In other words: welcome to the Baroque period and the early Rococo era of the history of French fashion. More specifically, the fashion of the French Bourbon consorts.

The House of Bourbon descended from Louis I, 1st Duke of Bourbon, grandson of the French king Louis IX. They ruled France from the 16th through the 18th century, through the French Revolution, and again in the 19th century, when they were restored after Napoleon’s fall. The Bourbon name did not just rule the French territory. Their rule extended to the Spanish throne, the House of Bourbon-Anjou, from the 17th century to the present day. Henry IV was the first Bourbon king, followed by Louis XIII and then his son, the Sun King, Louis XIV. Louis XV and Louis XVI were the last two kings before the French Revolution. 

The queens consort of these magnificent kings were just as regal and powerful as their husbands. Draped in jewels and prestige wherever they walked. They also commanded attention with their fashion statement.

The Baroque Period and the Rococo Era

The reign of the six queen consorts of the French Bourbon kings falls between the Baroque and Rococo eras, so it is only right to get a brief glimpse of what these eras offered the fashion world.

The Baroque period spanned the 17th and 18th centuries, with its origins in Italy. This era was marked by astonishing architecture and art. Music flourished during this era. The Rococo era (1715-1780) followed the Baroque period. It was an architectural and artistic revival that originated in France. Each era brought about a different perspective to the world of fashion. The Baroque period brought in extravagant fabrics, embroidery, lace, and wigs, a more theatrical approach. The Rococo era, on the other hand, took a subtler approach to colour, incorporating silks, elaborate embroidery, and eye-catching ornaments.

The French Bourbon Consorts

Margaret of Valois was King Henry IV’s first wife, but the marriage was annulled in 1599. The second wife of Henry IV was Marie de’ Medici, a member of the infamous House of Medici. She served as the regent of France from 1610 to 1617. Marie was the daughter of Francesco I, Grand Duke of Tuscany and Joanna of Austria. 

Anne of Austria was the wife of King Louis XIII. She was of Spanish blood from the House of Habsburg. She also served as regent for her son, the future King Louis XIV, until 1651. She was the daughter of Philip III of Spain and Margaret of Austria. 

Louis XIV’s wife was Maria Theresa of Spain. She was the daughter of King Philip IV and Elisabeth of France. She was also a member of the House of Habsburg and was the Archduchess of Austria.

Marie Leszczyńska was the daughter of the deposed king of Poland, Stanislaus Leszczyński I, and Catherine Opalińska. She served as Louis XV’s wife for 42 years and 9 months, making her the longest-serving queen consort. 

Last but not least, Marie Antoinette. She was the youngest child of Francis I, the Holy Roman Emperor, and Maria Theresa. She was queen until the onset of the French Revolution.

Each of these queens was well known for their exquisite style and fabulous gowns. They left their mark on history.

The Fashion Lookbook of the Queens Consorts

Marie de’ Medici

Marie de’ Medici’s fashion era fell during the developing years of the Baroque period, which was often seen as theatrical. Portraits of her were depicted as expensive, a status befitting a deserving queen. It is also safe to call her a trendsetter of her day.

The one thing Marie popularised in her time was the fan-shaped collar, also known as the Medici Collar. It is carefully laced around the collar of the neck with an opening in the front. The lace is incredibly detailed, with various patterns along with ruffed edging. 

Marie de’ Medici was often seen in lavish, robust gowns of velvet and silk, heavily embellished with precious stones. He gowns had beautiful prints which included Fleur de lis. She preferred a French farthingale for a more lavish, extended look rather than a Spanish farthingale. The French farthingale added dimension to her extensive gowns, giving her a majestic, attention-worthy look.

She draped herself in luxury and prestige, befitting the Queen of France.

Anne of Austria

Anne of Austria had a different approach at the beginning of her life as queen. She preferred the Spanish lifestyle, as one would expect, as she was born in Spain. She preferred the Spanish fashion, which included a Spanish farthingale, a higher neckline with lace collars and stiffened sleeves.

However, she slowly transitioned to the Baroque French style, honouring her new home and kingdom. Her fashion style was similar to that of her predecessor, Marie de’ Medici.

She draped herself in heavily embroidered gowns of pearls and jewels. Another highlight is her Medici collar with noticeable ruff edgings, along with a beautifully elongated French farthingale. Off-the-shoulder bodices were also very common during this era in France. In some of Anne of Austria’s portraits, she is shown to have worn off-the-shoulder gowns with a lace finishing at the wide neck design that encircles the shoulders. 

Maria Theresa of Spain

Maria Theresa, wife and Queen of the Sun King, Louis XIV, was another Baroque-period idol. In other portraits, the young Maria, like Diego Velázquez’s The Infanta Maria Theresa, was shown in an elongated, wide gown. Wide enough not to fit through our modern doors.  

After her marriage to the French throne, people can see the transformation in her style. Though subtle, she set the tone among her ladies at the Versailles Court. She adorned herself in luxurious gowns of various designs, jewels and other embellishments. She embraced her French kingdom through her style and appearance. Her use of corsets was also distinguishable. Like her predecessor, Anne of Austria, Maria Theresa of Spain also wore off-the-shoulder gowns with lace finishing at the wide neckline, abandoning the rigid neckline of the Spanish style.

Marie Leszczyńska

Marie Leszczyńska became queen at the height of the Rococo era. She lived in an era of bright colours, with fabrics that were lighter but fuller, and lavish details. Mantua was worn during this era, and Marie Leszczyńska was also seen wearing it in some of her portraits. The mantua brought back the roundness of the skirt, giving it life and dimension, which was highly desirable among women of the time. The Medici collar had been done away with by this period. The low neckline remained highly fashionable. Her gowns were still largely and elaborately designed with various patterns. Frill sleeves were very popular during this period. They were tiered, detachable and made of lace or sometimes beautifully embroidered linen. 

Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette is famous for the legendary quote “Let them eat cake”, but she never said it, of course. But most importantly, she was the reigning queen consort during the rise of the French Revolution and was also guillotined along with her husband, King Louis XVI. 

Despite her terrible fate, she had impeccable fashion taste. She embraced the use of printed cottons like the toile de Jouy, ribbons, florals, and pastels, taking inspiration from thinkers like Jean Jacques Rousseau; she popularised the “French country” aesthetic. Scholars regarded her as a trendsetter of her period, lavishing spending on her wardrobe.

In the 1780s, her dressmaker, Marie-Jeanne Rose Bertin, called her the “Minister of Fashion” and “Minister of Trinkets.” In 1787, she was called “Madame Deficit” because her wardrobe spending declined.

When it comes to her overall fashion, she loved her extravagant and large gowns. Each one had intricate floral embroidery. The most scandalous of her wardrobe was the chemise dress that was worn at Trianon, which disregarded heavy gowns for breathable cotton fabric. Another notable gown, known even today, is the robe à la francaise featuring Watteau pleats: flat pleats falling from the shoulders and flowing freely to the floor. This wide-shaped gown is truly an attention-seeking beauty. She adopted the pouffe, which set a stage for all women at court.

