Is Fashion Less Creative…Or Are We All Just Overextended?

Photo courtesy of Fashionista.

Many reviews of this year’s Met Gala shared a similar sentiment: the fashion felt flat.

Not necessarily bad. Not devoid of beauty. But restrained. Safer. Less emotionally charged in what is meant to be one of fashion’s grandest celebrations of self-expression, fantasy, and artistic risk. In an industry built on imagination, the night somehow felt oddly practical or even commercial.

Is fashion starting to feel overextended?

Photos of Jonathan Anderson’s Dior Cruise 26 Collection, show in Los Angeles May 13th (Photos courtesy of the Coveteur)

The timing of the gala falls within one of fashion’s most intense stretches of the year. Within the same stretch of weeks, the Cannes Film Festival has kicked off, Cruise collections are underway: Chanel just presented two weeks ago, Dior two days ago, and Louis Vuitton is set to present on May 20th. Fashion now moves in a seemingly constant state of output: resort, menswear, womenswear, couture, collaborations, campaigns, celebrity dressing, social content, events: an endless train of visibility.

Creative directors are no longer simply designing collections. They are managing cultural ecosystems.

And while there are still houses producing truly distinct worlds — Schiaparelli being perhaps one of the strongest examples in recent years, where fantasy still feels handcrafted — many collections and red carpet appearances are beginning to blur together. Not because talent has disappeared, but because spaciousness has.

Images of Daniel Roseberry for Schiaparelli (Photos courtesy of Vogue France, Harper’s Bazaar, CFDA, Le Monde, and Tatler)

AI was supposed to make life easier. Instead, it seems to have made expectation faster.

We are now expected to produce more, respond quicker, remain constantly visible, and somehow still create work that feels emotionally resonant. Fashion is hardly alone in this. The entire creative economy seems caught in the same loop: more output, less pause.

And perhaps that pause matters more than we think.

Razor clamshell dress by Alexander McQueen (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

There is a long romantic tradition in fashion and art of celebrating creativity born from restriction. Alexander McQueen famously built early collections from unconventional materials and transformed scraps into poetry. Young artists painted on newspaper when they couldn’t afford canvas. Entire artistic movements emerged from limitation rather than abundance. Restriction, in many ways, can sharpen imagination. When possibilities narrow, the mind often becomes more inventive within the boundaries.

But there is a difference between creative restriction and depletion.

A designer experimenting with unconventional materials out of curiosity is very different from a creative team being asked to deliver six collections a year while navigating shrinking budgets, constant online commentary, unstable economies, and impossible timelines. At some point, limitation stops feeling playful and starts feeling heavy.

Perhaps that is the real tension modern fashion is facing. We often say constraints make us more creative, and sometimes they do. Too much choice can dilute vision. Too much abundance can make work feel directionless. But too little time, too little rest, and too little room to think eventually begin to flatten imagination altogether.

It may also explain why fashion increasingly feels less emotionally distinct. Why red carpets feel safer. Why spectacle is replacing experimentation. Why collections sometimes feel created for immediate digital consumption or solely for commercial viability. In a culture where visibility has become constant, creativity risks becoming reactive instead of reflective.

Images from Iris van Herpen and Robert Wun (Photos courtesy of Dezeen and Numéro)

And yet, audiences are still hungry for dream worlds. You can feel it in the response whenever a designer truly commits to one. We still crave surprise. Fantasy. Wit. Tension. The feeling that someone made something not because it would perform well online, but because they had a feeling to express.

Maybe the greatest creativity has never come from having everything. Some of fashion’s most beautiful ideas were born from limitation, discipline, and invention within boundaries.

But creativity also cannot endlessly exist in survival mode.

There is a difference between discipline and depletion. Between experimentation and exhaustion. Between creative constraint and creative suffocation.

Fashion, and perhaps all of us, may be starting to confuse the two.

Perhaps the antidote is not more efficiency. Maybe what fashion is missing is not talent, resources, or even originality, but the breathing room to feel something again.

Thanks so much for reading! I means a lot to me, x.