Somewhere along the way, the fashion and culture industries stopped wanting relationships and started wanting shortcuts.

You can see it everywhere. The founder who wants coverage before they’ve built anything worth covering. The brand that wants community before it’s given people a reason to care. The endless obsession with visibility, reach, impressions, and growth hacking. The assumption underneath all of it is the same: that relevance can be engineered.

I’ve spent close to a decade watching the opposite happen.

Let me tell you how a lot of front rows actually work. An established brand allocates budget. A talent team gets a call. The fee to simply show up — not post, not wear anything, just exist in a seat — can start at five figures for a mid-tier name and climb well into six figures for anyone who actually moves culture. That’s before the car. Before the glam. Before the stylist. Before the hotel. The talent arrives, walks a lap, has a seat, hugs the designer, takes a photo, and fifteen minutes later they’re back in the car with their eyes already somewhere else. Nobody is pretending otherwise. It’s a transaction. Both sides know it.

I don’t judge it. I just work differently.

Last September, I was standing outside Brooklyn Borough Hall as thousands of people flooded the plaza for a KidSuper show. It wasn’t a traditional fashion week event. There was no velvet rope. No paid talent sitting in the seats. No brand budget behind the guest list.

Ms. Lauryn Hill was there. Busta Rhymes. A$AP Ferg. Fabolous. Slick Rick. Ne-Yo. Kodak Black. Jim Jones. Jordan Clarkson. Terance Mann. Francisco Lindor. Saint Jhn. The Marley family. All in the same front row on a Sunday night in Brooklyn. Every corner of New York culture in one place.

I’ll be honest. I didn’t fully believe Ms. Hill was coming until I saw her step out of the car. The clock was ticking and I was watching that door like my career depended on it. And then she was there. I walked over, said hello, and escorted her and her family in. It was one of those moments where you have to hold it together on the outside while everything inside you is completely losing it.

What most people don’t see is what it actually took to get to that moment.

I had spent years building a relationship with her stylist. Not for this specifically, but because that’s how real relationships work. When the show came together I reached out. Her stylist replied in under ten minutes. A minute after that, the answer was yes.

But yes came with conditions. Ms. Hill would only attend if she felt she looked right. That meant 25 bags of clothing options delivered to her so she could choose. It meant her full escort. It meant every one of her children seated front row beside her. Every condition was non-negotiable and every condition was met. Because when a legend decides she might come to your show, you make it work.

Nobody paid her to be there. The work that made it possible happened long before that night, in years of quiet relationship building that had nothing to do with a contract or a campaign brief.

The only thing that got her in that seat was trust, and trust can take years.

I’ve seen the same principle play out with brands, too. When I first met Colm Dillane in Brooklyn in 2019, KidSuper wasn’t the global name it is today. We met by happenstance and three months later we were in Paris doing his first ever runway show. For a brand that was barely known outside Brooklyn at the time, that was an enormous risk. I’d seen enough to know that I didn’t care. Standing there on that first night in Paris I remember thinking – I hope this swims. And it did.

I’ve also watched the opposite. Big brands with enormous budgets producing campaigns so disconnected from the culture they’re trying to reach that they become a punchline inside the industry before they even launch publicly. I’ve been sent briefs by major brands with celebrity and influencer ideas attached and thought: seriously? Do they even know who’s relevant right now? The answer, more often than you’d think, is no. Because the people making those decisions aren’t inside the culture. They’re observing it from a distance and guessing.

Twenty years ago, brands had more control over the conversation. Today audiences have a vote. And they can feel the difference between something real and something assembled in a boardroom.

The problem isn’t the budget. The problem is the approach. Audiences are more sophisticated than brands give them credit for. They know when a collaboration exists because two parties genuinely aligned versus when somebody signed a check. They know when a room is full of people who actually want to be there versus people who were placed there. They know the difference between a brand that stands for something and a brand performing like it does.

The same applies to media. The best editor relationships aren’t built when you need coverage. They’re built in all the moments when you don’t.

I’ve never paid for a placement. I’ve never paid someone to wear a client’s clothes or show up to an event. Every editor relationship I’ve built took years. Every front row that made people talk happened because the culture was already real before anyone sat down in it.

That approach requires patience, which is increasingly unfashionable. The industry wants results in a quarter. PR is expected to generate visibility on demand. But the moments that actually shape culture rarely work that way.

Once I sent clothes to a celebrity and waited eight months before anything happened. No follow-up. No contract. No deliverable. Eight months later I woke up to a placement that moved the needle more than any paid campaign could have. Because it was real. Because she actually wore it. Because nobody manufactured it.

The brands that matter most right now aren’t winning because they’re the loudest or the best funded. They’re winning because people feel genuine ownership over them. Audiences aren’t consuming these brands. They’re participating in them. That’s a completely different relationship and you can’t buy your way into it.

Culture isn’t built through transactions. It’s built through relationships. Every moment that has ever mattered in my career proves it. Lauryn Hill stepping out of that car. Colm saying he wanted Paris. An editor texting back because they trust your taste. A celebrity wearing something eight months after you stopped expecting it.

Ms. Lauryn Hill stepped out of a car 45 minutes late and the whole night shifted. Not because of a contract. Because of a relationship.

No algorithm creates that. No media buy gets you there.

Some things you can only earn.

Follow Britt McGovern on Instagram and Substack