Dressing Fast and Slow

Koko want birkin bag. Practical Koko possession bag

went to the university of servington to study mothermatics

Fashion season just ended, with Paris Couture Week in January (that’s the one with the weirdest clothes) and the four Fashion Weeks (New York, London, Milan, Paris) over February and March. I’m interested in fashion, and so, because there’s also not a lot of other stuff for me to talk about right now anyways, I thought it was the perfect moment to get into some topics I kinda let slide.

Real Business Trend Cycle Theory

Let’s start with some fashion news: Pierpaolo Piccoli, creative director of Valentino, is out. Alessandro Michele, the briefly unemployed ex-director of Gucci, is in? Why does this matter? Well, firstly, because Michele is thought to be a very commercially viable director - under his control, Gucci tripled its sales, and that kind of success is thought to be appealing to the (comparatively more niche) Valentino. Of course, Gucci isn’t as profitable now, since sales have declined 20% or so.

But wait, why does any of this matter? Well, firstly, because it’s interesting, especially if you care about this kind of stuff. Different people in charge of the creative output of different fashion houses means that different clothes get created. Gabriella Hearst left Chloe, and was replaced by Chemena Kamali - and her first collection was pretty good. Sarah Burton, the longtime director of Alexander McQueen, was replaced by some guy called Sean McGirr, and his first collection was pretty bad. Dries Van Noten is retiring from his own brand. Phoebe Philo started her own brand, which charges like 20,000 dollars for a plain black coat. It’s like Succession, except the outfits aren’t boring.

But how does this affect me? Well, because what happens at the top of the fashion food pyramid (the luxury houses) eventually trickles down to what all of us mere, penniless mortals wear. If sheer is in for celebrities, it’s in for us. If Sandy Liang’s bows blow up, you see the coquette aesthetic all over Instagram. If a bunch of people wear cherry red to the Oscars, then you’re gonna be wearing it too. I mean this one bit from Devil Wears Prada is a classic for a reason:

You think this has nothing to do with you. You… go to your closet, and you select… I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back, but what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean.

You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that, in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns, and then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent, wasn’t it?… who showed cerulean military jackets. (…) And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.

However, that blue represents millions of dollars of countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room… from a pile of “stuff.”

So either you’re a woman who wears clothes, or (more likely, given what I imagine my demographics to be) you’re a man who, with at least a 75% chance, likes women and therefore finds what we wear (un)appealing: what happens at the top reverberates at the bottom, and with social media working the way it works, it’s reverberating more and more quickly. The luxury houses are, to put it in Industrial Organization terms, the industry leaders, and wherever us poor souls buy our clothes are the followers. For realheads, this isn’t a new thought - the Trend Cycle is also a Business Cycle.

For the longest time, fashion trends tended to last a while: some were short lived, and only went on for a couple of years. Others lasted for longer: think flats or heels, long versus short skirts, or high versus low rise jeans, or wide versus skinny pants. Contrary to common belief, this has nothing to do with recessions and everything to do with, well, time: menswear guy knowers are aware that men’s suits used to be very baggy, but then Thom Browne became really really big by making very tight, shrunken suits, which is why all of the sudden all men wear those hideous skinny chinos to the office. Now skinny pants are out, and wide leg pants are in. Same is true for different kinds of heels, or different types of skirts, or different waistlines on pants. Likewise, different moments take inspiration from different decades, usually 20 to 30 years prior - for example, the most fashion-forward communities saw a reignition of interest in wide leg jeans as early as 2012, but the trend wasn’t solidified until nearly a decade later, and now baggy pants reign supreme. In around 5 years, skinny jeans (eugh) will come back, and in 10 to 15 they’ll be properly trendy. That’s the way things go, and by then I’ll be old enough that nobody cares what I’m wearing anymore.

Social media, however, has accelerated the trend cycle: novelty drives engagement, and people want to be up to speed. If everyone is dunkiing on the latest The Cut personal essay (which changed three times since I started researching this piece), you are going to want to read it and get the joke. If everyone is talking up the Panera Lemonade that kills you, hey, why not take a sip. And if people are saying that checkerboard vests or weird ugly Don Ramón hats or bows or ballet flats or whatever are the next It Item, then why the hell not buy one? The problem is, of course, that this can only move in one direction: fast. And obviously, if you like bows or shoes with buckles or cherry red or Brazil football jerseys, then get one! But otherwise, this can incentivise some pretty scummy business practices. Constant trend changes mean, after all, more money - people are going to spend more on clothes if they somehow feel “less than” for wearing older ones.

