Author:
David - Lead Buyer & Curator at ZOO Fashions
Expertise: Designer Intent, Shifting Luxury Paradigms and Investment Curation. With over two decades of securing ZOO’s Day 1 brand accounts, David curates collections by identifying the designers who dictate the cultural zeitgeist, bridging the gap between high-fashion tailoring and street-level subversion.
Luxury was once defined, in part, by the things you couldn't have. It wasn’t so much that you couldn’t afford them, but moreover because they were simply difficult to find, to access, to understand without knowing where to look. Products carried a certain mystique, and air of the intangible and discovering it therefore meant just that much more.
Roll forward to 2026 and that world is unrecognisable. Today, luxury is everywhere. On our screens, in our feeds, on the backs of celebrities, strewn across the high street and malls and increasingly reproduced at every price point imaginable. Collections now arrive at a relentless pace, the once coveted collaborations are now ten a penny and generate their own news cycles. Products sell out in minutes, appear on resale platforms at inflated prices and are quickly followed by something else demanding our attention.
The luxury industry, once renowned for its quiet authority has become exceptionally good at creating constant desire, but the question now being posed, is whether it is equally good at sustaining it?
The ZOO team have spent more than four decades watching fashion evolve, designers challenge convention, customers discovering new ideas and observing the market turn those ideas into commercial opportunities. We have participated in that process, benefited from it and, over time, witnessed its contradictions. Let’s not get it twisted, we are not advocating against commercial success. After all fashion is a business, designers need customers, retailers need to sell products and great collections deserve to find an audience. But there is a valid debate to be had about what happens when the pursuit of volume begins to compromise the very qualities that made luxury desirable in the first place.
I believe we are approaching the end of one particular model of luxury. Not the end of luxury itself, but the end of our unquestioning faith in fast luxury, and herein this point the difference most certainly matters.
For much of ZOO's early history, discovering designer fashion required a certain amount of knowledge. Knowing the designers, understanding the references and appreciating the differences between products that, to the untrained eye, might have appeared similar. Scarcity played a big part as well as price, craftsmanship, reputation and the authority of the houses themselves.
Even back in the heyday, the luxury industry was burgeoning with a desire for growth and the commercial opportunity was obvious: take something desirable, introduce it to a larger audience and turn cultural recognition into sales. During the early 2000s, music television helped accelerate that process. Hip-hop, celebrity culture and MTV brought designer branding into living rooms across the world. The logo was no longer confined to the traditional luxury customer as it became part of a global visual language.
Nelly's ‘Dilemma’, released in 2002, belongs to that wider cultural moment, when music videos helped make fashion and celebrity inseparable in the public imagination, with Gucci's monogram-heavy aesthetic a big part of this expanding visual language. The logo could travel far beyond the boutique, carried by the music, the celebrity and popular culture to a younger audience who wanted a piece of that world.
The monogram mutated from a design detail to a declaration. That one recognisable item that meant you didn't necessarily need an entire designer wardrobe to participate in the culture. This realisation was the genesis of a commercial behemoth as younger customers could now enter a designer's world through a single product, while the brand gained exposure far beyond its traditional clientele. The accessibility was exciting and introduced customers to designers they might never otherwise have discovered. However, on the flip side the power of the symbol began to outweigh the substance, desire of ownership undermining the desire to understand it and with that luxury started moving towards a different kind of value.
Being seen with it was worth more than the product itself…
By the mid-2010s, the rules of men's luxury were being re-written at a rapid pace. Tailoring was no longer the unquestioned centre of the conversation. The trainer had moved from the sports field into the designer boutique, and it was carrying a very different kind of cultural authority.
Balenciaga's Arena leather trainer helped establish the new luxury-sneaker proposition. The Race Runner followed a more technical, athletic direction, whilst Valentino brought its own interpretation through the Rockrunner, with camouflage and bold colourways. These weren't simply products that happened to sell well. They were engineered and marketed to represent a genuine shift in how men dressed and how luxury was worn. The street had well and truly entered the luxury wardrobe, and luxury had discovered that the street could be extraordinarily profitable.
Then came Yeezy.
A seminal moment. Ye's adidas partnership took the relationship between anticipation, scarcity and desirability to another level. The Yeezy Boost 350 arrived in 2015, the Turtle Dove colourway in June, followed by Pirate Black and Moonrock later that year. The earliest releases were difficult to secure, and resale prices reflected a level of demand that extended well beyond the original retail transaction. Every sneaker became an event before it became a product in the conventional sense. Early visibility, celebrity wear, limited availability and the promise of the next colourway all helped build anticipation.
But the longer story is even more interesting. Fast forward to 2022, the Turtle Dove had returned, and the broader Yeezy business had expanded far beyond the scarcity that defined its earliest releases. The original proposition of the trainer everyone wanted but relatively few could get had evolved into a humungous commercial machine.
Ye had long spoken about making Yeezy more accessible and the wider availability of the product demonstrated that ambition, although the eventual termination of the adidas partnership in October 2022 brought that chapter to an abrupt end. The lesson however is not that Yeezy failed because more people could buy it, but that scarcity, when it becomes the main source of desirability, creates a difficult question: what happens when the product is no longer difficult to acquire?
