What if there was an app for reviewing fashion shows? Letterboxd, GoodReads, Rotten Tomatoes and...

What’s the point of watching a movie if you can’t drop a witty one-liner on Letterboxd afterwards? Is it even worth going to the cinema if a film hasn’t pulled at least a 70% on Rotten Tomatoes? And how would BookTok even survive without Goodreads? In recent years, somewhere between the burnout of super-apps and the craving for niche communities, review-based platforms have become the real buzz of the entertainment ecosystem. And yet, in this revolution of popular opinion, why has no one ever thought about rating runway shows with stars? The clearest example is Letterboxd itself, which went from a clunky, cinephile-only website to being everywhere on premieres and red carpets, today considered an almost essential reference point for film journalism. The viral “Top 4” clips from Hollywood A-listers regularly dominate TikTok: millions of users comment, share, or drag their picks (the video of the Wicked cast, for instance, has racked up 1.7 million likes and over 12.7 million views).

The numbers behind review apps

Take Goodreads, the go-to platform for readers and writers, which had already surpassed 150 million members by September 2023, becoming a cornerstone of TikTok’s BookTok ecosystem. Letterboxd itself has seen explosive growth: from 1.8 million users in March 2020 to 17 million by the end of 2024, as reported by the New York Times. IMDb remains a giant, with over 83 million registered users, while SEMRush reports Rotten Tomatoes pulling in more than 100 million monthly visits. In short, film, literature, and music all share one key trait: accessibility. They are democratic, universal art forms that thrive on communities built through the now-viral practice of reviews. Fashion, on the other hand?

The fashion system, as we’ve learned, has long tried to spin a fairy tale of democracy and “openness”, especially since luxury sales started to slump. We hear about street shows and public-facing events, but there are caveats (actually, two): first, mainstream events almost never carry the same weight as the “official” ones, and second, in a sea of institutional voices, the opinions of the crowd lose traction, or at least never echo as loudly as a Vanessa Friedman or Angelo Flaccavento.

When everything is driven by hype

Some tools, however, have turned into semi-indicators of popular sentiment, like the Lyst Index. The platform, which claims over 150 million yearly shoppers, is often treated as a barometer of brand success, almost as if it were a crowdsourced review site. In reality, metrics like Lyst capture only digital attention, which makes them closer to an hype tracker than a genuine sentiment tool. The criteria it relies on – mentions, shares, engagement – mirror virality more than strategic or creative consistency. That means brands that are hyper-visible on social media are rewarded, while established houses that are less “Instagrammable” get pushed aside. A label can easily climb the Index with a mediocre collection, simply by riding a temporary social media wave. Adding to the issue is the total opacity of the formula: no one really knows the actual weight of clicks, searches, views, or dwell time, leaving the impression that the Lyst Index is more of a black box of digital trends than an objective analytics tool.

But the truth is, there’s still no equivalent of Letterboxd or Goodreads for fashion: no platform where collections can be openly rated and reviewed by the public. Where film, books, and music have integrated popular judgment into the cultural experience, fashion continues to operate under vertical, closed-off logics, keeping criticism in the hands of insiders and journalists.

The audience has opinions—and wants to share them

The lack of a dedicated platform for fashion reviews is not a demand issue, as social media numbers clearly show. On X.com, the Fashion Twitter community alone counts over 273k members, not to mention the thousands of users who live-comment every fashion week show, sparking parallel conversations alongside official reviews. The same is true on TikTok, where the hashtag #fashionshows hosts nearly 900k posts and close to 18 billion views. These numbers prove there’s already a huge, engaged, and vocal audience eager to consume and create content around fashion with the same energy we see on other review-based platforms.

And yet, fashion insists on staying gated, keeping control of the conversation within exclusive, self-referential circles. Despite clear demand for participation, the industry still clings to an elitist model built over decades to safeguard its aura of exclusivity. As a result, critique remains confined to insiders, while the public voice—loud, persistent, and ever-present online—never finds a true space of legitimacy. De facto, the absence of a fashion review app is yet another sign that the system neither wants to talk to a general audience nor be in conversation with it.

The issue is that this very exclusivity mirrors the roots of declining sales and the wider crisis in the luxury sector. If aspirational consumers are never allowed to feel part of the system, how can the industry expect to strengthen or renew itself? Persisting in verticalizing fashion means running the risk of an industry that, trapped in its own bubble, will eventually shrink to the point of irrelevance—as is already happening, to some extent, with Milan Fashion Week. So the real question is: is there a way out of this?