The Editor's Letter: What Fashion Forgot in the Attention Economy
Thirty years of watching fashion reinvent itself. One blind spot most of the industry is still pretending isn't there.
There was a time, most of my editorial career, actually, when fashion set the cultural agenda and the rest of us caught up. The runway showed. The magazines framed. The stylists translated. In that order. Nobody questioned the hierarchy, because the hierarchy worked.
The runway still thinks it's setting the conversation. It's been having a monologue for three seasons.
That order is over. The runway still exists. The magazines still exist. But the agenda is now being set somewhere else: on a vertical screen, in fifteen seconds, by somebody who did not ask permission and will not be needing the invitation next season.
Three decades as an editor, and I can tell you the one thing the industry still hasn't come to terms with. Fashion moves on a four-month cycle. The conversation moves on a four-hour one. The arithmetic does not sort itself out by pretending.
