ASOS Landed
ASOS finally opened in Germany and something just snapped. Fashion blogs exploded. People were buying constantly. The postmen were drowning in packages. Within weeks it felt like it had always been there, like some essential piece of the world had just been plugged in.
I wasn’t tracking fashion closely at that moment, but you could see what was happening. Before ASOS, if you wanted something specific—a brand, a cut, a particular thing—you either lived in a city with good shops or you did without. German retail was fine if you wanted German things, but it was also narrow in its own way.
Then suddenly eight hundred brands, anything, delivered. That’s not retail. That’s removing a wall. You could browse endlessly and want everything without justifying it to anyone. You’re not in a store where decisions feel weighted; you’re in folders, in images. You can fill a cart with things that would be hideous together because you never see them all at once. Want becomes clean. Contradiction disappears.
Fashion bloggers had somehow become the people who decided what was acceptable to wear. ASOS made them irrelevant overnight. You didn’t need their taste. You didn’t need to be in Berlin or Munich. You didn’t need to trust anyone. You looked and bought. Their gatekeeping just evaporated.
The funny part is nothing actually changed about the wanting and buying and then not wearing most of it. ASOS just removed the friction. Made the cycle instant. The postmen broke under the volume, and by the next season people had forgotten half of what they’d ordered. The magic was already dead, replaced by the next catalog, the next possibility, just more and more.
Maybe that’s what ASOS did to Germany. Not brought fashion closer, but made it infinite and disposable at once.