Rethinking Luxury Fashion: The Role of Cultural Intelligence in Creative Strategy [1st ed.] 9783030453008, 9783030453015

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PALGRAVE ADVANCES IN LUXURY

Rethinking Luxury Fashion The Role of Cultural Intelligence in Creative Strategy Thomaï Serdari

Palgrave Advances in Luxury

Series Editors Paurav Shukla Southampton Business School University of Southampton Southampton, UK Jaywant Singh Kingston Business School Kingston University Kingston Upon Thames, UK

The field of luxury studies increasingly encompasses a variety of perspectives not just limited to marketing and brand management. In recent times, a host of novel and topical issues on luxury such as sustainability, counterfeiting, emulation and consumption trends have gained prominence which draw on the fields of entrepreneurship, sociology, psychology and operations. Examining international trends from China, Asia, Europe, North America and the MENA region, Palgrave Advances in Luxury is the first series dedicated to this complex issue. Including multiple perspectives whilst being very much grounded in business, its aim is to offer an integrated picture of the management environment in which luxury operates. It explores the newer debates relating to luxury consumption such as the signals used in expressing luxury, the socially divisive nature of luxury and the socio-economic segmentation that it brings. Filling a significant gap in our knowledge of this field, the series will help readers comprehend the significant management challenges unique to this construct. All submissions are single blind peer reviewed. For more information on our peer review process please visit our website: https://www.pal grave.com/gp/book-authors/your-career/early-career-researcher-hub/ peer-review-process. For information on how to submit a book proposal for inclusion in this series please contact Liz Barlow: [email protected]. For further information on the book proposal process please visit our website: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book-authors/publishingguidelines/submit-a-proposal.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15396

Thomaï Serdari

Rethinking Luxury Fashion The Role of Cultural Intelligence in Creative Strategy

Thomaï Serdari New York University New York, NY, USA

ISSN 2662-1061 ISSN 2662-107X (electronic) Palgrave Advances in Luxury ISBN 978-3-030-45300-8 ISBN 978-3-030-45301-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45301-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To my parents

Preface

I have always found it perplexing that, in 2020, we still follow an educational system that was established in the late nineteenth century. A most prolific time for a myriad of discoveries, the late 1800s gave birth to a system that divided knowledge into distinct fields and allowed scholars to delve deep into their respective areas of concentration. What ensued was remarkable. Today, this model is outdated. Schools need to design a new curriculum based on interdisciplinary thought without sacrificing depth. It would prepare students for a professional life that is hard to envision at the moment, when, in the middle of the COVID19 pandemic, the global economy is crumbling. What the pandemic has brought, other than suffering and pain for thousands of people, is an opportunity to distance ourselves from the linearity that was imposed upon us by modernity. It is time to question the very structures that broke down due to the pandemic: retail and specifically, department stores; global supply chains that are the backbone of large-scale fast fashion; pollution; a fashion calendar that does not correlate with consumers’ real needs in the now; a maddening acceleration of collections, drops, and campaigns to the point of mental fatigue; work lives configured in the 1950s when much of today’s technology had not been invented yet; and a realization that we own a lot of stuff that does not make us happy. We need more culture and fewer products. And this is what the departure point could be for a complete overhaul of the fashion school

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curriculum where science, engineering, art, and design could form a dynamic core from which new ideas could blossom. Ideas don’t need to become garments necessarily, but they are still marketable in the fashion industry. As long as critical thinking is rooted in culture, it can generate creative content that addresses the human condition on all kinds of new media—many of which have not even been invented yet. Rethinking luxury fashion may very well be the path to a more humane future. New York, USA

Thomaï Serdari

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all my students for their curiosity about the luxury market and for having raised a lot of questions about luxury brands’ strategies for long term differentiation and financial success. They have helped advance my research based on a lot of intelligent exchanges in the classroom and stimulating chats during office hours, over coffee, on field trips and recently… on Zoom. I thank my MBA students at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University for having challenged my point of view and pushed my work to the formulation of concrete frameworks that I know they have already taken with them into their professional roles in the luxury industry. I think of them as a strong community of skilled management professionals and business leaders around the world whose career and achievements I have had the privilege to follow for almost ten years, since I first started teaching Luxury Marketing at NYU. I would also like to thank my students at Parsons School of Design, The New School. As part of this incredibly talented design community in the heart of Manhattan’s West Village, I have had the pleasure of helping young creatives shape the conceptual direction of their design work in preparation for their senior year thesis projects in fashion and product design primarily but also in illustration, photography, and communication design. Thank you, my lovely Parsons students, for helping me see the world through your eyes. What a gift!

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Praise for Rethinking Luxury Fashion

“This book gives you the code to read the soul of a luxury fashion brand and understand not only how it operates but also, most importantly, why it is successful. Art, science, engineering, and design are the ingredients behind a luxury fashion brand business model. They tell you how it operates. However, if you want to know the alchemy that makes the brand successful in a certain space and time, understanding its business model is not enough. This book suggests “cultural intelligence” as a way to understand why some brands enjoy long-term financial success.” —Massimiliano Bonacchi, Professor of Accounting, University of Bolzano “Serdari has a way of taking the abstract and illusive notion of what drives fashion and luxury and brings structure to it. She clarifies what most of us can only sense at best, that the creative root of this industry is a compelling and powerful blend of the arts, science and math, sociology, psychology, business acumen, and masterful talent. What we think is cool marketing is really the ability of collaborative, creative talents feeling and responding to the consumer and her wishes. This celebratory and insightful book breaks this process down and gives it context and shape.” —Steven Roberts, CEO, The Echo Design Group “In this outstanding book, Serdari explores luxury fashion’s cultural contexts and shows how the most successful brands have stayed relevant by constantly adapting their message to the society evolving around them, xi

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PRAISE FOR RETHINKING LUXURY FASHION

while being true to their spiritual self. The author does not limit herself to analyzing ad hoc cases; she also creates a framework that integrates quantitative analysis and qualitative inputs. In so doing, she allows the reader to better understand the complexity of the fashion luxury industry and its connection with the world around it. This is required reading if you want to delve beneath the headlines and comprehend the nuances of the industry.” —David Meir Sasson, Chief Operating & Financial Officer, Bonobos

Introduction

Fashion sells desire. The more heightened consumers’ desire for a branded lifestyle, the more successful the brand. In luxury fashion, a term that is constantly extended to include more than apparel, there are very few players that enjoy uninterrupted success and longevity. Yet, there are brands whose creative approach to shaping desire has rendered them timeless. They launch cool products, propose hip lifestyles, and confer status to their clients. They also have a lot to teach us about what is behind their thriving business. In a time when several industries have faced critical disruption with the ability to radically restructure, the fashion industry seems trapped in an antiquated matrix demarcated in the previous century. Modern scientific management systems such as Taylorism, with its emphasis on cost reductions, scale efficiencies, and labor productivity, coupled with overseas outsourcing, that led to the separation between fashion designer and production teams, have contributed to the depletion of the fashion industry’s ability to bring to market product of lasting value. Instead, the focus on short term financial gains for large, publicly traded fashion companies has led to an acceleration of the fashion calendar, diminished merchandise quality, escalating pollution issues, and, worse, to indifferent and hard-to-impress consumers. Treating the fashion industry as any other industry has been misguided. Why would anyone believe that scientific management can be applied to a sector that is mainly producing symbolic value? How can management’s

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focus on numbers without consideration for contextual and qualitative information lead to viable solutions? On the contrary, fashion brands that have been achieving admirable financial results and continue to produce pieces that excite consumers come from the luxury sector, where most mass-market strategies are either rejected or reversed. It is exactly the challenge of researching the symbolic value inherent in luxury fashion that made the topic exciting. Based on United States Congress statistics, fashion is an almost $3 trillion global industry, of which $70 billion is generated by luxury fashion houses. Yet, there are no clear definitions of the concepts fashion, luxury, or luxury fashion in the academic literature. This tends to be so fragmented that it often results in repetitive, one-sided views on the aforementioned terms. Additionally, there is no clear-cut approach to measuring luxury fashion companies’ performance in the marketplace. All this indicated the possibility of launching a research project that would examine companies with long enough history so as they could be studied through a variety of academic methodologies. This project is the result of a unique approach to studying luxury fashion companies as material culture producers that also compete in the global markets. It focuses on case analysis of specific luxury fashion brands and attempts to link those to the greater context of material culture while also elaborating on theoretical discussions when pertinent. Specifically, it studies the brands, their products and signature experiences as well as their relationship with the consumer in an attempt to define the greater powers that have pushed fashion labels in and out of fashion. Using the field of material culture as its methodological departure point (Prown 1982), this work explains the strategic advantages that brands can set in place when their executives (owners/ chief creatives/ chief executives) are fully in command of how to define the firm’s strategy. Ensuring that the vision they have articulated for the brand serves a greater role in facilitating the evolution of widely interconnected systems of consumption is what links a strategic vision to intelligence about contemporary culture. In other words, this work reveals insights that have not previously been discussed in the scholarship of luxury fashion history, theory, and business and does so while it draws from examples of well-known fashion brands, some historical, and some contemporary. In the process, a supplementary investigation on how cognitive functions define human levels of creativity and their ability to decipher and produce culture revealed that this is the first time a connection

INTRODUCTION

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is established between cultural intelligence, creativity, and relevance to consumers’ changing modes of behavior and preferences. Other than using several theoretical texts from a multitude of disciplines, archival material as well as newly produced online content were consulted in order to build the most comprehensive profile possible of creatives and brands who turn cultural intelligence into creative strategy for long-term financial and symbolic success. While a daunting endeavor in terms of balancing knowledge from a variety of scholarly fields, this project allowed me to draw on academic training I have acquired in three distinct disciplines: business, art history, and design. In a time when COVID19 has imposed a mandatory break from earlier norms of production and consumption, this work may reveal new ways of approaching the art of asking questions, the need to observe life in its entirety and not through slivers of subjective predisposition, and the flow of allowing creative ideas to mature in the studio and the real world through a concerted cross-pollination between fields of thought.

