On October 4th, after 30 or so days of looking – continuously, nearly unblinkingly – at fashion and fashion shows, I woke up early, groggy, sour, and went to see the cows. They were skinny, brindled things, more like dogs than heifers, and they had outfits, or at least, accessories: bells around their necks that clanged in warning when they walked. They sounded like church bells in miniature.

I had come to escape. I was by a field in an obscure canton of German-speaking Switzerland, where the locals talk in a dialect unintelligible even to Swiss German speakers, fry veal sausages and go about their business well insulated from what we euphemistically call the ‘fashion world’. A multibillion dollar business that in recent years has mutated into something combining the best and worst parts of commerce, blockbusters and bullshit. I am (luckily, I might add) part of an odd, sizable caravan whose job it is to follow the circus and report what goes on there to those who are interested. It’s a job I found my way into without intending to, but found myself enraptured by an industry that exists at the nexus of so many fascinating vectors, often working against one another. I love commerce. I love blockbusters. Properly delivered, I love bullshit.

As fashion has moved from the elite privilege of the cloistered few to mass entertainment on a Hollywood scale, more people are interested in it than ever, and accordingly, there is more need to interest them. So the shows have become richer, stranger, with musical acts and set pieces and sponsored starlets sitting front row. More than anything else, there just seems to be more of everything: more brands and more shows and more insistence on giving them your full attention. The scale and the scope have become dizzying, the language used to describe them more hyperventilated. We’re obsessed and we need and we must have and we love. (I am guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty.)

Despite the alarming bounty, there is also a nagging feeling of alarming sameness, ideas ricocheting from one collection to the next, sequential tiles in an endless Instagram scroll. (If Instagram has made it easy for everyone to imbibe one another’s lives, loves and ideas, it also makes it easy for upstarts like Diet Prada to call out serial offenders.) Every collection seems enslaved to the idea of a millennial shopper, so every collection now includes a high-end sneaker, a logo T-shirt, a flirty, whiplash mix of ‘street’, ‘sport’ and ‘haute’.

What brought me to Switzerland was a creeping feeling that the fashion circuit has become alarmingly closed; that fashion people, such as we are, do fashion things, talk fashion talk, chew over the same small handful of references like cud, and retire home to do it all again. Half the people leaving Paris Fashion Week seemed to be headed to Frieze, and half seemed to be headed to a Supreme store opening in Brooklyn. I headed to a Swiss hotel with a more than passing resemblance to a sanatorium. I don’t say this to brag; St Moritz this was not. I dined on health mush and hot cheese; I was the youngest guest by a decade at least. The Blue Room outside of which a strings-and-piano duo in formalwear played every night had not been redecorated since 1908. Every morning, print copies – imagine, print copies of a newspaper! – of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung waited, relaxing in a language I cannot read.

It was profoundly, restoratively un-fashion. Everyone wore unstylish skiwear and sipped thin red Swiss wine in the cold open air by the third-rate golf club. (The Swiss consume most of the wine they produce and export very little; you are not likely to see it on the wine list of any fashionable place any time soon.) Reprieved from the obligation to obsess, to notice every shoe (and the fact that no fewer than three of your international colleagues are wearing it at any one time), I relaxed. I didn’t realize how sensitive my antennae had become, nor how tense I had gotten from holding them aloft at all times. I straightened up from my front-row defensive crouch. I rode a bike (terrifying). I petted a cow.

Maybe you knew this all already. Maybe you don’t need to be reminded to unplug by someone recently converted to the lifestyle of a Swiss convalescent in the years preceding World War I. (Please prepare yourself for my forthcoming lifestyle brand.) But fashion will wait. I blame no one for sheltering in it as a distraction and a refuge, especially at a time when it seems as uncertain of its own future as at any time I can recall (retail is hobbling, magazines are shuttering, ‘the system is broken’, the lifers mutter as they head off for their town cars).

But to obsess without end won’t save it, or us. What we may need – in my own, single, humble opinion – is to go farther from the trail, to be braver, stranger, less slavish in our devotion to our obsessions and less terrified of our deviations, and to return the better for it. So I did. I left in my overnight bag the high-end sneaker and the logo tee. I asked not for whom the cowbell tolls. It tolls for me, and thee.