4 Best Resources to Understand Fashion for Those Who Don’t Get It, but Just Can’t Look Away

Ten years ago, my son entered the fashion world as a designer for a high-end clothing brand in New York City. Ten years later, he was appointed as the Creative Director of Schiaparelli in Paris, one of the top luxury fashion houses in the world. As his success has grown, so has my appreciation and understanding of the fashion world on its impact.

Recently, I asked Daniel to help me understand and appreciate the world of fashion, where it comes from, the impact it is making, why its influence is so far-reaching, and what might be coming next. Here is what he said:

1. Watch this Documentary: The Kingdom of Dreams is a beautifully produced four-part series that showed how four genius-level designers, with very human flaws and weaknesses, unknowingly created the current luxury fashion world and made one man, Bernard Arnault, the richest man in the world.

2. Read The Business of Fashion: This online magazine analyzes global fashion trends, and it removes all doubt that fashion touches every aspect of every person’s everyday life. The current value of the fashion world is 1/7 Trillion and it is growing at about 6% annually. BoF is the CNN of Fashion.

3. Watch the Youth Scene: Behemoth institutions, like Vogue magazine, have always tried to create fashion culture. But today, they are just trying to capture it and understand it. The Internet and social media freely allow ideas, trends, and products to spring up overnight from anywhere.

4. Three Cities: The fashion world may seem like a free-for-all. But people should watch for what is coming out of three different cities. The tone and trends for fashion are being set by the youth culture in Brooklyn, Austin, and Portland. There, Gen Z is blending and bending gender, race, body, and traditional definitions of beauty to create new looks. It seems scary to older generations, but for the youth, it is freeing.

I have attended more fashion shows in New York and Paris than I ever imagined. I’ve learned much from these massively creative people trying to create wearable art and functional clothing. Not all of it makes sense to me. Not all of it is beautiful to me — or is intended to be beautiful at all. But it is a world that has a tremendous reach across all cultures around the globe.