Life isn’t getting any easier for the neither-here-nor-there crowd sitting in the increasingly uncomfortable spot between value and luxury. 

“Some customers orient themselves downward and go for what value offers. Others don’t buy mid-market products because they can get discounted premium products and get more brands, maybe more fashionability for the same price,” said Achim Berg, the former McKinsey consultant and fashion expert who founded FashionSights, the independent corporate think tank. 

While that squeeze has been going on for some time now, Berg and his colleagues took a deep dive into the broader dynamic that’s pressured the middle and found it to be a kind of storm front that can move higher up the price ladder. 

FashionSights’ lays out its case in a new white paper, titled “After the Mid-Market Squeeze: The Vertical Blueprint Set to Hit Premium.”

The study — written by FashionSights’ Dr. Kerstin Schäfer, Paula Trus and Berg — said, “No corner of the industry has been contorted quite as dramatically as fashion’s mid-market.

“What used to be the industry’s stable center, the ‘aspirational mainstream’ between mass and premium, has turned into the most disrupted, scrutinized and polarized part of fashion,” the study said. “Fast-fashion and value players scaled up from below with speed, price, quality and vertical control, while premium brands moved down with more accessible price points, heavy discounting and outlet expansion. Together they eroded mid-market’s price-value advantage and blurred its purpose.”

The group found this was no more visible than in the U.K., where the mid-market peaked with 20.5 percent market share in 2019 and has steadily declined since, “indicating a structural shift, rather than solely a cyclical setback, following the pandemic.”

“Between 2019 and 2025, the segment’s share declined by 2.1 percentage points, falling to 18.4 percent while the mass market share increased by 3.6 percentage points,” FashionSights found. 

Over the last decade only a few “vertically integrated or strongly positioned brands meaningfully expanded their market share” including Zara, up 1.2 percentage points, Marks & Spencer, up 1 percent, and Next, up 0.5 percent.

“In contrast, mid-market department stores and brands reliant on fragile networks or those constrained by weakened brand-appeal and value-chain inefficiencies saw their positions deteriorate or even turn ruinous,” the report said, pointing to Debenhams, House of Fraser and Arcadia. 

And Berg said the winners have been strategically positioning themselves. 

“You had to build critical mass,” he said. “Ten years ago, a billion in sales was quite sizable. Nowadays, it’s not.”

Zara-parent Inditex is approaching 40 billion euros in revenues globally and has been a key consolidator of market share.

“You need critical mass in order to digitize and use AI now, in order to deliver the ESG requirements, to work in multiple channels and also to do e-commerce or you need to deliberately play a niche,” Berg said. “There’s hardly any survival in the middle ground.”

So watch out premium. 

The report said: “The forces that hollowed out the middle — polarization, verticalization, consolidation, and the squeeze on subscale models — are now moving up the value ladder. What we observe in the mid-market today is the playbook that will increasingly shape the premium segment going forward.”