Fashion’s Boring-and-Expensive Era Is Over

Not long ago, designer Jonathan Anderson attended a music festival where he surveyed the crowd and thought, Now this is where all the fashion has been lurking.

“I saw more people dressing more in high fashion than actually what was happening in fashion,” said Anderson , who designs the British clothing brand JW Anderson, as well as LVMH’s Loewe.

The free expression of these festival goers stuck with Anderson as it clashed with the risk-shy attitude that has guided much of luxury fashion in recent years. “I wonder,” said Anderson this past weekend in Milan, “has fashion become so conservative whereas what’s happening out there is actually way more avant-garde?”

Just a couple of years ago in Milan, “quiet luxury” was on the tip of everyone’s tongue. This collocation was a simplistic shorthand for where fashion was going: pricey but prim; light on logos but heavy on the wallet; all cashmere everything in gray, beige, navy.

Fashion is a creative industry and designers can only cup their mouths for so long. At the latest edition of Milan men’s fashion week, shouts in the form of new, notice-me clothes broke out from the runways.

“People want uniqueness, maybe they want something which is challenging somehow,” said Anderson, speaking after the latest JW Anderson show, which was widely held up as the most successful collection of a muddled Milanese sprint.

Highlights included winsome cardigans with children’s book depictions of London terrace houses, leather jackets contorted by ski-slope-like hems and a kitschy sweater showing a smirking pint of Guinness—an upmarket riff on a Dublin tourist souvenir.

The day after Anderson’s show, came the surprise online release of a bulging 171-outfit lookbook from Valentino, the first stab from the label’s new creative director Alessandro Michele, who helped lift Gucci to a more than $10-billion brand before leaving in 2022.

At Gucci, Michele ushered in a maximalist fashion moment, and based on this initial showing, his taste for theatrics is intact. Against a backdrop of winter-mint curtains, feather-haired models (often wearing gigundo nerd glasses and hoops of pearls) sported floppy dog-ear ties, Kermit-green suits and tapestry prints. Flipping through the collection, all the tired but fitting Michele comparisons came rushing back: Wes Anderson films, kooky grandmothers and leopard-clad psych-rock bands.

Model on the runway at the Gucci fashion show during Milan Fashion Week Menswear Spring/Summer 2025 held at Triennale di Milano on June 17, 2024 in Milan, Italy. (Photo by Aitor Rosas Sune/WWD via Getty Images)

Valentino, which is part-owned by Kering, also made its commercial intentions clear by sending out 93 close-up photos spotlighting easy-to-buy accessories like V-logoed sandals and rectangular handbags.

Notably, Sabato de Sarno, the still newish creative director who replaced Michele at Gucci, seemed to be shrugging off his own restraints. Neither De Sarno nor François-Henri Pinault, CEO of Gucci parent company Kering, spoke to the press after the show, but the collection was a departure from the brand’s recent strategy of focusing on classic, trend-agnostic pieces that cater to older, wealthier clients.

De Sarno’s surf-inspired offering bounded between skin-revealing mesh polo shirts, skimpy thigh-high shorts and camp-collared shirts with blooming hibiscus flowers prints. It would be hard to imagine much of it on anyone over 29. (Actor Paul Mescal, 28, was already in the front row in a pair of those shorty shorts.)

Youthful abandon was the theme at Gucci’s mightiest Milanese competitor, Prada. “Sometimes when you get older you start to overthink a lot and you limit yourself,” said Raf Simons, who is co-creative of the brand with Miuccia Prada , the grand doyenne of Italian fashion. “When you are young, you just go. We like that spirit.”

Models wore navel-exposing shrunken sweaters and pre-wrinkled sportcoats, a seeming nod to teens who haven’t yet learned the wonders of ironing. A lurid palette of hot pink and electric blue spoke to juvenile fashion experimentation.

Throughout the long weekend in Milan, the feeling settled in that this new, shoutier tone was a necessary course correction during an unsteady period for the apparel industry, and really, Europe at large.

The chatter of the front row centred on this month’s European Union elections which saw a surge in support for right-wing candidates, catching pundits and leaders like French President Emmanuel Macron by surprise. Inflation also remains stubbornly high.

Pressingly, for the fashion world, some of the world’s largest luxury labels have been reporting a glut of unsold products and a dearth of shoppers. Past strategies don’t seem to be working and one could tell that brands were ready to try anything to spur shoppers to spend a bit more.

Even at Zegna, a label so synonymous with quiet luxury that the cast of “Succession” wore it on that money-mad show, the clothes were more conspicuous. In between its Learjet-bound sotto voce suits, one found vivacious coral patterned jackets in blue and yellow.

“For sure playing more with colors and prints, we had fun,” said Zegna’s artistic director Alessandro Sartori following his show. “It’s a sense of freedom that I wanted to express.”

