of the United Kingdom’s capitol city.
If you’ve been out shopping for clothes in the last five years, you’d be no stranger to retail’s great bifurcation.
And now, fashion’s great squeeze is complete. The middle class shrinks, and so too do the brands that once dressed it. Mass market feels soulless, luxury increasingly unreachable, and even the contemporary sector prices out anyone without a significant clothing budget. Meanwhile, a generation raised on personal style content has developed Dover Street Market tastes on H&M budgets.
Enter the creator economy's fashion experiment: brands born from YouTube bedrooms and Instagram grids, promising authentic aesthetic vision at accessible price points.
Yet, even with fresh creative direction, mass brands are failing to satisfy a deeper yearning for individuality and creativity.
For those seeking more distinctive designs and an aesthetic point of view (whether authentic or cribbed), the options polarise at two ends: On one, the conscience-wearing siren of fast fashion. On the other, the extravagant allure of luxury. Even the brands that form the alleged middle—the contemporary sector—feel ever out of reach.
Our Legacy, with its 2024 LVMH investment, remains a darling among fashion’s cool kids, but at $250 for a shirt and $600 for a jacket, it’s far from an impulse buy. So where does that leave those of us with Dover Street tastes but not quite Dover Street Wallets? The answer may lie in a new class of influencer-led micro brands. From Daniel Simmons’ army of minimalists to Emily Oberg’s cool girl club of “Sporty & Rich,” these labels aren’t necessarily cheaper, but they are expanding what the mid-market can look and feel like.
Industry skeptics question their legitimacy, often pointing to their lack of technical design skill and spotty quality control. But there is no doubting their ability to create an audience and build that nebulous thing: community. The real test, however, remains. Can they grow beyond their niche and transcend their creator-led origin? And if so, can they transform themselves from “influencer brand” to just “brand”?
When ‘Like’ability Doesn’t Equal Sellability
The idea of an influencer-led fashion brand is nothing new. The logic is familiar: trade recognition for attention, and attention for sales. This model has shaped fashion since the earliest celebrity endorsements of the late 1800s.
Over time, few celebrity-led brands have broken through into real legitimacy with the only clear outlier being The Row. Over the past two decades, the Olsens managed to turn a fixation on the perfect T-shirt into a byword for minimalist luxury, picking up several CFDA Awards along the way.
Influencers have struggled to achieve that same level of credibility and clout. Some, like Chiara Ferragni, managed to build commercially successful lines, but few were able to make the leap into anything resembling a fashion institution. The clothes often felt like merch with better margins. The fandom stayed shallow. The signal didn’t travel.
Even fashion’s ultimate cool girl, Alexa Chung, couldn’t make it work. Despite years of goodwill, glowing press, and successful high street collaborations, her namesake label never quite landed. The expectations were part of the problem.
Her brand launched big: full seasonal collections, mid-luxury pricing, millions of dollars in investment. But the product never matched the weight of the launch. Early collections were criticised as outdated, and while things eventually improved, it was too late to turn the ship around. When the label shut down in 2022, it was reportedly £2.3 million in debt.
Others, like Danielle Bernstein’s WeWoreWhat or Arielle Charnas’s Something Navy followed a similar trajectory of fast growth, faster backlash. Aesthetically derivative collections, plagiarism allegations, and the looming presence of the creators themselves made it difficult for the brands to evolve into anything more independent. The clothes weren’t allowed to speak for themselves. They were always speaking for the woman behind the curtain.
That, more than anything, is the throughline: these brands were never able to detach the product from the person. And because they launched under the assumption they had to be taken seriously immediately, there was no room to experiment, to grow. The result was a kind of aesthetic burnout. Too much hype. Not enough runway. Destined to fade away as some sort of fashion zombie.
The Influencer to Brand Pipeline ft. Daniel Simmons
There are two qualities that differentiate this new batch of brands from their less-successful predecessors: a slower, more embedded approach to growth that begins with a clear point of view, and more importantly, a willingness from the creator to step back once that point of view is established.
While by no means applicable in every case, the typical creator-to-brand pipeline now often looks a little like the path taken by creator, Daniel Simmons.
