What Fashion Can Teach Hollywood About Its Midlife Crisis

Fashion and Hollywood built their empires on brand mystique and audience obsession. Both printed money during their golden years. Now, they both have growth charts like EKG flatlines.

Luxury fashion was clocking double-digit growth every year. Today it's at 2-4%. LVMH hit single digits. Kering watched Gucci sales crater 20% before desperately throwing Sabato De Sarno at the problem. Still profitable, still prestigious, but the rocket fuel tank is empty.

Hollywood rode the streaming wave until the subscribers stopped showing up and started churning. Disney's streaming losses only narrowed after they axed half the staff and called it 'content rationalization.' Warner Bros literally threw Batgirl in the trash for a tax write-off. Everyone except Netflix is prepping to merge, and/or pivot, pretending this was always the plan.

The money machine just doesn't work anymore.

The Creative Director Shuffle

Fashion houses are playing designer musical chairs. Michele jumps to Valentino, Chanel and Bottega swap creative heads within days, even Donatella stepped down after 27 years at Versace. It's chaos at Fashion Week.

Hollywood's doing the same. Disney fired its own CEO and begged Bob Iger to come back. Twice. Paramount replaced Bakish with a committee, because nothing says vision like three people sharing one steering wheel. Hand the keys of that blockbuster to that hot indie director. Chase the TikTok creator with 10 million followers. Throw stuff at the wall. See what sticks.

It's not about vision or strategy. It's about signaling. Look, we hired someone young! We get it! We're relevant! But by the time that Hulu show drops, the cool kid you hired is already yesterday's news.

The Audience Problem

Luxury brands built their entire thing on scarcity and heritage. Handwoven in Tuscany. Three-year waitlist. Your grandmother's Hermès. But Gen Z doesn't care about your Tuscan artisans if your supply chain is sketchy. They're on Depop buying vintage. They're watching 'deinfluencing' videos. Unimpressed by your three-year waitlist when thrift finds get more likes.

Same problem in Hollywood. The town keeps making shows for an audience that no longer exists. The Boomers finally figured out YouTube. Gen X is watching Anime and Korean dramas. Adults are listening to podcasts. Squid Game crushed everything Hollywood put out that year. Gen Z is creating their own stories with memes. TikTok creators are redefining what a story even is, sixty seconds, no third act required. H-Wood legacy isn't an asset. It's baggage.

Everyone's Netflix Now

The line between product and story is gone. Every brand wants to be a media company, every studio wants to be a lifestyle brand.

Saint Laurent's bankrolling Almodóvar. Gucci's opening museums. Balmain's in Fortnite. Louis Vuitton hired Pharrell—not for his design chops, but for his Instagram reach. Fashion houses are hiring directors the way studios used to hire stars.

Hollywood's chasing fashion collabs and lifestyle brands like they've just discovered merchandising. Warner Bros partnered with Loewe on House of the Dragon costumes. Netflix launched branded merch and pop-up stores. A24 acts more like a lifestyle brand than a studio. Zendaya's not just an actress anymore, she's a Louis Vuitton campaign and an On Running creative director. The talent doesn't even know which industry they work for anymore.

I remember when people thought Heroes webisodes and comics were revolutionary transmedia. Now every luxury brand has a cinematic universe, and every streamer wants to be Supreme. The product isn't the product. The brand story is the product.

Money Talks, Creativity Walks

Here's the inconvenient truth: when the growth stops, the art suffers.

Disney slashed $2 billion in content spending while LVMH dropped $100 million on campaigns that disappeared in three days. Fashion houses are cutting runway experimentation but burning cash on social campaigns. Hollywood's canceling shows, shrinking scribble rooms, turning every green light yellow. American Born Chinese, Renegade Nell, and Shardlake were dead after one season. Good reviews don't pay for Wall Street's growth targets.

All under the guise of "optimizing for efficiency" while "maintaining creative excellence." Translation: do more with less until we figure out what the hell we're doing. When money gets tight, the bold bets are the first to die.

The Reckoning

This isn't just fashion and Hollywood having midlife crises. This is what happens when industries built on cultural dominance are forced to grok that culture doesn't live where it used to. Back in the day, cool was dictated from the top down. Fashion weeks. Pilot season. Big gatekeepers deciding what mattered.

Now cool comes from everywhere and nowhere. A random kid in Seoul. A meme that lasts three days. Some TikTok fashion critic called @hautelemode has more influence than Anna Wintour’s replacement. Ryan Trahan gets more views than network TV. A Discord server you've never heard of. The legacy institutions that once defined taste are desperately chasing relevance in a world where relevance is calibrated by the attention span of a goldfish.

What This Means for Scribblers

If you're scribbling scripts, games, brand stories, or even fortune cookies - maybe this convergence is your opportunity. While the OG players are having their identity crisis, you can:

Build without permission. You don't need a studio deal or LVMH backing. You need a camera phone and something to say. Nathan Fielder and Boots Riley built followings outside the system. Telfar and Marine Serre proved brand intimacy beats legacy scale.

Connect without scale. A thousand true fans on Patreon beats a million passive Nielsen viewers.

Create without committees. The best stuff happening right now is coming from outsider individuals with strong POVs, not focus group rooms.

Fashion houses are trying to be media companies. Studios are trying to be lifestyle brands. Everyone's trying to be everything. Maybe they should focus on being the best version of themselves.

Scribbler's Takeaway

I've been in rooms where the mandate was to reverse-engineer cool. Track the demographics. Study the psychographics. Create content for quadrants. But the stuff that connected with audiences was never built that way. Alias, Lost, Heroes, and Hannibal weren't focus-grouped into existence. They came from bold creators supported by bold executives.

The fashion world's learning what Hollywood's learning and it’s what the music industry already learned: you can't manufacture authenticity. You can't committee your way to cultural relevance. Nor focus-group your way out of irrelevance.

While they're still trading Pokemon cards in the C-suites, maybe the rest of us can start drawing our own deck. It’s a radical idea, I know. But at this point, what option do we really have?