cultural appropriation—the legitimate accusation, in some cases, of stealing symbols from marginalised cultures—the real issue was the appropriation of culture itself as a tool, a weapon, brandished yet deactivated. The selective absorption and neutralisation of the most uncomfortable or radical voices of an entire culture—our own!—resold like prime real estate, polished and made harmless. The question isn’t just who copies whom, but who gets to sterilise and resell critical thought. And everyone, of course, can decide for themselves who’s authentic and who’s the usurper.

The deeper question remains: when did fashion become political? Or rather, when did we decide it had to be? Is it really fair that we now expect fashion houses to take a stand on war, on the environment, on Palestine?

The risk, of course, is banalisation, but there’s a side hypothesis worth considering critically. What if the use of culture as a marketing tool were actually the lever through which creatives find a way to express themselves? What if, instead of hypocritical exploitation, citation itself created a short circuit that escapes the normativism of fashion-finance and quarterly performance logic?

In this light, the learned reference, the philosophical quote, would not just be a coat of paint but the last militant space of freedom and autonomy left to the creative director. The only way to insert complexity, doubt, and an intellectual echo into a product that must be instantly sellable and globally digestible. It’s a form of lateral resistance: giving finance what it demands—branding and the aura of storytelling—to preserve a secret space where thought, however diluted, can still exist.

But then why, if this is a form of resistance, do brands perceive it as harmless, or even beneficial? The answer lies in the compromise. The system, brilliant in its cynical voracity, has learned to monetise even its own critique. It knows that a ‘deep’ narrative adds intangible value and drives far greater engagement than a banal dress. Resistance is tolerated, as long as it sells. And in fact, when it stopped selling, every reference to it vanished. Hence, our lovely half-decade of quiet luxury. Now that even that has ceased to sell or to matter, brands have once again become frightened warriors, searching for some new form of cultural, countercultural, or anti-cultural hegemony to feed on.

To do politics through fashion doesn’t mean displaying a message; it means questioning one’s own conditions of production.

Yet that’s the step almost no one in fashion dares to take. It’s easy to declare oneself against the patriarchy; it’s harder to stop producing thirty collections a year. It’s easy to march for women’s freedom; it’s harder to pay the women who sew the garments fairly. Commitment, when branded, loses its disruptive power. It becomes an ornament.

It might sound like the grumbling of old militants, a relic of vintage activism. But if it’s true that complexity is not of this era—or of the Gen Z and Alpha generations—and that yes, fine, Pasolini, Nietzsche, and Benjamin in bite-sized TikToks or on €500 T-shirts are better than nothing, it’s equally true that we’re living through the most radical and identity-driven time since the 1970s. And maybe the poor performance of fashion brands has to do precisely with this paralysis: the total loss of suspended disbelief among the new generations (and even the not-so-new ones, but still not entirely zombified).

Pasolini, who despised ‘development’ but defended ‘progress’ would have recognised in all this the perfect incarnation of the bourgeois contradiction: the desire to change the world as long as the market stays the same. The perverse relationship between progress and development that kept Pasolini awake at night is, in the end, the original sin embodied by every ‘committed’ runway show: as an act of development, an industrial event, a global spectacle that reproduces exactly what it claims to criticise.

And yet, despite everything, the question remains open. We can’t simply dismiss the act of citation as hypocrisy. There’s also a residue of genuine desire in it; the unconscious need to reconnect with the idea of culture as a space of freedom. I believe Alessandro Michele cites Pasolini not to empty him out, but to invoke him as an amulet against the sterility of the system that engulfs him. In those shows, there really was an attempt to give fashion back a dimension of thought, even if through the language of advertising.

And if someone—even just one viewer—went home after the show and looked up that Corriere article, then perhaps it did mean something after all. The doubt remains: what if this is the new form of critique? A critique disguised as spectacle, a kind of sabotage from within? It’s a fascinating hypothesis, though a fragile one. Because, as always, the risk is that the system will digest and monetise even its own negation, turning it into the next irresistible, desperate moment of hype.