Fashion Doesn’t Need More Content
Endless drops, empty metrics, and the burnout of image-making in a content-obsessed industry.
Hi everyone,
Today I’m sharing an essay I’ve been writing for a while. A year ago, I posted a piece called “Is Social First Killing the Role of the Art Director?” It came from a personal frustration: client after client asking for content to look lo-fi, shot on iPhone, stripped of anything that felt produced or crafted. Every curated decision got taken out. So did the fun in my job. It made me wonder: is being an art director even enjoyable anymore?
Now, a year later, it feels worse. Timelines are tighter, budgets are smaller, yet every brief screams for “virality” as the measure of success. Shotlists feel like next-level mathematics, juggling formats, channels, edits, and endless variations.
Every corner of fashion is obsessed with output. Brands post daily because they’ve been told attention equals value. Stakeholders don’t value craft anymore. Campaigns that once felt like events, a single image that stopped you in your tracks, have been reduced to noise you scroll past. We’re burning out talent, cheapening ideas, and losing the ceremony that made fashion feel like culture in the first place.
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The Content Age
There was a time when fashion understood how to create a moment. A show invitation hinted at something bigger than a collection. Think of Alexander McQueen’s Plato’s Atlantis show, where the set, sound, and choreography made you feel like you were witnessing the future of fashion. Or Steven Meisel’s Joy to the World editorial for Vogue in 2002, where a single image dressed in Galliano’s Dior couture felt like an entire world in itself, one that lived far beyond its publication date. Back then, models carried a character, and brands developed a visual language that evolved over seasons instead of being reset with every trend.
Campaigns felt like an unveiling, crafted to stop you in your tracks and stay in conversation for weeks. Nick Knight’s Dior campaigns under Galliano are a perfect example, one striking image could shape an entire season’s mood. ‘Visually owned’ by Dior at the time, it was bold, not to be copied by other brands.
Today, that sense of build-up has been replaced by an endless feed. Shows are chopped up into clips before they’re even over. Campaigns disappear within a day, sliced into quick edits built for algorithms instead of audiences. Fashion traded anticipation for quantity, mistaking constant output for cultural relevance. And the result? People scroll past what used to spark debate or obsession. Brands are talking more than ever, yet saying less each time. The stage that once belonged to fashion moments has been handed over to content calendars, and nobody is waiting for what comes next.
Is It the Budget Cut?
Getting a million dollar + campaign briefing on your lab is rare these days. But I don’t think they lost their budgets, they’re just spread so thin they no longer feel powerful. Money that once built entire worlds: sets, locations, films that pulled you in, is now carved up into dozens of deliverables for every platform, every content calendar moment, every semi-relevant influencer and what not. Every department gets a slice, every channel needs content, and the ambition of the work shrinks with each cut.
Instead of one unforgettable film, brands fund twenty short clips that disappear in a day. Instead of constructing a set that feels like stepping into another universe, they settle for whatever backdrop fits a fast-turnaround shoot. The craft that made images timeless is sidelined because every penny is accounted for in frequency. While what we need is depth.
The irony is that brands are spending more than ever to say less. Quantity has replaced boldness. The vision is lost in the production schedule, and fashion ends up feeling small, which is not because it lacks resources, but because the resources are spread across noise and the need to show up everywhere and jump on every trend.
The Metrics are Killing the Vision
When every brief is tied to numbers, creativity starts to shrink. The industry no longer asks, is this powerful? it asks, will it perform? Concepts are stripped down to what’s safe, what can be understood in two seconds, what avoids any hint of controversy. Ideas that once made you stop and think don’t make it past the approval process because they’re “too risky” for the algorithm or being dragged on the internet and an entire generation cancelling the brand.
The obsession with performance turns fashion into a guessing game. Designers and image-makers are no longer pushing creative boundaries, they’re optimising for clicks. Even the most ambitious work is chopped into formats that fit the analytics dashboard, where success is defined by views and likes rather than cultural impact.
The result is a feedback loop that rewards sameness. If the boldest images are killed before they’re made, the industry ends up with content that’s flat, safe, and forgettable. Fashion used to set the tone for culture, spark conversation and be the first to act on what is going on in the world. Now it’s letting metrics set the tone for fashion, while brands sit back quietly trying not to have an opinion or a point of view on anything, because it’s too risky today.
We Are Losing the Plot
The obsession to make something beautiful, the craft of it all, that’s what is lost. Fashion used to feel immersive because time and detail went into building its worlds. Campaigns had sets that felt alive, films that unfolded like a story, images you wanted to return to. Think of Tom Ford’s Gucci campaigns in the late ’90s, where every frame felt like a cultural event. You waited for those images to drop because they promised more than a product, it was like an atmosphere or lifestyle, a story only fashion could tell. That kind of craft doesn’t survive a schedule that demands daily output.
When a campaign budget is split into short clips and social edits, there’s no room to build anything lasting. Film crews are told to “just grab something vertical” instead of composing a scene. Styling gets reduced to quick looks that work in a scroll, not in print or on a billboard. Even sound and pacing, once part of what made a fashion film memorable, are flattened into background noise for feeds that people swipe past on mute. Custom music for fashion films has almost disappeared entirely, because everything is designed for the feed. Which is either in 1) a trendy sound, 2) royalty free sound or 3) people scrolling on mute.
Craft takes time. It needs patience, decisions made for the work itself, not for what will trend this week. Without that space, fashion loses its texture. Everything starts to look like content: fast, surface-level, easy to forget.
