It’s a famine of beauty!
André Leon Talley said it first: “It’s a famine of beauty.” Today, the phrase feels less like one of his entertaining quotes and more like an accurate description of fashion itself. Collections appear, campaigns follow, celebrities are dressed, content is produced, and the machinery continues moving exactly as it should. And yet, one is left unmoved. Beautifully manufactured clothes continue to arrive season after season. The seams are straight, the looks are cohesive, the work is competent. Competence, however, is not inspirational. Where is the fantasy that once made us delirious? Where is the drama that could make you weep, laugh, and covet all at once? A window at McQueen was once more mysterious than a reliquary… now it’s as thrilling as an Apple Store. I miss the irrational desire fashion was good at producing, like seeing something entirely unnecessary and suddenly becoming convinced that a life without it would be a life not worth living.Luxury is a business. Pretending otherwise is childish. A dress may be a work of art, but someone still has to sell it. The problem begins when the intention of selling becomes so visible that it overwhelms the allure of what is being sold. Too contemporary fashion feels as if the collection has survived meetings before it has ever reached the runway: recognizable enough for the existing customer, digestible enough for social media, commercial enough for the balance sheet, and unobjectionable enough to offend nobody.
Fashion shows themselves have fallen prey to this dullness. The grandeur of Galliano’s Dior—where models were given roles, narratives, characters—felt dreamlike. His shows had this theatrical element that undoubtedly was one of the things that made us consumers watch, rewatch, and rewatch. He would create a world you entered, but most importantly, a world you didn’t want to leave. Today, most shows don’t linger in the mind. They are consumed as quickly as an Instagram reel and forgotten just as fast. Beauty requires memory.
It also requires judgment.
That word—judgment—has acquired an odd connotation in culture, as if having standards is somehow an act of aggression. But fashion cannot exist without selection. Editing is selection. Styling is selection. Casting is selection. A collection itself is an accumulation of decisions about what belongs and, equally importantly, what does not. Not every sketch becomes a dress. Not every dress makes it to the show. Not every image is used in the campaign. And not every person belongs in every story.
That’s called authorship.
Casting is perhaps where this conversation becomes most sensitive, and therefore most worth having. A body is not a clothes hanger. Height changes proportion, shoulders change a jacket, a waist changes a dress, and a particular walk can transform a garment entirely. To pretend otherwise is to deny one of fashion's most fundamental realities.
The interesting question is not whether every body should represent every garment. It is whether the casting serves the idea of the collection.
A severe, elongated silhouette may demand one physical presence, where a voluptuous one may demand another. Fragility, athleticism, age, softness, androgyny, sensuality, and even awkwardness can each completely alter the meaning of clothes. Great casting makes that relationship intentional. The question should not be whether every body can wear every piece, but whether the person wearing it completes the designer’s idea.
Fashion becomes poorer when every decision must justify itself through marketability, accessibility, or reach. Beauty has never been particularly efficient. Neither has desirability. Their value lies precisely in their ability to make us want something before we have found a reason to want it.
Perhaps that is what André Leon Talley meant. Not an absence of clothes, talent or beautiful things, but an absence of conviction: the willingness to decide that something is beautiful, strange, excessive or important and pursue that belief without asking whether everyone will understand it.
The industry does not need more unnecessary products. It needs designers willing to risk failure, editors willing to make choices, and image-makers willing to create something that cannot be reduced to another piece of content passing through a screen.
So yes, André, the famine is real. But I say the feast is possible. The question is whether we still have the appetite for it.
I know I do.
WRITTEN BY FREDDY ESPINAL
