How Gen Z’s relationship with fashion is forcing every team in every organization to get aligned.
One Sunday afternoon, 34-year-old Radhika was walking through a mall with her 21-year-old cousin Jiya. The UCB window had a ‘50% Off’ sticker the size of a small billboard.
Radhika: Look, UCB’s on sale. Didn’t you want some summer basics?
Jiya: Huh? No, di. I already ordered. New Me dropped their summer collection at midnight. I got the last three pieces, and they were delivered in the morning.
Radhika stared. New Me. She’d never heard of it.
But Jiya had 14,200 followers on Instagram. By the time they reached home, Jiya had posted a reel trying on all three pieces. #UnboxingHaul. Three of her friends had already asked where she bought them.
Radhika kept wondering ever since they walked past that empty UCB store.
What happened to UCB? To M&S? Is it a marketing problem?
Well, to answer Radhika’s question, this article is not really about marketing. It is about alignment. Today, the brand story doesn’t emerge from the marketing team but from the board rooms and the factory floors. And Gen Z has become the branding police.
And why not? Gen Z is the first consumer generation with the tools, the platforms, and the instinct to punish any gap between what a brand says and what it actually delivers. In public. At scale. With screenshots that never expire. The brands winning in this space have one thing in common: their product team, operations team, logistics team, and marketing team are all pointed at the same consumer, in the same direction, at the same time. The ones losing are running sales that nobody is stopping for.
The Goliaths Are Struggling. And It’s Not Just the Campaigns.
Walk through any premium mall in India today. The stores are full of sale signs. The queues are at the food court.
You would think maybe they ignored Gen Z while planning their campaigns. They didn’t.
Both brands run influencer campaigns. Both have active Instagram pages. M&S has run campaigns explicitly trying to shake its older-consumer image. UCB has decades of bold, countercultural advertising behind it. The Benetton shock-ad era was anything but quiet.
And yet Gen Z remains unmoved.
The diagnosis that most brand teams miss: they’ve marketed to Gen Z without restructuring for Gen Z. The brief changed on the surface. The product didn’t. The Instagram posts got younger. The drop cadence didn’t follow. The campaign creative got fresher. The store experience, the size range, the creator strategy, the price ladder: none of it moved with it.
Think about what genuine Gen Z loyalty actually requires. Price point is not the ceiling. This cohort will spend Rs. 6,000 on New Balance 550s or Rs. 3,000 on a Stanley tumbler. What they won’t spend on is a brand that feels designed for someone else and is simply being pointed in their direction.
And then there is Uniqlo. Uniqlo grew 45% in India in FY25. A legacy brand, winning Gen Z decisively. The difference? Uniqlo didn’t just update its campaigns. It built an entirely different value proposition around functional quality and everyday utility. Product, pricing, store experience, and creator strategy all moved together. That kind of alignment across every function is what UCB and M&S have attempted in parts, but not in full.
From Discovery Funnel to Discovery Spiral
For years, Radhika discovered new brands through TV, magazines, and hoardings. She saw a celebrity face. She planned. She purchased when the time felt right. She had time to window-shop, watch, and think.
That consumer still exists. But she is no longer the most commercially interesting one in the room.
Enter Indian Gen Z women. Born between 1997 and 2007. Mobile-first. Instagram-native. With real spending power, often as the second generation of salaried earners in their family.
And here is what makes them genuinely different: it is not just that they use their phones more. Their entire relationship with brands, discovery, desire, and purchase has been rewired.
Radhika’s playbook: AIDA. Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action. Deliberate. Sequential. Patient.
Jiya’s reality: Discover on Reels. Save. Send to friends. FOMO kicks in. Buy before it sells out. Same day. Or it is gone.
Marketers call this the Discovery Spiral: a non-linear, always-on loop that begins with passive scrolling and ends in a purchase, often in the same session. Traditional funnels were built for deliberate consideration. Gen Z’s buying behavior doesn’t pause long enough for deliberation. A media plan built on the old funnel is, by definition, already misaligned.
