How do we save emerging fashion?
1/Introduction: Where's the next Alexander McQueen?
2/Building a Fashion System
3/Fashion With a Capital F
1/Wherefore art thou, Lee Alexander?
Recently, my mom emailed me two articles from the Buffalo News about a nascent fashion industry in the Rust Belt city I grew up in.
A new generation of designers has chosen to forgo moving to New York City, taking advantage instead of the lower costs and smaller, more hospitable creative ecosystem in Buffalo. For most, working out of Buffalo represents a rare opportunity to develop a viable commercial practice.
There they are again: the shifting winds of a massive polarity shift in the flow of culture and capital throughout the industry as a whole.
Excessively rare today is the young designer with a creative vision who builds a commercially successful brand on grit (and seed funding) alone. Over the past few decades, the economies of clothing production have pushed young fashion graduates into the hands of major conglomerates - where they join design teams producing collections at a global speed and scale - or out of the industry entirely.
For a long time, this centralization of creative energy in the hands of the few was the logical outcome of the massification of the luxury industry. But as the post-Covid golden years are dying down, conversations have quickly placed the blame on a “lack of creative renewal” for what’s either an "industry downturn" or a full-blown existential crisis - depending on who you ask.
With fewer young designers building their own visions, the chance of stumbling on once-in-generation stars like Lee (Alexander) McQueen is even lower. You get fewer fresh emerging brands, fewer tortured geniuses priming for years at eponymous Houses before getting scooped up for Creative Director roles. You get less life in fashion. It’s become exceedingly difficult for young designers to emerge in a fashion system that’s stacked against them.
It’s interesting, then, to take a closer look at places like Buffalo, where a young generation is stepping outside the system all together. It’s an anecdotal microcosm, to be sure - there’s just a handful of designers meaningfully living from their work, much less operating at scale. But what’s happening in Buffalo is a rare cosmic alignment, bringing together the necessary ingredients to create an operable-ish fashion ecosystem adjacent to the mainstream industry.
While we might not be heading to Buffalo Fashion Week next season, it’s interesting to look at why something is working there and now. These designers aren’t trying to develop major retail brands with mass appeal - they’re building a community, a closed-loop semiotic structure based on localized aesthetics and resources, in which value is based on savoir-faire, hometown authenticity, and pure daring.
What does their drive to imagine an alternative system tell us about what’s happening in ours?
2/How to build a fashion system
First, you need a city.
The fashion industry as a whole is a complex, globalized system that concentrates creative capital in a handful of cities (Paris, New York, London) while outsourcing production elsewhere - often to the Global South. Despite a handful of early weak signals showing creative ecosystems developing in places like Dakar and Rio, they remain at the economic and cultural periphery of the Fashion System.
Cities are essential to creative synergies: they afford serendipitous interaction, connection, and proximity. They are even more efficient than the Internet at developing the shared visual languages and identitary references that inform design processes. The inhabited physical space remains the setting for lived experience and the set for storytelling.
Young creatives are increasingly priced out of major fashion capitals. There’s a cost of living trade-off that makes it impossible for all but a happy few to pursue creative work as a commercial practice without precarity.
Every decade or so, a supernova of fresh creative energy bursts from some gentrifying or gentrified town: the East Village, Williamsburg, Portland, Detroit, Berlin, and now Buffalo. Cheaper housing, public transport, and a network of similar-minded youth all lead to the kind of meddling and mucking about that leads to artistic output and is unaffordable in Paris or New York.
With that comes a strong, heterogenous cultural identity that signifies distinction and difference - what marketers love to call “authenticity.” In Buffalo, the city’s working class culture and valorization of labor and craft is central to its fashion ethos - creating something with one’s own hands. That’s precisely the kind of symbolic value bigger brands capitalize on and play off of when they build localized activations.
Ultimately, though, this contributes to a gap between creative producers and those who consume their output - the simulacra of these areas become signifiers of cultural capital. Alas, black combat boots and a couple of tattoos do not a Berliner maketh.
Recognizing, protecting, and encouraging cities as incubators for creatives is a profoundly complex macroeconomic challenge beyond the scope of the fashion industry. But it’s essential work - and key actors, like fashion schools, owe it to themselves and the industry at large to make sure that physical proximity to “where it’s all happening” remains accessible to student designers. That could mean housing stipends, expanded online courses, and satellite programs in emerging cities.