French fashion ran from era to era, from queen to queen, and it is safe to say the French had style, and they still own it. These women perfected the word ‘influencer’, and heaven knows what they would do if they had phones of the 21st century. Their ‘GRWM’ would surely earn them millions and millions of views. Who wouldn’t like to be dressed as a ‘Queen’?  

The post Fashion Lookbook of the French Bourbon Consorts: Before the French Revolution- The Baroque Period and Early Rococo Era. appeared first on Fashion Law Journal.

What the Fashion Act Would Actually Require

The Fashion Act would require large apparel, footwear and fashion bag sellers doing business in New York to map their supply chains and run ongoing due diligence on the human rights and environmental impacts hiding inside them. The bill’s own text requires covered companies to identify, prevent, mitigate, account for and remediate adverse impacts in their own operations and in their suppliers’ operations, set science based targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and work with suppliers to improve chemical management. Companies would also have to publish this data publicly online and adopt responsible purchasing practices that do not push suppliers toward the labor violations that unrealistic deadlines tend to produce.

One provision goes further than disclosure. The bill would hold fashion sellers jointly and severally liable for wage theft committed by their tier one suppliers, meaning a company cannot simply blame its manufacturer when workers go unpaid.

Who Actually Has to Comply With the Fashion Act

The threshold is global annual revenue of at least $100 million, combined with doing business in New York State. That combination catches nearly every major apparel, footwear and fashion bag brand sold in the US, whether the company is headquartered in New York or not, and whether the garment carries the company’s own name or someone else’s. The bill explicitly reaches private label goods too, closing the obvious workaround of manufacturing under a store brand instead of a designer label.

The Fashion Act’s Enforcement Has Real Teeth

Unlike a lot of disclosure legislation, the Fashion Act does not rely on public shame alone. The bill assigns enforcement to the New York Attorney General, and violators face fines of up to 2% of their annual revenue. For a company posting several billion dollars in global sales, that ceiling turns noncompliance into a genuine financial risk rather than a line item. Penalty money does not disappear into the state’s general fund either. The bill creates a Fashion Remediation Fund that channels fine revenue directly into environmental and labor remediation projects in the communities most affected by the violations.

Why the Fashion Act Keeps Stalling

Senator Alessandra Biaggi and Assemblymember Anna Kelles first introduced the bill in January 2022, backed by the Act on Fashion Coalition and designer Stella McCartney. It never made it out of committee that session. Kelles reintroduced it in the Assembly in 2023, paired with a Senate version from Brad Hoylman-Sigal after Biaggi left the Senate, and that version stalled too. The current 2025-2026 session carries two more versions, A4631 and S4558, both still sitting in committee.

New York is not alone in trying this. California, Massachusetts and Washington all introduced similar fashion accountability bills in 2025, and by early 2026 the picture diverged sharply. California’s AB 405 missed its committee deadline on January 31, 2026, and died under the state’s own constitutional rules. Washington’s HB 1107 missed its floor deadline on February 17, 2026, and died the same way. New York’s bill did neither. Albany’s legislative session runs on a two year cycle rather than resetting annually, so the Fashion Act simply carries over into 2026 rather than expiring, which is the reason it has survived this long while its peers in other states have not.

What Happened to the Fashion Act This Spring

On April 2, 2026, Senator Kavanagh introduced a companion bill, S9740, which folds the same due diligence and remediation fund framework into something called the Interstate Fashion Environment Accountability Act. The name signals an attempt to coordinate with whatever survives in other states rather than have New York regulate the industry alone, an approach that could matter given how quickly California and Washington’s versions collapsed. As of this writing, S9740 sits in committee alongside its sister bills, with no floor vote scheduled.

Why the Fashion Act Still Matters to a Brand That Isn’t in New York

A bill that has failed three times can look like background noise, but the $100 million revenue threshold and the “doing business in New York” trigger mean this law was never really about New York retailers specifically. Any national apparel brand selling into the state falls inside its reach the moment it passes, and the enforcement structure, a 2% revenue fine plus joint liability for supplier wage theft, sets a template other states have already started copying. Whether or not this exact bill becomes law, brands with real exposure to fast fashion supply chains would be wise to read it as a preview rather than a curiosity.

The post The Fashion Act, Explained Simply appeared first on Fashion Law Journal.

The case is usually put like this. A laboratory learned to make something that luxury had spent a century insisting could only be dug out of the ground, and within a decade the story collapsed. Leather, the reasoning continues, is simply next in the queue. Mushrooms are already being turned into handbags. Give it ten years.

It is a tidy argument, and the first half of it is entirely correct. The second half misunderstands what actually happened to diamonds, and the misunderstanding matters, because the mechanism that destroyed the diamond premium is largely absent from leather. Where it does exist, almost nobody is looking.

What actually happened

The numbers are worth stating plainly, because they are more dramatic than most people realise.

In 2018, laboratory-grown stones accounted for around three percent of centre stones in American engagement rings. By early 2026 the figure had reached roughly fifty-two percent. A one-carat lab-grown diamond averaged about $3,410 per carat in 2020. By May 2026, the average had fallen to around $564, roughly a sixth of the price in six years. Wholesale prices dropped somewhere between seventy-four and ninety percent depending on whose index you accept, and De Beers itself has described lab-grown wholesale jewellery prices as tracking toward cost plus.

The consequences for the incumbent were severe. Anglo American wrote down De Beers by $6.8 billion across three consecutive years, the business posted a $511 million EBITDA loss in 2025, and in January 2026 the company cut official rough prices for the first time in over a year, having previously sold discounted stones privately while maintaining list prices around twenty-five percent above the market.

The company that invented the modern diamond is now being written down by its own parent.

The mechanism, which is the part that matters

Now, the crucial question. Why did this particular substitution work when so many others have not?

Because it was not a substitute; a laboratory-grown diamond is a carbon crystal, identical in structure to a mined stone, rating ten on the Mohs scale, and reading as diamond on every standard tester. It is not an alternative to a diamond. It is a diamond, produced by a different method, and no expert with an instrument can tell a buyer otherwise.

That single fact did all the work. The diamond premium had never rested on beauty or rarity, both of which were manufactured, but on the impossibility of producing one. Remove the impossibility and the entire edifice has nothing underneath it.

A second lesson is more painful. De Beers launched Lightbox in 2018 at a flat eight hundred dollars per carat, precisely to demonstrate that laboratory stones were cheap and trivial. It closed the brand in May 2025. The pricing strategy intended to discredit the category instead taught consumers exactly what these stones cost to make, and then legitimised them by putting the industry’s most authoritative name on the box.

You cannot cheapen a rival product without also telling everybody the price.

Why leather is not diamonds

Apply that mechanism to leather, and it does not transfer.

Mycelium materials, grown from the root structures of fungi, are not leather produced by another method. They are a different material with different properties, different ageing behaviour and different wear. They may be beautiful, and in the case of the Hermès collaboration with MycoWorks, which produced a version of the Victoria bag using a grown material finished with traditional French tanning, they are demonstrably capable of sitting inside a luxury product without embarrassment. But nobody can claim they are hiding, and a buyer with a magnifying glass can tell.

