The Slow Rise of 'Quiet Hype'
How shopping experience, not price, defines luxury
Quiet luxury is the fashion buzzword of 2023. Strategically and symbolically, there is a lot to unpack when it comes to quiet luxury. The underlying idea of quiet luxury is that a seemingly utilitarian piece of clothing is made of premium materials and costs a large premium. This idea of elevated minimalism recently entered the hype circle, creating the rise of ‘Quiet Hype.’ While quiet luxury suggests, ‘you have no idea how much I paid for this shirt,’ quiet hype suggests, ‘you have no idea how quickly this shirt sold out.’ In the venn diagram of Quiet Luxury and Quiet Hype, ‘Quiet’ is obviously the commonality. Quiet refers to the understated minimalism of the product. As for the ‘luxury’ and ‘hype’ part, what separates both is the shopping experience. While the price points and aesthetics of the two are occasionally similar, the white glove client-servicing you get when shopping for a hat at Loro Piana is fundamentally different from refreshing your internet browser at 11am on a Thursday for a JJJJound jacket with hopes that you will be able to checkout fast enough.
The way we discover new brands is an important distinction between Quiet Hype and Quiet Luxury. Luxury brands have hundreds of years of legacy branding and developed iconic design language while the market for understated hype brands is becoming increasingly crowded and harder to differentiate. Discovery for understated, elevated hype brands is highly community driven, whether it be through reddit threads, discord channels, or podcasts. In the hunt for the perfect oversized dress shirt, I turned to the menswear legends at Throwing Fits and also menswear icon Jake Woolf. Through their content, I discovered mfpen and Our Legacy, two brands leading the minimalist menswear industry that are not heavily reliant on external marketing. While the price point of these shirts is similar to some Italian luxury brands, these brands fall in the quiet hype bucket because of the intense discourse and online fanfare, in addition to being a new and exciting POV on menswear. Wearing an mfpen shirt is a badge of honor that signals that you scoured the depths of online menswear articles to primarily, just find this incredible brand, and secondly, figure out the enigmatic sizing. Throughout the shopping process, you’ll likely have had great discourse with online strangers and also have made some friends along the way. Quiet Luxury, by contrast, is a much more streamlined experience. Buying a Brunello Cucinelli shirt, I would likely go to one of the lavish stores, have a glass of champagne, and enjoy the shopping experience as a whole through direct interaction with a brand representative. Everyone knows what Brunello is and few people know what mfpen is. To the naked eye both shirts look very similar, but tell an entirely different story.
The community aspect is very important in the distinction between quiet hype vs quiet luxury. The hype market has indirectly created these communities through their unique drop model, where previously teased, scarce items are released at pre-disclosed times either online or in person. This is a competitive process by nature and can make even the most mundane object exciting since you’re competing for limited stock items. We often see the luxury markets draw inspiration from topical markets like streetwear and skate culture, but now the funnel has flipped and hype brands are starting to offer their own take on luxury products. The luxury fashion world rarely relies on the drop model, but more so the standard fashion week schedule where we see the clothes on the runway and they are later released through the classic wholesale sources. In such a highly referential design market, the products become harder to differentiate aesthetically so the smallest details like release strategy make a difference in the categorization of your brand.
So what does this mean for the future of menswear? Mens fashion is about to enter an era where products become simpler and we become overly obsessed with marketing versus branding. Ultimately, to differentiate in a crowded market, marketing and lookbooks must become your most powerful full-funnel brand strategy. In order to sell a seemingly simple sweater, brands will start to tell us which mill the cotton is sourced from, exactly where the production took place, and even more minute details because to justify the prices. Soon you will be playing a premium for that information because it becomes a competitive advantage. As a modern brand, regardless of if you are hype or luxury, community interaction through highly produced creative assets and transparency around manufacturing/design will be your most important strategy in navigating this new era of menswear.
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