You’ll need creatives.
Not creatives as in the matcha-latte sipping ‘creative class’ of upwardly-mobile, wealthy consumers you see in fashion memes, but producers of creative output. You need fucking weirdos, queer kids and misfits who devote themselves to the pursuit of the aesthetic, the exciting, the new.
Buffalo may not be known for its creative economy, but it’s an inexpensive haven for oddballs and misfits to pursue a dream - it brought us Ani DiFranco and the Goo Goo Dolls, and now it’s bringing us designers. The challenge for these designers, unlike in the indie days of old when “selling out” was an insult, lies in operating in a broader culture that encourages commercialization and monetization. Or at least, only favors weirdos that are able to be commercialized and monetized.
We have a responsibility to encourage - with our energy, our time, and our wallets - young creative talent that steps outside the rigid boxes of fashion pedagogy. We need to recognize and nurture a generation that ignores historic structure to play with cross-material and cross-genre practices.
Saying that creatives should follow their dreams, not the money, would be exceedingly naive - young designers want to eat, too. Rather, it means creating the conditions for creative expression without the necessity of mass-appeal, at least not immediately.
Most importantly, young creatives need community. They need contact, not just with their peers, but with mentors who will take the fear out of it all, connect them with resources, and build out networks.
What’s happening in Buffalo right now is magical because it’s tiny, insular, and anecdotal - it’s exactly the kind of nurturing space for creative energy that pushes those weirdos to take the leap and start something of their own. By operating adjacently to the macrocosm of The Fashion Industry, they’re finding freedom - and opportunity - in hyperlocality.
The global fashion industry recognizes this need. Initiatives like the LVMH Prize, the Hyeres festival (sponsored by Chanel), and the Andam Prize are amongst the most significant and dedicated patrons of emerging design talent in the world; providing the funding and visibility necessary for creative talents to grow without the pressure of building operations from the ground up.
What’s needed now is to expand these initiatives into emerging markets and developing creative ecosystems, casting a wider net to capture new energy outside the lens of the existing system.
Add raw materials and resources.
If you’re going to make fashion, you need stuff to make fashion. Material cost, however, is often a significant barrier for young creatives. Fabric alone is expensive; ‘noble’ materials like leather and lace are prohibitively so, as are zippers, grommets, and the machines required to assemble them. This isn’t just a business model challenge, it’s a creative one - not only does it price less privileged kids out of exploring the industry, it limits everyone’s ability to freely explore and experiment.
The problem is industry-wide. As the cost of raw materials continues to rise, historic Maisons like Chanel have begun to consider how to leverage deadstock and unsold product into new garments; similarly, platform Nona Source is an LVMH-backed initiative that sells luxury deadstock to fashion students.
The kids in Buffalo are, of course, solving this problem at the thrift store: much of the design culture in Buffalo is built around the upcycling and reworking of vintage and found items. In Richie Hunter’s case, his work is literally lost hats and gloves he finds on the street.
“Upcycling” as an aesthetic parti pris and design philosophy has gained significant heat over the past few years. Reworking second-hand garments isn’t new to the industry - early Margiela pieces were often ‘upcycled’; brands still use vintage pieces for early fittings - but only recently has it become a sort of new savoir-faire.
Brands like 2025 LVMH-prize nominee All-In got their start using reworked vintage pieces to create new looks, and in some cases still do; designers like Dapper Dan are finally getting long-deserved recognition for the innovation of their work.
Here, I want to touch on upcycling as an example of resource innovation and successful reappropriation of the raw materials accessible in a given ecosystem.
Upcycling is very difficult to do at scale: it’s difficult to guarantee quality and uniformity at scale or maintain supply from one collection to another, much less long term. For young designers, it’s also somewhat time and cost prohibitive to source materials that are actually usable.
The first solution is commercial: in Buffalo, thrift store chain Goodwill frequently often struggles with inventory management, an overload of donations that can’t or won’t sell. In response, they’re developing a local fashion incubator that sells inexpensive bulk fabric resources to designers while offloading significant overstock.
