It is an unseasonably warm afternoon in May 2023, but the temperature in the Vogue office is decidedly frosty. “If I receive one more email about quiet luxury, I am going to throw my laptop out the window,” announces one editor, visibly close to the edge. “Who knew that a toilet roll could be quiet luxury?” observes another, studying an email. From TV shows to shoes, bed sheets to headphones, the culture was in the Italian cashmere-clad grip of a powerful force and, well, it had all gotten a bit much.
It had started so well. In March 2023 the fashion crowd swooned when Gwyneth Paltrow gave the American judicial system the Goop treatment with her covetable trial wardrobe, all “I-have-a-bank-account-at-Coutts” Brunello Cucinelli, and “if-you-know-you-know-I’m-richer-than-you” Loro Piana. Beyond the courtroom, the It-girl obsession with The Row was peaking, with Hailey Bieber, Kendall Jenner and Jennifer Lawrence all championing its logoless appeal on every pap walk, while on screen Succession – the show set in the rarefied world of the one per cent, lubricated by Dom Pérignon and lit by Byredo candles – was coming to its grim conclusion.
An intense fascination with the lives of the wealthy elite is nothing new (F Scott Fitzgerald and Jane Austen were mining the mores of the upper classes for material long before The Real Housewives franchise existed), but in the face of an increasingly chaotic news cycle and an unstable economic backdrop, consumers were, more than ever, drawn to the plush fantasyland that quiet luxury inhabits, and the sense of ease and comfort that it represents.
“The streetwear and sneaker boom we’d seen over the previous decade finally slowed down, as people returned to work and socialising and let go of their hoodies and trainers, to invest in more sophisticated clothes,” explains Lucy Maguire, senior trends editor at Vogue Business. “Quality replaced logos as the new status symbol. Fashion brands were shooting for the top spending, high luxury customers, who tend to prefer ‘stealth wealth’, high quality garments. Suddenly, every label was showing quiet luxury looks and pushing the aesthetic. So consumers were getting it from all sides!”
Of course, the problem with “getting it from all sides” is that you’ll inevitably hit a saturation point. “Brands [had] started to play it safe,” Maguire continues. “The economic situation has had a huge impact on collections over the last couple of years, and we saw a surge in quiet luxury minimalism, tailoring and coats on the runway, and fewer showpieces. It got to a point where a couple of seasons ago, the shows were almost indistinguishable from each other.” Plus, when even Shein introduces a quiet luxury edit, you know a disconnect has occurred. As the Business of Fashion put it in April 2023: “To the standard-bearers of quiet luxury, mass-market options will likely never actually compare.” That same month, online searches for quiet luxury spiked by 1,230 per cent, according to fashion analytics platform, Data But Make It Fashion, but by June it had peaked, and it has been falling ever since.
Fast-forward to January 2024, and John Galliano elected to stage Maison Margiela’s spring couture show in a dingy alleyway beneath Paris’s Pont d’Alexandre III bridge. Inspired by Brassai’s 1920s and ’30s portraits of Paris after dark, what unfolded was an immersive and theatrical spectacle, and lauded as a lesson in sartorial world-building. Eerie, subversive and sensual, guests, livestreamers and Vogue editors alike lost their minds in real time. There was nothing “quiet” about it.
“Galliano made such an all-out stand for the value of extreme creativity in a time when, all around, daring in fashion is at a low ebb… he spoke with the authenticity of his own voice, the voice we’ve known for so long – yet more powerfully and more skillfully than ever. There are plenty of lessons in that which might resonate across the industry.” Sarah Mower said in her Vogue Runway review.
“It was a reminder of how creative and thrilling the industry can be when designers truly push boundaries and embrace boldness,” echoed online fashion commentator, Boringnotcom. “Galliano proves that fashion isn’t just about clothes, it’s about storytelling, emotion and leaving a lasting impression.”
Galliano’s Margiela moment seemed to unlock something, and from that point onwards, fashion’s neatly finished French seams seemed to unravel in a slow motion mess of colour and eclecticism. In March 2024, fashion’s prince of prints and personality, Alessandro Michele, was announced as Valentino’s new creative director; in June, Rhianna was snapped in one of Conner Ives’s eclectic upcycled sports dresses, spawning a wider obsession with patchworked, upcycled goods. That same month, Charli xcx dropped the defining album of the summer in brat, her paean to embracing your inner chaos, imperfections and individuality.
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In November, WGSN coined a term to describe the mood of the moment: “Chaotic customisation”. In an article for Vogue Business, Amy Francome explains that, “unlike traditional fashion trends that revolve around specific aesthetics, chaotic customisation is about process… it’s pushing personalisation to an extreme: layering embellishments, celebrating uniqueness and embracing self-expression in its wildest, most unrestrained forms”. It’s an attitude that can be seen in Gen-Z’s current obsession with DIY, Jane Birkin-inspired bag charms (“I hang my watch off it, and all my baubles, bangles and beads. Because, when you walk around, they jingle and jangle. So, it’s a happy sound,” Birkin said of her magpie-like approach), and secondhand streetwear – and, more broadly, their embrace of secondhand shopping as first-choice. It is, quite simply, joyful.
Of course, chaotic customisation will be no more immune to the pitfalls of the seasonal fashion cycle than any other trend, and even in its exhausted state, there is still value to be found in quiet luxury’s tenets of timelessness. But at least in this moment, maybe this is the universe’s way of telling us (and fashion brands), that it’s time to stop playing it safe, to lean into the messiness of multiple narratives and embrace the coolness that comes from contradiction. It’s a return to individualism, in whatever form that takes.
