One very important aspect of being an artist is knowing when to take critique seriously and when to filter it.
I agree with you that there are a number of posters in this forum who pull their words out of their ass when they "critique" a good photo just to feed their own ego, but in this case I have to agree that the hot spots are highly distracting, and even if the fashion is on point with the current trends the lighting in 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 8 is causing the photo to suffer and pulls focus from the styling. Even still, the styling seems to be lacking in my opinion, and those blown out highlights are doing nothing to make these dresses look any better. Nor does that dead tree seem to be relevant at all to the style and feeling in these shots.
I think the posing/composition is appropriate for current fashion trends, but I do NOT think that the lighting is; I would be VERY surprised to find lighting such as in #4 in any reputable fashion periodical. Certainly harsh lighting is a technique, and not a new one, BUT... there's harsh, and then there's blown.
Here is the raw image for you to see, do you see any blown highlights? maybe a little on her right side, nothing that can't be fixed. now ask you this question, do i really wanted these highlights blown in post processing? maybe.
I'm never quite sure if you're THAT guy or THAT OTHER guy, but let's assume I have correctly remembered who ghache is! I assumed that everything in these was a conscious choice, you're good enough and in control of the process enough to make that happen. That's why I described them as experiments. I *do* recognize some fashion tropes in here, but I feel that you're pushing them quite a bit further than contemporary shooters are doing. More importantly, though, the overall feel of the shots is much more ad hoc than the fashion I look at. When a model is placed into an industrial background (which we see a lot of) there's the sense that the background was very very carefully selected and managed -- or that 10,000 frames were shot, and the 4 that felt the most "studied" were pulled out. Your photos here don't feel studied, they feel very loose and thrown together. The half-dead trees are probably the clearest example -- rather than the carefully cut and placed tree branches from the high end florist, lovingly arranged in the studio, we see an actual half-dead tree and the model sort of.. stood up next to it, and partly behind it, and so on. Perhaps this is the experiment, though? What happens if we combine fashion tropes with a guerilla/hit-and-run feel to the shoot? I dunno. It could be a thing, or become a thing. Fashion is nothing if not fickle. It's pretty definitely NOT what I seeing in contemporary fashion photography, though.
You assume so much stuff, it become incoherent. You see a half dead tree because we where shooting outdoor in the middle of half dead trees, where do you come out with the florist crap? Please, stop
OK, I'm just an old fart and what's fashionable in photography and what's not goes right over my head. I'm not even much good on the technical side of photography, nor do I follow fashion magazines. I just know what I like and what I don't. I like 7 and 8, quite a lot. The dead leaves on the tree do detract but the girl is simply stunning in these shots. The rest of the shots don't do anything for me, some even less than others - but I'll write that off as a matter of my personal taste.