Part 1: INTERREGNUM
The time of monsters
Monster derives from the Latin word for warn, remind, or instruct.
Which also gave us another modern word: premonition.
TL;DR: we're living through an industry-wide - and culture-wide - interregnum. A strange space between coherent ‘reigns’ where unsettling, even monstrous, things happen on a daily basis. But is it all historically foretold?
Hello,
This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while but didn’t really know how to put into words. It’s the thought behind the thought re all the meh-ification stuff I’ve been writing over the past year.
A longer than usual one today. LMK what you reckon.
Beth
—-
Fashion is the third largest wealth-generating industry after finance and tech.
And what happens in the fashion industry is often a bellwether for what’s about to happen in so many others. Woe betide those who write fashion off as frivolous.
Right now the whole fashion system is deep in its interregnum era. No longer where it was, but not yet where it’s going. It feels like that’s also what’s happening society-wide.
"The old world is dying. And the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters…In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
That was written nearly 100 years ago (by Antonio Gramsci while imprisoned by Mussolini).
But it could have been written this morning, maybe even around one of fashion’s boardrooms tables.
Because monsters - and monstrous things - are having a moment, aren't they?
Fashion’s interregnum era
In the past year, 20 creative directors stepped down, with 14 moving on to new roles. Musical chairs with billion-dollar stakes. The Wall Street Journal this week describes fashion’s creative directors as as “kings and queens” with god-like power, idolised and gossiped about.
rounded it all up in her Substack this week:
“This past month saw studio collections presented (meaning no creative director in place) at Chanel, Gucci and Loewe. Final bows from the designers at Jil Sander, Versace, Bally, Balenciaga, Christian Dior (this one is unconfirmed but widely speculated!). Debut collections from new designers at Tom Ford, Givenchy, Dries Van Noten and Calvin Klein. Bottega Veneta didn’t even show, holding off until September to relaunch with Louise Trotter (former BV designer Matthieu Blazy is headed to Chanel…Michael Rider’s Celine is expected in June….so much upheaval and so much change….so many mega brands in flux.”
These moments of transition between creative visions are fashion's most vulnerable and vital periods. The old codes suspended, new ones not yet established. A house without a creative director exists in a state of hiatus, frozen between what it was and what it might become.
Right now that feeling of hiatus extends far beyond the atelier.
The industry itself is (as anyone reading this is well aware, I’m sure) has for some time being in a major state of flux, dealing with some complicated headwinds - structurally, culturally, systemically, economically, ethically.
At the upper echelons, luxury multi-brand retailers like Matches and Farfetch - until fairly recently heralded as the nailed-on future of shopping - have collapsed or teeter on the edge. Many of our luxury department stores are bloated, undifferentiated, and behaving poorly with their suppliers (e.g. Hudson’s Bay Co). Meanwhile, god tier discovery platform LYST is gaining ground by understanding that in a shopping landscape that’s complicated to the point of overwhelm…fashion intelligence is the new currency.
Not everyone gets LYST yet. But that’s sort of the point. Old systems of distribution and discovery are giving way to new ones. Similar pattern in legacy fashion media - another magazine title joined Substack this week: Allure.
Luxury, once a refuge of stability and tradition, finds itself succumbing to some extreme measures. Price hikes continue despite the danger signs. Runway shows become more visually extreme to capture attention: Lantick’s boobs, Coperni’s stunts, Sciapiarelli’s wow moments, even The Row’s lack of phones (and now sufficient seats) turns the show into more of a news item.
Case in point: Gucci reaching for Demna. After forcing de Sarno to make the brand ‘more universal’ (= more conservative, less interesting) after Michele’s fever dream, this appointment is more than a volte face. It’s the nuclear button.
At the fast fashion level, shopping has become a moral issue. Quality is in crisis. High street stores are boarded up and many malls are withering on the vine. And waste is at an all-time high (despite all the demand-anticipation technology now available). In response, pre-loved is growing 11x faster than new.
A confusing time, where seamless in-app social shopping, influencer discount codes, and breathless shopping hauls compete for our attention with de-influencing, no-buy challenges and shop your wardrobe videos.
