For as dark as this year has been, it has clarified things. The lockdowns gave us lots of time to reflect, to study the numbers, to error-correct. Some brands won’t make it through the crisis, but the ones that do will run smarter in 2021. Rag & Bone’s Marcus Wainwright drilled down to basics on a pre-fall call last week. “Everything we make has to have a reason to exist,” he said. It sounds obvious, but for too long fashion hasn’t operated that way. Collections were designed with an eye to editorial credits, not real-life wearability. And store buyers made orders based on previous seasons’ sell-throughs, then returned merchandise when it didn’t move or offloaded it at deep discounts. With runways out of the picture and brick-and-mortar stores closed for much of this year, brands relied on their own e-commerce platforms. Now that they have adjusted their operations, returning to former ways of doing things seems more and more unlikely as the crisis extends. “There’s a chasm between what works in a big way online and the old runway collection idea,” Wainwright said.