In a line’s earliest stages, the creator builds an audience through low-effort, high-return content like “get ready with me” videos (GRWMs), fit pics, and product roundups. In the menswear space, this usually involves handsome boys with floppy hair lingering a little too long in boxer briefs before putting on their uniform: cropped shirts, baggy trousers, loafers, and maybe a baseball cap. It’s performative, but useful. Over time, this establishes the creator as someone with taste, or at least consistency.
Then comes the pivot to intimacy. The vlog era begins. Personal routines enter the frame. Fit breakdowns are now interspersed with reflections on burnout, skincare, or a favourite Diptyque candle. The tone shifts from advice to companionship. For those with an intellectual bent, there’s often a long-form video essay; say, 45 minutes on Kahara denim (though let it be known that Kahara also supplies Uniqlo). The content builds emotional proximity. The creator becomes aspirational and relatable, allowing parasocial attachment to occur.
Daniel Simmons followed this pipeline almost to the letter. He began posting men’s style content in 2017 and has since amassed over 740,000 subscribers on YouTube and 1.1 million followers on Instagram.
The tone was always consistent: Clean visuals, neutral colour palettes, minimalist styling. An aesthetic built less around fashion trends and more around the idea of being quietly put-together. By the time he launched his eponymous label in 2025, the audience was already primed.
The first collection was focused and simple. Think draped shirts, essential hoodies, and tank tops. Price points were aspirational, but not inaccessible: £85 for a tee, £160 for trousers, and £230 for a merino knit. In May 2025, the brand ventured into physical retail, launching its first pop-up at 52 Brewer Street in London’s Soho. The shop was modest but slick.
Eventually, many creators in Simmons’ position begin to pull back. Those who have been in Simmons’ position like Magnus Ronning, or Oscar Jardorf (both contemporaries of Simmons) gradually withdraw. The brand becomes the louder voice. In some cases, this becomes a controlled vanishing act. If the brand survives that phase, if it can exist without constant proximity, it might reach escape velocity.
Simmons hasn’t stepped back fully yet but the mechanics are in motion. The product is strong. The audience is loyal. And perhaps most importantly, the aesthetic is no longer just his. Rather, it belongs to the brand now.
Compared to the influencer brands of the mid-2010s, this new batch has mastered the ability to cultivate an organic audience. Like their predecessors, they grow out of personality and style. But unlike those earlier efforts, they’ve figured out how to build enough narrative infrastructure that they can eventually step back and let the brand stand on its own.
Wearing Your Flaws
Two clear challenges remain for creator brands: product quality and the signalling paradox.
The first is practical. While many of these brands have improved, complaints about quality still surface. Threads unravel. Sizing shifts. At a small scale, these things are manageable. But as the brand grows, these small annoyances become major liabilities. If these labels want to be real alternatives to established fashion houses, the product needs to hold up.
The second challenge is harder to fix. Most influencer brands don’t come from design backgrounds. At some point, replicating your own style plateaus. The best of these founders either bring in real design talent or, like Ken Sakata, put in the hours to learn. But until then, the collections often lack the kind of formal innovation or material literacy that earns long-term fashion credibility.
And then there’s the irony at the centre of it all. These brands exist because their founders built credibility through personal taste. Yet wearing their clothes doesn’t signal the same. In fact, it might even suggest the opposite. If you’re buying the influencer’s brand, maybe it implies you couldn’t access the original reference. Maybe you’re wearing the downstream version.
This tension matters more the further upmarket a brand tries to go. At lower price points, no one cares. Just buy the pants. But once you're charging higher prices, does the product still hold status? Why buy Daniel Simmons when I could farm clout more effectively through MFPen?
A Question of Survival
The emergence of new influencer brands is a compelling challenge against conventional fashion narratives. While obstacles in quality and legitimacy remain, the new model in which these brands operate provides a longer-term time frame and longevity from which they can grow.
It remains to be seen whether any (let alone many) of these personality-driven upstarts will break out of influencer brand hell and into the mainstream. But whatever the outcome may be, this is their strongest outing yet.
Edmond Lau is a luxury and cultural strategist whose work explores how taste, technology, and internet culture shape the way we consume. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Financial Times and more.