Running behind all of it is an out of control trend cycle. Corecore has by now become the endgame aesthetic: random, seemingly unrelated things put together in chaotic ways. Reflecting an overloaded fashion system where coherence can feel kind of hard to grasp.
Cultural and aesthetic confusion
Seems like strange, confusing phenomena always seem to show up at times when industries/systems/culture/society are experiencing upheaval.
Medieval maps marked unknown waters with strange sea monsters: here be dragons. Or Renaissance art’s weird hybrid creatures that appeared during a time of structural and intellectual upheaval. Frankenstein and other gothic fiction boomed while industrialisation was reshaping society in scary new ways.
Horror films (and literature) have always reflected the fears and anxieties of their time.
1960s scary movies were about psychological horror and paranoia, in an era of Cold War, espionage, and male fear about women’s lib (Psycho, Night of the Living Dead, Rosemary’s Baby).
Now, post pandemic, mid-AI anxiety and deep in economic uncertainty, our horror films have become more lo-fi, many with non-human threats in unexpected/surreal forms. Reflecting existential dread - fear not so much for the body, but of societal collapse (M3GAN, Talk to Me, Barbarian - horror movies for a generation braced for impact).
Really, the algorithm is the blob monster of our times, neither human nor autonomous, exerting control over people’s minds and flattening everything in its path. Meh-ifying all it sees. It can only look backwards, never forward - the perfect monster for a time between times. All it can do is reproduce warped versions of what came before. Mehification then is a symptom of this interregnum era.
….’unprecedented’ times
Like you, I’m sure, I feel like I’ve been reading versions of “in unprecedented times” or “in an era of great change” my whole career…in trend reports/marketing briefs/LinkedIn posts.
Those kinds of expressions were put on banned lists in creative agencies and newsrooms long before ‘unprecedented’ became the unofficial word of the COVID years.
Because the entire 2000s so far has been a period of unprecedentedness. The first 20 years of the century were a period of unbelievably rapid innovation, optimism and now-mythical hockey stick growth - VC cash flowed, unicorns emerged, there was always breakthrough technology to talk about.
We had wearable tech on the runways. Digital media to play with. Social platforms to distribute ideas through and create community with. Apps to build.
It was a literally unprecedented run of economic growth, and unprecedented relative global peace. Techno-optimism. Moonshots. A black president. Yes we can.
Exactly as Matt Klein and Edmund Lau describe in their Light Mode.
Now ofc times feel unprecedented for other reasons.
Climate anxiety. Economic flattening. Wealth stratification. Polycrisis. Political extremism. War. Techno-pessimism. Social de-progress. Insularism. Nationalism. Loneliness. Birth-rate collapse. Trepidation for the future. And in the boardroom, risk aversion and short-termism.
Exactly as Matt Klein and Edmund Lau describe in their Dark Mode.
If you think the “vibe shift” is sudden, you weren’t paying attention.
Now is the time of monsters
An interregnum comes when the old structures have lost authority but new ones haven't yet emerged to replace them. In the vacuum, the weird and extreme thrives.
Think of some of stand-out moments/things/people/happenings in culture over the past couple of years, and we see a lot of things that feel weird and extreme.
I’m not calling any of these people monsters, but what they’re doing is clearly seen as extreme/monstrous to some. These are the times we live in.
Bianca Censori’s extreme controversy-courting, culminating in the recent total red carpet nudity. As predicted months out by
in .Charlie XCX’s BRAT: an iron fist in a velvet glove. Hedonistic, creative and exuberant, it was about togetherness and youth and self-confidence and most of all: fun. But it was also highly reactionary. A statement of nihilism…yolo, devil may care, caution to the wind, two fingers to the establishment (or anyone) from a generation sick of living within someone else’s expectations…because it’s getting us nowhere. Her Grammy’s performance was like a biblical tableau.
Demna's Balenciaga (the mud, the trash bags, the pre-destroyed footwear, the disturbing controversies).