Contents

Part I

Background of Luxury Fashion as a Field of Material Culture 3

1

Defining Fashion, Luxury, and Luxury Fashion

2

Established Methods of Classifying Luxury Fashion Brands

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A New Method for the Classification of Luxury Fashion Brands

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3

Part II Production and Consumption of Luxury Fashion 4

The Producers of “Newness” in Luxury Fashion

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What Do We Really Consume Through Luxury Fashion?

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How Do We Consume Luxury Fashion?

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CONTENTS

Part III

Cultural Intelligence and Creativity 95

7

A Close Look at Cultural Intelligence

8

Cultural Hyperobjects

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9

Luxury Fashion Products Addressing Cultural Changes

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Luxury Marketing Strategies Based on Cultural Intelligence

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Part IV 11

The Future of Luxury Fashion

Step by Step Application of the Framework

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Conclusions

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Index

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Abbreviations

CFDA CQ ZMET

Council of Fashion Designers of America Cultural Intelligence Zaltman metaphor elicitation technique

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List of Figures

Fig. 3.1

Fig. 5.1

Fig. 5.2

Fig. 5.3

Fig. 6.1 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2

ASCEND framework, Field of luxury production and creative innovation (Source Author’s creation based on Thomaï Serdari. “Experiments in Suchness: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Silk Shiki for Hermès.” In Critical Luxury Studies: Art, Design, Media, edited by John Armitage and Joanne Roberts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016 [Plate 2]) First stage analysis of a product, brand, or social group based on Jules Prown’s framework and augmented by the author (Source Author’s creation) Second stage analysis of a product, brand, or social group based on Jules Prown’s framework and augmented by the author (Source Author’s creation) In-depth intellectual analysis of a product, brand, or social group based on Jules Prown’s framework and augmented by the author (Source Author’s creation) Transmedia luxury fashion consumption (Source Author’s creation) Transmedia Luxury Fashion Production (Source Author’s creation) Transmedia luxury fashion consumption applied to the Gucci customer (Source Author’s creation) Transmedia Luxury Fashion Production: Michele as CQ interpreter for Gucci (Source Author’s creation)

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69 83 102 112 114

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 8.3 Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2 Fig. 10.3

Fig. 10.4 Fig. 10.5 Fig. 10.6

Fig. 10.7

Fig. 11.1

3 Transmedia luxury fashion brand model (based on the Gucci example) (Source Author’s creation) Transmedia Fashion Production: Schiaparelli as CQ interpreter (Source Author’s creation) Transmedia Fashion Production: Prada as CQ interpreter (Source Author’s creation) The luxury business model (Source Author’s creation based on Thomaï Serdari. “Steidl: Printer, Publisher, Alchemist: The Field of Luxury Production in Germany.” Luxury: History Culture Consumption 2, no. 2, November 2015: 33–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/205 11817.2015.1099340) Transmedia Fashion Production: Hermès as CQ interpreter (Source Author’s creation) Transmedia Luxury Fashion Production: Karl Lagerfeld CQ interpreter, Phase I (Source Author’s creation) Transmedia Luxury Fashion Production model: Karl Lagerfeld cultural interpreter, Phase II (Source Author’s creation) Transmedia luxury fashion brand model: Chanel’s creative strategy activates all nodes of the model allowing the brand to launch collections that are met with great commercial success (Source Author’s creation) The future of luxury fashion brands: branded contemporary culture (Source Author’s creation)

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145 149 156

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PART I

Background of Luxury Fashion as a Field of Material Culture

CHAPTER 1

Defining Fashion, Luxury, and Luxury Fashion

Abstract While traditionally difficult to define, the concepts of fashion and luxury are examined anew to highlight key moments in scholarly thought that advanced our understanding of how these two terms can relate to each other and to culture. Identifying their role in the fields of creativity elucidates how they can impact the individual physically, emotionally, and intellectually. This launches our inquiry into understanding how weak signals that are perceived within a specific culture can become the instigators of new creative thought which in turn can transform society and culture. Keywords Fashion · Luxury · Culture · Design · Sociology

Fashion “Fashion is the armor to survive the reality of everyday life,”1 insisted the late Bill Cunningham, fashion photographer for The New York Times, whose candid street photography documented New Yorkers’ mood, week after week. Cunningham’s work was entertaining, informative, and above all prophetic. No one else has managed to capture the future of fashion in the present with such ingenuity. The ultimate expression of urban folklore, fashion evolves as a result of individual freedom. In wishing to predict what might come next, one needs to identify these individual

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Serdari, Rethinking Luxury Fashion, Palgrave Advances in Luxury, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45301-5_1

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expressions, one by one. When a handful of them have appeared, the future has folded into the now. The Merriam Webster Dictionary offers several definitions for fashion, which reveals the complexity of the term. Fashion refers to the prevailing style during a particular time, but it also refers to the garment itself. It is a widespread custom or usage, but it is also the make or form of something. As a verb, fashion means to give shape or form to, to design or devise for a particular use or purpose. The definition of fashion therefore implies change and transformation. This constant flux that characterizes fashion as a creative domain happens on three different dimensions: time, space, and the individual. Additionally, the inherent association of a style with a physical product (dress, garment) links fashion to art historian Jules Prown’s theory and model of “material culture [which] is the study through artifacts of the beliefs— values, ideas, attitudes, and assumptions—of a particular community or society at a given time.”2 In classifying the range of objects that make up our world, Prown listed fashion as third in a sequence of six categories that “progressed from the more decorative or aesthetic to the more utilitarian,”3 reinforcing the idea that fashion is as much a statement as it is a necessity. Almost 40 years after Prown articulated the theory and method of material culture, a discipline whose sole goal is the investigation of culture through its use of objects as primary data, the most prominent change related to fashion is the fact that today fashion straddles the established categories as it both respects and defies the taxonomy of material classification. A little over ten years earlier, sociologist Herbert Blummer had already discussed this aspect of fashion in a groundbreaking article in which he prophetically maintained that fashion “is to be found in manners, the arts, literature, and philosophy, and may even reach into certain areas of science.”4 Maintaining this train of thought, one can easily appreciate that today, digital devices can be fashion and fashion can be art. Nonetheless, fashion appeared as soon as the first civilizations were established.5 Apart from the creation of clothing for protection, ancient societies created and participated in their own fashion systems through which class status was assigned and imitated. Therefore, if culture is the ability of homo sapiens to enact creative (i.e., visual arts, music, performance, theater, dance, poetry, literature, etc.) and analytical thought (language, religion, politics, commerce, etc.), fashion is a domain of human activity that is informed both by creative and analytical thought.

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This hybrid nature of fashion as a concept that has additionally been shaped by craft and industry contributed to its dismissal from serious academic inquiries until the 1990s with only a few exceptions rooted in classical sociology.6 Several of these writings are worth summarizing, even if briefly. This is offered to showcase the multitude of interpretations and their fragmented approach to the field of fashion. No thesis among them offers a comprehensive definition of fashion. Classical sociologists, such as Herbert Spencer (1820–1903),7 Ferdinard Tönnies (1855–1936),8 Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929),9 and Georg Simmel (1858–1918),10 who were primarily concerned with “the systematic study of human society and social life in its earliest period,” were mainly focused on the concept of fashion as an idea rather than any of its material forms. This led them to variations of a singular discussion centered around the idea of imitative relationships in society, enabled through fashion. Intrinsically imitative in nature, fashion, according to classical sociology, aims at the erasure of class distinction either because imitation constitutes a reverential event that denotes respect toward the imitated or because imitation is competitive and is driven by an individual’s desire to assert at least equality with another person (if not even superiority). Veblen advanced the discussion of imitation by declaring expensive fashion as “conspicuous consumption,” namely immediate evidence of economic wealth. He also noted that the less functional the dress the higher the class of the wearer who, through fashion, expresses s/he is not concerned with practical labor. Finally, Veblen observed the temporal character of fashion in the sense that the most up to date the dress the higher the class of the wearer. Simmel added to Veblen’s theory by pointing out that in addition to being conspicuous and imitative, fashion allows for demarcation of social groups that develop a mentality of belonging. Demarcation also explains the fascination with the novel, the exotic, or foreign in fashion because it precisely did not originate in any of the familiar social contexts. Tönnies augmented the idea of demarcation by discussing how fashion is defined by unwritten customs that rule gender, race, and religion and that become less relevant when a small community (Gemeinschaft) transitions to a larger society (Gesellschaft). This implies that creativity in fashion is linked to modernization and perhaps to establishing a greater distance from traditional craft and know-how.

