Let’s dish: Racing to the bottom of fashion’s gossip problem

One problem with filling the vacuum by breaking stories ahead of time — maybe when you’re assured by a trusted source that a designer is interviewing for a position, or in contract talks but hasn’t yet signed — is that plans go awry. Houses change their minds at the last minute, and so do designers. I still feel grimy after last year hassling the office of a house I was absolutely sure had signed a big-name designer, but which turned out to have shut down negotiations close to the point of agreement over a non-negotiable sticking point. Shamefully, I had repeated the rumour I had mistaken as fact to several friends: rightly, they still tease me about it. Lesson learnt.

Pumping out to publication putative fashion appointments — Jacquemus to Chanel? Galliano to Dior/Fendi/Chanel/Somewhere else? — and then dumping them when they turn out to be false is fashion’s equivalent of speculating on memecoin; you might make a short-term gain, but someone somewhere will lose out. Yes, it’s a dog-eat-dog world, but as one creative director tells me: “These leaks and rumours weigh on the psychology and well-being of the teams, and sometimes they truly affect decisions of management. They only add to this weird thing right now in a market that gets bored so quickly, where the moment someone does anything remotely interesting people feel the need for them to be taken away from the place they have done that interesting thing in order to try and repeat it somewhere else.” An executive adds: “A sudden wave of noise about a new creative director, or a new CEO, or even the sale or takeover of a house doesn’t just affect psychology, it can also affect the value of the company in the market — even when the noise turns out to be a false flag. Who benefits from that?”

Serving up content for the spectator sport of fashion industry speculation has become a fruitful angle to pursue, because there are a lot of positions open and because the audience is there for it. And it seems pretty hypocritical for anyone in the fashion industry — an industry where the customer is always right — to carp about that. Still, says one senior executive: “The endless speculation and gossip is unfair to everyone involved. It’s demeaning, and it’s counterproductive. Just because it’s popular doesn’t make it good, and it’s certainly not good for all the people involved at the houses and in the teams. Because fashion isn’t a reality show, it’s a reality. There is always going to be change in an industry that is predicated on change, and at the moment we are going through a particularly high rate of change. But the level of speculation and gossip we are seeing now? It’s bad for business.”

Or as Thom Browne said after his most recent show: “With everything changing so much I feel like designers are not treated so well… I think it’s time for each and every designer to really be looked at, and appreciated for what they did.”

George Harrison sang that gossip is “the Devil’s radio”. Right now in fashion, that radio is turned up to full volume, and it’s the soundtrack to fashion eating itself. Or as another creative director commented this week: “When we’re focused on the personnel more than we’re focused on the product, then that’s a problem.”

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