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Last week in the office, I saw three colleagues wearing a version of the same outfit: charcoal jeans and a grey crewneck jumper. As the intrepid writer I am, I inquired about the fashion credits. Loro Piana? The Row? No, each jumper was from Uniqlo.
“It’s not quiet luxury, it’s silent luxury,” one of them joked (as in, “don’t tell anyone”). Except that they were all actually thrilled about wearing the same fit and to have discovered the same bargain (a cashmere sweater under $100), spreading the gospel of Uniqlo knitwear. The jeans, however, were from either The Row or Loewe, making it the perfect representation of high-low dressing.
This year, finding the look for less has become more of a flex, a sign of fashion scrappiness and cleverness that even the most particular enthusiasts are embracing. “I like to think I have the special skill of finding things that look way more luxurious than their price tag reflects,” wrote my colleague and Vogue fashion editor Mai Morsch, one of the three Uniqlo musketeers, in her under-$300 shopping guide. But does it count as a dupe? Morsch remarked that while she doesn’t “believe in dupes”, she certainly believes in finding wardrobe essentials that can sub for more expensive pieces.
And it’s true, we’re not talking about dupes in the sense of luxury handbag knock-offs. Instead, as average luxury prices continue their climb, we’re all now finding treasure troves in the hallowed halls of mid-market labels — Uniqlo, Gap, Banana Republic, J Crew, Cos — that trend-forward, style-minded people had, for the most part, dismissed over the past decade or so. Quality matters: the hunt for a luxury substitute always takes the material makeup into consideration, prioritising natural fibres, as customers grow more informed and aware.
It’s not that everyone stopped shopping at these brands. It’s that the gap between luxury and everything else widened, leaving behind a customer base that aspires to invest in fashion but cannot afford ‘luxury’.
As reported by my colleague Maliha Shoaib last month, the global personal luxury goods market has lost around 50 million consumers in 2024. Similar to the way dupe culture rose on TikTok last year, much of this mindset shift from the consumer side has to do with luxury’s rising price points. People simply don’t see themselves or their aspirations reflected in luxury fashion and its price tags any longer, which has given alternative brands an opportunity to fill the void — and in doing so, bend our perception of what a good fashion find is. And it’s not just the mall brand, it’s a wide range of players — including affordable luxury giants like Coach — that have swooped in to fill the void and conquer this unattended shopper.
Nailing the new consumer’s ‘look for less’
Earlier this year, Zac Posen joined Gap Inc. as chief creative officer of Old Navy and creative director of Gap. In May, he attended the Met Gala wearing a Banana Republic suit, while his date, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, wore a Gap denim dress reminiscent of Posen’s eveningwear designs for his namesake label that shuttered in 2019. That moment, I thought then, represented a vibe shift — one that rippled through the year and was crowned just yesterday with the launch of Vogue’s December digital cover outlining how fashion is “coming down to Earth”.
Posen is not alone: Clare Waight Keller was named Uniqlo’s creative director in September, following the debut of her capsule collection for the Japanese giant a year earlier. Zara tapped everyone from Kate Moss to famed designer’s designer Stefano Pilati — of 2000s Yves Saint Laurent fame, for the uninitiated — to design capsule collections, while J Crew got its groove back through successful collaborations with Maryam Nassir Zadeh and Christopher John Rogers. This mindset has impacted designers, too, who seem to now value the power of mass more than ever.
What should be remarked here is that this shift seems to be not just about finding the look for less, but also, and primarily, about offering the same kind of consideration luxury fashion gets to the middle market and its primary consumers. After all, not many people are in desperate need to replicate a look from The Row, but simply want good, stylish clothes they can actually afford. The takeaway here is that talent from the likes of Posen and Waight Keller, both known for their past celebrity muses and couture fabrications, should not be reserved solely for luxury. Think also of how Zara now taps high fashion photographers like Steven Meisel (who also debuted a capsule with the Spanish behemoth last year) to shoot its campaigns. ‘Fashion’ — in italics and with a capital F — should be for everyone, but that’s gotten further from the case.
“When I was in my 20s, buying a handbag was like $700 — still really expensive, but I felt it was somewhat near my range,” Waight Keller told my colleague Hannah Jackson for Vogue’s December cover story. “Now, an object like that feels very, very unattainable for a young person.”
High fashion, within reach
While my own perception of what constitutes luxury in the professional context of my life is distorted the longer I work in fashion, especially with rising prices, my financial reality continuously grounds my aspirations. The fact is that luxury, for most people and myself included, still equates primarily to ‘something nice’, something one buys ‘as a treat’. This definition shifts depending on one’s personal tax bracket but has more than ever before shifted away from luxury fashion as it’s gone from aspirational to unattainable.
When I was younger, my parents, my brother and I came to the US for the first time for a holiday trip to Disney World in Florida. We hit the outlets, as one does, and my mom purchased a charcoal Banana Republic overcoat. It was beautiful and at an outlet price of $80. (She still owns it, by the way, just under two decades later.) Eighty dollars for a coat — mind the currency exchange from Bolivian pesos to American dollars — was for us then, and still is, a luxury purchase. It was my mom’s ‘something nice’ from that trip.
Here’s another anecdote. When I graduated from university and got my first job as an assistant handbag designer at Coach in New York, most of my friends back home could not believe I was working there, making the handbags their mothers saved to purchase at the outlets during a holiday. I couldn’t believe it either, quite frankly, and I still remember the first bag I gifted my mother and the first wallet I gave my father — the latter a sample. Those were luxury items to them. It’s not from thin air that Coach, Michael Kors and others were dubbed ‘accessible luxury’, as much as most brands today try to avoid the term. And while I was working there, it’s this that we kept in mind: we made products for people who aspired to own things. It’s how the same names have rebranded to aspirational luxury over the last decade. It’s also how Coach and Tory Burch have regained their places in the landscape of American fashion this year by remembering that they don’t need to be the highest of luxuries, but they need to give people something to want that’s still attainable.
Meanwhile, high fashion and designer clothing has lost its centre when it comes to pricing and has forgotten how important it is to serve an aspirational customer that will one day evolve to a loyal, full-price luxury shopper; it’s refocused to prioritise projecting an image of exclusivity and making itself inaccessible to most to be more alluring to the few. (That’s all fine, of course — until it isn’t, just ask Burberry, but that’s another column.)
In the meantime, mid-market and accessible luxury staples from Banana Republic and Cos to Coach and J Crew have been hard at work giving the customer that aspires to shop high fashion something they can dream of that’s within reach. This is how accessible luxury got its groove back, dear reader. By remembering that most of us want something nice, want to look good, without doing away with a month’s rent. Maybe, after all, 2024 wasn’t the year of the dupe, but the year of realistic aspiration.
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
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