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Contemporary sociologists who wrote on fashion after the WWII maintain that fashion may very well be about imitation and class distinction, but it is, undeniably, about fluidity of behavior and mobility of the individual or classes, in general. This completely dissociates the idea of fashion from a rigid, hierarchical society further abstracting fashion as a concept and definitively dissociating it from its older material manifestations.11 In rejecting their discipline’s classical view on fashion, contemporary sociologists such as Herbert Blumer (1900–1987), Diana Crane (1933–) and Fred Davis (1925–1993) advocated that rather than a means to differentiating the social classes, fashion refers to a collective selection, which, according to Crane, is often consumer-driven. In other words, fashion’s identity is shaped by the masses. Therefore, there is more than one point from which ideas can originate in fashion. As a phenomenon, fashion is post-modern (rather than a product of modernity) and allows for a trickleup and trickle-across type of imitation that contradict Veblen’s singular trickle-down theory.12 Finally, Yuniya Kawamura (1963–) and René König (1906–1992) introduced the idea of fashion as a system in their respective works, consisting mainly of empirical studies on the fashion industry and all its participants.13 According to Kawamura, the fashion system is an institution in which individuals associated with fashion are part of a collective that further perpetuates the ideology of fashion as well as its culture.14 Based on the aforementioned theorists, the only way to understand fashion is to interpret it within a greater social and cultural context. Giorgio Riello, scholar of history and culture with a focus on fashion, product innovation, and textiles, has outlined the subtle differences between looking at fashion as a mere object and theorizing about fashion as an abstraction. Riello concluded that “material culture is not the object itself (which […] is at the [center] of dress history), but neither is it a theoretical form (which dominates the approach of fashion studies). Material culture is instead about the modalities and dynamics through which objects take on meaning (and one of these is that of fashion) in human lives”15 which reinforces the present work’s approach to fashion interpretation. Moreover, in fashion and all its unpredictable material expressions one may discover aspects of thought that may “differ from, complement, supplement, or contradict what can be learned from more traditional literary and behavioral sources.”16 In conclusion, we can define fashion as a field of design, itself a solution to a problem17 (with its

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own history, theory, and practice) that has produced material expressions of creative and analytical thought (dress across space, time, and communities/societies) and that has served as a catalyst of change in culture.

Luxury The term luxury has traditionally presented a different set of challenges for scholars mainly because the field of luxury research is interdisciplinary, which prevents the research community from establishing a comprehensive overview of its key publications. This leads both to omission of important works that originate in different academic disciplines and to repetition by many academics who feel obligated to begin their discussion with Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).18 Most have worked around its definition by mainly articulating its major traits.19 Even in what seems to be an elusive term, many agree that luxury is the “extraordinary.”20 It is also generally agreed that the construction of luxury depends on its historical and cultural context.21 Therefore, the question of luxury revolves around decoding the “extraordinary,” establishing that there is no culture without consumption (since antiquity and certainly in the modern world), and finally, recognizing that emotions and cognition are part of the experience of luxury consumption.22 My definition of luxury, published elsewhere, maintains that “luxury is a universal certainty that implies scarcity, beauty, and culture. It is a multi-sensory experience that impacts the individual on an emotional, intellectual and physical level.”23 This definition allows for the concept of luxury to evolve through time as it provides a high level understanding of why luxury is so personal and subjective as many authors have suggested in their scholarship. Rather than contradicting their work, it organizes the meaning that had previously been uttered in adjectives into a coherent summary from which additional definitions can be formulated. For example, luxury object and luxury experience are now easier to define. A luxury object must be made of materials that are rare or beautiful (or both) and through a process that is culture-specific (based on a special type of craftsmanship or knowhow). It is perceived as more luxurious when it activates more than one of the five human senses and becomes attractive by evoking a physical, emotional, and at times intellectual response from the user. Similarly, a luxury experience, even if transitory in nature, is based on the orchestration of rare or beautiful (or both) ingredients that address at least one or

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more of the human senses in a way that enables the enactment of a specific creative train of thought. The individual who perceives the luxury experience may be physically, emotionally, or intellectually impacted. When interacting with luxury objects or experiences the user may not be able to express in precise words how exactly she was impacted because she may be lacking the sophistication or the vocabulary to do so.24 Regardless, she will most probably be able to at least refer to the “aura” of the object or experience, to its “magic” or “dreamy” nature, to the “extraordinary.” In fact, these are adjectives that populate academic and professional publications that deal with the subject of luxury brand management.25 They are great words that relate to the transcendent nature of luxury objects and experiences. They are also in agreement with Eunju Ko’s definition of luxury brands based on a thorough review of the existing literature.26 According to Ko et al., a luxury brand is a branded product or services that consumers perceive to: 1. Be of high quality 2. Offer authentic value via desired benefits, whether functional or emotional 3. Have a prestigious image within the market built on qualities such as artisanship or craftsmanship or service quality 4. Be worthy of commanding a premium price; and 5. Be capable of inspiring a deep connection, or resonance, with the consumer. While this definition perfectly summarizes the field of consumer research, it does not explain the timeless quality of luxury. All five elements of the aforementioned definition may be activated within a brand without it being capable of holding the consumer’s attention through time. It is worth relating the definition of luxury brands to the author’s definition of luxury. A luxury brand is a well-delivered promise of value in the future—not just today, which is what Ko’s definition implies. The future value of products or experiences delivered within the universe of a luxury brand is dependent on the element of the “extraordinary,” itself a component of intangible concepts and ideas, which also explains why it is so difficult to construct luxury brands with lasting value in the market. It is precisely the lack of a discussion on the creative process that defines the intangible ingredients of luxury products/experiences/brands

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of lasting value that inspired this book. To accomplish this, the medium of fashion will provide the basis for an analysis of material culture and the forces that shape it.

Luxury Fashion For most people the term fashion connotes luxury. In the popular imagination, these two concepts are related as the expression of self-indulgence and over-indulgence, both traits associated with human behaviors of narcissistic proclivities that give into beautiful clothes and opulent accessories. In that sense, those who see anything beyond usefulness as a superfluous result of fancy with no applicable utility would define fashion as a category of luxury, itself a paragon of decadence and excess. On the other extreme, for anyone who has experienced the ubiquity of fast fashion and has suffered the pain of one-time wear fashion items, there is nothing luxurious about fashion. Its quality can range from horrific to extraordinary based on whether the creator’s intention is to sell a high volume of fashion items very fast for high profits or to express a nuanced point of view about an idea through a carefully produced piece that has been marketed fairly. In light of these two opposing perspectives, the most uncomplicated way to define luxury fashion would be as designer fashion27 at high prices. This already recognizes the importance of a creative perspective during the production process and agrees with the view that high pricing denotes luxury. According to fashion scholar Jonathan Faiers when the two words luxury and fashion are “uttered in one breath,” the combination “implies cost, exclusivity, indulgence, and excess, and is typically understood as being constructed from the finest materials, involving a high level of craftsmanship, laborious production, and often originating from a specific manufacturing location.”28 The scholar maintains that “today luxury fashion is being consumed and produced on an unprecedented scale, but this very proliferation of luxury begs us to ask some important questions about fashion’s relationship to luxury, for in an age where super brands dominate the luxury fashion landscape, it might seem that as long as there are enough prominently displayed logos and the most expensive materials are used the term ‘luxury’ can be attached to any piece of clothing.”29 To this accurate assessment, one would add that luxury fashion should also be delivered through some type of remarkable experience, whether

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this takes place in real life, online, or on any of the channels that are designed to provide the customer with a 360-degree access to her preferred products. Luxury fashion brands can be easily spotted in the marketplace based on the symbols they are using to communicate to their consumers, the type and quality of merchandise they market, and the level of experiences they stage in order to capture the customer’s imagination and deliver their specific dream as holistically as possible. High-end apparel brand Burberry30 is a great illustration of Faiers’s definition—it is also the first luxury fashion brand that embraced technology in an effort to further advance the customer experience while also exploring new ways of delivering products and messages through new platforms that bridged the physical and the digital seamlessly. While these connotations are part of our understanding of luxury fashion and some relate directly to the experiences most of us have had when shopping, the term “luxury fashion” is key in the discussions that ensue in this book. As French sociologist Lucien Karpik noted, luxury fashion products cannot be valorized by conventional methods because they are “multidimensional, incommensurable and of uncertain or indefinable quality.”31 It would therefore be premature to fully define luxury fashion here since we need to rely on the discussions in the chapters that follow. The goal is to add to the aforementioned definitions by providing an opportunity to rethink luxury fashion.