The market has been unsentimental about this. MycoWorks, the most advanced company in the field, which had opened a commercial-scale plant in South Carolina and raised well over a hundred million dollars, became insolvent in late 2025 and was liquidated through an assignment for the benefit of creditors. Bolt Threads, whose Mylo material appeared in a Stella McCartney bag, had already wound back its ambitions. The mycelium materials market was worth around twelve million dollars in 2024, which is a rounding error against global leather goods.

This is not evidence that biomaterials have failed. It shows they were never doing what everyone assumed. A substitute competes on preference and price, and preference is exactly where the leather premium is strongest. Nobody buys a calfskin bag because hide is technically superior to every alternative. They buy it because of what a calfskin bag means, and a material with better sustainability metrics does not displace meaning.

Where the diamond logic actually applies

Which brings us to the part of this story that receives a fraction of the attention.

Cultivated leather is not an alternative material at all. It is genuine animal leather, grown from animal skin cells in a bioreactor, chemically and structurally identical to hide. VitroLabs raised forty-six million dollars in 2022 from a group including Kering, Bestseller, Khosla Ventures and Leonardo DiCaprio, with Kering continuing to support quality testing, tanning and finishing. Other companies are working on the same problem in Singapore, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

That is the diamond situation exactly. Same substance, different origin, no instrument that can produce a meaningful distinction.

It is also nowhere near commercial scale, which is why the coverage is thin. But it is the only development in this field that carries the structural threat, and any luxury house reading the diamond collapse as a cautionary tale about mushrooms has read the wrong lesson entirely.

What a house should take from this

Three things follow, and the third is uncomfortable.

The first is that a material premium survives only where the material cannot be reproduced. Every scarcity story that rests on a physical property is, in principle, on a clock.

The second is that the incumbent’s response matters enormously. De Beers had two options: ignore the category or brand it. It branded it, discovered it had legitimised a competitor, and withdrew seven years later at a substantial loss. A luxury house launching a cultivated leather line to prove that cultivated leather is inferior would be making precisely the same error. It could read the whole case study in an afternoon.

The third is the one nobody in the industry says aloud. Diamonds were exceptionally vulnerable because the product was pure material and nothing else. A diamond has no atelier, no cut that only twelve people can execute, no fifty hours of hand-stitching, no maker. It was a stone with a story attached, and when the stone became reproducible, the story had nothing left to hold on to.

Leather goods are not in that position, and their protection is not the hide. It is everything done to the hide afterwards, by people, slowly, in a building with a name on it.

Which suggests the houses best insulated from what is coming are the ones that have spent a century talking about their workshops rather than their raw materials. They were not being sentimental. They were, whether they knew it or not, diversifying away from the one thing a laboratory can copy.

The post The Diamond Already Fell. Leather Is Next. appeared first on Fashion Law Journal.

Borrowing its language from the internet’s obsession with “maxxing” or optimising different aspects of life, the trend draws from the symbolism and practices associated with Goddess Lakshmi, the Hindu deity traditionally associated with wealth, prosperity, abundance and auspiciousness.

On social media, however, Lakshmi maxxing has emerged less as a religious practice and more as a lifestyle philosophy. Content surrounding the trend encourages rituals such as waking during Brahma Muhurat, practising abhyanga, drinking water from a copper vessel, chanting Lakshmi mantras, offering flowers and creating intentional morning and self-care routines.

Presented through the familiar visual language of contemporary wellness content, these practices can look remarkably similar to the rituals that dominate the internet’s morning-routine and “high-vibrational” lifestyle culture.

The aesthetics of abundance

At its heart, Lakshmi maxxing appears to translate the idea of abundance into a modern lifestyle vocabulary. Beauty, femininity, self-care, prosperity and intentionality become interconnected, with Lakshmi serving as the symbolic centre of that world.

There is an obvious appeal to this framing. Social media has increasingly transformed wellness into an aesthetic, where rituals are not simply things one does but things one documents. Morning routines, oils, flowers, traditional clothing, jewellery, skincare and spiritual practices can all become part of a carefully constructed visual identity.

For a fashion and lifestyle audience, this intersection is particularly interesting. The trend does not simply borrow individual practices. It packages a cultural idea into an aspirational lifestyle, one that can be photographed, styled and consumed. However, Lakshmi is not merely an aesthetic symbol.

Where the criticism comes from

For many Indians, particularly those familiar with Lakshmi through religious and family traditions, the trend raises questions about cultural context.

Lakshmi is a deity who is actively worshipped by millions of Hindus. Her association with prosperity does not exist independently of a larger religious and cultural tradition. Consequently, reducing her to concepts such as beauty, luxury or “manifesting abundance” can feel like a significant simplification. The criticism surrounding Lakshmi maxxing therefore centres largely on cultural appropriation: the concern that practices rooted in Indian traditions can be removed from their original context, given contemporary terminology and subsequently marketed as a new wellness discovery. The issue becomes even more sensitive when religious symbols are involved. For some, an ancient practice being adopted by a global audience can be a positive form of cultural exchange. For others, the transformation of a sacred tradition into an aesthetic trend risks stripping it of the meaning that made it significant in the first place.

The yoga parallel

This debate is not entirely unfamiliar, as Yoga has undergone a similar transformation as it travelled from India to the global wellness industry. Today, yoga can mean anything from a spiritual discipline to a fitness class, a fashion category or a social media aesthetic.

That evolution does not automatically make its global adoption inappropriate. Cultures have always influenced one another, and traditions naturally change when they move between communities. The more difficult question is what gets retained and what gets removed.

When a practice is separated from its history, philosophy or cultural context and presented primarily as a product or lifestyle hack, the conversation shifts from cultural exchange towards cultural commodification. Lakshmi maxxing has consequently become another example of a much larger conversation about how Indian culture travels through the global fashion and wellness industries.

Beyond the trend cycle of Laxmi Maxxing 

There is also a certain irony in seeing centuries-old Indian traditions enter an internet culture built around constantly changing trends.

What is traditional is often considered ordinary by the people who grow up with it. What is ordinary can then become “new” when it enters a different cultural market. This has happened repeatedly with Indian food, textiles, beauty rituals, wellness practices and spiritual traditions. The response to Lakshmi maxxing, however, need not be reduced to a simple appreciation-versus-appropriation binary.

There is a meaningful difference between learning about a culture, respectfully adopting a practice, commercially repackaging it and using a sacred symbol without understanding its significance. These distinctions matter, particularly when the trend enters industries where culture and commerce are already closely intertwined. Whether Lakshmi maxxing remains another fleeting social media phenomenon or develops into a lasting wellness movement is difficult to predict. What is more certain is that its popularity has reopened an important conversation about cultural ownership, context and the way ancient traditions are transformed when they enter the global trend cycle.

Perhaps the real question is not whether Indian traditions can be shared. It is whether, in the process of making them fashionable, we remember where they came from.