The Bonnie Blue/Lily Phillips rage-baity race to outdo each other to (er, search it up if your algorithm hasn’t already shoved this under your nose).
The White Lotus, Saltburn, Squid Game, Succession, Inventing Anna. The blockbuster entertainment genre of the moment is the monstrosity of the privileged elite. And the skewering of traditional aspiration generally: why would any of us work and save and strive to be like these people? They’re venal monsters.
Adolescence and its imagining of the monstrous effects of toxic masculinity and social media on our boys. And the fear our girls continue to live with.
Dupe culture and the worrying spread of plagiarism in fashion. And in beauty: MCo Beauty built a billion dollar empire on duping everyone else’s smash hit products, confusing customers with “eerily similar” products and weathering a ton of law suits in the process. The industry is eating itself (
breaks this all down brilliantly).
Uncanny as a dominating aesthetic: Insta face, deepfakes, filters, botched plastic surgery horror stories, filler and botox disasters, AI-generated ‘glitches’…distorted faces/bodies seem to be showing up everywhere, from meme culture to high fashion (JWA’s plasticine hoodies and pixelated aesthetics).
AI slop-temisation and the enshittification of, well, everything.
Weird speculative economies (crypto booms/busts, meme stocks like GameStop) and controversial gold rushes (OnlyFans). The implosion of FTX and the wider crypto crash look, in hindsight, monstrous - financial innovation consuming itself. Devouring believers and skeptics alike.
Chaos agents: Andrew Tate, Elon Musk, the trad wives…hyper-femininity to go with that hyper-masculinity.
Confusing hybrids: political leaders that feel like living contradictions (coastal elite wealth with populist trucker-hat values, tech progressivism meets cultural regressivism). Tech titans that are no longer just CEOs but hybrid entities we don’t have words for yet (well, I can think of a few).
The markets themselves: freefall one day, irrational exuberance the next. The economic system seems to exist in a reality all its own.
The moral panics and conspiracy theories that are now able to spread faster than ever.
A lot of this feels like what Gramsci was talking about. An unsettled, unsettling time where old certainties don’t seem to make sense anymore, but new ones are yet to take form.
Ok Doomer
Apparently as few as 20% of people think life will be better for future generations. That explains a few things, don’t you think?
The doomer meme (permanently depressed, chain-smoking character who gets no joy from anything).
Collapse prep culture (advice videos on foods to stockpile and how to purify tap water for storage; or the instant lockdown drill my daughter took part in at her infant school, in case of invasion by a shooter or a knife attack. Heartbreaking. Her teacher let the kids think they were being taught to hide from a virus in the air (we have to stay away from the windows Mummy so the virus can’t see us). Stop the world, I want to get off.
The anti-ambition movement, can we call it that? A radical rethinking of what’s worth striving for. Lying flat culture in China, the death of hustle culture/rise+grind and the dethroning of the girl-boss, the ongoing conversation about Corporate America is a trap (see Sarah Wynn Williams smashing the bestseller lists despite Meta’s best efforts to silence her).
See also: anemoia, nostalgia for a time/place you never experienced; Y2K aesthetic yearning and the redux of indie sleaze; the rise of dumbphones among far-sighted teens.
Back to
who joked, in her fashion month summary, “what will we be wearing in September, should the dollar still exist?”Trust no one?
A hallmark of any kind of interregnum is skepticism around things previously widely accepted. Which we’re def seeing in abundance.
The Edelman Trust Barometer has for years been tracking relentless longterm decline in trust in all the major systems/infrastructure of shared public life, globally: the media, big business, government, and NGOs. Same deal with Big Pharma (the opioid crisis), Big Food (addictive UPFs, an obesity epidemic, irreversible soil degradation from intensive farming), and Big Tech (waves arms around).
It’s all echoed in fashion: a lot of industry people have lost faith/interest in the fashion calendar, fashion week, fashion seasons, legacy fashion media, fashion’s gatekeepers, even status symbols themselves.
BoF published data last month on the relative levels of interest in/attention around the big four fashion weeks. This does not look like a system that’s working:
Desp times, desp measures.