Conclusion The critical differentiation of a new definition of luxury fashion lies in the fact that we have brought together two conceptually challenging terms, luxury and fashion. As has already been established, both relate to a greater cultural context at a given time, define ideas and objects all at once, and belong to creative fields that have the potential to impact individuals physically and emotionally but also intellectually. This is exactly where our inquiry begins. To engage the user’s cognition, the creators of luxury fashion work from a vantage point that allows them to turn weak signals of change into behavioral updates that quickly gain critical mass and transform society and culture.

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Notes 1. Harper’s Bazaar. “The 70 Greatest Fashion Quotes of All Times.” Harpersbazaar.com, January 29, 2020. https://www.harpersbazaar.com/ fashion/designers/a1576/50-famous-fashion-quotes/. 2. Jules David Prown. “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method.” Winterthur Portfolio 17, no. 1 (1982): 1–19. Accessed February 22, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/1180761. 3. Ibid. Prown’s list was “intended simply to define the terrain and suggest the outlines of a system” and consists of: (1) Art (paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, photography); (2) Diversions (books, toys, games, meals, theatrical performances); (3) Adornment (jewelry, clothing, hairstyles, cosmetics, tattooing, other alterations of the body); (4) Modifications of the landscape (architecture, town planning, agriculture, mining); (5) Applied arts (furniture, furnishings, receptacles); (6) Devices (machines, vehicles, scientific instruments, musical instruments, implements). 4. Herbert Blumer. “Fashion: From Class Differentiation to Collective Selection.” The Sociological Quarterly 10, no. 3 (1969): 275–91. Accessed April 2, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/4104916. 5. “Ancient Mesopotamia—The Sumerians—Full Documentary.” YouTube video 51:57 posted by “Documentary Warehouse,” November 26, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNkEDbZ8zF0. 6. Fashion scholars Elizabeth Wilson (1985), Gilles Lipovetsky (1994), Sandra Niessen, and Anne Brydon (1998), and Yuniya Kawamura (2004) have all asserted the devaluation of fashion as a topic mainly because the philosophers that had included fashion in their works approached it through moral and social critiques. Kawamura, Yuniya. “Fashion and Sociology.” In Bibliographical Guides. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Accessed February 22, 2020. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.newschool.edu/ 10.5040/9781474280655-BIBART11002. 7. Herbert Spencer. The Principles of Sociology, Volume II. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1966 [1887]. 8. Ferdinand Tönnies. Custom: An Essay on Social Codes. Translated by A. F. Borenstein. New York: Free Press, 1961 [1909]. 9. Thorstein Veblen. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. London: Allen & Unwin, 1957 [1899]. 10. Georg Simmel. “Fashion.” The American Journal of Sociology LXII, no. 6 (May 1957) [1904]: 541–58. 11. Yuniya Kawamura. “Fashion and Sociology.” In Bibliographical Guides. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Accessed February 22, 2020. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.newschool.edu/10.5040/9781474280655BIBART11002. 12. Diana Crane. “Postmodernism and the Avant-Garde: Stylistic Change in Fashion Design.” MODERNISM/Modernity 4 (1997): 123–40.

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13. René König. A la Mode: On the Social Psychology of Fashion. New York: Seabury Press, 1974. 14. Yuniya Kawamura. “Fashion-ology: An Introduction to Fashion Studies.” Berg Fashion Library, 2004. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.newschool.edu/ 10.2752/9781847888730. 15. Giorgio Riello. “The Object of Fashion: Methodological Approaches to the History of Fashion.” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 3, no. 1 (2011): 8865. https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v3i0.8865. 16. Jules David Prown. “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method.” Winterthur Portfolio 17, no. 1 (1982): 3. Accessed February 29, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/1180761. 17. Paola Antonelli. “Treat Design as Art.” TED2007, March 2007. https:// www.ted.com/talks/paola_antonelli_treat_design_as_art?language=en#t280436. 18. Hannes Gurzki and David M. Woisetschläger. “Mapping the Luxury Research Landscape: A Bibliometric Citation Analysis.” Journal of Business Research (2016). https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2016.11.009. 19. Thorstein Veblen. The Theory of the Leisure Class. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998 [1899]; Christopher J. Berry. The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994; K.-P. Wiedemann et al. “Measuring Consumers’ Luxury Value Perception: A Cross-Cultural Framework.” Academy of Marketing Science Review 7, no. 7 (2007): 1–21; J. N. Kapferer and Vincent Bastien. The Luxury Marketing Strategy: Break the Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands. London: Kogan Press, 2009. 20. Christopher J. Berry. The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994; D. GrugelPannier, Luxus: eine begriffs- und ideengeschichtliche Untersuchung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Bernard Mandeville. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1996; K. Heine. The Concept of Luxury Brands, 2012. Retrieved on February 29, 2020 from http://www.conceptofluxurybrands.com/ content/20121107_Heine_The-Concept-of-luxury-Brands.pdf. 21. Hannes Gurzki and David M. Woisetschläger. “Mapping the Luxury Research Landscape: A Bibliometric Citation Analysis.” Journal of Business Research (2016). https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2016.11.009. 22. B. McFerran and J. J. Argo. “The Entourage Effect.” Journal of Consumer Psychology 24, no. 4 (2014): 455–71. 23. Thomaï Serdari. “Experiments in Suchness: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Silk Shiki for Hermès.” In Critical Luxury Studies: Art, Design, Media, edited by John Armitage and Joanne Roberts, 131–50. Edinburgh University Press, 2016.

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24. Pierre Berthon et al. Aesthetics and Ephemerality: Observing and Preserving the Luxury Brand. California Management Review 52, no. 1 (2009): 45–66. 25. Michel Chevalier and Gérald Mazzalovo. Luxury Brand Management: A World of Privilege. Singapore: Wiley (Asia), 2008; J. N. Kapferer and Vincent Bastien. The Luxury Marketing Strategy: Break the Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands. London: Kogan Press, 2009; Manfredi Ricca and Rebecca Robins. Meta-Luxury: Brands and the Culture of Excellence. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 26. Eunju Ko et al. “What Is a Luxury Brand? A New Definition and Review of the Literature.” Journal of Business Research 99 (2019): 405–13. 27. According to the Collins Dictionary online, designer clothing is fashionable, or luxury clothing made by, or carrying the label of, a well-known fashion designer. Last visited on March 7, 2020. https://www.collinsdi ctionary.com/us/dictionary/english/designer-clothing. 28. Jonathan Faiers. “Luxury.” In Fashion Photography Archive. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Accessed June 18, 2020. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy. newschool.edu/10.5040/9781474260428-FPA145. 29. Ibid. 30. Burberry is a publicly traded, British luxury fashion brand based in London. Christopher Bailey is its CEO and Riccardo Tisci its creative officer. https://us.burberry.com/. Accessed June 18, 2020. 31. Lucien Karpik. Valuing the Unique. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 24.

References “Ancient Mesopotamia—The Sumerians—Full Documentary.” YouTube Video 51:57 posted by “Documentary Warehouse,” November 26, 2016. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNkEDbZ8zF0. Antonelli, Paola. “Treat Design as Art.” TED2007, March 2007. https://www. ted.com/talks/paola_antonelli_treat_design_as_art?language=en#t-280436. Berry, Christopher J. The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Berthon, Pierre, et al. Aesthetics and Ephemerality: Observing and Preserving the Luxury Brand. California Management Review 52, no. 1 (2009): 45–66. Blumer, Herbert. “Fashion: From Class Differentiation to Collective Selection.” The Sociological Quarterly 10, no. 3 (1969): 275–91. Accessed April 2, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/4104916. Chevalier, Michel, and Gérald Mazzalovo. Luxury Brand Management: A World of Privilege. Singapore: Wiley (Asia), 2008.