If you’ve been out shopping for clothes in the last five years, you’d be no stranger to retail’s great bifurcation.
And now, fashion’s great squeeze is complete. The middle class shrinks, and so too do the brands that once dressed it. Mass market feels soulless, luxury increasingly unreachable, and even the contemporary sector prices out anyone without a significant clothing budget. Meanwhile, a generation raised on personal style content has developed Dover Street Market tastes on H&M budgets.
Enter the creator economy's fashion experiment: brands born from YouTube bedrooms and Instagram grids, promising authentic aesthetic vision at accessible price points.
Yet, even with fresh creative direction, mass brands are failing to satisfy a deeper yearning for individuality and creativity.
For those seeking more distinctive designs and an aesthetic point of view (whether authentic or cribbed), the options polarise at two ends: On one, the conscience-wearing siren of fast fashion. On the other, the extravagant allure of luxury. Even the brands that form the alleged middle—the contemporary sector—feel ever out of reach.
Our Legacy, with its 2024 LVMH investment, remains a darling among fashion’s cool kids, but at $250 for a shirt and $600 for a jacket, it’s far from an impulse buy. So where does that leave those of us with Dover Street tastes but not quite Dover Street Wallets? The answer may lie in a new class of influencer-led micro brands. From Daniel Simmons’ army of minimalists to Emily Oberg’s cool girl club of “Sporty & Rich,” these labels aren’t necessarily cheaper, but they are expanding what the mid-market can look and feel like.
Industry skeptics question their legitimacy, often pointing to their lack of technical design skill and spotty quality control. But there is no doubting their ability to create an audience and build that nebulous thing: community. The real test, however, remains. Can they grow beyond their niche and transcend their creator-led origin? And if so, can they transform themselves from “influencer brand” to just “brand”?
When ‘Like’ability Doesn’t Equal Sellability
The idea of an influencer-led fashion brand is nothing new. The logic is familiar: trade recognition for attention, and attention for sales. This model has shaped fashion since the earliest celebrity endorsements of the late 1800s.
Over time, few celebrity-led brands have broken through into real legitimacy with the only clear outlier being The Row. Over the past two decades, the Olsens managed to turn a fixation on the perfect T-shirt into a byword for minimalist luxury, picking up several CFDA Awards along the way.
Influencers have struggled to achieve that same level of credibility and clout. Some, like Chiara Ferragni, managed to build commercially successful lines, but few were able to make the leap into anything resembling a fashion institution. The clothes often felt like merch with better margins. The fandom stayed shallow. The signal didn’t travel.
Even fashion’s ultimate cool girl, Alexa Chung, couldn’t make it work. Despite years of goodwill, glowing press, and successful high street collaborations, her namesake label never quite landed. The expectations were part of the problem.
Her brand launched big: full seasonal collections, mid-luxury pricing, millions of dollars in investment. But the product never matched the weight of the launch. Early collections were criticised as outdated, and while things eventually improved, it was too late to turn the ship around. When the label shut down in 2022, it was reportedly £2.3 million in debt.
Others, like Danielle Bernstein’s WeWoreWhat or Arielle Charnas’s Something Navy followed a similar trajectory of fast growth, faster backlash. Aesthetically derivative collections, plagiarism allegations, and the looming presence of the creators themselves made it difficult for the brands to evolve into anything more independent. The clothes weren’t allowed to speak for themselves. They were always speaking for the woman behind the curtain.
That, more than anything, is the throughline: these brands were never able to detach the product from the person. And because they launched under the assumption they had to be taken seriously immediately, there was no room to experiment, to grow. The result was a kind of aesthetic burnout. Too much hype. Not enough runway. Destined to fade away as some sort of fashion zombie.
The Influencer to Brand Pipeline ft. Daniel Simmons
There are two qualities that differentiate this new batch of brands from their less-successful predecessors: a slower, more embedded approach to growth that begins with a clear point of view, and more importantly, a willingness from the creator to step back once that point of view is established.
While by no means applicable in every case, the typical creator-to-brand pipeline now often looks a little like the path taken by creator, Daniel Simmons.