Is This the End for Microtrends? A Deep Dive into Fashion’s Ever-Changing Trend Cycle

The post Lakshmi Maxxing: When Traditions Become the Internet’s New Wellness Aesthetic appeared first on Fashion Law Journal.

I was three video essays deep on a Tuesday night; the scroll started as research and ended as something closer to dread when I landed on the one about the “big words” fight. The whole argument had started over a single word, scrying, posted on Threads by a reader alongside a request: “authors, please use easier words“. When other readers pushed back, a defender reframed the pushback itself as the problem, telling critics to check their ableism: “authors who use big words are ableist.” No, I’m not kidding. One video essay responding to the fallout took the claim apart piece by piece, arguing that the real issue was not ableism but what she called the infantilizing of readers, and named the pattern outright as evidence of “a huge problem with anti-intellectualism in our country right now.” She reached for an analogy that has made my brain feel heavy: a building can install a ramp beside the staircase without tearing the staircase out the same way a book can exist for readers who want a simpler vocabulary without anyone asking every other book to lower itself to meet them. I closed my iPad that night with a feeling I’ve carried into every fashion story I have written since.

I work in an industry that talks about culture constantly. I wanted to know if we are actually part of it, or just watching it happen to someone else.

BookTok’s Fight Over “Big Words” and What Counts as Reading

The vocabulary fight was not an isolated flare-up. A separate video making the rounds way before showed a reader working through a fantasy novel and stopping to ask, more or less, why the pages were so filled with so many words in the first place, a moment that went on to rack up tens of millions of views on X and split the conversation in two, with one camp asking why anyone would be surprised that a book has words on its pages and another arguing she was simply a reader who tried a genre that was not built for her, according to reporting from the Independent and Unilad. It sat inside a longer pattern BookTok has been having with itself for a while now, one where a growing number of readers admit, without much shame, that they skip the parts of a book that are not dialogue. BuzzFeed reported on readers logging thirty or more books a year by reading only the conversations and cutting everything else, the description and the sentences doing the quiet work of building a world before anyone speaks in it, and the response split the community in two, with defenders calling it a valid way to read and critics asking what a reader can honestly call finished when half the book goes unread. One commenter said the practice made her want to put her head through a door.

I do not bring this up to make fun of anyone’s reading habits, because I read a lot, and I live inside this space enough to know the discourse is rarely as simple as either side wants it to be. What strikes me is the shape of the argument itself. The complaint was never really about one word or one dense paragraph. It was about the demand a book makes on a reader’s attention, and a growing appetite to negotiate that demand down. The literacy researchers behind that instinct are not wrong to worry either. About 21% of American adults score at or below the lowest tier of English literacy, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, and a reader who struggles with a page has every reason to want a book meant for her. The argument was never about whether those books should exist. It was about whether every other book owes her the same accommodation. As a writer, should I also change my writing tone?

Why Critics Praised The Odyssey for Refusing to Explain Itself

I noticed the same shape of complaint showing up around film, just aimed the other direction. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opened this summer to a 94% critics’ score and a 97% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and the praise kept circling back to the same idea: this film refuses to hold your hand. Forbes called it ambitious and moody, and admitted the film asks you to sit with it, maybe even watch it twice, before you fully catch what Nolan built. Nobody asked for the nearly three-hour runtime to be trimmed down. People kept describing that demand as a relief. Somewhere along the way, a script that trusts its audience to keep up became the exception worth celebrating rather than the baseline anyone expected, and that tells you something about every script that came before it, the ones that explain a character’s motive out loud in case you missed the look on their face, the ones that narrate a twist before it lands so nobody has to sit in confusion for even a second.

Skimming a book for dialogue and praising a film for refusing to explain itself sound like opposite instincts, but they answer the same complaint. Something in us has gotten less willing to sit inside difficulty and wait for it to pay off.

What Attention Span Research Reveals About Why We Skim

None of this lives only in vibes. Gloria Mark, a researcher at UC Irvine who has spent two decades tracking how long people stay focused on a single screen, found that the average attention span on one task dropped from about two and a half minutes in 2004 to roughly 47 seconds by the late 2010s, with half of all those stretches lasting 40 seconds or less, according to her research summarised by Silicon Canals. Mark is careful to say this is not proof that human brains have broken. It is proof that the environment asking for our attention has changed shape faster than we have adapted to it, notification by notification, tab by tab, until switching became the default and staying became the effort.

That is the part that makes the BookTok fight and the Nolan praise make sense together. A reader who has spent the day fragmenting attention across a dozen screens is not lazy for wanting a book that asks less of her. She is responding rationally to a nervous system that a full day of screens has trained, hour after hour, to expect the next thing in seconds rather than minutes.

Is Fashion Anti-Intellectual Too, or Just Quiet About It?

Now here is the part I cannot stop turning over. Fashion sits inside the exact same attention economy as books and film, scrolled through on the same thumb, competing for the same 47 seconds, and yet fashion rarely produces this kind of open argument about itself. We do not really have a fashion equivalent of the big words debate, a public fight over whether a look asks too much of the person wearing it, whether an outfit should have to be explained or defended the way a paragraph does. When fashion does turn self-critical, it is almost always because a story has crossed into something the culture at large is already fighting about: appropriation, labour, size, money. The industry rarely turns that same lens on its own trend cycle and asks whether the cycle itself has gotten too easy to just go along with.

I do not think that silence means fashion is exempt. I think it might mean the appetite for the easy version is moving through fashion in a way that never has to say its own name, because nobody needs to defend a purchase the way a reader has to defend a book they claim to have finished.

Inside the Speed of Today’s Fashion Trend Cycle

The clearest evidence sits in how fast a trend now lives and dies. A microtrend today can rise and disappear within a handful of weeks, sometimes a single season, and the same platforms that host the BookTok arguments now drive that speed. The office siren aesthetic and brat summer each burn through their moment faster than the one before it. An influencer can wear something once and watch the search volume spike within hours. None of that leaves much room for a person to sit with a look, try it on in their head, and decide whether it actually says anything about them before the next trend has already taken its place.

Layered underneath that speed is a forecasting apparatus that increasingly runs on AI rather than instinct. Firms like Heuritech and WGSN now feed runway footage and social activity into algorithms that cross-check the results against purchase data, flagging a trend months before it reaches a mainstream feed, work that used to belong to editors sitting front row and trusting their own eye. Heuritech’s Noémie Voyer described catching “early signals of trends” long before shoppers ever see them coming. That is not really a person deciding what they like. That is a person being shown, with mounting precision, what they are statistically about to want.

I keep coming back to the same fork in that idea, and I am genuinely unsure which side of it is true. An influencer chasing a trend at that speed has an obvious, almost forgivable reason: staying visible is the job, and the algorithm rewards speed over reflection. But most people buying into a look within days of seeing it are not being paid to keep up. So what is their reason? Is it the same reflex that makes a reader skip to the dialogue, the same fatigue that makes a slow film feel like a chore instead of a gift, showing up in a closet instead of a bookshelf? Or is getting dressed simply a different kind of decision than reading a novel, one that was never supposed to demand the same kind of sustained attention in the first place?

