The Marvelization of fashion, where clothes are just players in a story

“This is how crazy the fashion industry is,” she said in a phone interview. “They could have gotten to their goal immediately” — a person buying their shoes — “without advertising. But they’re not going to get to that goal ever, because, probably, I’ll never find that these shoes are actually anywhere.

“We’re basically selling the selling of things,” she said, laughing. “We’re not selling the thing. We’re selling the selling.”

More and more, what fashion brands create are not products or ideas that tell consumers what to wear or buy. Instead, fashion has transformed into a system that prizes narrative and content over clothing, at best, and, at worst, a spectacle meant to provoke, distract or even shield us from reality.

Of course, fashion has aligned itself with celebrities for decades to give its niche and often bewildering ideas a broad audience. (Remember Catherine Deneuve shilling Chanel No. 5?) And celebrities, through clothes, have been able to give the world something personal — style, or something like it — without truly having to reveal anything at all.

But the fashion business is no longer satisfied with being a leech on Hollywood’s skin. François-Henri Pinault, the owner of Kering (and husband of actress Salma Hayek), bought the Creative Artists Agency last year, while Bernard Arnault, the CEO of LVMH, has launched his own entertainment studio, 22 Montaigne. Last summer, the fashion executive Ana Andjelic told me that she thinks of a brand like a Marvel movie. She was in the midst of reinventing Esprit, the colorful 1980s mall label, and piles and piles of clothes in bright crayon tones were mounded all around us. “You plug the ‘characters’” — the clothes — “into different stories,” or marketing moments, she said. “You create a lot of buildup, the same way you market a movie,” she elaborated in an interview more recently.

Gap Inc.’s new CEO, Richard Dickson, tasked with the daunting salvation of the flagging fashion giant plus Banana Republic, Old Navy and Athleta, came from Mattel, where he successfully oversaw the transformation of Barbie from a dated toy to a cheeky, semi-feminist pop culture Hollywood phenomenon.

He has put it more bluntly. “Fashion is entertainment,” he said in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal. “The story around a brand and what it stands for is more powerful than any one product.”

All the while, the seemingly simple task of finding a T-shirt, a button-up or a stylish pair of pants has become impossible. (If you want the fluid khakis and T-shirts that the Gap was once known for, you would have better luck finding them at the Row for $1,150 and $350, respectively.) Clothes seem almost irrelevant.

Jacquemus’ most recent show was more notable for its ingenious memes — a guy ironing on a paddleboard on the glittering water, a woman taking a chair lift with absurd stacks of Jacquemus shopping bags and boxes — than the garments. One of LVMH’s star designers is musician Pharrell Williams. But can you close your eyes and picture his designs? One of the most viral moments in fashion this year was Jeremy Allen White in an ad for Calvin Klein — taking off his clothes.

Fashion is now dinner and a movie — but you leave without eating any of the courses.

In May, Dickson’s recently appointed executive vice president and creative director, Zac Posen — who works across the Gap portfolio, including at Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy — designed a white cotton shirtdress that Anne Hathaway wore to an event for the jewelry house Bvlgari. Posen designed a denim dress that Da’Vine Joy Randolph wore at the Met Gala a few weeks prior, but Hathaway’s dress had a twist: You could order it online, for $158.

“The Gap brand is all about celebrating originality through unique, personal style,” Posen wrote in an email. “It’s an exciting time for product storytelling across all the brands in the Gap Inc. portfolio. We are inserting the brand in cultural conversations that matter while committing to accessibility for these timeless classics.”

The dress sold out online within hours. And the company’s stock has more than doubled since Dickson arrived in 2023.

The idea that a celebrity might draw a customer into a store may seem outdated. But a stunt like that may not even be about sales. “It’s about this accelerated relationship that actually moves faster than the purchasing process can even move,” said Thom Bettridge, the VP of creative and content at Ssense. “Just interacting with someone in terms of buying product is not enough engagement. You have this 365-days-a-year interaction with your core audience.”

Bettridge wrote on the beginnings of this moment in 2021, after a Balenciaga show staged as a red carpet. He called it “MerchTainment.”

“MerchTainment is the fashion industry swallowing entertainment whole, at a time when no one could care less about a Grammy or an Oscar, and when many teenagers can name more creative directors than film directors,” he wrote in HighSnobiety, where he was then editor in chief. “MerchTainment is how fashion spilled out of its designated weeks and into a year-round spectacle where consumers follow brands as much as they buy things from them.”

But three years later, we have the ’tainment without the merch. Andjelic said that although she liked the Gap’s Hathaway moment, “they really need to focus on the business: Just fix the product and inventory and merchandising. All the nuts and bolts.”

Movies are synonymous with escapism and fantasy, which fashion has always been about. But in the pursuit of amusement for cash, Korbjuhn sees a growing irrelevance. “I never thought of my clothes as entertainment; I thought of them as a fantasy. I can imagine myself in all these other lives I haven’t lived yet. But now it’s almost like, it won’t infiltrate my own life. I can only LARP it. I can only emulate it. I know it’s not going to change my life. Clothes have lost their power in that way.”

In the 20th century, the cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer wrote about the development of movie theaters in Berlin, which he called “palaces of distraction” and “shrines to the cultivation of pleasure.” Surely, our phones now hold that place in culture, and it is from our phones that we understand fashion, even as clothes are something to be experienced in three dimensions, in motion, in reality. That has made it at once more accessible — it’s in our hands, all the time — and more contained, more remote from our lives and from the world at large.

All of this content production merely amuses when it should challenge us — like, say, Rick Owens’s recent menswear show, which celebrated unity and solidarity through dress in a moment defined by masculine isolation and political divisiveness. Business of Fashion critic Tim Blanks wrote in one of his recent reviews that “the fashion industry’s lack of engagement with the horrors unfolding before our eyes will follow it to its grave.”

Even if you see little wrong creatively or ethically with all of this, the truth is that few businesses have the savviness of Jacquemus or Marc Jacobs, whose TikTok page is stuffed with outlandish videos by viral creators redoing their shtick tailored to Jacobs’s whims. (Jacobs may be the rare designer who can do both: His shows are consistently and outrageously creative.) Do people really want to watch a Timothée Chalamet ad for Chanel fragrance? The ad has more than 9 million views since its release in May — which was teased for months on end, starting with a lengthy announcement and interview with Chalamet in Vogue — and reads like a cheeky update on Martin Scorsese’s sleeper hit “After Hours.” But if you watched it, have you thought about it since?

And does this mean that any designer who can’t make a documentary narrated by Paul Mescal (Gucci), create a suggestive film starring Brad Pitt and Penélope Cruz vacationing on a French beach (Chanel), or appoint a celebrity as their designer is out of luck?

While those houses have been trying to create the next great superhero (or villain), they have also made space for much smaller brands to thrive. A show at Pratt’s Manhattan gallery earlier this year highlighted designers, such as SC103, All-In and Eckhaus Latta, that work in the vein of Bernadette Corporation or Vivienne Westwood: aware of fashion’s pitfalls and worst impulses, and disturbing or working against them through the very mediums bigger brands cynically employ, whether that be runway shows, collaborations with the art world or even magazine-making. SC103’s designers recently opened a fine-art show at a Tribeca gallery, Theta. “It’s interesting because this is actually about the creative process,” said Jordan Barse, Theta’s director.

Korbjuhn, who said watching the “Barbie” movie was like “getting a philosophy lecture from Ryan Gosling’s face fillers,” also spent the past few years on a limited-run fashion magazine called Paradigm Trilogy. The final issue, released this spring, was a film.