In a global context that will only see supply chains become more unstable - especially at the bottom end - this is the kind of business model innovation we should be inspired by, nurturing, and building upon.
The second solution is more cultural. Numerous Buffalo designers spoke about finding value in the fact that no two garments are the same. For a generation grown tired of homogeneity and sameness in fashion, symbolic value is increasingly tied to curation and uniqueness, rather than top-down status.
Identity is built on creative and cultural capital of “sourcing” garments that feel personally authentic, rather than valuable as defined by major actors. As rarity, customization, and uniqueness continue to emerge as key drivers, we owe it to ourselves to watch the young brands responding to this demand with a distinct creative POV of their own.
Bring production closer to home.
Lee Alexander McQueen was, famously, a working class kid who discovered fashion as an apprentice to a Savile Row tailor, with whom he mastered construction and technique. It’s harder to find that kind of hands-on education these days, in part, because so much of fashion production has been outsourced and off-shored.
It’s now exceedingly rare for RTW garment production - beyond concepts, technical drawings, and certain samples - to occur fully in-House. This is especially true for smaller brands, who might rely on full package production manufacturers for everything from design, pattern making, fabric sourcing, and more. Outsourcing provides a cost savings, but it’s more often than not a necessity: the manufacturers, skilled laborers, and specialized machinery needed to produce garments at scale aren’t available in fashion design hubs.
Earlier this spring, when Trump first announced his intention to levy tariffs on a majority of the countries responsible for exporting apparel to the US, the garment industry was quick to point out that nearshoring production in the US wasn’t going to happen overnight: even if there were operable, cutting edge factories in the US, the skilled labor market would take years to train, if it even existed.
Emerging brands would thus be forced to either drastically reduce order volume or find a solution closer to home.
As it happens, such a solution exists in Buffalo. Over the past two decades, Buffalo has welcomed an influx of asylum seekers and refugees, principally from South Asia and the Middle East. Once the last stop before Canada on the Underground Railway, Buffalo is once again a haven city attracting long-term settlement.
Stitch Buffalo is a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering refugee and immigrant women through sewing and seamstress services and textile re-use. Founder Munawara Sultana ran her own fashion brand in Pakistan prior to seeking political asylum in the US.
She connects a growing skilled textile and sewing labor force in Buffalo with young designers: “Most of the designers in the local fashion scene make their pieces by hand. These new fashion entrepreneurs often aren’t ready, and can’t afford, to send their designs to manufacturers across the country or overseas that make pieces by the thousands,” she explained to the Buffalo News, “But by outsourcing some of the sewing to the artisans at Stitch Buffalo, designers can slowly scale up their brands, or start a fashion line without knowing how to sew.”
This hyper-localization of production through the strategic partnership with an existing and under-exploited labor market suggests that it’s possible to imagine a middle ground future for fashion production, one that doesn’t force small designers to rely on volume - and scale too quickly - or remain limited to small batch production.
What’s more, there’s an emerging re-valorization of savoir-faire and craftsmanship that underscores this dynamic - a sense of proximity between designer and producer that can only be imbued in the clothing itself; a creative synergy that leads to smarter, better, more powerful garments as design objects.
Luxury brands are known to leverage Métiers d’art and localized savoir-faire to create fantastic pieces with this kind of production. For example, the Maison Chanel operates not only the 19M, but invests heavily in vertical integration of the family-owned businesses that produce its broderies, leather, hats, gloves, and more.
This kind of verticality shouldn’t be limited to creating Métiers d’art pieces sold at a premium, however - brands of all sizes and markets should explore how localizing production can reinforce supply chain agility and protect margins in an increasingly volatile global operating context.
Build a market
Lest it seem like I’m describing some idyllic fashion utopia nestled in Western New York, let me throw in a healthy dose of Buffalo cynicism.
If you’re going to sell clothing, you’re going to need a retail market. And of the handful of Buffalo designers earning a living wage from their work, most seem to rely on word-of-mouth and online DTC; very little specialized boutiques and independent retail exist in the area.
More broadly, you need demand: while there are consumers with dollars to spend in Buffalo, they’re reaching for Lululemon and Coach; not cutting-edge fashion. Those that do - the top 1-5% of the market - shop in Toronto, or New York, or Scottsdale, or abroad.