Virgil Abloh understood the power of anticipation from a different direction. By 2015, Off-White had become one of the most visible new names in fashion. Its imagery, graphic language and cultural associations were everywhere in the conversation. Yet, from the perspective of a buyer trying to secure the product, the level of visibility could feel far ahead of the availability on the rails. Virgil was building a world around the product through image, reference, association and the force of his own cultural position. In this landscape the anticipation could travel faster than the clothes themselves and that was part of the genius. He made sure that fashion was no longer confined to the runway or the shop floor, so that it existed in the space between what people saw, what they wanted and what they could actually get.
These designers were not simply copying a commercial formula, in fact many were creating something genuinely new. They were changing the language of luxury, making it more immediate, more street-led and more relevant to a generation that had grown up with music videos, celebrity culture and the internet.
The problem with this success is that the market is always watching, learning and eventually copying. The formula was successful and more brands wanted a piece of it. The recognisable sneaker, the graphic jersey, the logo tee, the limited collaboration: each became a repeatable commercial opportunity, attainable in a new way, but also collectable.
A customer who might never have considered a conventional luxury purchase could sacrifice other spending to own one pair of trainers, one jersey or one T-shirt. These pieces offered an accessible entry into a designer's world, visible markers of belonging, and once the product became collectable, it acquired a second life beyond the original retail transaction.
This rise of luxury streetwear coincided with the growth of resale culture. A product that was difficult to buy at retail could acquire a second life, sometimes at a substantial premium.
The Louis Vuitton x Supreme collaboration in 2017 captured the scale of this convergence. Luxury and streetwear met at the highest level, queues formed, products became highly sought after and resale prices reflected a demand that extended well beyond the original retail transaction. Product was no longer just product, it was an object of acquisition.
Supreme understood the power of controlled availability, artificial scarcity and community long before luxury houses fully embraced the mechanics of streetwear. Its identity was built around a particular cultural world, rather than simply a promise of expensive goods. Demand was constantly high and through this pipeline the wider market saw the chance to monetise the scarcity.
A customer could buy an item because they loved it, because they understood its cultural relevance, because they wanted to wear it or increasingly because they believed somebody else would pay more for it later and the market increasingly rewarded the latter.
Resale premium became a measure of desirability and Sell-out became proof of success even when the product itself was not especially scarce in any meaningful cultural sense. An artificially created market conceptualised and then realised via the boardroom. I am not suggesting that every limited release was cynical or that every collaboration lacked creative merit. Some of the most interesting work of the past two decades came from the meeting of different design languages, technical expertise and cultural communities.
But a shift had taken place and the question was no longer only whether a product was good but now whether it was available, whether it was difficult to obtain and whether owning it conferred a particular advantage.
As a manor retailer of these brands through this period we benefited from that demand. We were selling the products customers wanted, and the appetite for certain brands and pieces was extraordinary. There is no point pretending otherwise. However the commercial success can make a business comfortable with a model long after the reasons for its success have begun to change and that is where the challenge lies. When do you recognising the moment when a cultural movement becomes a commercial formula?
Every fashion movement eventually reaches a point of saturation - whether it’s the familiar silhouette, the ubiquitous graphic or the over proliferation of identical brand identity and the hype drop formula was no different. Balenciaga demand at ZOO softened. Amiri jeans became harder to secure for our customers. The appetite that had seemed relentless was no longer behaving in the same way.
Luxury prices had risen substantially as customers were being asked to pay more, while the constant stream of campaigns, collaborations and new releases made it increasingly difficult for any individual product to hold attention. The industry had become adept at generating the next moment whilst toying with the risk that it could make any of these moments meaningfully last.
The tone of conversation within the luxury sector turned towards value, customer fatigue and the consequences of overexposure, a bitter reminder for even the most prestigious of names that constant visibility does not guarantee enduring desirability. There is a limit to how often a customer can be told that something is essential before they begin to question the claim and there is a limit to how many times a brand can repeat its own codes before those codes stop feeling distinctive.
The bubble doesn't necessarily burst in one dramatic moment. Sometimes it simply loses air. A customer chooses not to buy, a previously coveted product becomes easier to find, a familiar logo loses some of its power. The next release arrives, but the excitement is no longer quite the same.
In amongst this turbulence, not every brand had followed suit, with certain brands retaining a recognisable identity and a more disciplined relationship with their product. Saint Laurent, Prada and Moncler remained important reference points for us. Their appeal was not dependent on every product becoming a viral moment and their strongest pieces continued to be defined by a clear design language, a recognisable point of view and demand that could outlast a single launch.
Stone Island offers a useful example. Since joining the Moncler Group, with the acquisition completed in March 2021, the brand has continued to build around its own language of textile research, garment treatment and technical design. It’s specialised lines and projects, from Ghost and Marina to Denim Research, give the customer more to discover than a logo alone.
The important distinction is not simply that some products are harder to obtain. It is that scarcity can follow from the character of the product, the scale of a release or the particular logic of a collection, rather than serving as the sole justification for its desirability. Luxury doesn't need every item to be rare. It needs its products to have a reason to exist.