When the world feels chaotic and we feel unsettled, what do humans do? We create our own rituals that create structure in the chaos.
(Sidebar: have you seen that new KFC ad everyone is talking about? An army dressed defensively in fatigues, unspeaking, ritualistic, intense soundtrack, is shaking us out of our stupor, calling us to arms, giving us something to believe in. Even if it is only ‘CHICKEN’. If we’re looking for a sign of the times, we just got one.)
The surge in wellness culture isn't just a lifestyle megatrend - it's a collective coping mechanism. Burnout, anxiety, overwhelm, stress, fear and disillusionment drive us toward anything promising some restoration.
So is the rise of therapy-speak (boundaries, trauma, triggers).
And the surge of interest in spirituality, mysticism, tarot, astrology, and psychedelics - older, more intuitive ways of understanding the world.
And retreat/shelter from technology is also a coping mechanism. Digital detoxes, off-grid living, Ungrammable hang zones as Blackbird Spyplane calls them, modern speakeasies as I call them:
Privacy itself is becoming a luxury, a privilege of the elite who can afford to opt out of the surveillance economy while the rest of us remain exposed, our data harvested, our movements tracked, our choices nudged or manipulated. Monstrous.
All these responses - wellness, spirituality, privacy - are adaptive strategies. Attempts to create stability in an unstable time. Monster-taming tools.
In our wardrobes, I would put Quiet Luxury and minimalism on the same list, as attempts to create calm, order and simplicity against a firehose of overwhelm and distraction (ditto three-word method, colour analysis, capsule wardrobes, Kibbe body types, no-buys).
I think there’s a reason The Row is the brand of our times.
Burn after reading: what’s the interregnum cheat code, then?
The most successful, interesting brands right now seem very clearly to have two things: rock-solid brand foundations + high risk tolerance. That’s what you need to thrive in hybridity.
Miu Miu, in its golden era, fuses thought-provoking intellectualism and kooky eccentricity with easy, uncomplicated hits and stand-out viral-ready styling ideas.
Loewe under JWA was weird and wonderful at the same time, straddling heritage craftsmanship, contemporary art, and the chaotic scrappiness of internet culture.
Jacquemus feels like an old-school Riviera fantasy and surrealist TikTok-era creative powerhouse, all at once.
None are frantically worshipping the false god of algorithmic approval, or desperately clinging to outdated business model. They’re hybrids for a hybrid era: confident, experimental orgs that are - and do things that - defy categorisation.
It’s messy. But was it all to be expected?
Interregnums rarely seem to resolve neatly. The fall of Rome led to centuries of disorder before medieval society stabilised. The shift away from agrarian life during the industrial revolution spanned decades.
Peter Turchin, an anthropologist, thinks we're in the midst of what he calls a ‘disintegrative phase’, with peak instability/mess expected between 2025-2030 (*checks watch*). He looked at centuries of data across civilisations and found recurring cycles of integration and disintegration.
And Pierre Bourdieu wrote that in periods of intense, ongoing cultural turbulence we can’t be surprised if widely-agreed status markers and normal consumer behaviours start shifting or collapsing.
Is this why we’re feeling stuck? Could Matt Klein’s ‘cultural stasis’, or Lindyman’s ‘stuck culture’, or this meh-cade of meh-ification I keep writing about, be the eye of the storm? A moment of apparent deceleration before transformation accelerates again?
Seems like the monsters are messengers, then.
Forcing us to confront tensions we'd probably rather ignore, but shouldn’t.
So not turning away must become the spirit of the age?
What do you think?
Thanks for reading/see you next time.
Beth
This post is part of a series. Subscribe below so you catch them all.
Such a well chosen article title:
"Monstrum" is derived from the Latin verb [monere] "to warn, remind, or instruct".
In ancient times, "monstrum" referred to anything strange or unnatural, often seen as a sign or omen from the gods, indicating impending misfortune.
What are the Gods of Fashion 'showing' us...?
This was a lot 🫠 but absolutely on the pulse. So what comes after doom fatigue?