In a line’s earliest stages, the creator builds an audience through low-effort, high-return content like “get ready with me” videos (GRWMs), fit pics, and product roundups. In the menswear space, this usually involves handsome boys with floppy hair lingering a little too long in boxer briefs before putting on their uniform: cropped shirts, baggy trousers, loafers, and maybe a baseball cap. It’s performative, but useful. Over time, this establishes the creator as someone with taste, or at least consistency.
Then comes the pivot to intimacy. The vlog era begins. Personal routines enter the frame. Fit breakdowns are now interspersed with reflections on burnout, skincare, or a favourite Diptyque candle. The tone shifts from advice to companionship. For those with an intellectual bent, there’s often a long-form video essay; say, 45 minutes on Kahara denim (though let it be known that Kahara also supplies Uniqlo). The content builds emotional proximity. The creator becomes aspirational and relatable, allowing parasocial attachment to occur.
Daniel Simmons followed this pipeline almost to the letter. He began posting men’s style content in 2017 and has since amassed over 740,000 subscribers on YouTube and 1.1 million followers on Instagram.
The tone was always consistent: Clean visuals, neutral colour palettes, minimalist styling. An aesthetic built less around fashion trends and more around the idea of being quietly put-together. By the time he launched his eponymous label in 2025, the audience was already primed.
The first collection was focused and simple. Think draped shirts, essential hoodies, and tank tops. Price points were aspirational, but not inaccessible: £85 for a tee, £160 for trousers, and £230 for a merino knit. In May 2025, the brand ventured into physical retail, launching its first pop-up at 52 Brewer Street in London’s Soho. The shop was modest but slick.
Eventually, many creators in Simmons’ position begin to pull back. Those who have been in Simmons’ position like Magnus Ronning, or Oscar Jardorf (both contemporaries of Simmons) gradually withdraw. The brand becomes the louder voice. In some cases, this becomes a controlled vanishing act. If the brand survives that phase, if it can exist without constant proximity, it might reach escape velocity.
Simmons hasn’t stepped back fully yet but the mechanics are in motion. The product is strong. The audience is loyal. And perhaps most importantly, the aesthetic is no longer just his. Rather, it belongs to the brand now.
Compared to the influencer brands of the mid-2010s, this new batch has mastered the ability to cultivate an organic audience. Like their predecessors, they grow out of personality and style. But unlike those earlier efforts, they’ve figured out how to build enough narrative infrastructure that they can eventually step back and let the brand stand on its own.
Wearing Your Flaws
Two clear challenges remain for creator brands: product quality and the signalling paradox.
The first is practical. While many of these brands have improved, complaints about quality still surface. Threads unravel. Sizing shifts. At a small scale, these things are manageable. But as the brand grows, these small annoyances become major liabilities. If these labels want to be real alternatives to established fashion houses, the product needs to hold up.
The second challenge is harder to fix. Most influencer brands don’t come from design backgrounds. At some point, replicating your own style plateaus. The best of these founders either bring in real design talent or, like Ken Sakata, put in the hours to learn. But until then, the collections often lack the kind of formal innovation or material literacy that earns long-term fashion credibility.
And then there’s the irony at the centre of it all. These brands exist because their founders built credibility through personal taste. Yet wearing their clothes doesn’t signal the same. In fact, it might even suggest the opposite. If you’re buying the influencer’s brand, maybe it implies you couldn’t access the original reference. Maybe you’re wearing the downstream version.
This tension matters more the further upmarket a brand tries to go. At lower price points, no one cares. Just buy the pants. But once you're charging higher prices, does the product still hold status? Why buy Daniel Simmons when I could farm clout more effectively through MFPen?
A Question of Survival
The emergence of new influencer brands is a compelling challenge against conventional fashion narratives. While obstacles in quality and legitimacy remain, the new model in which these brands operate provides a longer-term time frame and longevity from which they can grow.
It remains to be seen whether any (let alone many) of these personality-driven upstarts will break out of influencer brand hell and into the mainstream. But whatever the outcome may be, this is their strongest outing yet.
Edmond Lau is a luxury and cultural strategist whose work explores how taste, technology, and internet culture shape the way we consume. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Financial Times and more.
