The spring 2021 collections will start two weeks from today in a radically altered New York. What to expect? None of the cramming cheek by jowl onto benches that we usually do at fashion shows. Few, if any, big American names on the calendar. The schedule has been shrunk to just three days, with many designers holding off until October or November to present new clothes. The city was the last of the four fashion capitals to reopen, and it’s in the unfortunate position of being first out of the fashion month gate. For some, the timing just doesn’t work. Others are opting to move their presentations closer to delivery dates in an effort to make their events more consumer-friendly. In London, Milan, and Paris we may see more live shows—if COVID-19 infections stay low enough, that is; all of a sudden that’s looking doubtful. But this isn’t an article about logistics.

What should we expect from the clothes? How will designers respond to the changes the coronavirus and its attendant quarantines have wrought—changes to our schedules, to our environments, to our needs and desires? These aren’t idle questions. The fashion industry is forecasted to shrink by a third in the wake of the pandemic. For designers and brands to maintain their relevance and, by extension, their solvency, they’ll have to not just tap into our collective anxiety, but also reckon with the tedium of the current moment. The interim resort collections proved not overly newsworthy. For many, it was a victory merely to be able to produce familiar looks in deadstock fabrics, to revive and renew brand classics. Will the solutions they propose for next spring rouse interest?

A glancing look back at the season directly following the stock market crash of 2008—fall 2009—is informative. Yes, that crisis seems far more manageable than the one we’re now living through—it didn’t ground fashion month to a virtual halt, as the pandemic nearly has—but at the time the mood was comparatively bleak. The Great Recession ended the over-the-top aesthetics of the aughts overnight. Logos disappeared and the abrupt decrease in consumer spending precipitated the profit-depleting department store cycle of early deliveries and early sales still in place today.

On those fall 2009 runways (whose casts were glaringly white, as our pictures show), designers responded to the downturn with sobriety. My colleague Sarah Mower called Dries Van Noten’s camel coat a “symbol of the new restraint” and Miuccia Prada’s collection of boiled wool suits “a call for austerity measures.” Even Stefano Pilati, who up until that point at Yves Saint Laurent had aligned himself with the louche glamour that was YSL’s signature, was trumpeting real clothes for real women: “I think timelessness is a good message for now, no?” Victoria Beckham was still a New York Fashion Week newbie, presenting her second collection, but she was talking timelessness too. “It’s so important, especially these days,” she told me at the time. Other designers, like Lanvin’s Alber Elbaz revisited ideas he’d had years before, and like Van Noten channeled the retro of the 1940s, the last time the Western world had known such privations.

Sounds familiar, no? But is playing it safe in this moment the answer? Marc Jacobs would likely say no. In early 2009, he was on the side of glorious excess. After a show of party clothes that would’ve fit in at the nightclubs of his ’80s youth, with hair and makeup to match, he said, “I was thinking about the good old days in New York, when getting dressed up was such a joy.” Jacobs is skipping the season, which is very much New York Fashion Week’s loss. He’s our consummate showman and a prescient one too. In the months after his very joyful indeed Karole Armitage–choreographed fall 2020 show he’s said that even he’s come to see it as a sign-off, as the end of something.

If there’s anything positive about Jacobs’s absence and that of other name-in-lights designers (Michael Kors and Tory Burch, among them) this Fashion Week, it’s that they may make more room for young designers. History teaches us that great crises produce great change in fashion, as in Christian Dior’s New Look coming out of the wake of World War II. Or, yes, as in Phoebe Philo, whose agenda-setting runway debut at Celine with its new strain of provocative pragmatism came a year after the stock market crash. But fashion is too large and too diverse an industry now for a single era-defining look to stick for long.

Fashion in the 2020s won’t be defined by hem lengths and waistlines or a preponderance of the colour camel. Trends of that kind are truly over. Instead, the spring 2021 collections may be shaped by a new wave of designers who have something crucial to say about the chaos and possibilities of our time. It could be one of the young BIPOC designers that Brandice Daniel of Harlem’s Fashion Row is supporting with her Icon 360 fund. Or it could be someone who hails from Chicago or Atlanta or another city far off the fashion capitals map. Heck, it might even be Phoebe Philo herself. After all, she’s “acted as lightning conductor of the female energy of the times,” as Sarah Mower put it, twice already. Whoever rises up, they are likely to centre both sustainability and social responsibility at the core of their practice. The pandemic and the social justice movement have made necessities of them both, and thank goodness.