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Crane, Diana. “Postmodernism and the Avant-Garde: Stylistic Change in Fashion Design.” MODERNISM/Modernity 4 (1997): 123–40. Faiers, Jonathan. “Luxury.” In Fashion Photography Archive. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Accessed June 18, 2020. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.newschool. edu/10.5040/9781474260428-FPA145. Grugel-Pannier, D. Luxus: eine begriffs- und ideengeschichtliche Untersuchung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Bernard Mandeville. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1996. Gurzki, Hannes, and David M. Woisetschläger. “Mapping the Luxury Research Landscape: A Bibliometric Citation Analysis.” Journal of Business Research (2016). https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2016.11.009. Harper’s Bazaar. “The 70 Greatest Fashion Quotes of All Times.” Harpersbazaar.com, January 29, 2020. https://www.harpersbazaar.com/fashion/des igners/a1576/50-famous-fashion-quotes/. Heine, K. 2012. The Concept of Luxury Brands. Retrieved on February 29, 2020 from http://www.conceptofluxurybrands.com/content/20121107_ Heine_The-Concept-of-luxury-Brands.pdf. Kapferer, J. N., and Vincent Bastien. The Luxury Marketing Strategy: Break the Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands. London: Kogan Press, 2009. Karpik, Lucien. Valuing the Unique. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Kawamura, Yuniya. “Fashion and Sociology.” In Bibliographical Guides. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Accessed February 22, 2020. http://dx.doi. org.libproxy.newschool.edu/10.5040/9781474280655-BIBART11002. Kawamura, Yuniya. “Fashion-ology: An Introduction to Fashion Studies.” Berg Fashion Library, 2004. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.newschool.edu/10.2752/ 9781847888730. Ko, Eunju et al. “What Is a Luxury Brand? A New Definition and Review of the Literature.” Journal of Business Research 99 (2019): 405–13. König, René. A la Mode: On the Social Psychology of Fashion. New York: Seabury Press, 1974. McFerran, B., and J. J. Argo. “The Entourage Effect.” Journal of Consumer Psychology 24, no. 4 (2014): 455–71. Prown, Jules David. “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method.” Winterthur Portfolio 17, no. 1 (1982): 1–19. Accessed February 22, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/1180761. Ricca, Manfredi, and Rebecca Robins. Meta-Luxury: Brands and the Culture of Excellence. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Riello, Giorgio. “The Object of Fashion: Methodological Approaches to the History of Fashion.” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 3, no. 1 (2011): 8865. https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v3i0.8865.

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Serdari, Thomaï. “Experiments in Suchness: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Silk Shiki for Hermès.” In Critical Luxury Studies: Art, Design, Media, edited by John Armitage and Joanne Roberts, 131–50. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Simmel, Georg. “Fashion.” The American Journal of Sociology LXII, no. 6 (May 1957) [1904]: 541–58. Spencer, Herbert. The Principles of Sociology, Volume II. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1966 [1887]. Tönnies, Ferdinand. Custom: An Essay on Social Codes. Translated by A. F. Borenstein. New York: Free Press, 1961 [1909]. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. London: Allen & Unwin, 1957 [1899]. Wiedemann, K.-P. et al. “Measuring Consumers’ Luxury Value Perception: A Cross-Cultural Framework.” Academy of Marketing Science Review 7, no. 7 (2007): 1–21.

CHAPTER 2

Established Methods of Classifying Luxury Fashion Brands

Abstract Quantitative and qualitative data about the performance of luxury brands are regularly gathered in an attempt to create benchmarks for the classification of all brands. Quantitative reports do not give a complete picture of the entire luxury market, however. Several luxury companies are private and don’t reveal their financial results. Yet, innovation in the luxury sector stems from these very brands, which indicates that there are probably other ways to examine what is at the basis of their success. Keywords Luxury market · Reporting · Brand performance

Following the review of key definitions related to the concept of luxury, the discussion can move to the topic of the marketplace. According to Kapferer,1 there are multiple approaches to defining the luxury market: 1. Democratic: Potential clients of luxury brands can offer their opinion about which brands produce luxury. However, it would be impossible to receive a response from everyone in the world and even if we could, the respondents would have different ideas about products and brands which would render this an impossible task. While the market is far from democratic, noting which products do well with the masses is, in a way, a democratic measurement of the © The Author(s) 2020 T. Serdari, Rethinking Luxury Fashion, Palgrave Advances in Luxury, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45301-5_2

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luxury market. The challenge is that purchasing power is not equally distributed. Therefore, a part of the public’s preference shows on a company’s financial statements and another, much bigger part, shows up on how people identify themselves on social media by “liking” their favorite luxury brands. In other words, social media metrics are a democratic measure of the luxury market even if it does not always translate into revenues. There is, however, an easily accessible example to offer as an illustration of a luxury brand that has achieved tremendous brand equity as well as brand awareness. It is Louis Vuitton. This means that almost everyone in the world, regardless of whether they have ever purchased a Louis Vuitton item or not have heard the name and recognize it as a luxury brand. 2. Elitist: Rather than facing the challenge of the democratic approach, one could ask a few elite people who are highly regarded by everyone else and let them select the products and brands that the public should accept as luxury. This happens in all parts of the world, where regional celebrities or high-status individuals outline the competitive landscape of luxury brands for everyone else. This is extremely limiting for brands that may deliver on their promise of quality and future value but somehow have not gained the favor of a particular influential individual who can sway public opinion. British luxury fashion brand Reiss has used the influence of Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge (Kate Middleton) to reinforce its status among other luxury brands. Its executives refer to their brand as “a niche luxury, design-led brand with a high street location and high point.”2 3. Based on experts: Seeking the experts’ advice is perhaps a different type of elitism since the public does not necessarily understand everything the experts do and does not necessarily agree with their definition either. The experts may be editors in chief of publications that showcase luxury brands, academics who have been studying luxury brands, or seasoned marketing professionals who have gained deep insights on luxury brands during their long exposure to this particular segment of the market. Anna Wintour, editor in chief of Vogue, often reveals her favorite luxury brands in lists of five or ten at a time, even though she does not explain her choices with a consistent level of depth. For example, in March 2020 she praised Tom Ford for “[Having taken] his super-glamorous show and his super glamorous audience to Los Angeles, I thought, was

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genius,” Wintour continued. “The show was exciting and vibrant. Every woman there wanted every dress on the runway.”3 Whereas for J. W. Anderson, she was quoted to say “In London, I really loved Jonathan Anderson’s show for his own label. He threw out a lot of the layers and it was surprisingly wearable. But not in any way boring or mundane. I think he’s consistently leading the way in terms of British talent.”4 Expert opinion, as informed as it may be, changes as the expert’s views shift. 4. Empirical: This approach allows us to single out luxury brands according to a specific group of people. For example, certain luxury brands appeal to Americans and different appeal to the French. Similarly, different luxury brands appeal to the residents of two different New York City neighborhoods, such as Nolita and Tribeca, for example, where Aimé Leon Dore and Sandro are great hits, respectively. 5. Corporatist: Only a handful of official corporations have the authority to define which brands can be considered luxury. For example, the French Comité Colbert5 has been defining luxury since 1954. The Italian non-profit Altagamma,6 founded in 1992, has been selecting its members among high-end/creative Italian companies “recognized globally as authentic ambassadors of Italian style.” The British Walpole foundation, also founded in 1992, “promotes, protects, and develops British luxury worldwide,” while it also claims to be the “official sector body for over 250 of the UK’s finest luxury brands.”7 Similarly, the CFDA (Council of Fashion Designers of America),8 a not-for-profit founded in 1962, decides which fashion, jewelry, and accessory brands may be elected to become members of the organization. As invitation-only, CFDA membership is tightly exclusive, which implies that each member brand has reached a level of merit that deserves recognition. Each one of these organizations has established a different set of criteria to determine the excellence of fashion and luxury brands. Simply put, even among industry authorities the benchmarks are not consistent and don’t apply to all markets. 6. Based on the creators of luxury: This approach could result in more nuanced definitions of the luxury market. The maker of a product would be able to explain why an item showcases excellence and delivers a promise of future value. But what if the brand that sells the product deviates from the maker’s original vision to appeal

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to more customers? The haute couture line launched in 1953 by French-Italian designer Pierre Cardin (1922–) illustrates this final approach to defining luxury. In his Maison de Couture, Cardin created legendary designs that defined the epoch of space-influenced design, a direction he shared with his contemporaries André Courrèges (1923–2016) and Paco Rabanne (1934–). He was however expelled from the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne in 1959 for having launched a ready-to-wear line. In the 1960s, his name was on about 700 licenses for a variety of products that diluted the connotations of luxury associated with his early years in Paris.9 From a well sought-after brand with a unique conceptual approach and interesting material expressions, Pierre Cardin, the brand, became more of a throwaway. While Kapferer correctly asserts that each one of the aforementioned approaches offers an interpretation of the luxury market that is limited and prone to challenges, he also concludes that it would be safe to “deny the specificity of luxury.”10 Why this is inaccurate will be discussed in the following chapter. For now, it is important to review the most common methods used by management consulting firms to classify luxury brands, and the luxury market more broadly. Since 2000 and for 20 years continually, Bain & Co has been producing an annual Luxury Goods Worldwide Market Study that focuses primarily on changing consumer behavior in the luxury market.11 It covers the luxury industry in terms of products and experiences and comprises nine segments including luxury cars, luxury hospitality, and personal luxury goods (a category that includes fashion). It evaluates company performance of 300 luxury brands that form the Luxury Goods Worldwide Market Observatory, a database that can be dissected from various angles. The study’s conclusions are based on the volume of sales and include future scenarios tailored around empirical studies of consumers in regional markets (in which Bain & Co has a presence). The study additionally examines how the assortment of distribution channels has contributed to the overall financial health of the luxury sector. In addition to the aforementioned methodological points of analysis, Bain & Co conducts expert interviews with top management of brands, distributors, and department stores. Their methodology of enriching the metrics attained via financial statements with qualitative information coming from consumers and industry executives is well respected by the industry.