Three Shifts That Separate Aligned Brands From the Rest
SHIFT 1: ZMOT HAS MOVED TO THE FOR YOU PAGE
Google coined the term Zero Moment of Truth: the moment a consumer starts researching a product before buying. For years, that moment happened on search. Today, for Gen Z, it happens on a creator’s Reel. Discovery and desire often occur simultaneously, in the same 15 seconds. If your brand is not in that moment, you are not in the consideration set.
SHIFT 2: THE VEBLEN EFFECT, INVERTED
Old luxury logic: show off what you own, signal status through brands others recognise. Gen Z’s social currency works the other way. Finding a label before it goes mainstream is the signal. A brand with 50,000 followers can feel more aspirational than one with 5 million. This matters enormously for how challenger brands should be managed, and how legacy brands should think about earned versus paid media.
SHIFT 3: THE BANDWAGON-SCARCITY PARADOX
Gen Z wants to belong (everyone is wearing this) and to stand out (only 3 pieces left). Drop culture exploits this paradox quietly and brilliantly. The item is exclusive. The community around it is mass. The result is a purchase that feels personal and social at the same time.
Drop Culture: An Alignment Test Wearing Fashion Clothes
Drop culture is simple enough. A brand releases a limited collection, often with no advance catalogue and just a 48-hour countdown. The items sell out fast.
Jiya: New Me dropped at midnight. I set an alarm. My flat mate got the blue set. I got the co-ord. By 7 AM, both were sold out.
Radhika: You set an alarm. For clothes.
Jiya: Di, it’s like concert tickets. You snooze, you lose.
Zara actually pioneered this logic long before Gen Z brands existed. Zara’s genius was always micro-collections: new items hitting stores twice a week, which trained Indian shoppers to visit more often, buy faster, and expect newness constantly.
What Gen Z brands have done is take that cadence and add the urgency mechanics of streetwear. Seasonal fashion says: come whenever, the collection is here for months. Drop culture says: come now, or it’s gone.
The formula is straightforward:
- Teaser content, 3 to 5 days before
- Countdown Stories, 48 hours out
- Drop notification via WhatsApp or app push
- Sell-out in hours
- UGC from buyers floods the feed, FOMO hits non-buyers, waitlists build for the next drop
The psychological engine here is the scarcity heuristic: a cognitive bias where we value things more when they are harder to get. Legacy brands run sales. Drop brands manufacture desire by running out. The difference is not just tactical. It is structural.
A brand that runs drops needs its inventory management, logistics, app infrastructure, and creator strategy to all fire on the same day, at the same hour. Drop culture is, in that sense, an alignment test that fashion has been wearing as a trend. The brands that pass it are the ones where every team has been briefed on the same consumer. The ones that fail tend to blame the marketing.
Why Jiya Needs Five Outfits This Week
Radhika’s generation has four dress codes. Work. Casual. Party. Formal. Thirty good pieces covered a year.
Jiya has a different problem.
This week alone she needs an airport look for her Goa trip on Thursday, a concert fit for the Prateek Kuhad show on Saturday, a movie night aesthetic for Sunday, and something for what her friends are already calling the ‘soft launch’ dinner on Friday. Each of these has a name, a hashtag, a Pinterest board, and a dozen creators demonstrating the canonical version. Each will be photographed. Each will be posted. And none of them can repeat, because repetition on the feed is the one fashion crime Gen Z doesn’t forgive.
This is what some are calling the Occasionification of Everyday Life: the explosion of named, content-ready micro-occasions that each demand their own distinct look. And it has quietly rewritten the economics of fashion.
Notice what is actually driving Jiya’s purchase. It is not that she cannot afford a Rs. 2,500 top. It is that she needs five distinct looks this week. Rs. 2,500 once gets her one. Rs. 400 five times gets her five, each fresh, each performing a slightly different dimension of her identity to her followers. The premium brand loses not on price but on frequency.
Jiya is not buying fashion. She is buying content occasions and cultural capital at scale.
This also reframes quick commerce in fashion entirely. Slikk, Myntra’s same-day delivery, and their successors are not really a convenience play. They are content occasion infrastructure. The urgency is not ‘I have a wedding tomorrow.’ It is ‘I am posting my concert fit tonight, and I don’t have the right top.’ That is a same-hour need. The brands that understand this are building not just faster logistics but a fundamentally different reason for a Gen Z customer to buy.
