The fashion season was invented by a salesman in Paris in the 1860s. It is not a law of nature, and it has been quietly ruining clothes ever since.
By Florencia Macri, Creative Director — Come On
Researched and edited with AI assistance.
Say the sentence out loud and listen to what it does.
Nothing here is from this season.
In most of the industry that is an admission — a quiet apology, the thing a shop assistant says before pointing you toward the markdowns. Old stock. Last year’s. Not what we are showing now.
We mean it as a boast, and this is the argument for why.
Somebody invented the season
The seasonal collection is not an ancient rhythm inherited from agriculture. It is a commercial format, and it has an author.
Charles Frederick Worth, an Englishman working in Paris from the 1850s, is generally credited with turning dressmaking into fashion as we now understand it: he presented collections in advance, on live models, under his own name, on a schedule, and he expected clients to come back when the next one appeared. Before that, a dressmaker made what a client asked for. After that, the house decided what existed and when, and the client’s job was to keep up.
That is an extraordinary transfer of authority, and it happened for a straightforward reason. A collection that expires generates a reason to return. A garment that is simply good does not.
For most of the twentieth century this settled into two seasons a year, which is at least legible: things get cold, then they get warm.
Then it escalated.
Two became four, then six, then nobody was counting
Spring/summer and autumn/winter acquired pre-fall. Then resort, or cruise — a format that began as a small offering for wealthy clients travelling somewhere warm in January and grew into one of the largest commercial deliveries of the year. Then capsules, collaborations, drops, mid-season deliveries.
The people making the clothes said so, publicly, and not quietly. When Raf Simons left Dior in 2015 he spoke about the pace of the calendar and what it does to the work. Alber Elbaz said versions of the same thing. In 2020, a large group of designers and retailers signed an open letter — the exercise came to be known as Rewiring Fashion — proposing fewer collections, a realigned calendar, and an end to the practice of discounting garments before the weather they were designed for has even arrived.
Because that is the absurd end point of the system: heavy coats delivered to shops in July, marked down in October, and gone by the time it is actually cold. The customer who wanted a coat for winter either buys it in high summer at full price or waits until the middle of winter and buys a discounted one that is already being replaced by swimwear.
Nobody designed that outcome. It is the accumulated residue of a sales mechanism from the 1860s, running at eight times its original speed.
What a season does to a garment
Here is the part that matters to anybody who actually wears clothes.
A season assigns an expiry date to an object that does not have one. A well-cut coat does not become worse in February. A leather jacket does not degrade when the collection changes; if anything it does the opposite. But the calendar declares it over, the shop stops stocking it, the photographs come down, and the object is retroactively reclassified as a mistake you made last year.
And it trains the customer, brutally and effectively, to wait. If everything goes on sale eventually, then paying full price is for people who did not do the arithmetic. Whole brands have destroyed their own pricing this way, and then blamed the customer for being disloyal.
The customer was not disloyal. The customer was paying attention.
The counter-tradition has always existed
Everything we have written about this autumn points the same way.
The military coat bought second-hand and worn for twenty years. The biker jacket that was already somebody else’s before it was yours. The surplus jacket that outlasted the war it was issued for. The mourning brooch cut from Whitby jet in 1880 that turned up in a second-hand shop a century later and went straight back into use.
None of those garments belonged to a season. They belonged to whoever had them, for as long as they lasted, and their value went up rather than down as they aged.
The market has admitted this, incidentally, in the only way markets can: archive pieces from designers who worked in the eighties and nineties now trade for multiples of their original prices, sought by people who were children when they were made. Collectors do not ask which season something is from. They ask what it is.
What Archive means here
Archive is a section of this shop, and it is not a euphemism for a discount rail.
It holds pieces from past collections that are still in circulation, because they are still good and because we made few of them. Some pieces do eventually return at a lower price — we have written about that, and we call it Incinerate, and we think of it as a filter rather than an ending. But an archive piece is not a reduced piece by definition. It is simply a piece that is no longer new, in a shop that does not think new is the highest praise available.
This week we are not launching anything. There is no new product in this post and there is no discount in it either.
What we are doing is putting things together: pieces from different drops, from different months, combined because they work — leather with the pin stripe skirt, the Bauhaus capsule with camo, the tailored thing with the utilitarian thing.
And that is only a coherent proposition if the drops have not expired. In a brand that runs on seasons, combining October with September is a clearance exercise. Here it is just an outfit, because nothing has been declared over.
That is the whole point of building a catalogue this way, and this is the week you can see it.
Nothing here is from this season. Several things here are from a better one.
The sets
Made without gender or age in mind. Produced in small runs. Full price — these are combinations, not reductions.
- Browse the gifting sets — pieces from across the season, put together.
- Archive — past collections, still in circulation.
- Explore the full collection.
- Join the list.
Frequently asked
Who invented the fashion season?
Charles Frederick Worth, an English designer working in Paris from the 1850s, is generally credited with establishing the seasonal collection: presented in advance, on live models, under the designer’s name, on a fixed schedule. It transferred the decision about what exists from the client to the house.
How many fashion seasons are there now?
Far more than two. Spring/summer and autumn/winter were joined by pre-fall, resort or cruise, and a continuous stream of capsules and mid-season deliveries. Cruise began as a small offering for clients travelling somewhere warm in January and became one of the largest commercial deliveries of the year.
Why do winter coats go on sale before winter?
Because delivery schedules run months ahead of the weather. Coats arrive in shops in high summer and are marked down in autumn, so the customer who wants one when it is cold is choosing between paying full price in July or buying a discounted one that is already being cleared. Designers have publicly called for this to change, notably in the 2020 open letter known as Rewiring Fashion.
What does Archive mean at Come On?
Pieces from past collections that are still in circulation. It is not a discount section. Some pieces do return at a lower price, through what we call Incinerate, but an archive piece is simply one that is no longer new — in a shop that does not treat new as the highest form of praise.
Is it a bad idea to buy last season’s clothes?
Only if you believe the calendar. A well-made garment does not become worse when the collection changes. The second-hand and archive markets price older pieces above their original cost precisely because the people buying them are asking what something is rather than when it was released.
Come On is an independent clothing brand rooted in counterculture, inspired by punk and surrealism. Made in small runs.
NO RULES TO GET DRESSED. FOLLOW CULTURE, NOT THE ALGORITHM.