Fashion consumer culture today pushes towards many designs that are wearable and accessible; it requires designers to think in terms of speed, modularity, and mass appeal - not creativity. Where a parallel demand for curated, ‘if you know, you know’ offers exists, there’s a performativity to it that undercuts the “fashion tribalism” and subcultural recognition of markets past.
Put crudely, I'm not sure there's enough of a local - or even national - audience for this kind of work.
I think a lot of Buffalo designers want to build something with their own hands - that’s ingrained in the spirit of the city.
But I don’t get a sense that many of these designers are really all that concerned about growth in and of itself. Rather, their objective seems to be building an economy of symbolic value amongst themselves.
They wear each other’s creations, their work is inter-referential, they seem driven to opt out entirely from a fashion system whose economic constraints would push them towards conformity and commerciality.
It’s a bohemian dream shared by a number of young designers who increasingly seem to reject ‘fast-fashion’ and the mass market as a whole. A large part of that argument is environmental; but much of it is also a shift in our collective understanding of value, authenticity, and rarity. The headwinds of macro cultural change might be blowing in the Fashion industry, but creativity is far from dead.
3/Fashion With a Capital F
“Fashion” was an abstract concept to me as a kid. I think it still is.
Growing up in Buffalo, there was clothing - which came from Target, or Abercrombie, or (the height of glamour) the BCBG corner at Lord and Taylor where my sister worked. There were trends, which were like mysterious laws that obliged us to save up for $200 Seven for all Mankind Jeans from the Walker Center.
Fashion was something else entirely - a supernatural force that pulled me to rip editorials out of the Cosmo magazines I stole from my sister and tape them to my walls. Most of the time, I could barely even identify specific articles of clothing, or understand where people would wear them. I had no idea what it meant that Keira Knightly held a bowler cap to her torso for Coco Mademoiselle, were it not the absolute slightest indication I might be gay.
But I knew - instinctually, to my very core - that beyond this veil of signs and symbols there was a hidden world where they made sense, where function followed form; even if my approach to fashion was, and to a large extent remains, informed by an obsession with functionality, with clothing as design object, with wearing as being and doing.
The Fashion Industry, the world of Fashion with a capital F, was for a long time a hegemonic, top-down structure responsible for the production and sense-making of those signs and symbols. It existed very, very far away from me in Buffalo, and in a lot of ways it remains tightly centered in a handful of creative hubs.
In the twenty-odd years since I first became aware of that world, it’s changed a lot - it’s more accessible, more horizontal, and more tangible than it ever was. It’s gone from a small, relatively niche industry to a many multi-billion dollar global juggernaut; become a mass pop-cultural phenomenon; and in return exchanged accessibility and omnipresence for visibility, status, and power.
Fashion companies don’t dictate trends. They respond to consumer demand. But through that power, status, and visibility, they’re unchallenged arbiters of taste, welders of symbolic authority, using the sheer might of global superstardom to exercise - often unintentionally - outsized might in everything from algorithmic preference to positioning themselves on the urban landscape.
The moment we’re witnessing today across the broader industry is characterized by the slow decentralization of this kind of symbolic capital, where historic media loses its power to any kid with a TikTok and something to say.
In some sense, historic industry actors are playing their cards correctly - positioning themselves as cultural actors, not just clothing producers; supporting (and integrating) emerging designers; using their patrimonial power to act as patrons of the arts in the broadest sense of the term.
Increasingly, though, I think we’ll see Fashion with a capital F challenged by two important opponents: a mass-market apparel industry that offers cheap, accessible clothing for a consumer psyche in need of constant reinvention; and localized, ultra-niche symbolic economies like the one that’s emerging in Buffalo. These localized economies won’t necessarily scale, or even grow, or even produce ““good”” pieces by a lot of standards.
But they’ll come to highlight, again and again, that it’s often by looking at the small changes on the outskirts that we'll see the biggest changes come to Fashion.
Post-script
A huge thank you to Chiara de Nigris and to Marine Dévé for their expert contributions to this piece:
“Where’s the next Alexander McQueen? They couldn’t afford studying fashion design to begin with."
