Fashion’s Fake News Epidemic Fashion’s Fake News Epidemic

Between designer-less brands and rampant gossip, fashion is having a meltdown. And it’s not because of the heat.

There is yet another job opening in fashion. On Monday, Tom Ford (the brand) announced the departure of Peter Hawkings as creative director after just over a year. That company now joins the ranks of Chanel, Givenchy and Dries Van Noten, all soldiering on without a designer — or any real design direction besides rinse and repeat.

It’s an unprecedented state of uncertainty, not helped by the fact that at the same time speculation is swirling about a host of other brands that still have artistic directors, though you’d never know it by the gossip.

A brief sampling of the theories floating around:

Enough.

This kind of rampant, unfettered speculation, while occasionally entertaining in a fantasy football kind of way, is often rooted in nothing more than whispers and wishful thinking — or the product of strategically deployed leaks used as a tactic in a contract negotiation. And it is, in the end, good for no one. Not for the designers concerned or the hundreds of people who work for them or the consumers who buy their clothes — or who just follow the celebrities who wear them on social media, and thus are influenced by those clothes.

Insecurity just leads to boring fashion, even bad fashion. Most often, it makes designers choose the safe option, the thing that worked well last time — the banal. It mitigates against the wild ideas — the why nots? — that change what everyone wants to wear.