Everyone’s A Fashion Critic. But Where Is The Criticism?

In Birdman, the surprise Best Picture winner at the 2015 Oscars, actor Riggan Thomson (played by Michael Keaton) confronts a theatre critic after his play in a dimly lit bar. She is going to shred his play; he knows it. She walked out of it almost midway. But Thomson has put all his life, emotionally and financially, on this play, and he’s not going to let her pen reduce a magnum opus to some lazy, hollow adjectives.

“What has to happen in a person’s life for them to become a critic anyway?” he says, as he walks towards her, grabs the notebook in which she is writing another review and reads it aloud: “Coward? Coward’s a label. Lacklustre, that’s just a label. Margin… marginality? Are you kidding me? It sounds like you need penicillin to clear that up—that’s a label. These are just labels. You just label everything. That’s so fucking lazy,” and here he pauses, his voice almost a whisper. “You are a lazy… lazy fucker.”

If there is one thing we can all agree upon, it is our collective, almost-fetishising love for labels. Are they functional? For starters, they drown out nuance. We don’t have to dissect why Duran Lantink’s debut collection for Jean Paul Gaultier doesn’t work, even in terms of form and symmetry, if we can just call it ugly. No need to explain. We get our likes, and it’s a short enough word to look all pretty and cosy even in the comment section whose target audience, us, can't process or hold a compound sentence. And perhaps that’s our undoing. The platform where the criticism is hosted is a ball bearing on which pivots the axis of our mind and, by extension, our attention span.

This is not limited to fashion, even though online fashion criticism is its crudest manifestation. In the late 1880s, the American essayist, poet and philosopher Henry David Thoreau could write an essay almost 20 pages long for The Atlantic on the monsoonal joys of a tropical forest because he knew it was going to be read, picked apart and even taught in English classes for lessons on descriptive writing. In 2025, if he were alive, good luck getting that commissioned. It would simply be too academic, too verbose, words slapped together to mean nothing, or, worse, a self-indulgent, verbal masturbation disguised as a nature essay. After the Hiroshima tragedy during World War 2, The New Yorker dedicated the entire issue, page by page, to a single feature reporting from the ground by the reporter John Hersey. There were no other stories in that issue, barely any ads. That issue, on its own, elevated The New Yorker’s profile as a magazine not just for society ladies but as a formidable platform for journalism that could accurately reflect the horrors and contradictions of our time.

Why should fashion journalism be any different? But in a reel, or a low-resolution, hazy post after a fashion show, only labels come to our rescue. The Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) explains that working memory, which holds and processes information, has limited capacity, and learning is improved by managing the types of cognitive load experienced. On social media, then, we cannot manage the cognitive load. Between flicking DMs after posting a thirst trap, saving recipe videos and engaging with runway clips, do we really have enough bandwidth left to engage with caste and class consciousness on our runways?

Then there is the familiar refrain: Not everything has to be deep. Well, if our livelihood depends on reporting on, working with, and being part of dresses made of tulle, mohair and two strands of delusion, why shouldn’t it be deep? Why shouldn’t we unpack why Sudheer Rajbhar’s Chamar Studio can work directly and seamlessly with Dalit leatherworkers, while other leather brands in Delhi and Mumbai prefer routing things through middlemen from privileged castes? If contemporary publications cannot afford their advertisers’ ire, why is there so little engagement by our ‘reel warriors’ on the unfair labour practices employed by slow luxury brands, ones steeped in modern slavery? Or on how Indian ‘couture’ brands borrow patterns, motifs, and even entire cuts from tribal and indigenous rituals? When designers are personally called out by former interns and employees with horror stories about working in companies where the head designer is both manager and HR, why do we still focus on extracting generic bytes from showstoppers for their shows, dressed in lehengas whose gold zari runs out before our patience does?

Wasn’t that the whole point of opinion leaders on Instagram? To come in precisely where contemporary publishing fails? But no, that would require us to move beyond labels. The cognitive load would have to be managed; sentences will need to be complex enough to hold more than one thought. How can we also ignore our saintly humility in the face of death? Lee McQueen was an icon, but our label-generating machine would be full throttle if he’d just presented a collection for Gucci. “Not a very accurate interpretation of Italian house codes,” we’d say. I’d go so far as to say that the creations of Maria Grazia Chiuri, who online fashion critics love to hate more than their Grindr matches, would be displayed at The Met and hung on silken pegs at The Louvre after her passing.

Until then, we will sleep in the cocoon of our labels, those we make for ourselves and those we craft for others. It is easier than thinking, easier than reckoning with who makes our clothes, who profits from them, and who is left invisible in the process. The labour, caste and the politics can all remain backstage. And that, perhaps, is the most honest label of all: lazy.