What happens when creativity collides with the marketplace, and the dream no longer feels like yours?
Eddington, the 2025 Comedic Western written and directed by one of the most enigmatic and innovative voices in cinema, Ari Aster, premiered this May to mixed reviews. Some critics hailed it as a surreal reimagining of the American West, while others dismissed it as indulgent and tonally confused. What made the reception especially charged was not just the film itself, but the weight of Aster’s recent career trajectory. Coming off Beau is Afraid (2023)—a three-hour labyrinth of dread and absurdity that lost nearly $20 million at the box office—Eddington felt like déjà vu: another uncompromising vision, another commercial stumble. Aster himself has admitted that Beau was one of the first films he truly wanted to make, yet couldn’t secure funding for years. When he finally did, it was through the credibility earned from his earlier successes—Hereditary and Midsommar, two works that married arthouse sensibilities with box office triumph.
In interviews, Aster spoke with candor about the disappointment of pouring himself into a film that few audiences embraced. “It’s a bummer,” he said bluntly, “because it was a huge… it lost money. And I feel very protective of it.” The paradox here is striking. Aster is one of the few directors of his generation to possess enough cultural capital to bring his strangest, most personal ideas to life. Yet even he is not immune to the harsh arithmetic of the marketplace. He can sell a dream to financiers, but what happens when the dream doesn’t sell to audiences? What does failure look like for an artist once they’ve already proven themselves? And more importantly, what does it look like for those just beginning, who don’t yet have the cachet of critical or financial success to fall back on?
This tension—between creativity and commercialization, between the purity of a vision and the machinery of selling it—is not unique to film. It haunts every creative field, but nowhere is it more visible than in fashion.
Fashion as a Case Study
The fashion industry thrives on the promise of dreams. Designers create worlds, aesthetics, and mythologies, transforming fabric into identity. Yet, for emerging designers, this dream is costly. Materials cost money. Skilled craftsmanship costs money. Shows cost money. Even after developing a collection, marketing it—convincing the world to care—requires substantial resources. Unlike Aster, who can at least leverage prior box office numbers, young creatives rarely have a back catalogue that reassures investors.
The result is often a harsh paradox: to produce work of substance, funding is necessary; to secure funding, one often has to compromise on the work itself. Investors want market-ready clothes, not pure artistry. Retailers want proven sellers, not risky silhouettes. Consumers, conditioned by fast fashion’s immediacy, often hesitate at prices that reflect the true labor behind a garment.
This is where the line between art and commerce becomes razor-thin. Do you design pieces you believe in, even if they might not sell? Or do you create what you know will sell, even if it dilutes your vision?
The Illusion of Autonomy
The struggle extends beyond simple economics. There’s also the reality of predatory systems: late payments that cripple small brands, exploitative contracts, and the theft of designs by larger houses or corporations that have the resources to replicate and mass-distribute. For young designers, these battles are often invisible but deeply felt. It’s not just about making clothes; it’s about navigating a labyrinth of forces that can co-opt, distort, or crush a vision.
Ironically, it is often when a designer manages to “make it”—to enter the orbit of luxury conglomerates—that autonomy becomes most fragile. Suddenly, the weight of shareholders, seasonal expectations, and brand identity dictates creativity. The designer may still be the face of the dream, but the dream itself is now owned by a corporation. What started as a personal expression becomes a product. What began as a whisper of individuality is amplified into marketing noise.
This is where the parallel to Ari Aster deepens. When an artist’s work doesn’t perform, it isn’t just the work that is scrutinized—it’s the self. Aster admitted he felt protective of Beau because so much of himself was inside it. To watch it dismissed by critics or ignored by audiences was not merely a professional setback but an existential one.
For fashion designers, the same truth holds: a collection is not just clothing, but the manifestation of their worldview. To put it out into the world and watch it fail to resonate can feel like rejection at the most personal level. And yet, paradoxically, one must also learn to detach—to treat their own work as product, to speak of it in terms of sales, market penetration, and growth metrics. To sell a dream, one must often strip it of its intimacy.
The Line Between Creativity and Commercialization
So, where is the line? Does it even exist?
Perhaps the answer lies in balance, though balance is often easier said than lived. Some designers and filmmakers find ways to exist in both worlds: producing commercially viable work that still carries the weight of their identity. Some deliberately retreat into the fringes, refusing compromise and embracing the obscurity—or cult status—that comes with it. Both paths carry sacrifice. One risks dilution of self; the other, financial instability or irrelevance.
Some might argue the line is artificial altogether. Creativity has always existed within constraints—whether financial, political, or cultural. Michelangelo had patrons. Coco Chanel had investors. Even the most “pure” of artists have navigated power structures to bring their visions to life. To romanticize the artist as a figure wholly separate from commerce may be to ignore the history of art itself.
Ari Aster’s career offers no resolution. His successes proved the market could embrace his idiosyncratic vision. His failures reveal that even with resources, the dream may falter when measured against the box office. Fashion designers face the same crossroads, though with even higher stakes. A film can fail and still find life later as a cult classic. A fashion collection, bound to seasons, may vanish entirely, remembered only in scattered lookbooks and social media posts.
Perhaps the answer is not to resolve the paradox, but to live within it—to accept that art and commerce will always coexist in tension. To understand that creating a dream is an act of vulnerability, and selling it is an act of survival. The dream may never fully belong to either the artist or the audience, the creator or the market. It hovers in between, fragile and mutable.
And maybe that is the point. The dream was never meant to be owned.