Fashion needs newness. Without it, there is no evolution, no experimentation and no reason for designers to challenge themselves. The problem is not the arrival of a new collection each season but the pressure from within the industry to make every collection an event. The contemporary luxury customer is surrounded by a continuous stream of launches, campaigns, celebrity endorsements, limited editions and collaborations. Every product competes for the same attention, and every brand is encouraged to create the next moment of urgency.
Business of Fashion has examined the consequences of this always-on marketing culture, including the risk that repeated celebrity partnerships and collaborations can make brands appear increasingly interchangeable and there in lies the paradox.
The more everyone tries to stand out in the same way, the harder it becomes to distinguish one from another. If every product is paraded as essential then the word loses its meaning. We have to ask whether the pace of fashion is now serving creativity, or whether creativity is being asked to serve the pace of fashion, because there is a difference between a designer creating something that needs to exist and a business needing something new to sell.
The two can most definitely work together and at their best, they do, but when commercial pressure dictates the creative calendar, the product risks becoming an answer to a sales target rather than a question posed by a designer and that is the point where luxury begins to lose its authority.
At ZOO, the buying process has never been simply about identifying the next product that will sell. Commerciality of course matters, but we need to understand the customer, the market, the price and the opportunity.
The real work comes in understanding why a product matters before the market has finished deciding and this requires looking beyond the logo, understanding the designer's intention, the fabric, the construction, the silhouette, the reference and the place the product occupies within a wider collection.
It means asking whether a collaboration brings two creative worlds together in a meaningful way, or whether it simply puts two names on the same product and most importantly it means knowing when a familiar formula has run its course.
Since 1982, we have watched designers and movements emerge, become established, change direction and sometimes disappear. We have seen the market reward originality and then attempt to reproduce it at scale. We have also seen products whose significance extends far beyond the season in which they were released. The latest release does not automatically possess the greatest value. And the oldest product is not automatically the most interesting. The point is to understand what you are looking at and that is the difference between buying fashion and curating it.
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I don't believe the answer is a return to some imagined golden age when luxury was pure, exclusive and untouched by commerce. To be honest, that world never really existed. Fashion has always been commercial. with a desire to reach an audience, and retailers have always needed to sell. New technologies, new distribution channels and new audiences have always changed the way products are discovered.
We should also not dismiss the genuine creativity that emerged from the convergence of luxury and streetwear. The past two decades gave us remarkable products, new silhouettes and collaborations that challenged the old boundaries of fashion. and there are genuine aspects from this period that deserve to be carried through.
I believe the next phase belongs to brands and retailers that can offer more than constant newness. It belongs to designers with a recognisable point of view and products that justify their existence. To customers who understand what they are buying and to retailers who can explain why a particular piece deserves a place in someone's wardrobe.
It also belongs to a more considered approach to the launch itself. Within our buying portfolio hard launch dates across many adidas collaborations give a release a defined moment. Our work with collections such as Wales Bonner and Willy Chavarria demonstrates how a partnership can bring two creative languages together while respecting the identity of each.
With Rick Owens' Springblade arriving in November 2026, followed by ready-to-wear in early 2027, another chapter of the adidas collaboration is set to unfold. It is an intriguing proposition because it brings Owens' radical design language into a sportswear context without requiring the collaboration to abandon the identity that makes his work distinctive.
These partnerships have the potential to remain desirable because there is an idea behind them, not merely a date in the calendar. The hard launch date establishes when the customer can buy the product. It does not, by itself, establish why they should want it. That is the work of the designer, and the work of the curator.
Stone Island provides a complementary demonstration with specialised lines and projects that continue to give the brand a framework for technical exploration and distinct product identities. The release calendar matters, but so does the research, the fabric, the treatment and the knowledge accumulated across the brand's history.
These are the kinds of distinctions that can rebuild desirability without reducing it to a countdown clock.
Luxury when all said and done does not need to become less accessible It just needs to become more meaningful.
The customer should be able to discover a designer without having to navigate a closed world. They should be able to buy a product because they love it, rather than because they fear missing out, whilst being able to understand why something costs what it does, what makes it different and whether it deserves their investment. That requires better products, clearer creative identities and a more honest relationship between price and value.
It also requires curation. When everything is available everywhere at the same time then selection matters. When every brand is competing for attention, judgement matters. And when the market is flooded with information, the ability to distinguish what is important from what is merely visible becomes increasingly valuable.
This is where independent retail can make a difference and not by pretending to stand outside the commercial system, but by bringing genuine knowledge and perspective into it. Selecting with intention, respecting the identity of the designers we work with and giving customers the context to make informed decisions.
We have spent decades doing that at ZOO. Our responsibility now is to keep doing it in a market that moves faster than ever.
The death of fast luxury, if it comes, will not be marked by the disappearance of designer trainers, collaborations or limited releases, it will come when customers stop accepting speed as a substitute for substance.
Luxury will survive, it is a hardy, robust animal, but the brands that endure will be those that understand the difference between selling more and meaning more.
Find what matters. Understand why it matters. And never confuse the next thing with the right thing.
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