The Digital Detox Trend That Complicates This Theory

There is a complication I do not want to leave out, because it cuts against my own worry. Daily social media use across wealthier markets has actually dropped to around two hours and twenty minutes, nearly 10% below its 2022 peak, and researchers at Ofcom found that 48% of young adults believe they spend too much time online, with 68% actively trying to cut back. People are buying film cameras again. Paperbacks are outselling e-readers in some markets. Journals and phone-free meetups keep showing up as the thing people say they want more of. If an appetite for something slower and harder is genuinely returning, fashion would be a strange place for it to stop.

I do not have fashion’s own version of the vocabulary fight or the three-hour runtime to point to as clear evidence either way, not yet. What I have is a habit I noticed in myself after that video essay, the instinct to open an app and let it tell me what is worth wanting before I have asked myself the question first. I still do not know if that is anti-intellectualism wearing a new outfit, or something else entirely that just happens to look the same from this angle. I only know I have started paying attention to the seconds it takes me to decide I want something I saw for the first time an hour ago, and I am not sure I like what I am timing.

The Death of Trends: Has Individual Style Finally Triumphed?

Sources

The Independent, via Inkl: TikToker sparks debate after asking why book “has so many words on the page”

Unilad: People think ‘BookTok’ is killing literature

National Center for Education Statistics: Adult Literacy in the United States

Unexpected Paths: The “Big Words” Controversy

BuzzFeed: The Internet Rages Over New “Dialogue Only” Readers

Rotten Tomatoes: The Odyssey (2026)

Forbes: ‘The Odyssey’ Review

Silicon Canals: Gloria Mark’s attention span research

Fashion Law Journal: Is This the End for Microtrends?

NPR: How the fashion industry is using AI to predict the next big trend

Unplugged: 2026 Is The Year Of Analogue and Offline

The post Is There Anti-Intellectualism in Fashion? appeared first on Fashion Law Journal.

What Does an Entertainment Lawyer Do?

Entertainment lawyers spend most of their working hours on paper, not in court. By drafting and reviewing contracts, they ensure fair and beneficial terms for their clients, mitigating potential legal risks. They also play a significant part in managing and protecting intellectual property rights, guiding clients through issues related to copyrights, trademarks, and licensing deals. When a deal goes sideways, entertainment lawyers step in to mediate and advocate for their clients, whether through negotiation, arbitration, or litigation.

The role sits across several legal specialties at once. Depending on what part of the entertainment field they are in and for whom they work, an entertainment lawyer may have expertise in several areas of law, including intellectual property, contract law, labor law and litigation as they relate to the entertainment industry. For readers weighing this against other specialties, Fashion Law Journal’s breakdown of what fashion litigation disputes really look like shows how the courtroom side plays out once negotiation fails.

What Kinds of Deals Does an Entertainment Lawyer Handle?

The bulk of the job is transactional. Common tasks include: assisting with the negotiation process for entertainment contracts and drafting deal and payment agreements regarding bookings or events. An entertainment attorney also helps facilitate negotiation of contracts for talent acquisition and retention, as well as licensing deals, and defends copyrights and intellectual property for their clients.

• Recording, publishing, film and television production agreements
• Licensing and merchandising deals, similar in structure to the licensing work covered in Fashion Law Journal’s guide to fashion licensing deals
• Endorsement and brand ambassador agreements, an area explored in The Brand Ambassador Economy
• Copyright and trademark clearance, registered through bodies such as the U.S. Copyright Office
• Guild and union compliance for actors, writers and directors

Morals clauses fall into this basket too. When a celebrity endorsement contract includes conduct or health provisions, an entertainment lawyer is usually the one who negotiated the wording and the one called on when it is invoked, a dynamic Fashion Law Journal examined in its analysis of the Neutrogena morals clause coverage following Hayden Panettiere’s reported death.

Who Hires an Entertainment Lawyer?

These lawyers work diligently to safeguard their clients’ interests, whether they are artists, producers, directors, writers, or entertainment companies. On the corporate side, an entertainment attorney is a lawyer who specializes in representing the interests of entities within that industry; for example, they often work for television networks, studios, record companies, or publishers. Fashion crosses into this world constantly through modeling, licensing and influencer campaigns, which is one reason the skill set appears on Fashion Law Journal’s list of fashion law career paths.

How Much Does an Entertainment Lawyer Make?

Pay depends heavily on experience, city and whether the lawyer works in-house, at a firm or independently. As of August 2026, the average annual pay for an entertainment attorney in the United States is $121,094 a year, with salaries ranging between $85,500 at the 25th percentile and $132,000 at the 75th percentile, and top earners at the 90th percentile making $169,000 annually. The median wage is reported at $109.4K a year. Separate data from PayScale shows an early career attorney with one to four years of experience earning an average total compensation of $75,000, rising to $115,000 for a mid-career attorney with five to nine years of experience.

Broader ranges cited elsewhere run even wider: the national annual salary for an attorney with the title of entertainment lawyer ranges from $55,000 to $278,000, reflecting the gap between small firm generalists and lawyers who negotiate for A-list clients on a percentage basis rather than a flat salary.

How Do You Become an Entertainment Lawyer?

There is no separate license for the specialty. To become an entertainment lawyer, one must obtain both a bachelor’s and a Juris Doctor (JD) degree. Nearly all states require that JD to come from a school accredited under standards set by the American Bar Association, after which candidates must sit and pass the bar exam in the state where they intend to practice. After graduating from a law program, aspiring lawyers must take and pass the bar exam, and lawyers must pass the bar in the state they want to practice in. Employers also usually prefer that their entertainment lawyers have at least two or three years of industry experience, often gathered at a talent agency, studio business affairs department or entertainment-focused firm before moving into a specialist role. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks broader employment and wage trends for the legal profession through its Occupational Outlook Handbook, though it does not break entertainment law out as its own category.

Entertainment Lawyer vs. Talent Agent: What’s the Difference?

The two roles overlap but are not interchangeable. While agents are skilled at negotiating deals, an entertainment lawyer brings a deeper understanding of the specifics involved and can negotiate those details on your behalf. Agents typically find and pitch the work; lawyers review and negotiate the terms once an offer exists, and they are the ones who show up if a contract dispute heads toward arbitration or court, an area Fashion Law Journal covers in depth in its piece on fashion litigation disputes. In California, this boundary is written into statute: the Talent Agencies Act, enforced by the state Labor Commissioner, restricts who may procure employment for an artist, which is part of why lawyers and agents are treated as distinct roles rather than substitutes for one another. As one industry source puts it, the value of a manager or agent shouldn’t be discounted since both have industry connections and an agent can secure project deals.

FAQ

What does an entertainment lawyer do?

An entertainment lawyer negotiates and drafts contracts for talent, studios, labels and brands, protects copyrights and trademarks, advises on guild and union compliance, and handles disputes through negotiation, arbitration or litigation.

How much does an entertainment lawyer make?

As of August 2026, the national average pay for an entertainment attorney in the United States is about $121,094 a year, with a median around $109,400 and top earners making $169,000 or more, according to ZipRecruiter.