Of course, there is something of a desire to not go too far in that direction, especially from more established firms. That something “feels cheap” absolutely lessens its aeathetic value, even if it doesnt’ affect its retail value - who can forget the one Succession scene (aired around a year ago) where a woman’s perfectly normal bag is viciously roasted? While the (now extremely dated) references to “quiet luxury” as a trend (which has had multiple names in like two years, for a style that is more or less just wear neutrals and dress quasi modestly) may point to fashion cycles, in truth, continuity is crucial to these top players: you’re not buying the latest piece in such and such style more than you’re buying a part of such and such the brand. Which is also why people are so sensitive to staffing changes.

One such example of a fashion house with a good identity is Hermes: while you may not know about what they’re showing in the runways, you do probably know what a Birkin bag is - they’re such a status symbol even Koko the ape wants one. (In)famously, if you want a Birkin, you need to be a trusted and high level Hermes customer, which more often than not means spending a lot of money on various mid level Hermes products so you can be “offered” a Birkin, which you then spend like 10,000 dollars on. Because you have to buy to buy it, when you walk down the street with a Birkin, people don’t just know you spent 10k on a handbag - they know you spent several tens of thousands more on ugly keychains, ugly scarves, and ugly bags that are not Birkins to get it. The problem here is that this might not be legal (since demanding that people buy more to buy something violates the US Sherman Antitrust Act), so Hermes got hit with a somewhat spurious lawsuit from the Birkinless Victims of America. Since many brands do this, the case will be closely watched, with a caveat: many Hermes customers like the practice, which they feel adds not only to the value of their products, but to their shopping experience as well. They’re paying for the brand, and for the brand experience - not just a chunky and kind of ugly bag.

You got a FAAAST FASHH(ion)

What did I mean by “scummy practices” a few paragraphs ago? Well, more or less just “fast fashion” as a general concept. “Fast fashion” is, more or less, a kind of clothing item (or accessory) that is made in resemblance of a high-end one, but for a significantly discounted price. Basically, these garments (and shoes and whatever) tend to be cheaper, made from poorer quality materials, and produced much more quickly - to keep consumers up to date with the latest trends. Zara produces 20 collections a year (or twice a month), while other sellers produce new lines every week, or even more frequently.

What’s the positive case for this? Well, mainly, that it is economically beneficial. A first group of people it benefits are the consumers: because fast fashion brands are cheaper, this results in lower prices, and therefore in comparatively higher purchasing power. In the 70s, a dress from Sears cost around 70 dollars; now, it can cost as little as 12. Because clothing is a necessity, this means that low income families are able to make their budgets accommodate bigger clothing budgets. And additionally, many of these brands produce overseas, usually in poor countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, or Thailand, which means that people who would otherwise be in extreme poverty get to be productively employed for, comparatively, much higher wages.

What could be the negatives, then? Well, a whole lot. Firstly, the quality is a lot worse, which means that the items don’t actually work for low income individuals: if you need to buy multiple times as many clothes to keep them in good condition, then you’re not saving much money in the long haul. Around 60% of fast fashion items are thrown out, and they are worn, on average, less than seven times each. Secondly, fast fashion has an appalling human rights record, which countless instances of labor violations, forced and child labor, and extremely low pay - to the point where Shein had to stage a (ultimately disastrous) influencer trip to one of its factories to prove it didn’t employ borderline-to-full on slave labor.

Clothing overproduction also has an extremely high, if difficult to quantify, environmental impact: through obvious common sense, using multiple times more materials than before cannot be particularly good for the environment. While the production process, as well as the volume of output, are hard to parse out, the fact that fast fashion garments tend to be made from synthetic fabrics (which are cheaper but less durable) means that they have a shorter “wear life” and a longer “sit in a landfill filling the water with pollutants” life. Given the increased salience of climate change, and its growing impact on the fashion industry, fast fashion may be leaving the party stage and entering the hangover.

One final fact to consider, if the labor rights case for fast fashion is unconvincing, is that it also doesn’t have many consumer benefits anyways. Contrary to belief, the average shopper at Shein or H&M isn’t some cash-strapped mother of three trying to get to end of the month, but also not a 21 year old copying everything she sees online: it’s, according to UBS, a 35 year old woman who makes 65,000 dollars (vs the US median pay of 40,000 dollars or so for a woman), and spends $100 dollars on clothing a week (or $5,200 a year, 60% more than the typical American consumer). So the benefits aren’t actually accruing to the working poor, but rather, to wealthy fashionistas who don’t want to pay full price for trendy items.