The Human Cost of Fast Content
Behind every post is a team running on empty. Photographers, stylists, art directors, editors, they are all asked to deliver more work in less time, with less money and no room to think. What should be a process of exploration and refinement becomes a production line.
Creatives are not only tired, they are also losing the ability to take risks, because they get shut down when they try. Also when you’re working on five campaigns at once, you don’t have time to challenge an idea or push for something bolder. You settle for what you know will “work,” because it has to be approved tomorrow and posted the next day. The burnout is real, and it’s shaping the quality of what gets made.
The irony is that fashion depends on visionaries, yet it’s built a system that drains them. When creativity becomes about feeding a content machine instead of making images that last, the people who once defined culture are left executing briefs that barely scratch the surface.
And What If We Created Less Noise?
Fashion really doesn’t need more posts (with this I don’t only mean on their own channel, but also sponsored posts, seeding, influencer content and everything around that) It needs moments worth waiting for. The industry has to start choosing impact over output, fewer campaigns, fewer edits, fewer empty updates, so the work has space to breathe, shape and evolve over seasons.
Budgets should go back into building worlds, and not chopping ideas into a hundred pieces, more assets is not the merrier. A single image, a short film, a show that feels like an event, these can do more for a brand than months of filler content ever will. People don’t fall in love with fashion because it shows up in their feed every day. They fall in love because it surprises them, moves them, stays with them.
We don’t need more noise. We need brands to pause, think harder, and create less often but with more ambition. We need a small group of pioneering brands to break the cycle (like Bottega Veneta started doing, but we need more!). Fashion once knew how to do that. It still can, if we stop treating attention as the only currency worth chasing.
To conclude: Fashion doesn’t need more content. It needs fewer, bolder moments that make the world stop again.
Love,
Zoe
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Zoë, you absolutely hit the mark!!!!
Absolutely!! Keep these coming!
I think it's interesting to also reflect on the homogeny factor. The way the system (aka capitalism aka human & planet exploitation for profit at any cost) uses "globalisation" as a way to justify homogenous capitalist practice.
For example, Vogue is not one entity. Magazines, which to me is equal to advertising. All promotion for profit is, is advertising - when you look at logic from that prospective the words that sort of make me mouth vomit (influencer, content) are all just things that try to underline diversification but really just perpetuate the same shit, they some how for me become less nauseating. Cioè, 'oh we just still haven't innovated the systems.'
U.S. Vogue was always very different from their leading counterparts; British, Paris, Italia. But when you try and homogenise prospettive you're left with very little culture at all. Have you read Dressed for War, by Julie Summers? - that really reminded me of when I started at Vogue Nippon in Milano, early 2000s,- the last of the glory years, gosh I still miss my blackberry so much sometimes - and U.S. Vogue announced all editions could no longer have black and white covers, our editors were disgusted at the lack of diversity as their issues had to simulate more and more a one single market prospective. Shortly after that U.S. Vogue made it impossible for editors to consult, watered down it was like 'either we pay you and no one else can or you work for much less and no real job security or support can be given'. That was such a blow to how we all, the junior editors that were there to climb the ladders, looked toward building a future scalable career. Because that still acutely existed for the European editions - bc we all knew and talked about the horrors of the U.S. edition structured more like a finance corp with no real vacations [as mid july to mid september was dead], travel options for research, endless smoke and coffee breaks and days spent in libraries and museums and art openings (you know the creative stimulai perks-bc the pay was always mediocre vs the cost of living in our big cities) all for the same shitty pay. What was exciting were all the outside brand consulting that paid us all well and expanded our creativity when we had to come back to magazine editorials, issue themes, and layouts. Again I thought of the history of Condé Nast's Vogue origins when a singular british man become the decision maker for more than 100 countries and all of their sub cultures for a magazine that was founded on women's interests in 2020.
The budgets for some companies are still very much there while they add to the various ads in various departments. I did a job for a big historical european brand on one of their smallest budgets, being told endlessly that they had to prepare for economic uncertainty only to find out the main campaign still had 20million -- so there is also that. If editors are teaching styling courses (cringe but also my heart breaks for those next in line) to make up for their lack of income, where then will those next generation find jobs and plan for a future? The answer was never retail on commissions.
Fashion too then also produced much less, le Marais in Paris was still full of culture, not mirroring NYC's SoHo with H&Ms and Zaras (can you image what the industry could be if they invested all that money they make on exploitation and over production into innovative shopping; where the store is full of patterns and fabrics to buy rather than more and more microplastic...)and with all of that watering down of culture for bad tourism you have Amazon being a sponsor for "fashion" while we all complain that we can't get our shoes and handbags repaired because there are no repairs shops. Promoting sales when salaries still don't equate the cost of living seems more and more ignorant to me. IE, for me it's not at all about "inclusion" rather just justification for the lack of valuing paying people respectfully for such important work. (the amount of shareholders that could care less about anything but their ROI yet dictate how we create is just insane)
Absolutely less is more, but in a capitalist system that's uses religion to justify wars (remember fashion is also absolutely political) nothing will ever change... Less praise for sales and lower costs and glorifying homogeny and more actual multicultural respect -- which would force it to slow it down-- All that rant to say, thank you and yes please Zoë keep giving us all of these articles to discuss because these real reflections are what we all must continue to do if we're ever going to actually innovate meaning. Brava! 👏🎩