Do you need a law degree to become an entertainment lawyer?

Yes. You need a Juris Doctor from a law school accredited under American Bar Association standards, followed by passing the bar exam in the state where you intend to practice.

What is the difference between an entertainment lawyer and a talent agent?

A talent agent procures job opportunities and is often licensed and regulated under laws like California’s Talent Agencies Act, while an entertainment lawyer negotiates and drafts the legal terms of a deal once it is on the table and can also handle disputes and litigation.

This article is general information for readers interested in entertainment law careers and is not legal advice. Talk to a licensed attorney about your specific situation.

The post What Does an Entertainment Lawyer Do? Deals, Clients, Pay appeared first on Fashion Law Journal.

There is a fact about the shirt you are wearing that almost nobody knows, and once you know it you will not be able to stop testing it on people at parties.

A human being sewed it. Not just supervised a machine that sewed it. Sewed it, with hands, guiding cloth under a needle, making hundreds of small corrections per garment that nobody has ever successfully written down. This is true of the shirt, the jacket, the jeans, the four hundred dollar dress and the four dollar one. It is true of essentially every stitched garment in your wardrobe and in everyone else’s, which is a strange thing to say about the year 2026, when a car can be assembled almost untouched and a warehouse can run in the dark.

We automated the loom in 1785 and rioted about it. We have not automated the seam.

I have been thinking about this since someone told me, correctly, that machines already handle nearly every other stage of making clothes. Textiles are printed by machine. Fabric is spread and cut by machine. Garments are folded, tagged, packed and shipped by machine. The process is mechanised at both ends and human in the middle, like a very expensive sandwich.

The reason is almost embarrassingly physical. Robots are magnificent with rigid things. A car door has one shape and holds it. Fabric has no shape at all until something holds it, and then it takes on a different shape depending on what’s holding it, how fast, in which direction, and whether the material is a stable poplin or a knit jersey that stretches when you look at it. Textiles bunch and stretch as they are worked with, which is a mild way of describing a material that behaves less like a component and more like a small animal.

Human hands solve this without any conscious thought whatsoever. A machinist keeps the fabric organised as it feeds, adjusting tension continuously, and could not tell you how because there is nothing to tell. It is the same category of knowledge as walking downstairs.

The four minutes that never arrived

Which brings me to Little Rock, and to the most confident industrial promise of the last decade.

In 2012, a Georgia Tech spin-off called SoftWear Automation set out to solve exactly this, with help from the university’s technology development centre and a contract with DARPA, which is a sentence that tells you how hard the problem was considered. Their machines, trademarked Sewbots, took the autonomous-vehicle approach: cameras and sensors watched the fabric constantly, recognising distortion and correcting the material in real time as it travelled through the sew head, imitating what a seamstress does without noticing.

In 2017 the company partnered with Tianyuan Garments, one of China’s largest manufacturers, to build a fully automated T-shirt line in Arkansas. The numbers announced were spectacular. Twenty-one production lines. One T-shirt every twenty-two seconds. Twenty-three million shirts a year, destined for Adidas. Roughly four minutes from fabric to finished garment, and a personnel cost of about thirty-three cents per shirt.

Li & Fung, the supply chain giant, signed on. The trade press wrote the obituary of the garment worker. It looked, briefly, entirely settled.

Then nothing happened.

The company’s chief executive, Palaniswamy Rajan, later put it plainly: they ran into technology challenges working with knitted fabrics. His description of the problem is the best sentence in this entire story, because it inverts everything you would assume. A T-shirt, he said, is a simple garment, but a complex fabric.

That is the whole difficulty in eight words. We built machines to handle complex objects made of simple materials. Clothing is the reverse.

The starch problem, or, how to cheat

There is another approach, and it is so charmingly lateral that it deserves more attention than it gets.

A Seattle outfit called Sewbo, founded in 2014 by Jonathan Zornow, decided not to build a robot clever enough to handle limp cloth. Instead, it temporarily stiffens the cloth using a water-soluble thermoplastic, so ordinary off-the-shelf industrial robots can assemble a garment as though they were working with sheet metal. The panels can be moulded and welded and stitched while rigid, and then the stiffener is simply washed out at the end.

It is a beautiful piece of thinking, and it is also not new. Early attempts at automating sewing treated cloth with starch for exactly the same reason, decades ago, and never became commercially viable.

Which is the part of this story that finally made me put my coffee down.

Nobody solved it because nobody had to

The reason automated sewing has failed is only partly technical. The other reason, and I suspect the larger one, is that the industry never needed it badly enough to pay for it.

Apparel runs on margins thin enough to be translucent, with brutal delivery timelines and relentless price pressure, which pushes manufacturers toward the cheapest available labour rather than toward capital investment in unproven machines. Automation is an expensive answer to a question that a wage in Dhaka or Phnom Penh has already answered more cheaply. The clothing industry resisted automation for decades precisely because it could rely on inexpensive labour in developing countries, and a technology only gets solved when somebody is desperate enough to fund the solution.

So the seam survives not because it is sacred but because it is cheap.

This is worth sitting with, because it reframes the sentimental version of this story. The persistence of hand sewing is not proof that the craft is irreplaceable. It is proof that human beings remain, in this one industry, cheaper than the machine that would replace them. That is a different and much colder fact, and it is the one that actually explains your wardrobe.

There are roughly nine million sewers in the ASEAN region alone, and the people who study this worry openly about what happens if that changes quickly rather than slowly. Cambodia and Bangladesh have built substantial portions of their economies on a task that exists in its current form partly because a robot cannot yet do it, and partly because nobody has been sufficiently motivated to make one that can.

The likelier future

If I had to bet, and this is interpretation rather than fact, I do not think the answer arrives as a robot that finally learns to sew. I think it arrives sideways, as garments engineered to need less sewing in the first place. Knitted whole rather than assembled. Bonded rather than stitched. The problem is solved by removing the seam instead of by automating it, which is how most impossible engineering problems eventually get solved.

Until then, the situation stands, and it is genuinely lovely in its way.

Every garment you own passed through somebody’s hands. The most sophisticated supply chain humanity has ever built, moving cotton across four continents and delivering it to your door in two days, still contains, at its exact centre, a person at a machine doing something no computer has managed to learn.

The most advanced object in your wardrobe is the one that had to be touched.

The post Why Robots Still Can’t Sew Your Clothes appeared first on Fashion Law Journal.

The Lanham Act’s Statutory Damages Provision

Federal trademark law lets a designer skip the hardest part of a counterfeiting case entirely. Under 15 U.S.C. § 1117(c), a plaintiff can elect statutory damages instead of proving actual losses, a courtroom exercise that usually requires expensive expert testimony most small brands cannot afford. The range runs from $1,000 to $200,000 per counterfeit mark per type of goods, and climbs as high as $2,000,000 per mark if the court finds the infringement willful. A small designer does not need to show exactly how much revenue a counterfeiter’s knockoffs cost them. They only need to prove the mark was used without permission, a far shorter path to a real settlement than the actual-damages route most first-time plaintiffs assume they are stuck with.

