Fashion Is What Dares to Begin
On new brands, emerging designers and the reality of real risk
There is something undeniably exciting about the big high fashion houses. The scale, the history, routine that structures entire calendars and cities. The shows you grew up watching. The names you already know how to pronounce without thinking. You walk into those stores and see collections with context and expectations. You compare them to the last one. To the one five years ago. To the one that made you fall in love in the first place. That familiarity is powerful and beautiful. It gives fashion its backbone. We love it, we really do.
However, the narrative that treats new brands like noise is tiering. It’s just a side effect of social media, like something childish and temporary. As if creativity only counts once it has archives, just because it did not come from a house founded a hundred years ago. As if starting small is a flaw and not the only way anything meaningful has ever started.
Yes social media changed the speed. Yes it made things faster. Yes it sometimes rewards the wrong things. It amplifies shortcuts and spectacle. However, it also opened doors that were shut before. It gave visibility to people who would never have had access to Paris or Milan or New York. People without investors without connections without family names. It allowed someone with an idea and discipline and an insane amount of belief to put something into the world without waiting to be chosen and somehow that gets framed as cheap. As unserious. As disposable. Just another one of those brands that will disappear as fast as it appeared.
A small brand is not small because the work is small. It is small because the team is small. Sometimes it is literally one person. One person being creative director, designer, producer, accountant marketer and customer service at the same time. Designing, producing, sourcing, packing, shipping, posting ,answering, stressing about rent, stressing about taxes, stressing about whether this month will work out. One person carrying the entire emotional and financial risk. It is savings poured into fabric. It is nights without sleep. It is conversations with yourself about whether you are insane for even trying. It is love and fear and stubbornness mixed together.
Of course a tiny brand does not have the same depth as a house built in the nineteen twenties. How could it. Depth takes time. Time takes money. Money takes stability. Stability is a luxury. That does not mean the work is shallow. It means it is early. It means you are witnessing something in its most fragile state and that should make it more precious not less.
We live in a time where having one job is often not enough. Where two jobs still barely cover rent. Where people turn their creativity into work not because it is trendy but because it is necessary. Because if you have a gift and an idea and the discipline to push it into reality you are going to try. Even if there is no guarantee it will last. It feels easy to romanticize legacy and dismiss beginnings. Easy to say real storytelling takes time while ignoring the fact that every story starts somewhere. Fashion houses demand loyalty now because they earned it over decades. But that loyalty once looked exactly like belief. It is easy to praise loyalty when loyalty itself was once just someone believing in something before it was proven. New brands are asking for that chance.
Watch the big shows. Obsess over high fashion collections. Argue about creative directors. We will do it with you. But also go to your friends exhibition. Go to the tiny popup in a space that barely fits ten people. Buy one piece, comment on the post, show up when it is quiet, show up when it becomes louder. Fashion is not only what survives. It is what dares to begin and beginning deserves respect.