How do we save emerging fashion?
1/Introduction: Where's the next Alexander McQueen?
2/Building a Fashion System
3/Fashion With a Capital F
1/Wherefore art thou, Lee Alexander?
Recently, my mom emailed me two articles from the Buffalo News about a nascent fashion industry in the Rust Belt city I grew up in.
A new generation of designers has chosen to forgo moving to New York City, taking advantage instead of the lower costs and smaller, more hospitable creative ecosystem in Buffalo. For most, working out of Buffalo represents a rare opportunity to develop a viable commercial practice.
There they are again: the shifting winds of a massive polarity shift in the flow of culture and capital throughout the industry as a whole.
Excessively rare today is the young designer with a creative vision who builds a commercially successful brand on grit (and seed funding) alone. Over the past few decades, the economies of clothing production have pushed young fashion graduates into the hands of major conglomerates - where they join design teams producing collections at a global speed and scale - or out of the industry entirely.
For a long time, this centralization of creative energy in the hands of the few was the logical outcome of the massification of the luxury industry. But as the post-Covid golden years are dying down, conversations have quickly placed the blame on a “lack of creative renewal” for what’s either an "industry downturn" or a full-blown existential crisis - depending on who you ask.
With fewer young designers building their own visions, the chance of stumbling on once-in-generation stars like Lee (Alexander) McQueen is even lower. You get fewer fresh emerging brands, fewer tortured geniuses priming for years at eponymous Houses before getting scooped up for Creative Director roles. You get less life in fashion. It’s become exceedingly difficult for young designers to emerge in a fashion system that’s stacked against them.
It’s interesting, then, to take a closer look at places like Buffalo, where a young generation is stepping outside the system all together. It’s an anecdotal microcosm, to be sure - there’s just a handful of designers meaningfully living from their work, much less operating at scale. But what’s happening in Buffalo is a rare cosmic alignment, bringing together the necessary ingredients to create an operable-ish fashion ecosystem adjacent to the mainstream industry.
While we might not be heading to Buffalo Fashion Week next season, it’s interesting to look at why something is working there and now. These designers aren’t trying to develop major retail brands with mass appeal - they’re building a community, a closed-loop semiotic structure based on localized aesthetics and resources, in which value is based on savoir-faire, hometown authenticity, and pure daring.
What does their drive to imagine an alternative system tell us about what’s happening in ours?
2/How to build a fashion system
First, you need a city.
The fashion industry as a whole is a complex, globalized system that concentrates creative capital in a handful of cities (Paris, New York, London) while outsourcing production elsewhere - often to the Global South. Despite a handful of early weak signals showing creative ecosystems developing in places like Dakar and Rio, they remain at the economic and cultural periphery of the Fashion System.
Cities are essential to creative synergies: they afford serendipitous interaction, connection, and proximity. They are even more efficient than the Internet at developing the shared visual languages and identitary references that inform design processes. The inhabited physical space remains the setting for lived experience and the set for storytelling.
Young creatives are increasingly priced out of major fashion capitals. There’s a cost of living trade-off that makes it impossible for all but a happy few to pursue creative work as a commercial practice without precarity.
Every decade or so, a supernova of fresh creative energy bursts from some gentrifying or gentrified town: the East Village, Williamsburg, Portland, Detroit, Berlin, and now Buffalo. Cheaper housing, public transport, and a network of similar-minded youth all lead to the kind of meddling and mucking about that leads to artistic output and is unaffordable in Paris or New York.
With that comes a strong, heterogenous cultural identity that signifies distinction and difference - what marketers love to call “authenticity.” In Buffalo, the city’s working class culture and valorization of labor and craft is central to its fashion ethos - creating something with one’s own hands. That’s precisely the kind of symbolic value bigger brands capitalize on and play off of when they build localized activations.
Ultimately, though, this contributes to a gap between creative producers and those who consume their output - the simulacra of these areas become signifiers of cultural capital. Alas, black combat boots and a couple of tattoos do not a Berliner maketh.
Recognizing, protecting, and encouraging cities as incubators for creatives is a profoundly complex macroeconomic challenge beyond the scope of the fashion industry. But it’s essential work - and key actors, like fashion schools, owe it to themselves and the industry at large to make sure that physical proximity to “where it’s all happening” remains accessible to student designers. That could mean housing stipends, expanded online courses, and satellite programs in emerging cities.
