This week, I wanted to write a more personal piece. A bit of a reflection as to where I stand in my relationship with fashion, luxury and branding. Maybe it is something about the zeitgeist. Or maybe I am just growing older. Yet my relationship with fashion has slowly but notably evolved in the past few years. I grew up choosing clothes and pieces from brands I wanted to belong to. I wanted to add a piece to my identity wearing them, I wanted to perform a character I was craving to become. Fashion, then, was a future-tense language: a way of dressing not for who I was, but for who I hoped to become.
But today, I choose the pieces based on whether they resonate with me. I want them only if they already identify with my inner self, only if they truly reflect who I feel like I really am. Maybe it is because my identity is more stable, more complex, more… built through. Or perhaps, it’s because the archetypes that brands once offered feel less relatable, more manufactured than magnetic.
Recently, I have been having the same dream on and on. I do not usually remember my dreams but this one… sticks. I keep dreaming that my clothes are loosely and messily stored in a train station, and I remember having the feeling that I want to keep them and am in no way planning to discard them. Truth is, even in real life, I have a hard time discarding my clothes, I remember when and where I bought every piece. I also have been living a bit all over in the past few years, literally buried in boxes, so it makes train stations, airports and liminal spaces paradoxically feel more like home than anything else. Transience has become a form of continuity.
Curious about the meaning of this dream, I turned to ChatGPT, as one does in this day and age. According to Jung, a psychiatrist, follower of Freud and best known for his theories about dreaming, my dream is about going through major identity shifts. The clothes being stored in a train station means that my identity is on the move, and the fact that I want to keep my clothes means that this process is not violent, that I am not turning my back to who I was but I am integrating new pieces of myself to find a new balance. A poetic interpretation, but one that feels strikingly accurate.
Quite fittingly, I feel like this is representative of my relationship with clothes. I have always loved fashion, dressing is a way to perform, to express a part of my identity that I cannot show otherwise. It underlines the way I want to be perceived by the world. For a long time, it was more of an act than about showing what is truly inside. I would pick pieces not only because I liked them, but because they would say something about me that I wanted to be true. But, in hindsight, it did not always reflect what was actually inside. Fashion was costume before it became character.
Recently, my outfits have been a lot more aligned with my inner self. Instead of me performing the clothes, they are serving me. There is a lot more comfort in this, figuratively and literally. I am wearing a lot more ample, oversized, high-rise jeans, large pullovers and comfortable sneakers. My clothes represent my newer, hard-earning mindset of going with the flow. I am not trying to perform anymore. In a way, I let my identity speak first when choosing what to wear.
The shift is subtle but profound: clothes no longer construct me, they accompany me.
It means that rather than being attracted by brands, universes, or unreachable archetypes, I am drawn to pieces that fit my lifestyle, whichever brand they are from. I want them to fit me more than I want to fit in them. Maybe this is just me, but I also believe there is a generational, wider shift in how we relate to clothing, and to branding.
In some ways, fashion today feels a bit like French politics. There are more options than I need but none truly ticks all my boxes. Choice masquerades as freedom, but increasingly, it feels like fatigue. While branding tends to revolve more and more around full universes, especially in luxury, there are only a few planets I want to orbit around. Brands are now not only about fashion, including clothes, bags, shoes, jewelry and accessories, but also about hospitality from hotels to restaurants and even spas. They are about travel, lifestyle, homeware, and deep down, identity.
But, what is my identity? What is our collective identity? Do those concepts even make sense in a world that is hyper-connected, constantly changing, and often verging on the absurd? It is true that beauty standards and archetypes have less resonance. There are so many bubbles, so many micro trends, so many cores. Where do I fit? Do I really want to fit? Is there a brand to which I identify? I am gym girlie but I do not own any Lululemon piece, and you would never see me in a legging if I am not heading to a workout. Granted, I should add that I was born and raised in Paris and we just do not do that. Even my New York years won’t shake that off.
I love sophistication, curated pieces, a polished Dior New Look, but I never do my hair, rarely my make-up and cannot stand heels anymore, plus I know that I have a hard time dealing with the long skirt on a Vélib. I love extravagant pieces that scream look at me, but I do not necessarily want to be front of center at an event. I relate to streetwear and wear more sneakers than any other types of shoes, but I hate what Demna made of Balenciaga’s sharp yet ephemeral lines. On a more personal level, I am a French, who lived in the US, made a stop in Singapore and has close to as many country-codes-phone-numbers saved in my phone than countries on this planet. A mosaic of places and preferences, none of them exclusive, all of them mine.
Paradoxically, as luxury is trying to create even more aligned, multifaceted but coherent brand identities, we as people are becoming even more complex and dissonant. And yes, it becomes impossible for coherence to resonate with our oh so human incoherence. I do not think it is a new trend, but I believe I am, personally, coming to terms with that reality. And that means my relationship with fashion and luxury as an identity builder is shifting to an identity feeder. I no longer dress to become, I dress to belong to myself.
Can brands adapt? Should they even adapt? I do not have the answer, but I am certainly asking the question.
mabou 