Fashion is dead and nobody killed it? It just kind of starved? Hear me out, no one person, or group, brought about the end of fashion. Not Virgil, not Ye, not Denma, not…you get the idea. The environments where fashion existed and even flourished slowly eroded and just about have been obliterated. What was the cause? Well…this; the internet. With the internet came comfort, and with comfort came the obsolescence of the environments for fashion to exist in. Let’s be real for a second. The “fits” shown online really just amount to costumes. Garments and pieces worn for a specific place and time, usually in a room as you take a picture for the world to see and then you proceed to change to go to the grocery store. Or the opposite takes place where trying to stay true to only wearing things you would feel comfortable wearing irl and thus birthing “normcore”/”essential” looks. Because where else would you wear these things? Maybe you’re a creative so you constantly get to strut your stuff at warehouse parties and gallery openings, but you only have so many of those to go to. Most workplaces don’t have a uniform, and there is a surge of working from home going on. Maybe the club, but most of them sound the same, look the same, don’t have much of a dress code, and don’t foster a solid identity. Subcultures have all been beaten down into flavor of the month costumes for the hyper pace of the new fast fashion world to feed on until the next subculture wanders out of hiding so they can suck the blood out of that.

What is needed now is slowness and consistency to create and environment where a subculture can breathe. This is a monumental task with the current financial culture of a constant rush to gain the biggest audience in the shortest amount of time. Timescales have to be considered to be longer. Things must be thought past the financial quarter or just a few years. If culture is to develop, areas must exist where the snow globe stops shaking and the dust is allowed to settle where a solid foundation can be built upon. Can that happen in a fast pace, global, interconnected society we live in now? I think so.