Today's Fashion Is About Everything But Clothes

You’re reading Shopper: Highsnobiety's bulletin on what’s taking up headspace from the marketplace. This is an edit of September 16's newsletter, in which shopping editor Max Migowski realizes clothes are less important to fashion than ever. Subscribe here, or head to the Shopping tab for more recs.

Fashion Becomes the Supporting Act of Fashion Week

What do A24, the artist Tom Sachs, and Starbucks share in common? They are all closely concerned with fashion now, whereas the fashion industry itself seems like it couldn't care less about clothing. Dior just put money behind getting people away from their screens and into the theater (while simultaneously betting on a wellness line); the menswear at last week's Venice Film Festival felt awfully tame (except for John Malkovich's); Chanel's New York Fashion Week presence was limited to a bootleg life-sized dollhouse installation. Meanwhile, Rachel Antonoff's and Coach's events more so resembled pure entertainment than they were about showing off actual new garments via a dog show and an 85th birthday bash (complete with sparkly hats and trays of fast food), respectively. 

​Compare these distractions to other industries’ increased investment into fashiony territory. There’s the software firm Palantir's unsolicited collection of tennis apparel, OpenAI's soulless athleisure capsule, and even the aforementioned coffee chain's mind-boggling hiking gear collab with and wander. However large the chasm between these companies and style may appear, it’s a reminder that garments are vessels and luxury brands are arbiters of culture in ways that are easily understood. So while tech uses clothes as wearable billboards and pushes for us to all accessorize with Meta glasses and Oura rings, it seems the makers of those clothes are mostly jonesing to get their logos on everything but more clothing tags.

It reminds me of when fashion visibly infiltrated the Venice Biennale and Milan's Salone del Mobile earlier this year, where visitors expecting art and design works (or plain tennis, in the case of this past US Open) were welcomed by pop-ups and influencers, to much complaint. To be fair, fashion has never shied away from cultivating non-product-centric means of attention, and the logic of these strategies playing out within an attention economy is not lost on me either. 

In this era of method-dressed celebs and merch-baiting to sell movie tickets, it tracks that fashion brands want to cross-pollinate, too, by kicking up dust elsewhere and offering access to their universe by associating with a neighboring one. Sure, such grabby methods can deflect from products that should be powerful enough to speak for themselves — of which NYFW, by the way, had plenty on display, courtesy of Eckhaus Latta, our party's co-host Emily Dawn Long, as well as LII and Calvin Klein, to name a few. Product quality, however, is still overall usually secondary to how people fill their wardrobes. 

At least the shopping experience stands to gain from fashion's insistence on world-building: By the looks of NYFW activations and recent store openings by the likes of J.Press and Acne Studios, retail businesses are handling the attention arms race by tending to the spatial, the experiential, the experimental. Since retailers can’t exactly get too distracted from the product at hand, they're committed to providing the best possible table settings for consumers to pull up a chair and feast on their visions. The psychology behind this isn't new, and the efforts certainly merit credit, even when the results are, of course, all but guaranteed. Because, come to think of it, something like the Amsterdam designer Britt Liberg's lo-fi interpretive dance with her skirts — no fuss, no mess, not even a distracting top, ha! — at a small Brooklyn store on Wednesday night just might have been the most memorable (and straightfoward) presentation of them all.

Open Tabs

• Windbreakers are early fall's go-to outerwear, and Uniqlo has got a super minimalist one to join in on this trend with (as well as a fleece-lined model for EU readers).

• Long after kickstarting the environmentally-minded label's success, Patagonia’s rugby shirt is back and better than ever. 

• What looks like carpenter pants from afar is actually CASEY CASEY's great yellow barrel denim.

• Is a.Presse’s the prettiest (and priciest) chore jacket I've ever seen? Quite possibly so. Let's pray its collab with a certain streetwear stalwart includes some more accessible choices, too.

• Lemaire gave its famous tote a pebble grain makeover, creating this gorgeous belted leather bucket bag.

• Polo Ralph Lauren's western-style Chelsea boots are elegant, versatile, and surprisingly affordable. 

• So are Tod's Chelseas, while we're on the subject, with their charming car shoe-esque pebble soles.

• These LOEWE see-through wellies are kind of bonkers, but fab all the same.

• After balaclavas and tiny woolen triangles comes COS'... scarf hood?

• The Hanes x Saturdays NYC waffle long-sleeve double pack will be the best thing to happen to your basics drawer.