If you’ve been out shopping for clothes in the last five years, you’d be no stranger to retail’s great bifurcation.
And now, fashion’s great squeeze is complete. The middle class shrinks, and so too do the brands that once dressed it. Mass market feels soulless, luxury increasingly unreachable, and even the contemporary sector prices out anyone without a significant clothing budget. Meanwhile, a generation raised on personal style content has developed Dover Street Market tastes on H&M budgets.
Enter the creator economy's fashion experiment: brands born from YouTube bedrooms and Instagram grids, promising authentic aesthetic vision at accessible price points.
Yet, even with fresh creative direction, mass brands are failing to satisfy a deeper yearning for individuality and creativity.
For those seeking more distinctive designs and an aesthetic point of view (whether authentic or cribbed), the options polarise at two ends: On one, the conscience-wearing siren of fast fashion. On the other, the extravagant allure of luxury. Even the brands that form the alleged middle—the contemporary sector—feel ever out of reach.
Our Legacy, with its 2024 LVMH investment, remains a darling among fashion’s cool kids, but at $250 for a shirt and $600 for a jacket, it’s far from an impulse buy. So where does that leave those of us with Dover Street tastes but not quite Dover Street Wallets? The answer may lie in a new class of influencer-led micro brands. From Daniel Simmons’ army of minimalists to Emily Oberg’s cool girl club of “Sporty & Rich,” these labels aren’t necessarily cheaper, but they are expanding what the mid-market can look and feel like.
Industry skeptics question their legitimacy, often pointing to their lack of technical design skill and spotty quality control. But there is no doubting their ability to create an audience and build that nebulous thing: community. The real test, however, remains. Can they grow beyond their niche and transcend their creator-led origin? And if so, can they transform themselves from “influencer brand” to just “brand”?
When ‘Like’ability Doesn’t Equal Sellability
The idea of an influencer-led fashion brand is nothing new. The logic is familiar: trade recognition for attention, and attention for sales. This model has shaped fashion since the earliest celebrity endorsements of the late 1800s.
Over time, few celebrity-led brands have broken through into real legitimacy with the only clear outlier being The Row. Over the past two decades, the Olsens managed to turn a fixation on the perfect T-shirt into a byword for minimalist luxury, picking up several CFDA Awards along the way.
Influencers have struggled to achieve that same level of credibility and clout. Some, like Chiara Ferragni, managed to build commercially successful lines, but few were able to make the leap into anything resembling a fashion institution. The clothes often felt like merch with better margins. The fandom stayed shallow. The signal didn’t travel.
Even fashion’s ultimate cool girl, Alexa Chung, couldn’t make it work. Despite years of goodwill, glowing press, and successful high street collaborations, her namesake label never quite landed. The expectations were part of the problem.
Her brand launched big: full seasonal collections, mid-luxury pricing, millions of dollars in investment. But the product never matched the weight of the launch. Early collections were criticised as outdated, and while things eventually improved, it was too late to turn the ship around. When the label shut down in 2022, it was reportedly £2.3 million in debt.
Others, like Danielle Bernstein’s WeWoreWhat or Arielle Charnas’s Something Navy followed a similar trajectory of fast growth, faster backlash. Aesthetically derivative collections, plagiarism allegations, and the looming presence of the creators themselves made it difficult for the brands to evolve into anything more independent. The clothes weren’t allowed to speak for themselves. They were always speaking for the woman behind the curtain.
That, more than anything, is the throughline: these brands were never able to detach the product from the person. And because they launched under the assumption they had to be taken seriously immediately, there was no room to experiment, to grow. The result was a kind of aesthetic burnout. Too much hype. Not enough runway. Destined to fade away as some sort of fashion zombie.
The Influencer to Brand Pipeline ft. Daniel Simmons
There are two qualities that differentiate this new batch of brands from their less-successful predecessors: a slower, more embedded approach to growth that begins with a clear point of view, and more importantly, a willingness from the creator to step back once that point of view is established.
While by no means applicable in every case, the typical creator-to-brand pipeline now often looks a little like the path taken by creator, Daniel Simmons.