CBP e-Recordation

Registering a trademark with the USPTO opens the door to a second, cheaper layer of protection: recording it with US Customs and Border Protection. The fee runs $190 per class of goods, lasts for the life of the underlying registration, and costs only $80 to renew. Once recorded, CBP officers can detain and seize counterfeit shipments at the port of entry before they ever reach a customer. In fiscal year 2024, CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement seized nearly 33 million counterfeit goods that would have carried a combined retail value over $5.2 billion had they been genuine. Most of that enforcement starts with a designer who took the time to record their mark.

The INFORM Consumers Act

Anonymous sellers on marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy have gotten harder to hide behind since June 27, 2023, when the INFORM Consumers Act took effect. The law forces online marketplaces to collect and verify the identity of any seller who completes 200 or more transactions or $5,000 or more in revenue within a 12-month period, and to disclose that seller’s name and contact information to shoppers. A designer who spots a high-volume counterfeiter no longer has to fight an anonymous storefront. The marketplace already has that seller’s real identity on file, and the FTC and state attorneys general can enforce the disclosure requirement directly against platforms that ignore it. That enforcement authority matters because it puts pressure on the platform itself, not just the individual seller who can otherwise disappear and reopen under a new storefront name the same week.

The Trademark Modernization Act’s Injunction Tools

Getting a court to stop a counterfeiter immediately used to require proving irreparable harm from scratch, an evidentiary burden that favored large companies with resources to spare. The Trademark Modernization Act of 2020 changed that by giving trademark owners a rebuttable presumption of irreparable harm once they show a likelihood of success on the merits. That presumption shifts the burden onto the counterfeiter to prove the designer would not actually be harmed, a much easier position for a small brand trying to secure a fast injunction before a knockoff season sells out.

Criminal Referral Under the Trademark Counterfeiting Act

Not every counterfeiting case belongs in civil court. Large-scale operations, the kind moving thousands of units through organized supply chains, fall under the Trademark Counterfeiting Act of 1984, which makes intentional trafficking in counterfeit goods a federal crime. A first offense carries up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine for an individual, or $1,000,000 for a company, with repeat offenses reaching $5 million and twenty years. A small designer facing an operation clearly beyond their own resources to sue can refer the case to Homeland Security Investigations instead of paying for a civil suit alone.

Where Every Protection Actually Starts

None of these tools work without the same starting point: a federal trademark registration. CBP recordation requires one. Statutory damages under the Lanham Act depend on one. The presumption of irreparable harm attaches to registered marks facing infringement claims, not to a name a designer has simply been using and hoping nobody copies. A designer who launches without registering a name or logo forfeits every protection built into US law for exactly this problem, long before they ever need it, and the cost of registering upfront is a fraction of what any single enforcement action would run without one.

This article is general information for career planning purposes and is not legal advice. Speak with a licensed attorney or your school’s career services office for guidance specific to your situation.

The Lanham Act Explained for Fashion Brands

The post 2026 Guide to Counterfeit Goods Laws for Small Designers appeared first on Fashion Law Journal.

This is where fashion trend forecasting comes into play. The goal is to anticipate the styles, fabrics, and colors that will define a fashion moment so that apparel companies can meet the trend and maximize sales.

Defining Fashion Forecasting 

Broadly, there are two kinds of trend forecasters: 

1. Short-Term: This type of forecasting focuses on short-term, immediate industry changes. It usually relies on sales data, current trends, and real-time insights that brands use to shape collections and respond quickly to consumer demand. Forecasters usually draw on current trends on social media and pop culture, directly using these insights to inform product development. 

Fast-fashion businesses largely benefit from this forecasting model. A popular example is ZARA, which utilises a ‘Speed-to-Market’ strategy, quickly selling products strongly influenced by current trends, reducing reliance on long-term predictions, and allowing it to adjust production based on real-time market feedback.

2. Long-Term: The more traditional type of forecasting, which seeks to predict market trends at least two years into the future. This approach considers major socioeconomic, environmental, and technological shifts that may influence consumers’ expectations, values, and behaviours. 

Larger companies with longer production lead times may largely benefit from these predictions. For example, Nike has developed forecasting software to monitor current and future trends by analysing both contemporary market conditions and historical data. With this in mind, companies like Nike can keep up with rapidly shifting trend cycles while maintaining more sustainable production practices. 

In the fashion industry, trends seem to cycle more rapidly than businesses can keep up, making it difficult to maintain traditional long-term forecasts in an age where speed gives businesses a competitive edge. 

Today, brands largely benefit from a combination of short- and long-term trend forecasting. Systems such as Apparel ERP software help brands plan production timelines and reduce excess waste, while AI-driven prediction platforms let businesses quickly analyse current media trends alongside historical data. However, AI cannot completely replace the industry experience, cultural insights, and intuition contributed by human trend forecasters, ultimately highlighting the need for technological and human collaboration in the forecasting process. 

The Fashion Forecasting Process

Forecasting agencies largely conduct fashion forecasting, and French companies based in Paris have traditionally dominated the profession. For companies to make well-informed decisions, an effective fashion forecast must include: 

1. Market Research – The initial market research stage allows forecasters to understand where the market currently is. The apparel supply chain ultimately seeks to cater to consumer needs; therefore, every forecast must observe current consumer behaviours and how that might inform future trends.

This stage involves extensive analysis and obtaining data: whether at the consumer level by analysing social media activity, sales data and survey responses, or at the industry level through observing runway collections, reading fashion publications, monitoring popular culture trends, and networking with fashion professionals. 

2. Trend Forecasts – After conducting their research, forecasters can then move on to creating their reports. The research data is compiled to indicate either broad (e.g: market shift towards activewear) or narrow (e.g: potentially trending cuts, colours, and styles) predictions for what the market may favour next. 

These forecasts may also include a practical assessment of the feasibility of product designs and how to adjust production processes accordingly. 

3. Industry Review – Beyond consumer demand, forecasters also track new moves by competitors that may influence product development.

4. Colour Forecasting – Fashion brands will pay close attention to the colours they use in upcoming collections, which largely influence their products’ ‘mood’. As such, forecasters must consider different factors and their potential influences on consumer preferences. Colour predictions allow brands to hypothesise which tones and shades may be more favourable in the market in line with certain socioeconomic, environmental, or technological developments.

These predictions are usually made two years in advance, providing fashion brands ample time to rearrange production schedules and processes before initiating product development. These predictions are incredibly significant in the industry, relying on both real-life data and intuition. In fact, they are so imperative to the design process that there are specialist forecasting companies who will sell a limited colour story on a seasonal basis to the fashion and textile industry.

Colour choices are hugely significant for brands, and getting colour trends right is key to crafting collections consumers will connect with and improving a product’s saleability. This element of trend forecasting is one that has recently been extensively researched, with many papers discussing the importance of colour choice when releasing a fashion product in a micro-trend-driven market.

5. Textile Development – Aside from the visual element of connecting with the consumer, brands will often aim to consider the ‘feel’ of a product through the materials and textiles used. Technological breakthroughs play a role in this element of forecasting, as innovations in materials used may increase a product’s functional value (thereby, its consumer appeal). Forecasters must carefully predict certain materials’ appeal and use that to estimate the monetary value a textile may have to the public.