This whole thing smacks of gender

That the fashion industry is so obviously geared towards women as consumer makes it even weirder that the people making the clothes are usually men. This is even weirder when the vast majority of fashion students are also women: while 85% of fashion graduates are women, and a majority of entry-level jobs are held by women, only 40% of womenswear brands have women at top design jobs, and only 14% of top fashion brands are run by women. And even if 58% of winners of a top design awards are women, they tend not to be considered for jobs at the same rate as male winners, according to members of the prize’s awarding committee.

Why does this happen? Well, a study by McKinsey (summarized here) found three main components: a comparative lack of interest in obtaining top jobs, a lack of mentorship and camaraderie with top women, and difficulties in balancing home life with employment.

Let’s start at the end: work-life balance is different for women than men, because women do the overwhelming majority of domestic and care labor. Firstly, there is evidence showing that women do the overwhelming majority of unpaid care work, and there is a strong, negative correlation between domestic work and wages for women. Similarly, marriage negatively affects women’s wages even without children, and affects their career choices - straight women have shorter commutes than gay women, because men expect more (unpaid labor) from their partners than women do. When children come along, this gets more pronounced: there is a lifelong earnings penalty for women after they have children (chart here), to the point where motherhood and its implications account for most of the gender wage gap. This is especially important because the gender wage gap only really exists for women with children - women have to devote ungodly amounts of time to household chores and childcare, harming their workplace prospects and therefore their long-term earnings due to systematically fewer hours and less experience due to childcare breaks. This does not show up for fathers.

There is basically no wage gap between women with no children and men, with or without children, and this occurs even in societies as progressive as Denmark. The decision to work less at the office and more at home in the labor market happens at both the yes/no margin and the number of hours worked - as seen in both the Danish and Chilean labor markets. In Mexico, women whose mothers die drop out of the labor force both in number of hours and in rate of employment, unless they have a public or affordable childcare option. For American MBAs, so the top of the top of the education and income scale, there is a massive pay divergence between women and men that is mainly accounted for by number of hours worked and career interruptions. And this is heavily influenced by culture - Germanic nations, which heavily sanction women who work instead of raising their children (the much dreased Rabenmütter status, the raven-mother) have larger pay gaps.

Are women actually less ambitious than men? No, not really. While “women tend to negotiate less” is a common belief, popularized by Cheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In (spoilers for a future post here), and backed by evidence: in an experimental setting, women were 11% less likely to negotiate pay compared to men. However, a direct test of the counterfactual (i.e., forcing women to negotiate) results in worse outcomes for women, because women tend to only negotiate when receiving unfair offers, but not when receiving fair or advantageous ones - that is, the benefits of negotiation are caused by women who would not otherwise negotiate to do so. Likewise, other studies found that a lot of the difference in negotiation is explained by personality differences and differences in expected salary for equal qualifications. However, when there is clarity about whether there is room for negotiation, there is no negotiation gap, and when the median ask is publicly known, there is no ask gap between women and men - pointing to skewed distributions of beliefs about the market value of self-perceived competence. Of course, there is also evidence not only showing that the “negotiation gap” has disappeared, but also, that believing in it as a driver of the gender pay gap is associated with generally conservative values. So whether women have less drive or act on that drive less than men is kind of a wash.

Lastly, are women shut out of career advancing socialization? Yes, absolutely. Looking at transitions between managers in a large company, and taking advantage of data showing both gender status and smoker/non smoker status, a study has found that 1) employees who get substantially more “social” time with their employees are likelier to promote them (as seen by the fact that managers who smoke are likelier to promote employees who smoke, but the converse isn’t true); and that 2) when men go from having a female manager to a male manager, their odds of promotion rise by 40%, and drop by that much when going from a male manager to a female manager, without any such changes for female employees. Why is there no female/female affinity? Well, firstly, no schmoozing - there was no such thing as smoker related camaraderie for non smokers. Female managers are not more likely to reward female talent - women are less likely to be promoted to top jobs when other women are already present, especially if they are very well qualified or competent, and there is an “implicit quota” on women in top jobs - contrary both to expectations, but congruent with facts such as that after giving birth, women have different career tracks in firms.

Conclusion

Well, fashion is important, fast fashion is bad, and women have it hard in fashion. Could having more women designers be important? Well, yes: companies with diverse management teams have 22% higher profitability - which can be seen by the fact that trendsetters such as Chanel, Dior, Versace, The Row, or Miu Miu/Prada are headed by women (one woman, Miuccia Prada, in particular).