In a line’s earliest stages, the creator builds an audience through low-effort, high-return content like “get ready with me” videos (GRWMs), fit pics, and product roundups. In the menswear space, this usually involves handsome boys with floppy hair lingering a little too long in boxer briefs before putting on their uniform: cropped shirts, baggy trousers, loafers, and maybe a baseball cap. It’s performative, but useful. Over time, this establishes the creator as someone with taste, or at least consistency.
Then comes the pivot to intimacy. The vlog era begins. Personal routines enter the frame. Fit breakdowns are now interspersed with reflections on burnout, skincare, or a favourite Diptyque candle. The tone shifts from advice to companionship. For those with an intellectual bent, there’s often a long-form video essay; say, 45 minutes on Kahara denim (though let it be known that Kahara also supplies Uniqlo). The content builds emotional proximity. The creator becomes aspirational and relatable, allowing parasocial attachment to occur.
Daniel Simmons followed this pipeline almost to the letter. He began posting men’s style content in 2017 and has since amassed over 740,000 subscribers on YouTube and 1.1 million followers on Instagram.
The tone was always consistent: Clean visuals, neutral colour palettes, minimalist styling. An aesthetic built less around fashion trends and more around the idea of being quietly put-together. By the time he launched his eponymous label in 2025, the audience was already primed.
The first collection was focused and simple. Think draped shirts, essential hoodies, and tank tops. Price points were aspirational, but not inaccessible: £85 for a tee, £160 for trousers, and £230 for a merino knit. In May 2025, the brand ventured into physical retail, launching its first pop-up at 52 Brewer Street in London’s Soho. The shop was modest but slick.
Eventually, many creators in Simmons’ position begin to pull back. Those who have been in Simmons’ position like Magnus Ronning, or Oscar Jardorf (both contemporaries of Simmons) gradually withdraw. The brand becomes the louder voice. In some cases, this becomes a controlled vanishing act. If the brand survives that phase, if it can exist without constant proximity, it might reach escape velocity.
Simmons hasn’t stepped back fully yet but the mechanics are in motion. The product is strong. The audience is loyal. And perhaps most importantly, the aesthetic is no longer just his. Rather, it belongs to the brand now.
Compared to the influencer brands of the mid-2010s, this new batch has mastered the ability to cultivate an organic audience. Like their predecessors, they grow out of personality and style. But unlike those earlier efforts, they’ve figured out how to build enough narrative infrastructure that they can eventually step back and let the brand stand on its own.
Wearing Your Flaws
Two clear challenges remain for creator brands: product quality and the signalling paradox.
The first is practical. While many of these brands have improved, complaints about quality still surface. Threads unravel. Sizing shifts. At a small scale, these things are manageable. But as the brand grows, these small annoyances become major liabilities. If these labels want to be real alternatives to established fashion houses, the product needs to hold up.
The second challenge is harder to fix. Most influencer brands don’t come from design backgrounds. At some point, replicating your own style plateaus. The best of these founders either bring in real design talent or, like Ken Sakata, put in the hours to learn. But until then, the collections often lack the kind of formal innovation or material literacy that earns long-term fashion credibility.
And then there’s the irony at the centre of it all. These brands exist because their founders built credibility through personal taste. Yet wearing their clothes doesn’t signal the same. In fact, it might even suggest the opposite. If you’re buying the influencer’s brand, maybe it implies you couldn’t access the original reference. Maybe you’re wearing the downstream version.
This tension matters more the further upmarket a brand tries to go. At lower price points, no one cares. Just buy the pants. But once you're charging higher prices, does the product still hold status? Why buy Daniel Simmons when I could farm clout more effectively through MFPen?
A Question of Survival
The emergence of new influencer brands is a compelling challenge against conventional fashion narratives. While obstacles in quality and legitimacy remain, the new model in which these brands operate provides a longer-term time frame and longevity from which they can grow.
It remains to be seen whether any (let alone many) of these personality-driven upstarts will break out of influencer brand hell and into the mainstream. But whatever the outcome may be, this is their strongest outing yet.
Edmond Lau is a luxury and cultural strategist whose work explores how taste, technology, and internet culture shape the way we consume. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Financial Times and more.