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The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has been classifying luxury brands for over 10 years with a four-prong approach that includes a look at: 1. The industry: to analyze luxury business models, categories, and emerging trends. 2. The consumer: to unveil what the global luxury consumer wants from luxury brands and how these can deliver. 3. The luxury code: to help luxury brands manage their presence and improve their business. 4. The future: to organize for growth in the coming years in spite of macro-challenges. Their reporting is based on the intelligence they receive from their client-partners.12 Their approach is unique because a major part of their work focuses on the analysis of luxury business models. They help their clients ascertain which are the most profitable parts of their business and steer them in that direction. However, their claim that they refine their clients’ “luxury code” raises questions that will be elucidated in the later chapters of this book. Management consulting firm McKinsey has been relying on its global client roster of fashion and luxury brands to obtain intelligence and insights that help the firm to solidify a fashion and luxury sector expertise that can be tailored to meet the needs of any of McKinsey’s 1000 client brands in fashion, apparel, and luxury. The firm focuses on challenges relating to the entire value chain, including customer insights, brand strategy, product launches, supply chain, distribution channels, and retail store experience. The clients, luxury producers and brands, vertical fashion retailers, apparel multibrand retailers, department stores, and luxury goods-companies have been contributing to McKinsey’s reports for the last 5 years (2015–).13 McKinsey has strengthened its position among fashion producers and retailers with its latest partnership with online fashion news and “digital authority” Business of Fashion (BoF)14 that began in 2017. Together, they have been producing the annual State of Fashion report that offers “an in-depth look at the leading global trends for the coming year, provides an update on industry sentiment based on the BoF–McKinsey Global

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Fashion Survey, and contains the McKinsey Global Fashion Index— a metric that estimates industry sales and tracks operating profit and economic-value creation.”15 Their methodology is based on company reporting of financial results, similarly to Bain & Co and BCG, but it is paired with an in-depth analysis of the fashion sector through senior leadership expert interviews that offer perspective on the fashion industry through the lens of finance and banking, distribution and logistics, brand management and HR, product innovation and technology. The added value of the contextual information that is offered in this report augments its usefulness for anyone invested in the fashion sector because it takes into account future scenarios that arise from areas peripheral to sales or customer behavior, a methodology that had been the norm until 2017. Even though a late arrival in the landscape of luxury fashion, McKinsey’s partnering with BoF has transformed the typical management consulting firm report by pushing it in the right direction of qualitative intelligence. Future scenarios that result from a study that combines quantitate and qualitative insights have better chances of being applicable and useful to industry leaders in the near future. Deloitte, one of the “big four” accounting organizations, publishes a report that refers specifically to luxury for personal use, which means “designer clothing and footwear, luxury bags and accessories, luxury jewelry and watches, as well as prestige cosmetics and fragrances.”16 Deloitte excludes all other luxury categories from its report which makes it very relevant to our inquiry on how to classify luxury fashion brands. While more uniform in the type of brands examined, the report includes companies that have been ranked in the top 100 in luxury. Their ranking is affected by: • • • • • •

Price premium Quality/rarity of raw materials Quality of craftsmanship Product exclusivity Service and personalization Quality and exclusivity of points of sale.

The ranked companies are then examined based on financial performance. However, not all companies that are part of conglomerates (such as LVMH or Kering) offer individual financial results. Additionally, several

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brands that are ranked based on the aforementioned criteria are private and as such they don’t report financial results. These challenges contribute to the quality of the final assortment of luxury company names.17 The list is a combination of group names and individual brands. It may not include some of the most renowned luxury fashion brands because they are private. PwC, Deloitte’s direct competitor, produces a Global Consumer Insights Survey each year and offers “consumer-centric” metrics on luxury products and experiences. The report encompasses all traditional categories of luxury and its strength is the result of PwC’s global network and presence in the regions of North America (USA and Canada), Brazil, South Africa, Australia, the Middle East, Russia, as well as Asia (China, Japan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam) and Europe (Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, and UK). PwC’s vigorous global network produces a high number of survey respondents whose opinions are supplemented with expert interviews both in-house and from executives of consumer-facing companies. This holistic overview of consumer experience leads to insights about luxury consumer expectations as well as informed prospects for improvement of services in PwC’s client brands. In addition to the insights offered by major consulting and accounting firms, other organizations such as The Luxury Institute18 and Unity Marketing19 offer intelligence driven by interviews with a global network of luxury consumers. They both provide their roster of client brands with comprehensive reviews of the behavior of particular segments of luxury consumers20 using a combination of surveys, interviews, and empirical data that allows them to draw insights about customer preferences and brand weaknesses. In other words, while they, too, use a combination of quantitative and qualitative data to accurately depict current trends in the luxury marketplace, their insights are linked to customer segmentation that is based on personal wealth and speak to consumer behavior about products, services, and experiences that have already entered the marketplace. Similarly to the large consulting groups, their advice is valuable for short-term formulation of corrective strategy that can quickly bring brands up to speed with what consumers want today. Finally, Stylus, an agency that offers expert trend analysis and crossindustry insights, stands as a unique presence that enriches trend forecasting with a qualitative approach to intelligence. As stated on the

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company’s website, “to meaningfully innovate consumer-facing businesses must act on trends beyond their own industry.”21 Compared to dissecting past performance results, which is what most firms deliver, Stylus has implemented a very powerful methodology in envisioning future scenarios that may impact consumer behavior. The agency’s reports propose a novel approach to market trends and include directions that are based on customer surveys, in-depth interviews with area experts, as well as empirical, observation-based insights on products, services, and retail concepts. Stylus is two things at once: the closest to what will be proposed in the following chapter and the farthest from how most analytical professionals think. The agency promotes a rounded approach to analyzing the luxury industry that is based on verbal, mathematical, empirical, and cross-industry clusters of information. In short, Stylus provides a wealth of intelligence that may not be as popular as financial performance reports are because it presents industry analysts and executives with the challenging task of interpreting it without the absolute assuredness of numbers.

Conclusion In this chapter, we summarized the most popular methods used by market researchers in gathering quantitative and qualitative data about the performance of luxury brands and in observing changing trends in consumer behavior. The discussion also highlighted the idea that none of these quant driven reports gives a complete and accurate image of the entire luxury market simply because several luxury companies are private and don’t reveal their financial results. This alone disqualifies them from appearing on any of these lists published annually. Yet, these very brands have been innovating for years and changing the conversation of what luxury is and how we can all partake in it. In short, this review demonstrated that there is a great degree of subjectivity not only when consuming luxury but also when classifying it for purposes of market research that enables managers to define company strategy.

Notes 1. Jean-Noël Kapferer and Vincent Bastien. The Luxury Marketing Strategy: Break the Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands. London: Kogan Press, 2012, p. 40.

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2. https://www.marketingweek.com/assessing-the-reiss-brand/. 3. Erin Fitzpatrick. “Anna Wintour Reveals Her 5 Favorite Brands of Fashion Month.” Who What Wear, March 6, 2020. https://www.whowhatwear. com/anna-wintour-favorite-shows. 4. Ibid. 5. Last accessed on March 13, 2020. https://www.comitecolbert.com/. 6. Last accessed on March 13, 2020. https://altagamma.it/en/chi-siamo/. 7. Last accessed on March 13, 2020. https://www.thewalpole.co.uk/. 8. Last accessed on March 13, 2020. https://cfda.com/. 9. Vanessa Semmens. “Pierre Cardin.” In Fashion Photography Archive. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Accessed June 18, 2020. http://dx.doi.org. libproxy.newschool.edu/10.5040/9781474260428-FPA351. 10. Jean-Noël Kapferer and Vincent Bastien. The Luxury Marketing Strategy: Break the Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands. London: Kogan Press, 2012, p. 41. 11. Find all of Bain & Co studies on the company’s website. Last accessed on March 16, 2020. https://www.bain.com/about/media-center/pressreleases/2019/fall-luxury-report/. 12. BCG luxury reports can be found online on the company’s website and its “insights” section or special media publications such as. Last accessed on March 16, 2020. http://media-publications.bcg.com/france/TrueLuxury%20Global%20Consumer%20Insight%202019%20-%20Plenary% 20-%20vMedia.pdf. 13. Last accessed on March 16, 2020. https://www.mckinsey.com/indust ries/retail/how-we-help-clients/apparel-fashion-luxury. 14. Last accessed on March 16, 2020. https://www.businessoffashion.com/. 15. Last accessed on March 16, 2020. https://www.mckinsey.com/indust ries/retail/how-we-help-clients/apparel-fashion-luxury. 16. Last accessed on March 16, 2020. https://www2.deloitte.com/global/ en/pages/consumer-business/articles/gx-cb-global-powers-of-luxurygoods.html. 17. Deloitte. Global Powers of Luxury Goods 2019: Bridging the Gap between the Old and the New, p. 41. 18. Last accessed on March 16, 2020. https://www.luxuryinstitute.com/. 19. Last accessed on March 16, 2020. https://unitymarketingonline.com/. 20. The Luxury Institute, for example, claims to have access to networks of affluent, wealthy, and über-wealthy consumers. 21. Last accessed on March 16, 2020. https://www.stylus.com/about.

