Fashion has always sold fantasy. What it used to have, alongside the fantasy, was someone paid to interrupt the sales pitch.
The critic sat between the clothes and the consumer—not to announce that everything was fabulous, but to ask whether it actually was. Was the collection new, or merely new to its press release? Did the construction justify the price? Was the reference intelligently reworked or simply lifted from someone else’s archive? Was the designer moving fashion forward, revisiting their own greatest hits or hoping that dramatic lighting might distract us from a rather ordinary coat?
This was never a flawless system. Fashion magazines have depended on fashion advertising since the nineteenth century, and the relationship between the industry and the media has always involved a certain amount of smiling across dinner tables. Academic research traces the commercial model of fashion publishing back to the late 1800s, when advertising became central to magazine economics. It also explains why stronger evaluative criticism historically found more room in newspapers and general-interest titles, which were less reliant on fashion houses for their survival.
So, no, there was no golden age in which every fashion editor lived in a brand-free bedsit, declined all gifts and survived entirely on integrity and instant coffee. The conflict was always there. The difference was that criticism still existed as a job in its own right.
L-R: Suzy Menkes, Cathy Horyn, Robin Givhan
Suzy Menkes spent 26 years reviewing fashion for the International Herald Tribune, bringing historical memory and an international perspective to the collections. Cathy Horyn became only the second person to hold the title of fashion critic at The New York Times. Robin Givhan won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for criticism for writing that turned clothing into a way of examining culture, politics and power—the only fashion writer to have received the honour.
These writers were there to observe, interpret and judge, not to preserve everyone’s feelings.
Promotion Is Not the Same as Judgement
Today, fashion has more commentary than at any point in history. There are influencer reactions, rankings, unboxings, first impressions, outfit breakdowns, front-row diaries and urgent reports that a celebrity has worn trousers.
The contemporary fashion personality may be expected to attend the show, interview the designer, wear the clothes, film the hotel suite, post the gifted bag, tag the beauty sponsor, share an affiliate link and later provide an apparently impartial opinion on the collection. The same person can be the advertisement, the publication, the model, the retailer and the review.
That is an extraordinary amount of work for one ring light.
Illustration by Isabela Durão | Used for illustrative purposes only
It is not just my shower thoughts doing the talking, the data suggests the same. IAB projected US creator advertising spend at $37 billion in 2025, up 26 per cent in a year and growing almost four times faster than the wider media market. Nearly half of the advertisers surveyed considered creators a must-buy channel.
These partnerships help determine which designers feel relevant, which bags acquire status and which aesthetic becomes unavoidable long before the wider public has decided whether it actually likes it.
That influence is precisely what brands are paying for. Now there is nothing wrong with creators and ambassadors earning very good money. Fashion is a business, marketing is work and audiences are intelligent enough to understand that campaigns exist. The problem appears when advertising borrows the language and authority of independent opinion.
Everything becomes the best.
The best black T-shirt. The best new handbag. The collection of the season. A future classic, despite having existed for twelve working days.
“Luxury” now seems to cover anything with neutral packaging, a serif typeface and an adventurous price tag. “Trendy” often means several people received the same item during the same week. “Iconic” has been used so generously that actual icons may wish to seek legal advice.
When every release receives the language of a triumph, genuinely excellent work becomes harder to recognise. Praise loses its weight when disagreement was never on the table.
Critique Gives Taste Some Structure
Part of the reason critique has faded from fashion’s daily conversation is that criticism is now frequently viewed as cruelty, thanks to cancel culture. To question a collection is to be negative. To dislike a look is to be a hater. To interrogate a brand’s claims around craft, heritage or cultural inspiration is to be “missing the vision”.
But taste does not form through unanimous applause. It develops through context, comparison and the occasional well-supported disagreement.
A strong commentator can explain why a silhouette matters, where an embroidery technique originated or why a designer’s apparent new direction looks suspiciously familiar. They can admire the craft while questioning the concept. They can recognise commercial appeal without confusing sales with creative achievement.
They can also say that something is fine. Fashion desperately needs the word fine. Some collections are neither disastrous nor revolutionary.
Criticism restores proportion.