If you’ve been out shopping for clothes in the last five years, you’d be no stranger to retail’s great bifurcation.
And now, fashion’s great squeeze is complete. The middle class shrinks, and so too do the brands that once dressed it. Mass market feels soulless, luxury increasingly unreachable, and even the contemporary sector prices out anyone without a significant clothing budget. Meanwhile, a generation raised on personal style content has developed Dover Street Market tastes on H&M budgets.
Enter the creator economy's fashion experiment: brands born from YouTube bedrooms and Instagram grids, promising authentic aesthetic vision at accessible price points.
Yet, even with fresh creative direction, mass brands are failing to satisfy a deeper yearning for individuality and creativity.
For those seeking more distinctive designs and an aesthetic point of view (whether authentic or cribbed), the options polarise at two ends: On one, the conscience-wearing siren of fast fashion. On the other, the extravagant allure of luxury. Even the brands that form the alleged middle—the contemporary sector—feel ever out of reach.
Our Legacy, with its 2024 LVMH investment, remains a darling among fashion’s cool kids, but at $250 for a shirt and $600 for a jacket, it’s far from an impulse buy. So where does that leave those of us with Dover Street tastes but not quite Dover Street Wallets? The answer may lie in a new class of influencer-led micro brands. From Daniel Simmons’ army of minimalists to Emily Oberg’s cool girl club of “Sporty & Rich,” these labels aren’t necessarily cheaper, but they are expanding what the mid-market can look and feel like.
Industry skeptics question their legitimacy, often pointing to their lack of technical design skill and spotty quality control. But there is no doubting their ability to create an audience and build that nebulous thing: community. The real test, however, remains. Can they grow beyond their niche and transcend their creator-led origin? And if so, can they transform themselves from “influencer brand” to just “brand”?
When ‘Like’ability Doesn’t Equal Sellability
The idea of an influencer-led fashion brand is nothing new. The logic is familiar: trade recognition for attention, and attention for sales. This model has shaped fashion since the earliest celebrity endorsements of the late 1800s.
Over time, few celebrity-led brands have broken through into real legitimacy with the only clear outlier being The Row. Over the past two decades, the Olsens managed to turn a fixation on the perfect T-shirt into a byword for minimalist luxury, picking up several CFDA Awards along the way.
Influencers have struggled to achieve that same level of credibility and clout. Some, like Chiara Ferragni, managed to build commercially successful lines, but few were able to make the leap into anything resembling a fashion institution. The clothes often felt like merch with better margins. The fandom stayed shallow. The signal didn’t travel.
Even fashion’s ultimate cool girl, Alexa Chung, couldn’t make it work. Despite years of goodwill, glowing press, and successful high street collaborations, her namesake label never quite landed. The expectations were part of the problem.
Her brand launched big: full seasonal collections, mid-luxury pricing, millions of dollars in investment. But the product never matched the weight of the launch. Early collections were criticised as outdated, and while things eventually improved, it was too late to turn the ship around. When the label shut down in 2022, it was reportedly £2.3 million in debt.
Others, like Danielle Bernstein’s WeWoreWhat or Arielle Charnas’s Something Navy followed a similar trajectory of fast growth, faster backlash. Aesthetically derivative collections, plagiarism allegations, and the looming presence of the creators themselves made it difficult for the brands to evolve into anything more independent. The clothes weren’t allowed to speak for themselves. They were always speaking for the woman behind the curtain.
That, more than anything, is the throughline: these brands were never able to detach the product from the person. And because they launched under the assumption they had to be taken seriously immediately, there was no room to experiment, to grow. The result was a kind of aesthetic burnout. Too much hype. Not enough runway. Destined to fade away as some sort of fashion zombie.
The Influencer to Brand Pipeline ft. Daniel Simmons
There are two qualities that differentiate this new batch of brands from their less-successful predecessors: a slower, more embedded approach to growth that begins with a clear point of view, and more importantly, a willingness from the creator to step back once that point of view is established.
While by no means applicable in every case, the typical creator-to-brand pipeline now often looks a little like the path taken by creator, Daniel Simmons.