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References Altagamma. Last accessed on March 13, 2020. https://altagamma.it/en/chisiamo/. Bain & Co Luxury Goods Reports. Last accessed on March 16, 2020. https:// www.bain.com/about/media-center/press-releases/2019/fall-luxury-rep ort/. Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Insights. Last accessed on March 16, 2020. http://media-publications.bcg.com/france/True-Luxury%20Global% 20Consumer%20Insight%202019%20-%20Plenary%20-%20vMedia.pdf. Business of Fashion. Last accessed on March 16, 2020. https://www.businessoffa shion.com/. Comité Colbert. Last accessed on March 13, 2020. https://www.comitecolbert. com/. The Council of Fashion Designers of America, Inc. (CFDA). Last accessed on March 13, 2020. https://cfda.com/. Deloitte. Global Powers of Luxury Goods 2019: Bridging the Gap between the Old and the New. Last accessed on March 16, 2020. https://www2.deloitte. com/global/en/pages/consumer-business/articles/gx-cb-global-powers-ofluxury-goods.html. Fitzpatrick, Erin. “Anna Wintour Reveals Her 5 Favorite Brands of Fashion Month.” Who What Wear, March 6, 2020. https://www.whowhatwear.com/ anna-wintour-favorite-shows. Kapferer, Jean-Noël and Vincent Bastien. The Luxury Marketing Strategy: Break the Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands. London: Kogan Press, 2012. The Luxury Institute. Last accessed on March 16, 2020. https://www.luxuryins titute.com/. McKinsey. Insights. Last accessed on March 16, 2020. https://www.mckinsey. com/industries/retail/how-we-help-clients/apparel-fashion-luxury. Semmens, Vanessa. “Pierre Cardin.” In Fashion Photography Archive. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Accessed June 18, 2020. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.new school.edu/10.5040/9781474260428-FPA351. Stylus. Last accessed on March 16, 2020. https://www.stylus.com/about. Unity Marketing. Last accessed on March 16, 2020. https://unitymarketingo nline.com/. Walpole Group British Luxury. Last accessed on March 13, 2020. https://www. thewalpole.co.uk/.

CHAPTER 3

A New Method for the Classification of Luxury Fashion Brands

Abstract In an attempt to rethink the ranking of luxury brands in the market not solely based on revenues reported but taking into account the level of innovation that each one brings forth, the ASCEND framework is introduced. After clarifying its various elements, three different examples of fashion brands are discussed in relation to the framework. This elucidates each brand’s competitive advantage. An additional benefit of using the ASCEND framework is that brands that have clearly focused on expanding a second field (other than design) are brands that capitalize on early manifestations of weak signals of changes in consumer behavior in the market. This could become a tool for brand owners who wish to rethink the brand’s positioning in the industry, in the competitive landscape, and the world, in general. It clarifies pricing strategy from the consumer’s point of view as well. Keywords ASCEND framework · Competitive advantage · Luxury market · Innovation

Joseph Alois Schumpeter, renowned Austrian political economist and eccentric professor at Harvard University warned against the power of the old to persist and ultimately overpower the new. A proponent of the classic theory of creative destruction, Schumpeter maintained that innovation was possible when it was indeed applied to the everyday and © The Author(s) 2020 T. Serdari, Rethinking Luxury Fashion, Palgrave Advances in Luxury, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45301-5_3

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that it brought lasting transformation when it was structurally linked to processes of change that are not limited to a single-part system. In his introduction to Schumpeter’s work Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel prize economist, rightly commented that Schumpeter “wrote in words, but the language of modern economics is mathematics.”1 This accurately describes the prevalent modern attitude to evaluate aspects of life based on key metrics that can be expressed numerically. The deceivingly absolute nature of numbers has led to an atrophy of critical thinking that results in one-dimensional interpretations of industries, companies, products, and consumer attitudes. Marshall Fisher and Ananth Raman, authors of The New Science of Retailing, believe that “many retailers face this plight. They are drowning in numbers but lacking in insight.”2 Their response is to offer a new way of thinking about data, to not merely treat it as an absolute fact that can replicate success ad infinitum. On the contrary, the authors assert, success requires more than “just formulas. You also must have the right organizational structure and an implementation plan. You can’t just flail about, assuming that a new software package and a few quants will deliver salvation. You have to know exactly what you want to achieve in your particular context and how you intend to get there.”3 It is the idea of context that provides novel ground to substantiate a new classification system for luxury fashion brands. Context is the means to pioneering strategies that break down the stalemate of numerical data. In the fashion industry, and all creative industries for that matter, the ability to innovate and strategize comes from a combination of abilities that supplement number-driven logic. This idea will be discussed in detail in Chapter 7. For now, the insightfulness of cross-industry reports published by Stylus (Chapter 2) and the inaccuracy of mathematical formulas outside a proper contextual matrix are noted. Ranking luxury brands based on financial performance reveals consumer preferences—except we don’t know much about these consumers other than their spending habits. These habits are the direct result of consumers’ subjective reaction to products and services and as such fluctuate when consumers’ sense of self changes. In other words, the quantitative nature of these methods makes them appear misleadingly absolute. These numbers are as subjective as the relative positioning of luxury brands in the market. Moreover, consumer spending may change radically from one year to the next without warning. When that happens, some brands lose their spot on the Top 100 list of best performers

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while others continue on a prosperous path. According to marketing professor David Aaker, the brands that experience continued success are strong brands that are “strategically” managed to match brand awareness with perceived quality.4 This, Aaker maintains, is a brand association that becomes a brand asset because it has been shown to drive financial performance; it is the most important “strategic thrust” of a business; and it drives other aspects of brand perception.5 Seemingly, perceived quality, a two-part term, may hold the key to interpreting consumer behavior. “Perceived” indicates that this is a brand trait understood from the outside and as such it is in constant flux because a customer’s perspective is shaped by more than the commercial environment. This is an idea that deserves deeper analysis and we will return to it in Chapter 6. Life experiences and new needs as well as society and its institutions (religion, politics, government, marriage) alter consumers’ way of thinking and instigate changes in the way each individual prioritizes their needs, values and ultimately their spending. The reprioritization of needs may be a direct outcome of greater social modifications and may represent for the individual her personal, either negative or positive, way of dealing with change. The reprioritization of values is of paramount importance in our discussion because values are shaped by individual preferences, social realities, and cultural environments, as Pierre Bourdieu’s work has taught us. Values that define consumer taste are the articulation of each individual’s complex navigation through social, cultural, and intellectual conditioning.6 “Quality” refers to tangible traits that have to do with the quality of materials, processes, execution, and delivery over which each luxury brand should have total control.7 Let’s assume that a luxury brand has this type of total control. These aspects of quality alone do not suffice to ensure the brand’s prosperous path. It is the immaterial aspect of quality, the one that refers to the quality of thinking, ideas, and cultural relevance, that defines whether a brand resonates with consumers. In Alexandre Arnault’s words: “[…it is the] ongoing dialogue with their audience through a shared set of values and ideas [that creates] cultural relevance [for brands]. [This is] the new currency, and it is an essential element of the new luxury equation.”8 In short, there are aspects of the luxury brand that are managed internally. They seem to define consumer preferences when they align with the context that shapes these preferences. In today’s dynamic market

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where taste and spending behavior are impacted by a multitude of influence hubs, it would be useful for luxury brands to have a framework at their disposal as an analysis tool of their relative positioning against competitors. The (ASCEND) framework was developed in my previous work where I extensively discussed the reasoning behind it.9 The main points of the framework will be briefly reviewed here to offer the reader clarity over its theoretical foundations (Fig. 3.1).