It also protects fashion from its own marketing language. When a collection invokes rebellion, heritage, womanhood, sustainability or traditional craft, someone should be willing to check whether those ideas exist in the clothes or mainly in the show notes.
The French-Tunisian critic behind Reviewed by Osa brings a MENA perspective to global runway coverage. His reviews combine fashion history, close observation and personality.
An Arabic-speaking commentator and creative director making global fashion discourse feel relevant to a GCC audience. From runway shifts to luxury culture and celebrity style, he brings context to the trends already filling the feed.
Formerly Vogue India’s fashion features director, Bandana places clothing within wider conversations about labour, indigenous craft and sustainability. Her work looks beyond the finished garment to the people, systems and histories behind it.
A newer digital voice with a research-first approach to designers, collections and Indian craft. Mehrotra makes fashion history and industry analysis accessible without flattening either into bite-sized trivia.
The West and the Wider Digital Fashion Conversation
One of digital fashion criticism’s most recognisable voices, Luke Meagher combines long-form video, runway analysis and archival references with the energy of a very well-informed group chat. His work helped prove that serious criticism could find a large audience outside traditional media.
Besovic uses memes, reactions and visual commentary to make runway criticism accessible without stripping away its history. His work is fun, fast and often devastatingly accurate, but never careless about the clothes.
A fashion educator who judges garments through materials, construction, care labels, longevity and price. Her practical approach gives consumers the tools to look beyond branding and ask whether the product itself justifies the promise.
The creator behind Data, But Make It Fashion uses search behaviour and social data to examine how trends actually rise and fall. Her work separates genuine shifts in taste from the styles that only appear dominant because they have taken over the algorithm.
Laiba Babar is a Dubai-based journalist and the Editor of Soigné Middle East. Her bylines span Time Out, GQ Middle East, Cosmopolitan Middle East, and Grazia Middle East, shaping the region’s evolving dialogue between fashion, beauty, lifestyle and culture. At Soigné, she is intent on widening the lens for modest dressers, shaping a fashion landscape as diverse and inclusive as the region itself.
Fashion Is Losing Its Most Powerful Ally—Critique
Fashion has always sold fantasy. What it used to have, alongside the fantasy, was someone paid to interrupt the sales pitch.
The critic sat between the clothes and the consumer—not to announce that everything was fabulous, but to ask whether it actually was. Was the collection new, or merely new to its press release? Did the construction justify the price? Was the reference intelligently reworked or simply lifted from someone else’s archive? Was the designer moving fashion forward, revisiting their own greatest hits or hoping that dramatic lighting might distract us from a rather ordinary coat?
This was never a flawless system. Fashion magazines have depended on fashion advertising since the nineteenth century, and the relationship between the industry and the media has always involved a certain amount of smiling across dinner tables. Academic research traces the commercial model of fashion publishing back to the late 1800s, when advertising became central to magazine economics. It also explains why stronger evaluative criticism historically found more room in newspapers and general-interest titles, which were less reliant on fashion houses for their survival.
So, no, there was no golden age in which every fashion editor lived in a brand-free bedsit, declined all gifts and survived entirely on integrity and instant coffee. The conflict was always there. The difference was that criticism still existed as a job in its own right.
Suzy Menkes spent 26 years reviewing fashion for the International Herald Tribune, bringing historical memory and an international perspective to the collections. Cathy Horyn became only the second person to hold the title of fashion critic at The New York Times. Robin Givhan won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for criticism for writing that turned clothing into a way of examining culture, politics and power—the only fashion writer to have received the honour.
These writers were there to observe, interpret and judge, not to preserve everyone’s feelings.
Promotion Is Not the Same as Judgement
Today, fashion has more commentary than at any point in history. There are influencer reactions, rankings, unboxings, first impressions, outfit breakdowns, front-row diaries and urgent reports that a celebrity has worn trousers.
The contemporary fashion personality may be expected to attend the show, interview the designer, wear the clothes, film the hotel suite, post the gifted bag, tag the beauty sponsor, share an affiliate link and later provide an apparently impartial opinion on the collection. The same person can be the advertisement, the publication, the model, the retailer and the review.
That is an extraordinary amount of work for one ring light.