You’ll need creatives.
Not creatives as in the matcha-latte sipping ‘creative class’ of upwardly-mobile, wealthy consumers you see in fashion memes, but producers of creative output. You need fucking weirdos, queer kids and misfits who devote themselves to the pursuit of the aesthetic, the exciting, the new.
Buffalo may not be known for its creative economy, but it’s an inexpensive haven for oddballs and misfits to pursue a dream - it brought us Ani DiFranco and the Goo Goo Dolls, and now it’s bringing us designers. The challenge for these designers, unlike in the indie days of old when “selling out” was an insult, lies in operating in a broader culture that encourages commercialization and monetization. Or at least, only favors weirdos that are able to be commercialized and monetized.
We have a responsibility to encourage - with our energy, our time, and our wallets - young creative talent that steps outside the rigid boxes of fashion pedagogy. We need to recognize and nurture a generation that ignores historic structure to play with cross-material and cross-genre practices.
Saying that creatives should follow their dreams, not the money, would be exceedingly naive - young designers want to eat, too. Rather, it means creating the conditions for creative expression without the necessity of mass-appeal, at least not immediately.
Most importantly, young creatives need community. They need contact, not just with their peers, but with mentors who will take the fear out of it all, connect them with resources, and build out networks.
What’s happening in Buffalo right now is magical because it’s tiny, insular, and anecdotal - it’s exactly the kind of nurturing space for creative energy that pushes those weirdos to take the leap and start something of their own. By operating adjacently to the macrocosm of The Fashion Industry, they’re finding freedom - and opportunity - in hyperlocality.
The global fashion industry recognizes this need. Initiatives like the LVMH Prize, the Hyeres festival (sponsored by Chanel), and the Andam Prize are amongst the most significant and dedicated patrons of emerging design talent in the world; providing the funding and visibility necessary for creative talents to grow without the pressure of building operations from the ground up.
What’s needed now is to expand these initiatives into emerging markets and developing creative ecosystems, casting a wider net to capture new energy outside the lens of the existing system.
Add raw materials and resources.
If you’re going to make fashion, you need stuff to make fashion. Material cost, however, is often a significant barrier for young creatives. Fabric alone is expensive; ‘noble’ materials like leather and lace are prohibitively so, as are zippers, grommets, and the machines required to assemble them. This isn’t just a business model challenge, it’s a creative one - not only does it price less privileged kids out of exploring the industry, it limits everyone’s ability to freely explore and experiment.
The problem is industry-wide. As the cost of raw materials continues to rise, historic Maisons like Chanel have begun to consider how to leverage deadstock and unsold product into new garments; similarly, platform Nona Source is an LVMH-backed initiative that sells luxury deadstock to fashion students.
The kids in Buffalo are, of course, solving this problem at the thrift store: much of the design culture in Buffalo is built around the upcycling and reworking of vintage and found items. In Richie Hunter’s case, his work is literally lost hats and gloves he finds on the street.
“Upcycling” as an aesthetic parti pris and design philosophy has gained significant heat over the past few years. Reworking second-hand garments isn’t new to the industry - early Margiela pieces were often ‘upcycled’; brands still use vintage pieces for early fittings - but only recently has it become a sort of new savoir-faire.
Brands like 2025 LVMH-prize nominee All-In got their start using reworked vintage pieces to create new looks, and in some cases still do; designers like Dapper Dan are finally getting long-deserved recognition for the innovation of their work.
Here, I want to touch on upcycling as an example of resource innovation and successful reappropriation of the raw materials accessible in a given ecosystem.
Upcycling is very difficult to do at scale: it’s difficult to guarantee quality and uniformity at scale or maintain supply from one collection to another, much less long term. For young designers, it’s also somewhat time and cost prohibitive to source materials that are actually usable.
The first solution is commercial: in Buffalo, thrift store chain Goodwill frequently often struggles with inventory management, an overload of donations that can’t or won’t sell. In response, they’re developing a local fashion incubator that sells inexpensive bulk fabric resources to designers while offloading significant overstock.