The Hidden Gem Economy: Distribution That No Budget Can Buy
There is a very specific Gen Z behavior that brand marketers tend to undervalue. The obsession with finding a brand before it goes mainstream, and then sharing it like a secret #NotGatekeeping
Jiya doesn’t think of herself as a brand ambassador for New Me. But when she posts an unboxing reel and tags the brand, and three friends ask where the top is from, she has done the work of a nano-influencer. No brief, no contract, no fee.
This is what gets called the hidden gem economy. It runs on two things: authentic discovery (she found it herself, it wasn’t pushed at her) and social identity (her taste is an expression of who she is). No media budget can fully replicate it.
The corollary is important too. Get too visible too fast, too many ads, too mainstream too quickly, and you lose the mystique. A 20K-follower creator talking about a brand feels like insider knowledge. A Bollywood star wearing it feels like a press release.
For brands like UCB and M&S, who arrived in Gen Z’s orbit as household names rather than discovered secrets, reclaiming this sense of discovery is perhaps their steepest climb. And it cannot be climbed by the marketing team alone. Product needs to offer something genuinely new. The creator strategy needs to feel organic. And the channels need to be ones where real discovery actually happens. That is alignment working across every function. Not just a campaign.
Underneat: What Happens When Great Marketing Meets Operational Gaps
One of the clearest examples of this new fashion reality is Underneat, the shapewear brand co-founded by creator Kusha Kapila.
Long before the first product dropped, Kusha spent months turning ‘what are you wearing under?’ into a running conversation with her audience. She collected stories about chafing, bad fits, awkward shapes, and weather-unfriendly fabrics. In public. At scale. It was, in effect, content as open R&D and pre-launch audience building at the same time.
When Underneat launched in April 2025, the brand’s handle exploded to six-figure followers within days. Reels, memes, and try-ons flooded Gen Z feeds. The marketing was flawless.
And then the comments arrived.
Underneath the glowing reviews sat a quieter story. Underneat’s return policy does not allow returns or exchanges on shapewear, bodysuits, underwear, shorts, or accessories, citing hygiene reasons. Only bras, saree shapewear, and bodycon dresses qualify, within seven days of delivery. For a brand selling shapewear to Indian women across a wide range of body types, where fit is everything and online sizing is always a gamble, this is a significant post-purchase gap. Add early feedback about nylon fabric sitting poorly in India’s humid climate, and the distance between what the content promised and what the product delivered began to show. Publicly. In comments.
This is not a criticism of Underneat. The brand is young, genuinely well-intentioned, and has done something most D2C brands never manage: it built a community before it built a catalogue. But here is what the Underneat story illustrates, more clearly than any framework could: great content builds aspiration. UGC builds truth. And for Gen Z, a comment thread is more trustworthy than any ad ever written.
Underneat’s marketing instinct is clearly strong. The product and post-purchase experience just need to catch up to the story being told on the feed. A brand that closes that loop will find UGC is its most powerful media channel. One that doesn’t will find the comments section doing the job that no Reels budget can fix.
This is not a marketing department problem. It is a whole-company problem.
The Conversion Layer: Where Operations and Marketing Meet Quietly
Before anyone gets to media plans, there is a conversion layer that most fashion brand briefs completely ignore: what happens on the product page.
The next time you are on a Gen Z fashion app, look at what sits around the ‘Add to Cart’ button. ‘Only 4 left in your size.’ ‘Bestseller this week.’ ’47 people have this in their cart.’ These are not arbitrary labels. They are carefully placed psychological triggers drawn from Robert Cialdini’s principles of influence.
Scarcity: ‘Only 3 left’ creates urgency. The FOMO that social media builds is being reinforced right at the point of purchase.
Social Proof: ’47 people viewing’ confirms that this is a popular choice, and that you had better decide fast.
Authority: ‘Bestseller’ and ‘Editor’s Pick’ do the curation work when a shopper is scrolling through 300 items.