Luke Michel has already lived through two technology overhauls in his career, first desktop publishing in the 1980s and online publishing later on. But AI? He’s had enough.

So when his employer, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, made an early-retirement offer to some staff last year, the 68-year-old content strategist decided to speed up his exit. Before, he had expected to work a couple more years.

“The time and energy you have to devote to learning a whole new vocabulary and a whole new skill set, it wasn’t worth it,” he said.

It isn’t that he’s shunning artificial intelligence—he is learning Spanish with the help of Anthropic’s Claude. But, at this point, he’s less than eager to endure all the ways the technology promises to upend work.

“I just want to use it for my own purposes and not someone else’s,” he said.

After rising for decades and then hovering around 40% in the 2010s, the share of Americans over 55 years old in the workforce has slipped to 37.2%, the lowest level in more than 20 years.

The financial cushion of rising home equity and stock-market returns is driving some of the decline, economists and retirement advisers say.

But for some older professionals, money is only part of the equation.

They say they don’t want to spend the last years of their career going through the tumult of AI adoption, which has brought new tools, new expectations and a lot of uncertainty.

Many people retire when key elements of their work lives are disrupted at once, said Robert Laura , co-founder of the Retirement Coaches Association and an expert on the psychology of retirement.

“Maybe their autonomy is being challenged or changed, their friends are leaving the workplace, or they disagree with the company’s direction,” he said.

“When two or three of these things show up, that’s when people start to opt out.”

“AI is a big one,” he adds. “It disrupts their autonomy, their professionalism.”

Michel, whose work required overseeing and strategizing on website content, has been here before.

When desktop publishing arrived in the 1980s, he was a graphic designer using triangles and rubber cement.

The internet’s arrival changed everything again. Both developments required new skills, and he was energized by the challenge of learning alongside colleagues and peers.

It felt different this time around. “Your battery doesn’t hold a charge as long as it used to,” he said.

He would rather spend his energy volunteering, making art, going to operas and chairing the Council on Aging in North Andover, Mass., where he lives.

In an AARP survey last summer of 5,000 people 50 and over, 25% of those who planned to retire sooner than expected counted work stress and burnout as factors.

About half of those retired said they had left work at least partly because they had the financial security to do so.

In general, older Americans are less likely than younger counterparts to use AI, research shows.

About 30% of people from ages 30 to 49 said they used ChatGPT on the job, nearly double the share of those 50 and older, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey of more than 5,000 adults.

Baby boomers and members of Generation X also experienced the sharpest declines in confidence using AI technology, according to a ManpowerGroup survey of more than 13,900 workers in 19 countries.

“We as employers aren’t doing a good enough job saying (to older workers), we value the skills that you already have, so much so that we want to invest in you to help you do your job better,” says Becky Frankiewicz , ManpowerGroup’s chief strategy officer.

Jennifer Kerns’s misgivings about AI contributed to her departure last month from GitHub, where the 60-year-old worked as a program manager.

Coming from a family of artists, she said, it offends her that AI models train on the creative work of people who aren’t compensated for their intellectual property. And she worries about AI’s effect on people’s critical-thinking skills.

So she was dismayed when GitHub, a Microsoft-owned hosting service for software projects, began investing heavily in AI products and expecting employees to incorporate AI into much of their work. In employee-engagement surveys, the company had begun asking them to rate their AI usage on a scale of 1 to 5.

When it came time to write reports and reviews, colleagues would suggest that she use ChatGPT.

“I’d be like, ‘I have no idea how to use that and I have no interest in using AI to write anything for me,’” she said.

It would have been more prudent to work until she was closer to Medicare eligibility, she said. But by waiting until her children were out of college and some of her stock grants had vested, the math worked.

Her first act as a nonworking person: a solo trip to Scotland, where she took a darning workshop and learned how to repair sweaters.

“The opposite of AI,” she said.

Employers already under pressure to cut workers—such as in the tech industry—may welcome some of these retirements, said Gad Levanon , chief economist at Burning Glass Institute, which studies labor-market data.

“The more people retire, the fewer they have to let go,” he said.

Some of the savviest tech users are also balking at sticking around for the AI upheaval. Terry Grimm, who worked in IT for 40 years, retired from his senior software consultant role at 65 last May.

His firm had just been acquired by a bigger firm, which meant learning and integrating the parent company’s AI and other tech tools into his work.

Until then, Grimm expected he might work a couple more years, though he felt that he probably had enough saved to retire.

“I just got to the point where I was spending 40 hours at work and then 20 hours training and studying,” said Grimm, who has since moved with his wife from the Dallas area to a housing development on a golf course in El Dorado, Ark.

“I’m like, ‘I’ll let the younger guys do this.’”

Fashion’s Boring-and-Expensive Era Is Over

From Gucci to Valentino, designers have a new ethos: Fun

Their careers spanned the personal computing, internet and smartphone waves. But some older workers see AI’s arrival as the cue to exit.