In a global context that will only see supply chains become more unstable - especially at the bottom end - this is the kind of business model innovation we should be inspired by, nurturing, and building upon.
The second solution is more cultural. Numerous Buffalo designers spoke about finding value in the fact that no two garments are the same. For a generation grown tired of homogeneity and sameness in fashion, symbolic value is increasingly tied to curation and uniqueness, rather than top-down status.
Identity is built on creative and cultural capital of “sourcing” garments that feel personally authentic, rather than valuable as defined by major actors. As rarity, customization, and uniqueness continue to emerge as key drivers, we owe it to ourselves to watch the young brands responding to this demand with a distinct creative POV of their own.
Bring production closer to home.
Lee Alexander McQueen was, famously, a working class kid who discovered fashion as an apprentice to a Savile Row tailor, with whom he mastered construction and technique. It’s harder to find that kind of hands-on education these days, in part, because so much of fashion production has been outsourced and off-shored.
It’s now exceedingly rare for RTW garment production - beyond concepts, technical drawings, and certain samples - to occur fully in-House. This is especially true for smaller brands, who might rely on full package production manufacturers for everything from design, pattern making, fabric sourcing, and more. Outsourcing provides a cost savings, but it’s more often than not a necessity: the manufacturers, skilled laborers, and specialized machinery needed to produce garments at scale aren’t available in fashion design hubs.
Earlier this spring, when Trump first announced his intention to levy tariffs on a majority of the countries responsible for exporting apparel to the US, the garment industry was quick to point out that nearshoring production in the US wasn’t going to happen overnight: even if there were operable, cutting edge factories in the US, the skilled labor market would take years to train, if it even existed.
Emerging brands would thus be forced to either drastically reduce order volume or find a solution closer to home.
As it happens, such a solution exists in Buffalo. Over the past two decades, Buffalo has welcomed an influx of asylum seekers and refugees, principally from South Asia and the Middle East. Once the last stop before Canada on the Underground Railway, Buffalo is once again a haven city attracting long-term settlement.
Stitch Buffalo is a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering refugee and immigrant women through sewing and seamstress services and textile re-use. Founder Munawara Sultana ran her own fashion brand in Pakistan prior to seeking political asylum in the US.
She connects a growing skilled textile and sewing labor force in Buffalo with young designers: “Most of the designers in the local fashion scene make their pieces by hand. These new fashion entrepreneurs often aren’t ready, and can’t afford, to send their designs to manufacturers across the country or overseas that make pieces by the thousands,” she explained to the Buffalo News, “But by outsourcing some of the sewing to the artisans at Stitch Buffalo, designers can slowly scale up their brands, or start a fashion line without knowing how to sew.”
This hyper-localization of production through the strategic partnership with an existing and under-exploited labor market suggests that it’s possible to imagine a middle ground future for fashion production, one that doesn’t force small designers to rely on volume - and scale too quickly - or remain limited to small batch production.
What’s more, there’s an emerging re-valorization of savoir-faire and craftsmanship that underscores this dynamic - a sense of proximity between designer and producer that can only be imbued in the clothing itself; a creative synergy that leads to smarter, better, more powerful garments as design objects.
Luxury brands are known to leverage Métiers d’art and localized savoir-faire to create fantastic pieces with this kind of production. For example, the Maison Chanel operates not only the 19M, but invests heavily in vertical integration of the family-owned businesses that produce its broderies, leather, hats, gloves, and more.
This kind of verticality shouldn’t be limited to creating Métiers d’art pieces sold at a premium, however - brands of all sizes and markets should explore how localizing production can reinforce supply chain agility and protect margins in an increasingly volatile global operating context.
Build a market
Lest it seem like I’m describing some idyllic fashion utopia nestled in Western New York, let me throw in a healthy dose of Buffalo cynicism.
If you’re going to sell clothing, you’re going to need a retail market. And of the handful of Buffalo designers earning a living wage from their work, most seem to rely on word-of-mouth and online DTC; very little specialized boutiques and independent retail exist in the area.
More broadly, you need demand: while there are consumers with dollars to spend in Buffalo, they’re reaching for Lululemon and Coach; not cutting-edge fashion. Those that do - the top 1-5% of the market - shop in Toronto, or New York, or Scottsdale, or abroad.
