“Merchandising is almost as essential as the design,” said Burke. “There’s no compromise in saying that, and in fact, it’s a huge asset.”

Robert Burke, of retail consultancy Robert Burke & Associates, said there is a “recalibration” happening in the way that merchandisers rely on data, describing the importance of intuition in an emotional market such as fashion.

“We’re not buying and selling commodities,” he said.

And purchase data isn’t the only type of information retailers use. According to business consultant Robert Burke, whose New York firm specializes in fashion and retail, predictive algorithms can collect data on the way customers interact with the brand’s social media posts, or follow their web-browsing habits, which helps the retailer anticipate what will sell in the future and even which products to stock in which geographic location and in what quantities.

“Sometimes it is impossible to predict a viral move when you are not the one controlling the action,” Burke says. But data helps retailers exert a surprising amount of control, even when it comes to notoriously fickle viral trends. Some retailers are even using predictive artificial intelligence to forecast what will become trendy in the future, and how many they should produce.

“The trend in the fashion retail industry is that bigger is not better, whether that’s stores or developments,” said Robert Burke of retail consultancy Robert Burke & Associates. “People are looking for more intimate stores, they’re looking for environments that are more personalised.”

“You know, we as Westerners can sometimes be very arrogant that the customer - the consumer should understand us. And the brands have realized today that have been successful that, no, you have to understand the Chinese customer.

“The luxury sector of luxury goods are not going to slow down. And I don't say that in an arrogant way. And, you know, for the high luxury brands, for the customer that's buying these products because they want to be distinguished socially, there's not going to be a slowdown.

“They’ve been extremely focused from the very beginning on how they were represented, how they designed, who the customer was, and they’ve really stayed so true to that vision,” said retail advisor Robert Burke. “People were skeptical when they started, but they are absolutely the opposite of celebrity designers.”

Today, the consumer really wants a lifestyle assortment of juice bars, interesting restaurants, fitness and different levels of fashion. Madison Avenue, on the other hand, has become very one-note … it’s not necessarily how the customer is shopping today.

High-end jewelry is popping up on men’s fashion runways at Gucci and other big luxury brands, said Robert Burke, an independent fashion consultant. He also pointed to the influential Dover Street Market stores in London, Tokyo and New York, which are highlighting men’s jewelry. Saks Fifth Avenue’s New York flagship this fall is also opening a jewelry area called The Vault that will showcase high-end men’s watches.

"The first purchase a customer may make would probably not gonna be a $4,000 handbag or $3,000 jacket. So the brands realized they needed to have these products, small leather goods, in variety of ways, accessories, in variety of ways”, said Robert Burke

“It used to be taboo to have these products, today it’s recognized that if you have a $400 or $500 item in your luxury brand, there is nothing wrong with that. In fact that’s a good thing…”

“Barneys is a viable brand,” said Robert Burke, who runs a namesake retail and fashion consulting business in Manhattan. “It has good recognition. There’s certainly a future there. How big the footprint should be has yet to be decided.”

“When I was at Bergdorf’s, the team at Barneys always kept us on our toes,” said Robert Burke, founder of a namesake luxury consultancy and a former fashion director of Bergdorf Goodman. “You knew you would walk in there and find something inspiring and undiscovered.

“I think Chanel has remained a very innovative example to brands when it comes to footwear,” added Robert Burke, chairman and CEO of Robert Burke Associates, a retail and fashion consulting firm.

Burke said, “Chanel has always kind of followed their own beat.”

“Everyone woke up to the fact that if they sold product directly, their margins could be so much higher,” said Robert Burke, a retail consultant. “This is how younger brands are looking at it today. They want to control their distribution.”

“Because the business has been challenging, there is an aversion to risk,” Burke added. “And because of the aversion, the consumer feels like nothing is exciting and nothing is interesting.”

“The thing is, the stores are going to be important,” Burke said. “But not important to the degree that you have to have one in every city in America.”

“First we go out and examine who else is in the market, what’s the competition and what they’re doing. It’s a market assessment to see where the opportunities are. Then we conceptualize the retail strategy for our client; what brands are right for the project. We act as a liaison between property owners or developers and the brands,” explained John Mitchell, president of Robert Burke Associates.

The RBA team brings luxury to many projects but leaves room for other categories, creating a spectrum of prices, products and services that the team feels are relevant to how people shop today.

“The customer who buys Chanel is the same customer going to NikeLab and they’re going to Apple and want to go to SoulCycle,” Robert Burke said. “You still have to have fashion. But what we’ve done in these projects is really mixing it.”

Ron Frasch advocates “humanizing,” or bringing down the scale of, brick-and-mortar retail. “I love small. It feels so valid today,” he said.

Robert Burke, the founder of the Robert Burke Associates consultancy, said: “The fashion world as a whole has a short memory span. It lasts about the amount of time from one show to the next.” (That’s around five months, which is in fact about how much time has passed between the Dolce China crash and today.) 

Then he pointed out that fashion loves a comeback story and noted that John Galliano, who was ignominiously fired from Christian Dior after reports of a drug-and-alcohol-fueled anti-Semitic rant in a Paris bar, is currently the much celebrated creative director of Maison Margiela.

“Everything is in flux,” said Robert Burke, founder of consultants Robert Burke Associates. “What’s appealing today to the consumer, it’s not as traditional as what we have known in the past. When I look at someone like Virgil [Abloh] or I look at what’s happening today at Gucci, [with] Michele, being a very unknown designer, it’s impossible today to separate sheer design, classically trained design and marketing.”