By Rachel Tashjian, CNN
Milan, Italy (CNN) — There comes a time during fashion week, as you look at a throng of photographers fighting to capture photos of someone very thin wearing a very dated outfit, or watch Priscilla Chan — alongside her husband, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg — stride into the Prada show wearing the €11,500 ($13,000 and change) Prada shearling coat with the blonde collar you fantasized about owning if you one day became a multimillionaire in some fabulously ethical way, when you ask yourself: who is all this for?
Fashion has never been more omnipresent or less available. It has made itself as pervasive as pop music by livestreaming its shows and turning the race to attire celebrities into a sport. In adapting its output to platforms like TikTok and Instagram (whose vice president of fashion, Eva Chen, is in some ways as powerful as Vogue’s Anna Wintour), the industry has cultivated multiple generations of fashion savvy observers eager to weigh in on brands’ every move. The tacky-or-brilliant Gucci show, for example, generated days of debate.
At the same time, prices have skyrocketed: a Chanel bag went from $5,800 in 2019 to $10,800 by 2024; the Spring 2025 Versace collection that has been embraced as a welcome alternative to quiet luxury’s domination includes dresses priced at tens of thousands of dollars. The products that all these digital marketing efforts are ostensibly pushing are unavailable to most of the people talking about them. (The idea is that Zoomers sharing hot takes about fashion are going to buy a designer’s perfume or mascara. But the kids today are too savvy to settle for such crassly obvious merch.)
That has cast an unsettled feeling over this season of shows: what are we looking at, and why? Uniform proposals for the one percent who may care little for the nuances of runway philosophizing, or pop culture to be picked apart through social media discourse by communities with little stake in a brand’s market success?
This came into sharp focus at Prada’s Thursday show as Zuckerberg and Chan walked into the event, an appearance likely tied to rumors that Meta will collaborate with Prada on a smart glasses offering. The collection itself was a classic Prada feminine manifesto: just 15 models walked the runway four times each for 60 total looks, each a mix and match of their previous ensembles with pieces added in or taken out. It was a statement on the speed of modern womanhood – the way women rush through both the minutiae of their days and the sweep of history changing and reinventing with just a few tools (bloomers and kitschy beaded skirts; outrageous feather boots and spangly socks). When so much about femininity today focuses on slowly slathering faces and pricking bodies to lengthen youth or stop time altogether, it was a mischievous but toothy runway thesis.
But for many, Zuckerberg and Chan were a chilling distraction: what are these billionaires doing at the biannual luxury fashion event? The truth is that billionaires have more money than they’ve ever had before (according to Forbes, Zuckerberg’s net worth jumped from $72 billion to $177 billion in the time it took that Chanel bag to nearly double in price). At a certain point you really have to search for other things to spend money on, as couture front-row fixtures Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez Bezos showed us earlier this year. Like it or not, fashion is becoming the new playground for America’s technocrats, who are just as susceptible to the allures of Prada as anyone else.
Miuccia Prada, herself a billionaire, has no illusions that the runway is a space for political grandstanding. “I try to do everything political except (the) obvious political, because I would be criticized – a rich fashion designer can’t do politics because it’s not right,” she said backstage. “We are designing for rich people. We are talking about expensive clothes, dressing rich people. You have to be aware of that.”
Perhaps the tension of fashion’s big ideas and its, sometimes, oblivious consumers is what makes it so fascinating – not a problem to be resolved but a contradiction to be embraced.
The designer who knows that better than anyone else is 42-year-old Glenn Martens, who creatively helms Diesel and Maison Margiela. “Fashion has globalized so much more, especially with social media. Everybody can become a critic. Everybody has something to say. So it’s quite as democratized in a good way,” he said a few minutes before a Diesel show filled with riotously twisted garments and chopped and screwed granny knits. That has its downside: “I very much know that with fashion, maybe people who don’t have the background, know-how, and the years of studying of Yamamoto or whatever, they don’t really care, because they just want instant hits.”
That doesn’t exactly keep him up at night: “For Diesel, I actually embrace it, because it is a lifestyle brand at heart. This is really a brand for the people,” he said. “Part of our job is always to bring them into the boat.”
Some designers find success ignoring social media altogether. Fendi’s designer Maria Grazia Chiuri’s debut show looked customers straight in the eye and said, “Take out your wallet.” Her nine-year tenure as Dior’s womenswear director was never a hit with critics, and became a punching bag on social media. Her collection of gently remixed ideas from her Dior years – so-so suiting, pretty but underwhelming black lace dresses – showed she knows just what she needs to say with a fashion show: Fendi’s handbags, especially the famous Baguette, have never looked so insanely appealing.
Staging a spectacular runway show primarily to sell accessories is an old-fashioned idea, though, and not every creative is resigned to it. For midsize brands like Jil Sander or Marni, the clothes are the thing, and both of those brands’ designers – Simone Bellotti and Meryll Rogge, respectively – are interested in dressing an actual client, with little regard for dazzling social media or trickle-down accessories. Speaking backstage after his show, Bellotti wondered whether the ideas of his clothes were clear to people just looking online, but radically, in our William Gibson-couldn’t-have-written-it-better times, that doesn’t really matter. He started with the question of: “Can something superfluous become essential?” And he is making things, like a crisply cut coat with a gentle flap of fabric down the spine, a mottled Yves Klein blue dress with a high slit pinched together twice along the leg, and lean but not skinny suits, that you see in person, buy and spend the next ten years feeling thrilled to wear.
Rogge, in her debut for Marni, the Italian brand known for its ladylike quirkiness, had a similar approach: creative clothes for women and men who want to look like adults. “We really looked at the late ’90s and early 2000s,” she said, “but not in a Y2k way. Like Winona Ryder.”
Judging by the chairs at Louse Trotter’s Bottega Veneta, this is a brand that knows just who it’s talking to. Designed by eccentric furniture designer Max Lamb, these monastically narrow and profoundly uncomfortable seats are the kind of pieces that fill penthouses and palazzos all over the world. They complemented the clothing well: Brobdingnagian outerwear and tailoring, overwhelmed with intrecciato trims and pleated leathers, ending in a parade of bathmat-like garments with matching hats. There was indeed something charming about these explosive Muppet looks, but is the woman who can afford Bottega Veneta really flopping around Art Basel, dinner parties and business meetings in such enormous clothes? She knows that fancy uncomfortable chair is just for show – when she’s at home, she’s lounging on the sofa.
The week closed with Armani, now without its late founder and under the auspices of Giorgio Armani’s niece, Silvana Armani. The label’s bourgeois conservativism is more obvious than it was under the late designer, but that doesn’t matter, because it’s easy neutral clothes, with dazzling splashes like a shaggy burgundy and gray striped coat over quilted merlot trousers and a beaded jacket, make everyone, from the insecure multimillionaire to the college student buying Armani pants from TheRealReal for $110, feel like they own a private jet.
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