Fashion consumer culture today pushes towards many designs that are wearable and accessible; it requires designers to think in terms of speed, modularity, and mass appeal - not creativity. Where a parallel demand for curated, ‘if you know, you know’ offers exists, there’s a performativity to it that undercuts the “fashion tribalism” and subcultural recognition of markets past.
Put crudely, I'm not sure there's enough of a local - or even national - audience for this kind of work.
I think a lot of Buffalo designers want to build something with their own hands - that’s ingrained in the spirit of the city.
But I don’t get a sense that many of these designers are really all that concerned about growth in and of itself. Rather, their objective seems to be building an economy of symbolic value amongst themselves.
They wear each other’s creations, their work is inter-referential, they seem driven to opt out entirely from a fashion system whose economic constraints would push them towards conformity and commerciality.
It’s a bohemian dream shared by a number of young designers who increasingly seem to reject ‘fast-fashion’ and the mass market as a whole. A large part of that argument is environmental; but much of it is also a shift in our collective understanding of value, authenticity, and rarity. The headwinds of macro cultural change might be blowing in the Fashion industry, but creativity is far from dead.
3/Fashion With a Capital F
“Fashion” was an abstract concept to me as a kid. I think it still is.
Growing up in Buffalo, there was clothing - which came from Target, or Abercrombie, or (the height of glamour) the BCBG corner at Lord and Taylor where my sister worked. There were trends, which were like mysterious laws that obliged us to save up for $200 Seven for all Mankind Jeans from the Walker Center.
Fashion was something else entirely - a supernatural force that pulled me to rip editorials out of the Cosmo magazines I stole from my sister and tape them to my walls. Most of the time, I could barely even identify specific articles of clothing, or understand where people would wear them. I had no idea what it meant that Keira Knightly held a bowler cap to her torso for Coco Mademoiselle, were it not the absolute slightest indication I might be gay.
But I knew - instinctually, to my very core - that beyond this veil of signs and symbols there was a hidden world where they made sense, where function followed form; even if my approach to fashion was, and to a large extent remains, informed by an obsession with functionality, with clothing as design object, with wearing as being and doing.
The Fashion Industry, the world of Fashion with a capital F, was for a long time a hegemonic, top-down structure responsible for the production and sense-making of those signs and symbols. It existed very, very far away from me in Buffalo, and in a lot of ways it remains tightly centered in a handful of creative hubs.
In the twenty-odd years since I first became aware of that world, it’s changed a lot - it’s more accessible, more horizontal, and more tangible than it ever was. It’s gone from a small, relatively niche industry to a many multi-billion dollar global juggernaut; become a mass pop-cultural phenomenon; and in return exchanged accessibility and omnipresence for visibility, status, and power.
Fashion companies don’t dictate trends. They respond to consumer demand. But through that power, status, and visibility, they’re unchallenged arbiters of taste, welders of symbolic authority, using the sheer might of global superstardom to exercise - often unintentionally - outsized might in everything from algorithmic preference to positioning themselves on the urban landscape.
The moment we’re witnessing today across the broader industry is characterized by the slow decentralization of this kind of symbolic capital, where historic media loses its power to any kid with a TikTok and something to say.
In some sense, historic industry actors are playing their cards correctly - positioning themselves as cultural actors, not just clothing producers; supporting (and integrating) emerging designers; using their patrimonial power to act as patrons of the arts in the broadest sense of the term.
Increasingly, though, I think we’ll see Fashion with a capital F challenged by two important opponents: a mass-market apparel industry that offers cheap, accessible clothing for a consumer psyche in need of constant reinvention; and localized, ultra-niche symbolic economies like the one that’s emerging in Buffalo. These localized economies won’t necessarily scale, or even grow, or even produce ““good”” pieces by a lot of standards.
But they’ll come to highlight, again and again, that it’s often by looking at the small changes on the outskirts that we'll see the biggest changes come to Fashion.
Post-script
A huge thank you to Chiara de Nigris and to Marine Dévé for their expert contributions to this piece:
“Where’s the next Alexander McQueen? They couldn’t afford studying fashion design to begin with."