In a line’s earliest stages, the creator builds an audience through low-effort, high-return content like “get ready with me” videos (GRWMs), fit pics, and product roundups. In the menswear space, this usually involves handsome boys with floppy hair lingering a little too long in boxer briefs before putting on their uniform: cropped shirts, baggy trousers, loafers, and maybe a baseball cap. It’s performative, but useful. Over time, this establishes the creator as someone with taste, or at least consistency.
Then comes the pivot to intimacy. The vlog era begins. Personal routines enter the frame. Fit breakdowns are now interspersed with reflections on burnout, skincare, or a favourite Diptyque candle. The tone shifts from advice to companionship. For those with an intellectual bent, there’s often a long-form video essay; say, 45 minutes on Kahara denim (though let it be known that Kahara also supplies Uniqlo). The content builds emotional proximity. The creator becomes aspirational and relatable, allowing parasocial attachment to occur.
Daniel Simmons followed this pipeline almost to the letter. He began posting men’s style content in 2017 and has since amassed over 740,000 subscribers on YouTube and 1.1 million followers on Instagram.
The tone was always consistent: Clean visuals, neutral colour palettes, minimalist styling. An aesthetic built less around fashion trends and more around the idea of being quietly put-together. By the time he launched his eponymous label in 2025, the audience was already primed.
The first collection was focused and simple. Think draped shirts, essential hoodies, and tank tops. Price points were aspirational, but not inaccessible: £85 for a tee, £160 for trousers, and £230 for a merino knit. In May 2025, the brand ventured into physical retail, launching its first pop-up at 52 Brewer Street in London’s Soho. The shop was modest but slick.
Eventually, many creators in Simmons’ position begin to pull back. Those who have been in Simmons’ position like Magnus Ronning, or Oscar Jardorf (both contemporaries of Simmons) gradually withdraw. The brand becomes the louder voice. In some cases, this becomes a controlled vanishing act. If the brand survives that phase, if it can exist without constant proximity, it might reach escape velocity.
Simmons hasn’t stepped back fully yet but the mechanics are in motion. The product is strong. The audience is loyal. And perhaps most importantly, the aesthetic is no longer just his. Rather, it belongs to the brand now.
Compared to the influencer brands of the mid-2010s, this new batch has mastered the ability to cultivate an organic audience. Like their predecessors, they grow out of personality and style. But unlike those earlier efforts, they’ve figured out how to build enough narrative infrastructure that they can eventually step back and let the brand stand on its own.
Wearing Your Flaws
Two clear challenges remain for creator brands: product quality and the signalling paradox.
The first is practical. While many of these brands have improved, complaints about quality still surface. Threads unravel. Sizing shifts. At a small scale, these things are manageable. But as the brand grows, these small annoyances become major liabilities. If these labels want to be real alternatives to established fashion houses, the product needs to hold up.
The second challenge is harder to fix. Most influencer brands don’t come from design backgrounds. At some point, replicating your own style plateaus. The best of these founders either bring in real design talent or, like Ken Sakata, put in the hours to learn. But until then, the collections often lack the kind of formal innovation or material literacy that earns long-term fashion credibility.
And then there’s the irony at the centre of it all. These brands exist because their founders built credibility through personal taste. Yet wearing their clothes doesn’t signal the same. In fact, it might even suggest the opposite. If you’re buying the influencer’s brand, maybe it implies you couldn’t access the original reference. Maybe you’re wearing the downstream version.
This tension matters more the further upmarket a brand tries to go. At lower price points, no one cares. Just buy the pants. But once you're charging higher prices, does the product still hold status? Why buy Daniel Simmons when I could farm clout more effectively through MFPen?
A Question of Survival
The emergence of new influencer brands is a compelling challenge against conventional fashion narratives. While obstacles in quality and legitimacy remain, the new model in which these brands operate provides a longer-term time frame and longevity from which they can grow.
It remains to be seen whether any (let alone many) of these personality-driven upstarts will break out of influencer brand hell and into the mainstream. But whatever the outcome may be, this is their strongest outing yet.
Edmond Lau is a luxury and cultural strategist whose work explores how taste, technology, and internet culture shape the way we consume. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Financial Times and more.
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