2024 Was The Year We Finally Became Disillusioned With Quiet Luxury – Here’s Why

An intense fascination with the lives of the wealthy elite is nothing new (F Scott Fitzgerald and Jane Austen were mining the mores of the upper classes for material long before The Real Housewives franchise existed), but in the face of an increasingly chaotic news cycle and an unstable economic backdrop, consumers were, more than ever, drawn to the plush fantasyland that quiet luxury inhabits, and the sense of ease and comfort that it represents.

“The streetwear and sneaker boom we’d seen over the previous decade finally slowed down, as people returned to work and socialising and let go of their hoodies and trainers, to invest in more sophisticated clothes,” explains Lucy Maguire, senior trends editor at Vogue Business. “Quality replaced logos as the new status symbol. Fashion brands were shooting for the top spending, high luxury customers, who tend to prefer ‘stealth wealth’, high quality garments. Suddenly, every label was showing quiet luxury looks and pushing the aesthetic. So consumers were getting it from all sides!”

Of course, the problem with “getting it from all sides” is that you’ll inevitably hit a saturation point. “Brands [had] started to play it safe,” Maguire continues. “The economic situation has had a huge impact on collections over the last couple of years, and we saw a surge in quiet luxury minimalism, tailoring and coats on the runway, and fewer showpieces. It got to a point where a couple of seasons ago, the shows were almost indistinguishable from each other.” Plus, when even Shein introduces a quiet luxury edit, you know a disconnect has occurred. As the Business of Fashion put it in April 2023: “To the standard-bearers of quiet luxury, mass-market options will likely never actually compare.” That same month, online searches for quiet luxury spiked by 1,230 per cent, according to fashion analytics platform, Data But Make It Fashion, but by June it had peaked, and it has been falling ever since.

Fast-forward to January 2024, and John Galliano elected to stage Maison Margiela’s spring couture show in a dingy alleyway beneath Paris’s Pont d’Alexandre III bridge. Inspired by Brassai’s 1920s and ’30s portraits of Paris after dark, what unfolded was an immersive and theatrical spectacle, and lauded as a lesson in sartorial world-building. Eerie, subversive and sensual, guests, livestreamers and Vogue editors alike lost their minds in real time. There was nothing “quiet” about it.

Maison Margiela Artisanal spring 2024.

Maison Margiela Artisanal spring 2024.

“Galliano made such an all-out stand for the value of extreme creativity in a time when, all around, daring in fashion is at a low ebb… he spoke with the authenticity of his own voice, the voice we’ve known for so long – yet more powerfully and more skillfully than ever. There are plenty of lessons in that which might resonate across the industry.” Sarah Mower said in her Vogue Runway review.