For one, the outbreak in Italy is at least somewhat tied to Milan Fashion Week, which was held in mid-to-late February. Giorgio Armani, for example, made a decision to hold his show behind closed doors. Ultimately, guests from around the world had descended on the heart of Lombardy, then moved onto Paris or headed back home at a time when the virus was omnipresent—but still relatively under the radar—in Milan. Unwittingly, the thousands of buyers, editors, models and stylists could have been transmission vectors, either bringing it to Milan, or leaving with it. It’s a gut-wrenching reminder of how effectively the virus has spread.

As the world went on pause, fashion was one of the first industries to suffer. With people unsure about their financial future, they cut non-essential expenses. To counter this, there was also a wave of solidarity—those who could bought gift cards and T-shirts from small, independent brands and boutiques. As is the case with bars and restaurants, it was understood that the survival of these businesses—which, while non-essential, are crucial to fostering a community—was precarious to say the least.

New York menswear imprint Noah put out a statement that, in a way only Noah and Brendon Babenzien could, explained the need to encourage consumption, albeit responsibly. They didn’t ask consumers to buy a Noah T-shirt, per se, but they advocated for supporting small businesses—not just Noah—in a time of uncertainty. For the most part, people have answered the call.

Babenzien’s letter typified how a number of brands, stores and individuals in the fashion industry’s corridors of power approached the earliest stages of the crisis. Donatella Versace, hunkered down in Milan, penned a letter for Vogue about the reality on the ground in the industrial Italian city and emphasized how important it was to heed the advice of experts by engaging in social distancing so that doctors, nurses and the health care system could better deal with the virus. Also in [Vogue](https://www.vogue.com/article/msgm-massimo-giorgetti-coronavirus-milan, Massimo Giorgetti, of MSGM, hammered home that this was not a time for brands to make PR stunts, but to make sure that those around them were safe.

For the most part, the fashion industry has done just that.

Many of the big department stores and luxury brands have closed their stores and their factories. Bigger North American brands, like Nike and Lululemon, took steps to close their retail locations and offices. Rather than try to capitalize on the crisis, they’ve quietly left room for the smaller brands and independent boutiques to cater to the admittedly reduced demand.

Instead, those brands that have their future secured have pivoted to offering assistance. In Italy, [Prada](https://www.grailed.com/designers/prada is donating beds to overflowing hospitals, and most of the other big Italian brands have donated money to hospitals. Moncler, for example, donated millions to help build a temporary hospital in the Fiera area, where fashion week events once took place. LVMH has converted its perfume production facilities to produce bottles of hand sanitizer, which it’s donating to governments that need them. In Severance, a now-eerily prescient novel about a pandemic, Ling Ma describes a world where people walk around in designer respiratory masks; in the COVID-19 world, it’s bottles of hand sanitizer carrying Dior’s logo. It’s as surreal an image as the one painted by Ma.

What is suggested in Severance has actually come to pass: Countless brands have started making masks. They are not, however, commercial goods, as in Ma’s novel. They aren't overtly branded, nor are they being sent down runways as click-bait and street style catnip. Brooks Brothers converted factories across New England and is now making up to 150 000 protective masks, as well as protective gowns. Kering, the second major luxury conglomerate, purchased millions of masks for the French government, and two of its houses, Saint Laurent and Balenciaga, are now manufacturing masks themselves, as is Gucci. New Balance went from making shoes one day to making masks the next—literally. Ralph Lauren took a slightly different route, with his foundation donating $10 million to charitable organizations doing work related to COVID-19, including to A Common Thread, a CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund endeavour aimed at helping American designers struggling as a result of COVID-19.

Doing anything else seems insignificant now. Stores are closed, releases are postponed, and idle hands have turned into helping ones. Fashion, so often criticized as being a vain industry, is now at the forefront of the fight against COVID-19. It’s also an example of how, at its very roots, fashion is reactionary in the sense that what companies make reflects the social realities of the era.

But what happens once we see through this crisis? Surely masks, hand sanitizer and gowns are not the future of Gucci, Dior and Brooks Brothers. While the answer isn’t entirely clear, there’s a picture that’s beginning to emerge.

There will be no men’s fashion weeks in June, for one. The Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, in France, was the first to call off events scheduled for June. Pitti Uomo, scheduled for a week before Paris’ fashion week, had hinted at a hybrid event—both physical and digital—but the fair has now been postponed until September. The Camera Nazionale della Moda, which oversees Milan Fashion Week, has announced that menswear and womenswear will show together in September, too. Not only are they unsure if it’ll be safe for large groups of people to gather, but so many factories and workshops are closed, thereby making it impossible for brands to produce samples, let alone full collections.

As the fashion world grappled with the reality that they had unwittingly carried the virus across international borders, and as some brands opted to show behind closed doors, a number of industry insiders posited that maybe fashion shows were not necessary after all. A.P.C.’s ever-outspoken Jean Touitou told Vogue’s Nicole Phelps, that he hoped this would bring about a future with but a single fashion week per year.

As things stand, most brands show four times a year; some show pre-collections (Cruise and Resort); others also show Haute Couture collections. Almost everyone agrees that it is too much—that it’s a taxing ritual to undertake so often—economically, emotionally, mentally and environmentally. A number of labels had already experimented with combining menswear and womenswear and, at the very least, it’s hard to see brands reverting after September’s combined showing.

If COVID-19 turns out to be seasonal—something that comes back with a vengeance when the weather gets colder—it’s entirely possible that the entire fashion calendar gets reworked to accommodate new production schedules that take into account routine periods of social distancing and factory closures and general economic pause. That might force brands to condense things even more: A single combined show that might not include everything they’re producing, but indicates the brand’s general direction for that year, combined with fewer drops or precisely-timed collections, replaced instead with pieces that have longer shelf lives.

Of course there’s one last way in which COVID-19 is going to have a profound impact on the fashion industry: It’s put the world in a precarious position economically. Even if we’re only in a recession-lite, consumers are already dealing with reduced disposable income. It’s no coincidence that the sneaker craze of the mid-to-late 2010s was augmented by the fact that we were in the best economy in modern history. People had the money to speculate on sneakers—truly wild, in retrospect. The last recession gave us the hashtag-menswear movement, where men spent more individual garments, but less on clothes in general, because those garments were of better quality. Or, in short: Buy less, buy better. The drop model and the industry-wide penchant for collaboration are not the types of things that do well in recessions. Evergreen silhouettes like Gazelles are. A durable garment like selvedge denim is. Sustainable practices like recommerce, too.

Debating the merits of general release sneakers versus limited-edition collaborative drops seems incredibly trivial these days. But, it goes back to using fashion as a case study for how COVID-19 is changing the world around us. Fashion, like everything else, is going to be profoundly changed by this; in some cases, they’re changes that would have inevitably happened in ten years but are now happening over ten weeks. Jarring as that swiftness can be, it’s worth remembering that if fashion is the microcosm through which we’re analyzing COVID-19, we’ve also seen heartwarming displays of solidarity.

So while things are changing, we—all of us, collectively—are doing what we can to make sure things are going to be alright.