An example is the evolution of workwear to cater to the consumer’s needs: Some modern fabrics are infused with silver ions, copper, triclosan, and other compounds that inhibit bacterial growth, reduce odors, and improve hygiene; they also draw moisture away from the skin to keep athletes dry and comfortable during exercise.

6. Inventory Analysis – Although forecasting is largely dependent on monitoring external factors and trends, forecasters must also consider a brand’s internal trends. Before launching a new collection, fashion companies must also consider how their product might fare alongside existing collections, and whether a new launch dependent on certain trends might boost projected sales. 

7. Economic Forecasts – This final component of fashion trend forecasting is rooted in consumer behaviour, requiring forecasters to consider the global, sociopolitical context that might shape consumer demand, spending habits, and market stability. An effective forecast will thus also include a prediction of a product’s demand based on the market’s economic conditions, informing brands of how successful a certain collection or product might be in the current economy.

The Importance of Fashion Trend Forecasts

In a world where fashion is dominated by micro-trends and rapidly shifting consumer demand, fashion forecasting is more imperative to brands than ever. In response to fast-paced trend cycles, brands will often favour business models reliant on short-term forecasts, or integrate AI systems that can rapidly integrate real-time occurrences into long-term predictions. 

Brands rely heavily on forecasting reports, which are sold and protected as commercial intelligence, when developing their next steps as a brand. However, the rapid movement of trend cycles does beg the question of whether forecasting can even keep up with the constant changes in consumer demands. This begs the question: Are trends predictable? Or are they merely announced?

Author: Vyga Krish

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Fashion Law Journal

Is This the End for Microtrends? A Deep Dive into Fashion’s Ever-Changing Trend Cycle

The post Who Decides Next Season? A Look at the Fashion Forecasting Industry appeared first on Fashion Law Journal.

Now, there is a new place where brands want to be seen; the conversation itself.

OpenAI has rolled out advertisements on ChatGPT Ads in India, with more than 50 brands expected to come on board during the initial launch. The ads are being introduced for logged-in adult users on ChatGPT’s Free and Go plans while paid tiers such as Plus and Pro remain ad-free. OpenAI has also partnered with advertising giants WPP and Omnicom for the Indian rollout. At first glance, this might look like another development in the already crowded digital advertising ecosystem, but for fashion, it could be considerably more important since fashion shopping has always been conversational.

From “Buy This” to “What Should I Buy?”

Think about the way we actually shop for clothes.

We do not always begin with a brand name.

We ask questions.

What should I wear to a wedding in Delhi in December?

Where can I find a good black blazer under ₹5,000?

What kind of bag would work with this outfit?

Is this fabric worth the price?

What should I wear for my first day at a law internship?

Traditionally, brands have tried to intercept these consumers through search engines, social media algorithms and influencer content.

The advent of ChatGPT Ads changes the setting; instead of searching through 10 different websites or scrolling through hundreds of posts, a consumer can simply describe what they want and receive a conversational response. Now, advertisements can potentially enter that environment.

OpenAI says its ads are clearly labelled as sponsored and displayed separately from the AI-generated answer. It has also stated that advertisers do not influence ChatGPT’s answers. This distinction is important as an advertisement appearing alongside an answer is very different from a brand secretly controlling what the AI recommends, but the commercial opportunity is still obvious.

Why Fashion Could Be One of the Biggest Beneficiaries

Fashion is an unusually suitable category for conversational advertising because purchase decisions are rarely based on one factor. A shopper may care about price, colour, fit, occasion, material, trend, brand reputation and even whether something will photograph well.

A person searching “black dress” could be looking for almost anything, but a person telling an AI, “I need a black dress for a semi-formal dinner, under ₹4,000, preferably something I can wear again,” has already revealed considerably more about what they are looking for.

This not only makes the interaction potentially valuable to fashion advertisers but also changes what it means to be a discoverable fashion brand. For years, brands have competed to appear on the first page of Google. Then came Instagram, where brands competed for the algorithm. TikTok and Reels shifted the focus towards virality. In the latest arena, AI introduced another layer: being part of the answer.

The New Fashion Search Engine May Be a Conversation

This is perhaps the most interesting part of the development. Fashion discovery has already moved away from traditional search.

A consumer might discover a dress through a creator’s “get ready with me”, save a screenshot from Pinterest, see a celebrity wearing something similar and then search for alternatives on a shopping platform. AI could bring all of those behaviours into one conversation.

Instead of asking, “Which fashion brands are trending?”, users could ask something far more specific and even potentially receive suggestions based on the context they provide. Brands will not only have to ask, “How do I make someone see my product?” They may increasingly have to ask, “How do I make my brand relevant when someone asks for a product like mine?”

The Trust Question on ChatGPT Ads

The arrival of advertising inside an AI assistant also raises an obvious concern: trust. People often use ChatGPT because they feel they are having a conversation rather than being marketed to; this makes transparency particularly important.

OpenAI says advertisements will be clearly separated from ChatGPT’s responses and will not influence the answers. The company is therefore drawing a line between the information generated by the assistant and the sponsored content displayed alongside it. For fashion brands, this distinction could matter even more.

Fashion recommendations are personal. If someone asks an AI which handbag is worth buying, they are not necessarily looking for an advertisement. They are looking for an opinion. The challenge for brands will be to participate without making the experience feel like another shopping feed because the moment an AI conversation starts feeling like a salesperson who is constantly trying to sell something, some of the trust that made the medium appealing could disappear.

India Is Particularly Interesting

Particularly, the timing of the Indian rollout is significant. As of now, more than 50 brands are expected to begin advertising on ChatGPT in the initial phase, while self-serve access to ChatGPT Ads Manager is scheduled to open in India on September 4, with reported daily budgets starting at ₹725. This will lower the barrier for smaller businesses to experiment with the platform rather than leaving AI advertising exclusively to multinational companies with enormous marketing budgets.

For emerging Indian fashion labels, this could be particularly interesting. A small designer may never be able to compete with a global luxury house on television or billboards. But if AI-driven discovery becomes an important part of shopping behaviour, the question could become less about who can spend the most and more about who can be the most relevant to a particular consumer.

However, this does not imply that traditional fashion advertising is disappearing but simply means there is another place to compete.

Fashion Marketing’s New Algorithm

There was a time when getting noticed meant getting into a magazine.

Then it meant getting onto Google, then Instagram, then TikTok and ultimately, brands may have to think about AI.

ChatGPT’s entry into India’s advertising market signals a larger shift in how consumers could discover products: from scrolling through advertisements to actively describing what they want and receiving recommendations in return.

For fashion, that shift could be especially powerful because the industry has always depended on aspiration, discovery and personalisation. The interesting question is no longer whether AI will become another advertising platform but whether consumers will eventually start treating it as part of their shopping journey.

And if they do, fashion brands will have to learn a new skill: not just how to make people stop scrolling but how to become the brand they think of when they start asking.

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