The Warehouse That Ate Fashion

When ASOS launched properly in Germany in 2010, fashion bloggers went briefly insane. Piggy banks were raided. Postmen started having a bad time. The thing had over 850 brands, everything organized and searchable and deliverable to your actual front door, and it drew in anyone with even a passing interest in clothes—which turned out to be most people.

There’s something that happens when retail becomes genuinely frictionless. The threshold for buying drops. The barrier used to be a commute, a changing room queue, the mild social embarrassment of asking for a different size—all of that gone, replaced by a search bar and a next-day estimate. What ASOS actually sold wasn’t clothes; it was the feeling of having access to everything, which is a different product entirely, and considerably more addictive than anything in the catalog.

Whether that’s good for fashion, for the high street, for anyone—I still haven’t worked that out. The packages kept arriving anyway.