The Whole Fashion Ecosystem Is Being Rebuilt
It is not just the brands that have changed. The entire infrastructure around them is being rebuilt for this cohort.
Myntra FWD is a section built explicitly for Gen Z: drop-style launches, creator-curated collections, trend-first discovery.
Nykaa Fashion has leaned into the creator economy heavily, blurring the line between content and buying.
Instagram Shop has made the gap between discovery and purchase almost nothing. A swipe, a tap, done.
Slikk is attempting to bring the instant gratification of Blinkit and Zepto to apparel. Imagine discovering a piece at 8 PM, ordering it, and wearing it to dinner at 9.
Try and Buy programmes are gaining ground because they remove the sizing anxiety that is one of the biggest reasons people abandon an online fashion cart.
Each of these is a media opportunity. But only if the brand brief and the media plan are designed to speak to the right cohort, on the right platform, at the right moment.
The Old Brief vs. the New Brief: What the Plan Actually Looks Like
This is where the alignment argument becomes concrete.
We gave Ant10, The Media Ant’s AI-powered media planning tool, two briefs for two fictional brands in the same category: Zavora, a legacy premium label planning a summer collection launch, and Fleira, a Gen Z D2C challenger building buzz for a drop. Same season, same market, same category. The only difference was the cohort.
What Ant10 returned was not just different channels. It was a completely different theory of how each brand earns attention. That is what a brief built around a real cohort does. It forces every line of the plan to align behind a single consumer, rather than spreading itself across a generic one.
Zavora spends on CTV, airport media, and premium OOH to build brand recall among affluent urban consumers across 8 metros. It is an awareness-first, brand-led play. The creative is editorial: summer whites, linen textures, aspirational imagery. The KPI is brand lift and share of search.
Fleira puts most of its budget where the conversation is actually happening: on creators, on Instagram, on Google Search and Shopping. Its creative brief reads like a social feed: try-on hauls, before-and-after styling reels, drop countdown stories. The KPI is ROAS, creator engagement rates, and app installs.
The insight: media planning in fashion is no longer about channels. It is about cohorts. And cohorts don’t just differ in demographics. They differ in the media they trust, the creators they follow, and the moments when they are open to buying. The brief is not a marketing document. It is an alignment document.
The Way Ahead: You Need More Than a Market. You Need a Cohort.
For challenger brands looking to take on the Goliaths, the temptation is always to go wide: more cities, more budgets, more impressions. The brands that have grown fastest in Gen Z fashion have mostly done the opposite. They’ve gone deep.
They’ve found specific cohorts: college students in Tier 1 cities who follow K-fashion, working women in their early 20s who dress for content, women from Tier 2 cities who want metro-level style without metro prices. And they’ve built their entire media, creator, and product strategy around those cohorts.
Each cohort has its own media behavior. Some live on Instagram Reels all day. Some discover through YouTube Shorts. Some are in WhatsApp communities sharing drop links. Some are on Moj and ShareChat, where vernacular content drives real purchase intent. A media plan that does not account for this is leaving real performance on the table.
Share of Voice matters here in a way legacy brands sometimes forget. In a space where four or five Gen Z brands are competing for the same woman’s attention, the brand that shows up most consistently across creators, platforms, and moments is the one that gets the next drop purchase. SoV is not just a brand metric here. It is a conversion driver.
Back at the Mall
Radhika is still looking at that UCB sale sign.
Radhika: They used to be so cool. What happened?
Jiya: Di, I don’t relate with them
It’s a simpler answer than most strategy decks would offer. But it is the right one.
The Indian fashion market is not contracting. It is splitting. Legacy brands still have a real audience: affluent, brand-loyal, 30-plus, who want quality and reliability. That market deserves a serious, well-planned campaign.
But the next generation of buyers has already moved. They shop through drops. They find brands through creators. They buy before things sell out. They post reviews that outlive any campaign.
The brands that will win, whether they are Goliaths relearning the game or challengers writing new rules, are the ones that understand this is not a marketing problem.
It is a whole-organization problem.
And the first step is a more honest brief.
