The superfluous as a global industry

Posted on: 19 April 2026

Britain has been watching its high streets empty for the better part of a decade. Debenhams went in 2021, after 118 years. Topshop followed. BHS before them. The explanation offered each time was essentially the same: online shopping, rising costs, changing habits. Structural shift. The implication being that these were isolated casualties of a transition, not symptoms of something more fundamental.

Then H&M announced it would close 160 stores by the end of 2026. The same week, Kering published its 2025 results: revenues down 13% for the full year, Gucci down 22%. In January, Saks Global, which had just completed a 2.7 billion dollar merger combining Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman, filed for bankruptcy. Over the course of 2025, Forever 21 liquidated all 354 of its remaining stores, its second bankruptcy in six years. LVMH, the largest luxury conglomerate in the world, closed 2025 with revenues down 5%.

This is no longer a story about a single retailer misjudging the moment, or a British high street with particular structural problems. Fast fashion is contracting, luxury is contracting, the infrastructure built to distribute luxury goods is filing for bankruptcy protection. Different parts of the market, apparently different logic, the same failure arriving at the same time.

The comfortable explanation is that consumers have less money. There is some truth in this. But it does not hold as the primary cause: if the problem were straightforwardly economic, genuine luxury should be holding. Its customer base does not feel interest rate cycles in the same way. Yet it is not holding. The alternative explanation, the one repeated most insistently, is that retail has moved online. Also partially true, and also insufficient: Shein is online, and Shein is growing. The difference between Shein and H&M is not the channel.

The mechanism that most analyses miss is this: the clothing industry, from fast fashion to the upper floors of Bond Street, never really sold a product. It sold an emotion. And it then proceeded, through two opposite but symmetrical errors, to destroy the very thing it was actually offering.

Fast fashion sold novelty. The proposition was simple: there is always something new to wear, always a trend to catch before anyone else does. Zara built an empire on this in the 1990s, collapsing the traditional two-season cycle into something closer to fifty annual rotations. H&M followed. The problem is that once novelty becomes the product, you need escalating doses to maintain the same effect. It is a pharmacological logic: the first dose works, then you need progressively larger ones.

Shein understood before anyone else that the constraint was not price but velocity. It does not sell clothes so much as the dopamine loop of infinite scroll: thousands of new styles daily, a stream of discovery that never runs dry. Against that, H&M's seasonal offering looks like a mail-order catalogue from 1987. The model requires waiting, and waiting has become incompatible with the consumption rhythm that the industry itself trained its customers to expect. The structural irony is exact: fast fashion created the consumer who is now destroying it.

At the other end of the market, luxury made the inverse error with the same result. Exclusivity is the real product in luxury, not the material, not the craftsmanship, not even the design. A Gucci bag is worth what it is worth because not everyone has one. When LVMH and Kering decided they wanted to grow, they grew by democratising access: fragrances, accessories, entry-level products designed to broaden the base. It worked, for years, and produced extraordinary numbers. It also gradually eroded the one thing that made the product desirable. A bag seen everywhere is no longer a signal. It is simply an expensive bag. Luxury sold scarcity while quietly multiplying it, and at some point the market stopped believing the story.

There is a third mechanism worth naming, because it concerns brand loyalty, or rather its absence. The common observation is that consumers are less loyal than they used to be. This is true, but the reason is not cynicism or information overload. It is that a new brand offers exactly the same thing as an established one, with the addition of one sensation the established brand can no longer provide: the experience of discovery. Nobody buys Shein because it is better than H&M. They buy it because purchasing something they did not know existed last week produces a feeling that buying from H&M for the tenth time simply does not. Loyalty was never to the product. It was to the sensation, and the sensation expires at the moment of purchase.

This explains an apparent paradox. The brands in the deepest difficulty are often those that invested most heavily in building recognition, consistency, a coherent image. Everything that marketing theory instructs. The problem is that in a market saturated with novelty, familiarity is not an asset. It is evidence that the emotion has been spent. The customer who walks past an H&M on Oxford Street and immediately knows what they will find inside is also the customer who has no particular reason to go in.

What we are looking at, then, is an entire industry managing the consequences of decades of individually rational decisions that produced a collectively irrational outcome. Every choice made sense in isolation: accelerate the cycles, lower the prices, open access to luxury, multiply the touchpoints. The system that emerged is one in which consumer attention has been compressed to the point where no traditional brand can hold it long enough to build genuine loyalty.

This is not a strategic failure at the level of individual companies. It is a design failure at the level of the system itself: an industry that optimised relentlessly for volume growth and in doing so destroyed the value that made the volume possible.

What comes next is genuinely uncertain. The brands most likely to survive are probably those capable of creating real scarcity rather than performed scarcity, or those that can make the act of purchase mean something beyond the acquisition of an object. Not trend, not novelty: something a customer feels is theirs, something worth returning for. That is a considerably smaller, slower and less scalable model than the one the industry has been running for thirty years.

Whether this constitutes a crisis or a necessary correction depends entirely on where you are standing. For those who built their position on hyperproduction, it is the former. For those who resisted the temptation to grow at any cost, it may be the moment when the market begins rewarding substance again.

Or, and this is the reading I find most interesting, it is neither. It is simply the natural end of an industry that constructed its own demand from nothing, persuaded the world that the superfluous was necessary, and is now discovering that nothing, sold for long enough, eventually discloses its nature.