*It's not news that haute-couture costumes displayed on a catwalk are not really meant to manufactured and sold. They're cosplay for the luxury conglomerates, a form of brand enhancement or status entertainment, displayed by models who are professional beauties and social media celebrities.
*However, it's interesting to learn that the actual ready-to-wear clothing, on real racks in real stores, isn't profitable either. It's becoming a loss-leader for lifestyle packaging. What gives with that? It seems an awful lot like the economics of the music industry. Maybe clothing should be given away if it's sponsored by Red Bull.
*Also, if fashion clothing is losing its relationship to the normal industrial tenets of capitalism – if you're not buying clothes for the cost of the materials and the effort in tailoring – shouldn't clothes be a lot WEIRDER-LOOKING than they currently are? If they're not conventional goods, but actually brand promotions, they should sacrifice any pretense of clothing functionality and in future they should look much more like fantasy costumes.
The business of fashion. Like most analog businesses, having its problems nowadays
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High-end fashion was once a real business, making beautiful garments for real people to actually wear. This is rarely the case today. Many luxury brands stage lavish fashion shows — and then discard their catwalk styles, without even trying to sell them. The emphasis is no longer on products.
Indeed, many designer fashion brands with roots in ready-to-wear are struggling to stand their ground in a market in which their core category is hardly profitable. Multi-layer branding and licenses generate revenue, but dilute brand equity....
