Fashion and the addiction of evaporation

This week I attended a book launch and, chatting with other fashion workers, I realized how much we are overwhelmed by the chronic impermanence of this industry. Between one story and another, one of the members — more than twenty years of career — confessed that she still is surprised by the speed of changes, by the way everything, from a currency crisis to a tragedy on the other side of the world, finds its way onto the runway. It's not her naivety: it's the most honest symptom of a market that never learned — or never wanted to learn — to stand firm.

The word volatility comes from the Latin volatilis, “that flies”, “unstable”. The modern concept of measuring price fluctuations in financial markets was introduced by the French mathematician Louis Bachelier, in his 1900 thesis,

Théorie de la Spéculation, where he coined expressions such as “instability coefficient” to mathematically describe something that had until then been treated only as a speculator’s intuition. By definition, volatility measures the frequency and intensity with which the price of an asset — or the value of any quantity — fluctuates over a given period. It indicates the degree of variation and uncertainty: in financial markets, it quantifies risk; in physics and chemistry, it describes how easily a substance evaporates.

It is from this double meaning — risk and evaporation — that fashion appropriates, almost always without acknowledging it. Financial volatility becomes an alibi for political volatility: the same logic that justifies selling more than one collection per week also authorizes emptying entire agendas as soon as they cease to be profitable. Diversity is the most recent and most cynical example — and now there are enough numbers to prove it, not just feel.

The murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis, when police officer Derek Chauvin kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes, sparked international outcry and fueled the largest Black Lives Matter mobilization cycle in decades. In response, fashion companies made public commitments to the Black community that went beyond affirmative‑action hiring: they promised training, career pathways and—perhaps the most fragile promise of all—genuine Black representation at executive decision‑making tables. Malcolm X had already identified the structural problem behind this intermittency: “As Americans, we will not relinquish any right guaranteed by the Constitution. The history of unpunished violence against our people clearly shows that we must be prepared to defend ourselves, or we will remain defenseless, at the mercy of the cruelty of racist groups.” Written decades before any corporate diversity report, the sentence anticipates exactly what we have seen: rights and representation treated as revocable concessions rather than earned gains. The racist system did not disappear under the pressure of 2020—it merely refined itself, fortified itself and waited for the next retrenchment window. That window arrived with Donald Trump’s second term, which began on January 20, 2025, and whose executive orders against DEI policies accelerated a movement that had already been taking shape since the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action in higher education. In less than a year the result was a parade of roll‑backs: Meta ended its diversity programs citing changes in the “legal and political landscape”; Goldman Sachs removed the diversity and inclusion section from its annual report; Paramount eliminated diverse‑hiring targets; Bank of America replaced the word “diversity” with “talent” and “opportunity” in its documents; Disney rebranded its internal “Diversity & Inclusion” metric as “Talent Strategy.” Target went further: it not only ended its triennial DEI goals but also the Racial Equity Action and Change program—a five‑year initiative aimed at the career development of Black employees—whose termination, the company said, “had already been planned for 2025.” Planned. The word is revealing: the commitment was time‑bound from the start, merely awaiting a political climate that would make its withdrawal publicly acceptable. The irony is that the numbers never demanded this retreat.

A 2023 McKinsey study already showed that companies with more diverse leadership were 39% more likely to financially outperform their rivals. The retreat is not a response to any data—it is a response to political pressure, and fashion, historically, is the sector that realigns most quickly to any pressure, be it aesthetic, financial or ideological.

In Brazil, the gesture is more subdued, but the chasm it exposes is wider. The Fashion Revolution Brazil transparency report, released in November 2024, measured precisely the distance between window‑display and structure: Black women hold 54% of entry‑level positions in the sector—trainees, interns, the base of the chain—but only 2% of senior leadership roles. White men occupy 77% of those roles; white women, 17%; Black men, 4%. This is in a country where 56.1% of the population self‑identifies as Black or brown, according to IBGE (2022). The SPFW racial quota—established in 2020, mandating that 50% of models be Black, Afro‑descendant or Indigenous in the shows, under penalty of exclusion from future editions—remains formally in force until the 30‑year anniversary edition in 2025. The runway, therefore, meets the quota. The boardroom, does not. And it is precisely this mismatch that allows the national industry to survive the same cycle of depletion observed abroad without having to publicly acknowledge any retreat: when diversity has always been more a showcase than governance, there is no program to cancel—it is only a casting, gradually shrinking back.

In parallel, and not by chance, the industry's response to diverse bodies came via the pharmacological route. According to consulting firm Circana, about 23% of American households were already using GLP‑1 drugs by September 2025 — four percentage points higher than the previous year — and 80% of those users already expect to need new clothes due to size changes. The market responded at the same speed: Impact Analytics data show that between 2022 and 2024 the share of women's tops in sizes PP and P rose from 35% to 37%, while sizes G and above fell from 33% to 31%. Specialty plus‑size retailers felt the blow: Torrid recorded a 14.3% drop in sales in the last fiscal quarter of 2025 and plans to close 30 stores; DXL saw a 6% contraction in the same period. In Brazil, recent reports already note the same trend on runways: fewer “curvy” models walking, a retreat that international agencies attribute directly to the normalization of weight loss through medication. It is worth noting the caveat that the specialized press itself makes: there is no direct proof that Ozempic is changing consumers' bodies en masse — but the industry has found in it a convenient excuse to move away from something that has always been more costly to produce: extra fabric, careful tailoring, multiple fittings.

Fatphobia did not need any medication to exist; it was only waiting for a cheaper alibi than an inclusion discourse.

These two vectors — the political retreat on race, documented in corporate and transparency reports, and the return of thinness as a non‑negotiable standard, documented in inventory spreadsheets — are not parallel coincidences: they are the same volatility operating on two fronts, each with its own evaporation metric. The market that once elevated brands and narratives essential to the debate on Brazilian cultural production now returns space to agendas that empty out before maturing, because they were never treated as a structure — they were treated as a trend, with an expiration date as predictable as that of a collection. And a trend, by definition, evaporates