Influencer Fatigue
There is something tragic about brands hiring an influencer as if they were hiring a point of view, when in reality most are not much more than a delivery service with hyaluronic-acid cheekbones. The influencer arrives, posts the runway, uploads looks, tags the house, smiles into a flash, thanks the PR team, and leaves behind a trail of stories that expire in about twenty-four hours. The images circulate. The metrics rise. The strategy “works.” But understanding is lost.
The problem is not that influencers are invited. The problem is that too many of them are invited as vessels of distribution, not as someone capable of interpreting, embodying, or even extending the world of the brand they have been asked to represent. Saint Laurent, for example, is not just black tailoring, sharp contrast, and low exposure lighting. It is danger. It is a woman with smudged black eyeshadow ordering a dirty martini at an hour when respectable people are asleep. It is a trust fund baby studying political science to satisfy her parents while secretly dreaming of becoming a rock star who wears suffocatingly tight pants. It is night rain, cigarette smoke, and the eroticism of someone who knows exactly what they are doing. So when a brand like that invites people who do not carry even a trace of that spirit, the dissonance is felt immediately. They post the collection, they produce the sponsored carousel, but they do not help us enter the brand’s world. They do not clarify the work nor seduce us into the idea. They simply place an image in front of us and expect us to care.
And that is where fashion feels thin, and not in a fabulous way.
Because the bridge between the work and the audience has become polluted by superficiality. We are not being guided into a brand’s essence. We are being pushed through a marketing tunnel and forced to crawl, swim, and drag ourselves toward meaning. Fashion can be demanding. In fact, it should be. But it should not feel impossible to connect with a brand because the entire experience has been flattened into a business strategy that happens to wear a borrowed coat. Fashion shouldn’t be this clouded.
The algorithm has become the new editor. This is why so much of the industry now feels meme-like. Collections are conceived not only as clothes, but as “moments”. The question is no longer simply, “Is this beautiful? Is this intelligent? Is this necessary?” The question has become, “Will this travel?” And in that shift, fashion has handed too much power to the machine. The algorithm rewards speed, surface, repetition, and instant recognition. It cannot tell the difference between a reference and a costume, between restraint and laziness, between mystery and emptiness. It just knows what stops the thumb. So logically, most of the time, it does not reward material with great substance behind it.
There is a difference between being invited to a show and being worthy of it. I may sound cruel, but fashion used to understand the reasoning behind cruelty when it served standards. Now everything is content. Everything is coverage. Everything is a post. Everything is “obsessed.” A word that has become so overused it should be disposed and retired with immediate effect. This digital exhaustion has created a cultural condition: people are overfed, overstimulated, and somehow still starving. We have seen so much that we no longer see when something is enough. The most recent Met Gala proved this perfectly. The theme, the looks, the references, the execution — overall, there was much more depth than meets the eye. And yet the public’s reaction, in general, was dissatisfaction. Because people have lost the ability to recognize what’s good. They no longer know how to sit with something. They want instant visual violence. They want a look to perform its entire existence in one photograph. Fashion does not always work that way. Minimalism can carry enormous meaning. A single fabric can become radical depending on who wears it, who made it, or what it references. That requires knowledge and context, but most importantly, it requires someone to explain the story beyond the image.
This is why the role of editors matters more now than ever. Not as snobs, though fashion could use a few more intelligent snobs and fewer democratic disasters. Editors matter because they select, filter, and remember. They have the ability to tell us what deserves attention and what does not. They understand that not every collection is important, not every viral moment defines culture, and not every person with an audience is relevant. An editor’s job is not simply to tell people what to like. That would be too vulgar, too dictatorial, too old-fashioned. The real job is to teach people how to look at things. To explain why something works and reveal the architecture behind an image. To say: “This matters because of this history, this reference, this cut, this gesture, this contradiction.” Or, just as importantly: “This does not matter, and no amount of sponsorship will make it so."
Frankly, not everyone reads magazines, watches the shows, studies collections, or understands why one black dress can be genius and another is nothing more than funeral attire. That is fine. People have lives… allegedly, at least. But those who do have the knowledge, the discipline, and the eye have a responsibility not to gatekeep, but to protect meaning. There are digital creators with good taste, intelligence, and real cultural instinct. The issue is not the platform… it is the absence of judgment. Fashion does not need more people in the room. It just needs the right eyes. Because when everything is visible, visibility means nothing.
The next era of fashion will not be dictated by whoever posts the fastest but by whoever understands the deepest. The brands that survive will be the ones that stop treating their heritage like a marketing asset and start protecting it like their capital. The voices that matter will not be the loudest, but the most exact. That is the difference between content and criticism.
And the industry, whether it admits it or not, needs critics again.