It is not just my shower thoughts doing the talking, the data suggests the same. IAB projected US creator advertising spend at $37 billion in 2025, up 26 per cent in a year and growing almost four times faster than the wider media market. Nearly half of the advertisers surveyed considered creators a must-buy channel.
These partnerships help determine which designers feel relevant, which bags acquire status and which aesthetic becomes unavoidable long before the wider public has decided whether it actually likes it.
That influence is precisely what brands are paying for. Now there is nothing wrong with creators and ambassadors earning very good money. Fashion is a business, marketing is work and audiences are intelligent enough to understand that campaigns exist. The problem appears when advertising borrows the language and authority of independent opinion.
Everything becomes the best.
The best black T-shirt. The best new handbag. The collection of the season. A future classic, despite having existed for twelve working days.
“Luxury” now seems to cover anything with neutral packaging, a serif typeface and an adventurous price tag. “Trendy” often means several people received the same item during the same week. “Iconic” has been used so generously that actual icons may wish to seek legal advice.
When every release receives the language of a triumph, genuinely excellent work becomes harder to recognise. Praise loses its weight when disagreement was never on the table.
Critique Gives Taste Some Structure
Part of the reason critique has faded from fashion’s daily conversation is that criticism is now frequently viewed as cruelty, thanks to cancel culture. To question a collection is to be negative. To dislike a look is to be a hater. To interrogate a brand’s claims around craft, heritage or cultural inspiration is to be “missing the vision”.
But taste does not form through unanimous applause. It develops through context, comparison and the occasional well-supported disagreement.
A strong commentator can explain why a silhouette matters, where an embroidery technique originated or why a designer’s apparent new direction looks suspiciously familiar. They can admire the craft while questioning the concept. They can recognise commercial appeal without confusing sales with creative achievement.
They can also say that something is fine. Fashion desperately needs the word fine. Some collections are neither disastrous nor revolutionary.
Criticism restores proportion.
It also protects fashion from its own marketing language. When a collection invokes rebellion, heritage, womanhood, sustainability or traditional craft, someone should be willing to check whether those ideas exist in the clothes or mainly in the show notes.
The Commentators to Watch Today
The Middle East
Hafsa Lodi
The Dubai-based journalist and author of Modesty: A Fashion Paradox writes at the meeting point of clothing, faith, feminism and identity.
Osama Chabbi
The French-Tunisian critic behind Reviewed by Osa brings a MENA perspective to global runway coverage. His reviews combine fashion history, close observation and personality.
Nora AlBesher
A Saudi critic and fashion editor whose commentary brings regional context to international and Arab fashion.
Adham Alsaiaari
An Arabic-speaking commentator and creative director making global fashion discourse feel relevant to a GCC audience. From runway shifts to luxury culture and celebrity style, he brings context to the trends already filling the feed.
India
Bandana Tewari
Formerly Vogue India’s fashion features director, Bandana places clothing within wider conversations about labour, indigenous craft and sustainability. Her work looks beyond the finished garment to the people, systems and histories behind it.
Rishija Mehrotra
A newer digital voice with a research-first approach to designers, collections and Indian craft. Mehrotra makes fashion history and industry analysis accessible without flattening either into bite-sized trivia.
The West and the Wider Digital Fashion Conversation
Luke Meagher
One of digital fashion criticism’s most recognisable voices, Luke Meagher combines long-form video, runway analysis and archival references with the energy of a very well-informed group chat. His work helped prove that serious criticism could find a large audience outside traditional media.
Hanan Besovic
Besovic uses memes, reactions and visual commentary to make runway criticism accessible without stripping away its history. His work is fun, fast and often devastatingly accurate, but never careless about the clothes.
Andrea Cheong
A fashion educator who judges garments through materials, construction, care labels, longevity and price. Her practical approach gives consumers the tools to look beyond branding and ask whether the product itself justifies the promise.
Madé Lapuerta / @databutmakeitfashion
The creator behind Data, But Make It Fashion uses search behaviour and social data to examine how trends actually rise and fall. Her work separates genuine shifts in taste from the styles that only appear dominant because they have taken over the algorithm.
Laiba Babar
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