New York Fashion Week is in full swing as I write this, my feed is wall-to-wall spring 2025 looks, and somewhere between the street style and the show reviews I keep seeing something that would have been unthinkable when I started this blog: people in fashion talking about mental health, openly, by name. Today also happens to be World Suicide Prevention Day, which feels like the right moment to sit with that shift honestly, both the progress and the parts that make me uneasy.
Because mental health has gone mainstream, and fashion, as it does with everything, has noticed.
From Whisper to Slogan Tee
Rewind ten years and mental health in this industry was a rumor, a thing discussed after tragedies and then carefully re-buried. Today it’s on hoodies. Brands like Madhappy built their entire identity around “optimism” and mental health awareness, complete with a journal, conversation-prompt content, and a portion of proceeds going to research. Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty channels one percent of sales into its Rare Impact Fund, which has committed millions toward expanding mental health services for young people.
I have genuinely mixed feelings, and I think mixed feelings are the only honest response. On one hand: visibility matters. A 19-year-old buying a blush because the brand talks frankly about anxiety is a 19-year-old who grew up with less shame than I did. On the other hand, when “mental health” becomes a merch category, there’s a real risk the language gets hollowed out. A hoodie that says “Local Optimist” is not therapy. It was never meant to be, but marketing has a way of blurring that line, and struggling people deserve better than vibes.
My test for these brands is simple: follow the money and the specifics. Madhappy and Rare Beauty fund actual programs with named partners. That’s different from a “self-care” capsule collection with no receipts. Awareness without infrastructure is just aesthetics.
The Industry Is Finally Talking About Its Own
Here’s the part of this conversation I care about most, because fashion loves to champion causes while quietly grinding up its own people.
The pace of this industry is brutal and everyone inside it knows. Creative directors are expected to produce six, eight, sometimes ten collections a year, and the cost of that treadmill has been written on the industry’s history for decades. We’ve lost brilliant people to it. This past June, Dries Van Noten took his final bow in Paris after 38 years, one of the rare designers to leave on his own terms, at his own pace, with his joy apparently intact. The fact that his graceful exit felt so exceptional says everything about the norm.
Designers themselves have gotten more candid. We’ve heard luminaries describe burnout in plain language in recent years, and The Business of Fashion has covered the industry’s churn of creative directors and the human cost behind the musical chairs with increasing directness. The conversation that used to happen only in eulogies is finally happening in interviews. That’s progress, even when it’s uncomfortable to read.
And then there are models, the workforce this industry treats as most disposable. The Model Alliance has spent over a decade fighting for basic labor protections, and this June New York finally passed the Fashion Workers Act, which establishes real accountability for management agencies. Financial precarity, body scrutiny, working as a teenager in an adult industry far from home: these are mental health issues wearing a labor-law costume. You cannot meaningfully care about models’ wellbeing without caring about their working conditions.
What Celebrities Changed, for Better and Worse
The mainstreaming didn’t start with fashion. It started with famous women refusing to perform wellness they didn’t feel. Simone Biles stepping back in Tokyo and then returning to win gold in Paris last month rewrote the script: rest is not the end of the story. Bella Hadid has spoken for years, plainly and without polish, about anxiety and the toll of starting modeling young. Naomi Osaka did the same in tennis. Vogue now publishes mental health coverage as routinely as trend reports, which would have baffled the magazine’s own editors of twenty years ago.
The “better” part is obvious: representation reduces shame, and shame is the thing that keeps people from getting help. The “worse” part is subtler. When mental health becomes content, there’s pressure to package struggle into a redemption arc with a glow-up at the end. Real life is messier. Some weeks are just hard, without a brand deal at the finish line, and I worry sometimes that the mainstream version sells recovery as a before-and-after photo. It’s usually more like maintenance. Less cinematic. More true.
What This Looks Like From a Closet
I write about clothes, so let me bring this home to clothes, carefully.
I’ve written before about how getting dressed is one of the first small rituals to slip when someone’s struggling, and one of the gentlest ways back. I stand by that, with a caveat I want to make loudly: style is a support, not a treatment. A great outfit can carry you through a hard Tuesday. It cannot do the work of a therapist, medication when it’s needed, or a friend who picks up the phone. Anyone who tells you fashion heals is selling you fashion.
What fashion can do is honor the person wearing it. Dressing with care, on the days you can manage it, is a way of telling yourself you’re worth the effort. And noticing, without judgment, the weeks when you can’t manage it is useful information, the kind worth sharing with someone you trust.
So here’s where I land on mental health going mainstream: imperfect, commercialized, occasionally cringeworthy, and still unambiguously better than silence. The slogan hoodies will date themselves. The funded programs, the labor laws, the interviews where powerful people say “I was not okay” out loud, those compound.
If today is heavy for you, or any day is, please reach out to someone, whether that’s a person you love or a professional. In the US, you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, anytime. No outfit required. Just you, and that has always been enough.