Over the last few years, the word “designer” has been used so much that it has almost lost its meaning. And maybe it’s finally time to start saying it openly.
There is a scene that I keep experiencing over and over again at international fashion trade shows.
I walk into a booth. I look around. I see hoodies, t-shirts, tracksuits, caps, maybe a couple of oversized jackets and a large slogan on the wall explaining the “creative vision” behind the brand.
Then I look more carefully at the products.
And suddenly I realize that I have probably already seen that same hoodie fifty times during the same day.
The logo changes.
The print changes.
The brand name changes.
But the product itself is essentially the same.
And this is where, in my opinion, one of the most interesting but also problematic phenomena of modern fashion begins: the illusion of design.
Over the last few years, the number of brands built through OEM and ODM production systems has exploded.
For those outside the industry:
This system has completely transformed modern fashion because it has dramatically lowered the barrier to entry.
Today, theoretically, almost anyone can create a fashion brand.
All you need to do is:
And suddenly, a “new fashion brand” is born.
On one side, this democratization is interesting because it allows many creative people to enter the industry without having to build a massive production infrastructure.
But on the other side, it has created a huge problem:
After visiting countless trade shows across Europe, the United States and Asia, there is one feeling that keeps hitting me harder every year:
too many brands are becoming identical.
And I’m not just talking about similar trends, because trends have always existed in fashion.
I’m talking about:
In many cases, the only thing changing is the graphic printed on the t-shirt.
And this is where I personally start having a problem with the way the word “designer” is used today.
Because designing a product and placing graphics on an already existing garment are two completely different things.
Here we need to avoid falling into the simplistic narrative of:
“Asia = bad product.”
Because that would be false and extremely superficial.
Today, Asia has factories capable of producing incredible quality products, sometimes even better than many mid-range European productions.
The problem is not where the product is made.
The problem begins when the product completely loses:
and becomes nothing more than a commodity with a logo attached to it.
And this is exactly what is happening across many segments of modern fashion.
This is probably one of the biggest transformations of the last decade.
Many brands today are no longer born from product development.
They are born from marketing.
The process often starts with:
And only afterwards comes the product itself.
Which, in many cases, becomes almost secondary.
And this is precisely why so many brands still manage to succeed even without real product design behind them.
Because today, the average consumer increasingly buys:
more than actual product quality or development.
For years this model worked extremely well.
And to some extent, it still does.
The problem is that the market is now completely saturated with brands built in exactly the same way.
And when everyone uses:
everything inevitably starts looking identical.
And this is exactly where many brands begin to die very quickly.
Because if your only competitive advantage is:
someone else will always arrive doing something extremely similar at a lower price or with more aggressive marketing.
And yet, despite all this, something very interesting still happens.
When you encounter a brand that has genuinely worked on product development… you recognize it immediately.
You can feel it in:
And this is perhaps the greatest paradox of modern fashion.
The more the market fills itself with identical products, the more brands doing real development become recognizable.
And interestingly, the brands that often stand out the most are those that still maintain:
even at the cost of lower margins or slower growth.
The truth is that being a real designer today is far more difficult than it was twenty years ago.
Because creating a brand is no longer enough.
Printing graphics on a hoodie is no longer enough.
Building a beautiful Instagram page is no longer enough.
The market is now full of brands that look like designer brands, but in reality function mostly as marketing operations built on standardized products.
And this does not necessarily mean those businesses are wrong or destined to fail.
But it does mean that the line between:
is becoming thinner and thinner.
Perhaps the biggest problem in modern fashion is that today everybody wants to be a designer, but very few people actually want to go through the incredibly difficult, slow and expensive process that real design requires.
Because real design means:
Whereas copying something that already works and inserting it into a strong marketing strategy is infinitely easier, faster and more profitable.
And maybe that is exactly why the market is becoming increasingly full of brands… but more and more empty of real designers.