Naked Brands: The Future of Fashion

Author: David Perell URL: https://www.perell.com/blog/future-of-fashion One-line: Part of the Naked Brands series — the internet dissolves fashion’s gatekeepers, so individual personalities, not central authorities, drive style, and people increasingly follow people rather than brands.

Key claims

• Fashion is a language of identity — historically it communicated power, affluence, class, gender, culture, and descent (Shakespeare used clothing to signal status; the founding fathers used it to signal political unrest).
• The medium is the message (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964): societies are shaped more by the nature of their media than by the content communicated. McLuhan argued print bred conformity.
• Electric technologies create diversity, not conformity. McLuhan predicted a “global village” with no borders — paradoxically producing more variety in creativity, personality, and clothing styles.
• Distribution is free, participation is global, communication is instant. Without physical-space constraints, fashion’s gatekeepers lose their grip; influence decentralizes and style stops being governed by a central point of view.
• Individual personalities replace gatekeepers. Modern fashion is less about following trends and fitting in, more about crafting your own aesthetic, customization, and standing out. Identity is defined by taste, interests, and lifestyle rather than race, heritage, or nationality. Digital Creators
• Virgil Abloh epitomizes the Naked Brands phenomenon — designer, influencer, and brand in one, building cult fandom (the “physical form of the internet”) by chronicling his ethos on Instagram so fans feel emotionally and financially invested. 1,000 True Fans
• People don’t follow brands, they follow people — “and in the future, there won’t be a difference.”

Notable quotes

“On social media, people don’t follow brands. They follow people. And in the future, there won’t be a difference.”

“The important thing in today’s world of fashion is to appear to be wearing a popular fabric.” — Marshall McLuhan

“Through brands, we speak the language of fashion. Clothing is a conversation, style is a vocabulary, and brands are a dialect.”

How it connects

• Naked Brands — the parent essay; this is the fashion installment of the series.
• Marshall McLuhan — the medium-is-the-message engine behind the conformity→diversity flip.
• 1,000 True Fans / Digital Creators — performative, founder-led fandom as the digital-era driver of style.

Verbatim source notes — restored from Roam, 2026-09-21

• Today, in this age of hyper-individualism, people want to curate their own image. Social media doubles as a canvas for people to express themselves and craft their own eclectic style.
• Virgil’s lifestyle is as fashionable as his clothing. In a recent interview, he described himself as the “physical form of the internet.” Globetrotting between mega cities, he builds hype through Instagram, and connects with fans along the way. Virgil doesn’t call any single place home. Rather, he’s a self-proclaimed global citizen.
• As a result of this diversity, modern fashion is less about following the trends and more about crafting your own aesthetic. It’s less about fitting in, and more about standing out; less about wearing standard outfits, and more about customization and personality.
• Designer Virgil Abloh, the founder of Off-White, a popular streetwear brand with a cult-like following, epitomizes this Naked Brands phenomenon.This new streetwear category has inspired cultish fandom through its unique blend of art, sports, and subcultures, and only recently has it become high fashion. Abloh is a designer, influencer, and a brand — all in one package. He launched Off-White in 2013, at the age of 33, and in 2015, he was the only American finalist for the prestigious LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers. Brand Cults
• But today, fashion has a diverse blend of influences, from the exclusive spectacles of Fashion Week to rural tribal dwellers with few resources beyond spare textile scraps, a boundless imagination, and a sparse internet connection, which they use to communicate with the world.
• Historically, fashion has communicated power, affluence, class, gender, culture, descent, and more. It has also appeared within our most popular stories. Shakespeare had an intimate understanding of fashion. In his dramas of power politics among Medieval and Renaissance kings, Shakespeare used clothing to signal the personality and social status of characters. America’s founding fathers used clothing to demonstrate their political unrest, a clear message geared towards feudal classes during the French Revolution.
• By chronicling his artistic ethos on Instagram, and offering fans a behind-the-scenes peek at what it takes to build a brand, Virgil’s success feels at once achievable, and yet aspirational. As a result, his fans are emotionally and financially invested in his pursuits, as if they’re leading the charge themselves. 1,000 True Fans
• Societies have been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication… All media works over us completely… and leaves no part of us untouched, unaffected, and unaltered. The medium is the message.” In essence, the ways we communicate shape the way society functions, oftentimes without us realizing.
• Rather, the most successful brands have their own belief system, a distinctive vocabulary, and a cult following to boot. Some, even make us feel closer to God. That, though, is best achieved by an iconic founder with an uplifting story and an unmistakable point of view, like Abloh. Brand Cults
• Distribution is free, participation is global, and communication is instant.
• The fashion shifts brought on by the internet are complex, but they can be summarized: while the pre-internet world was limited by the constraints of physical space, the digital bits and bytes that underlie the internet have no such limitations.
• In his book, Understanding Media, released in 1964, Marshall McLuhan observed: “The important thing in today’s world of fashion is to appear to be wearing a popular fabric.” McLuhan, universally regarded as the father of media communications and a prophet of the information age, argued that human conformity was the inevitable byproduct of print technologies such as books and newspapers.
• Up to the late 20th century, we’ve defined human identity by race, heritage, religion, social status, and nationality. On the internet, beginning with the street style blog, we define identity differently — through a vortex of different signals, such as taste, interests, and lifestyle.