No one here would be surprised if Bob, a literature professor, who played tetris five times in his life would fail at building a video game startup. This is Bob, a literature professor, who gets his clothes at Macy's on sale ( still at ~400% markup ) building a fashion startup and failing.
That is why they failed. The founders are all men. The biggest consumers of apparel are women. Those that run successful boutiques are women and they largely service... women. Those that decide to do their own knock offs of the on trend are owners of the successful boutiques. Surprise surprise they are also women. What do they all have in common? They know that the market is in the throw away clothes that are supposed to last just one season ( trends move ), be cheap ( trends move ), and look kind of like what has been walking down the runway during the Milan FW, Hong Kong FW, New York FW and London FW. Turn around on this stuff in design is about 1 week, manufacturing is another 1 week and mass production is in 3-4 weeks. Designers of the knockoffs ( ok, call them inspirations ) can be talked with in NYC fashion district and in NYC Chinatown (I'm sure it can also be done in LA and during MAGIC in Las Vegas but they are in NYC weekly). Those that want to tweak designs can request it right there and in 3 weeks time i.e. a month after Willow Hand walked down the catwalk in Pineapple pants and well before D&G supplies their stores all those boutiques would have $40-$100 pants inspired by that.
I bet they did not hear what their potential customers were telling them.
And that's not even talking about the likes of Zara and H&M.
There was no market for this kind of a company.