Fig. 3.1 ASCEND framework, Field of luxury production and creative innovation (Source Author’s creation based on Thomaï Serdari. “Experiments in Suchness: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Silk Shiki for Hermès.” In Critical Luxury Studies: Art, Design, Media, edited by John Armitage and Joanne Roberts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016 [Plate 2])

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Let’s accept that each of these four intersecting circles denotes a separate field of knowledge.10 Our knowledge of the world begins with a question or philosophy that has not been proven yet (upper left-hand side area). This area of the diagram has been assigned to Art in the sense that it represents a field of inquiry that launches a multitude of questions that are open for debate. According to classical philosophy, humans reason through their questions and debate their opinions with the goal to find some type of practical application that will ultimately lead to their happiness.11 For example, the observation that there is energy exchange between objects (upper left-hand side area) led physicist C. P. Snow to define the law of thermodynamics (moving the discussion to the upper right-hand area of Science). Engineers applied this law in devising systems (such as the ones that define the refrigerator or air conditioner) that moved the question to the bottom right-hand side area. Finally, designers apply the engineering models that have been defined in the context of thermodynamics and design the refrigerator motor or the air conditioning unit. A plethora of similar examples exists in all aspects of human life and through all its manifestations, analytical and creative alike. Life keeps expanding by following this clockwise movement because no material application of design is finite. On the contrary, any type of design that is put to use triggers a whole new series of questions that help designers think of new iterations or move into a new type of inquiry altogether. Based on Schumpeter’s work, innovations have been understood as both the process of creating something novel and the novelty itself. The field of creative innovation is where the process of innovation takes place by incorporating elements of philosophic inquiry, science, engineering, and design and also where innovation materializes. It can also be the place where innovation gains its force to disseminate, which is what perpetuates the expansion of material culture in a clockwise movement along the ASCEND framework.12 The idea of dissemination will be discussed in Chapter 6. Here, we can recall that Bernard Arnault, Chairman and Chief Executive of LVMH, locates haute couture at the heart of the ASCEND framework as the “research and development laboratory of Parisian style.”13 Now that the general premise of the framework has been expounded, the discussion can return to the field of fashion. In the first chapter, fashion was defined as a design field. As such, fashion activates the design area of the diagram by definition. Fashion that is limited only to its own field loses relevance very quickly. It becomes temporary,

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ephemeral, seasonal—in other words, insignificant. For example, let’s picture a sweater that becomes an instant fashion hit because of an appealing design that is based on optical anamorphosis (i.e., a technique of perspective to produce a distorted image that will look normal when viewed from a particular angle or a special mirror14 ). This interesting design technique happens when the designer arranges the elements of an image in such a way so as to reveal one image or a completely different one when the viewer focuses her eyes on the subordinate structure of the image’s lines. Let’s also assume that this type of knitting had never been made into a sweater before. Three appealing colors (red, white, and blue) were chosen for the design. The novelty of the design and the freshness of the tricolor palette made it the perfect spring best seller, as a transition item between darker winter sweaters and no sweaters at all for the summer. The following year, the designer produces another batch of sweaters that have the same design but a new combination of colors. Sales are disappointing. Consumers don’t find it as novel any longer, even in the new color palette. The designer decides to change the design itself and reintroduce the original red, white, and blue colors. Sales are disappointing again. There are still consumers who buy that transitional item, but sales numbers don’t come close to the heights of the item’s first launch. All brands have similar stories about specific items that were novel and very desirable when initially launched and resulted in great sales numbers. Tweaking the products in terms of colors, or materials, may have maintained some type of momentum for a little while. Generally speaking, fashion that does not renew itself in a deeper sense does not excite the consumer for too long. It expires. It becomes dated, predictable, and goes out of fashion. If the design field alone is not enough to generate new ideas for fashion design, innovation must be the combination of at least two fields, design and another one. Three fashion brands have been selected to illustrate this suggestion: North Face Japan, Stone Island, and Comme des Garçons. While in all three cases, several fields are activated the discussion will be limited to the benefits of activating at least two, design and the one that is most prominent for the particular brand as it strives to bring forth innovation in fashion. In my original work where I introduced the ASCEND framework, I proved that luxury materializes in the heart of the diagram where all four fields are activated, as was demonstrated by examining the case of Hermès collaborating with the artist Hiroshi Sugimoto to produce a limited edition of scarves.15

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Apparel company North Face Japan launched the Moon Parka in December 2019. The jacket’s novelty relies entirely on a new engineering method implemented by bioengineering company Spiber. Spiber developed a new type of silk made of precision-engineered microbes as opposed to silk made by spider-produced proteins. The type of performance biomaterials used to manufacture this jacket is similar to those used in experiments trying to simulate the variety of material traits necessary to maintain and defend the life of astronauts on a lunar base. The textile is waterproof, breathable, moisture permeable, and high performing against frigid temperatures. It accomplishes all that through a biological process, very similar to natural wool or silk without the requirement of nonnatural, non-soluble, and petroleum-based materials, which are the norm in all types of high-performance, outdoors apparel. The happy launch of December 2019 was the result of a four-year-long collaboration between Spiber and North Face, the work of which began with a special Moon Parka prototype in 2015. And that was just over two years after Spiber went public with the news of having discovered a material that is “tougher than Kevlar, stronger than steel, lighter than carbon fiber, and can be stretched 40% beyond its original length without breaking,”16 as Dario Borghino explained in his article for online magazine New Atlas. He also clarified that Spiber had been working in developing a process that was based on decoding the gene responsible for the production of fibroin in spiders and using the information to bioengineer new bacteria with similar DNA to produce the same protein, fibroin, which then can be spun into artificial (but natural) silk. The characteristics of the artificial silk are defined early on in the process, when Spiber starts by “tweaking the amino acid sequences and gene arrangements in its computer models to create artificial proteins that try to maximize strength, flexibility and thermal stability in the final product.” These descriptions about Spiber’s process and the final product clarify the notion that in our framework the fields of Science and Engineering had to be activated even before North Face came in as a collaborator in 2015 to contribute its design expertise. In the four years between 2015 and 2019, the two companies went back and forth with a series of prototypes even though the original date for the launch was set in 2016. The goals for the two partners consisted of minimizing carbon footprint and perfecting the design to a level of versatility that would allow the jacket to “combat harsh arctic climates and be suitable for city life.”17 The final product is realized in tonal “Moon Gold,” the color that matches the

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natural glow of the Golden Orb spider’s web, a rather “unearthly glow,” according to Spiber, hence the name “Moon Gold.” North Face printed an image of the Earth atop the jacket’s black lining, highlighting the product’s “pollution-conscious” creation. While the scientific press had followed the experiments led by Spiber, the fashion world was aware of the intended 2016 launch and picked up the conversation in 2019 when the jacket hit the market (on December 12, 2019) in a limited edition of 50, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of humans walking on the moon. The Moon Parka was applauded by publications such as The Culture Curators and High Snobiety that regularly report on the latest “hype” items and marketed at about $1400. In the context of our discussion, the Moon Parka case showcases the activation of the fields of Design and Engineering, indicating the potential for future disruption of the outer apparel industry and rendering this particular item iconic on so many levels. Stone Island is the next case study that illustrates how the fields of design and science combined constitute the competitive advantage of a design company. Founded in 1982 by graphic designer Massimo Osti, Stone Island is an Italian brand appreciated by those who value style, performance, and excellent construction. An outwear company, Stone Island owes its uniqueness to a rather singular obsession with army goods that Osti exhibited since his early years as a designer. In an earlier brand by the name of C. P. Company that Osti launched in the 1970s, the designer had experimented with dyeing techniques, especially as they related to dyeing the final product as opposed to the uncut fabric. Depending on the structure of the garment, the dye would behave differently at different parts of it and the unique color combinations that resulted from this rather unsystematic dyeing process made the C.P. Company products inimitable and desirable. Osti’s testing of dyeing techniques gave him the idea for his new brand, Stone Island, when the heavy-duty, double-faced fabric, Tela Stella, that had been used to make tarpaulins for Italian army trucks resulted in an unprecedented, rugged, lived-in look that clearly did not fit with the sophisticated products Osti had been marketing under the label C. P. Company. The novelty of the aesthetic attracted strong consumer interest as well as an investor, Carlo Rivetti, who understood that the new appeal of Osti’s dyes was the expression of an entirely new turn in menswear. The two men together established Stone Island as the platform that allows Osti to bring together natural and high-tech materials and to develop new dyeing techniques and construction methods

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as Osti’s signature way of catering to the needs of the modern man. Emphatically, Osti’s methods had nothing to do with the superficiality of silhouette cutting or volume draping, which he saw as form for the sake of form.18 An item that fits nicely in the intersection of Science and Design is the Ice Jacket, first introduced by Stone Island in 1989. In that first iteration, the jacket was made of a polyester-based material enriched with a thermochromatic coating produced by “embedding liquid crystals into a resin bath. The liquid crystals reacted to temperature changes by dramatically changing color, from white to ultramarine blue, yellow, or military green, or gray to vivid pink.”19 Stone Island worked on improving the item by adding a thermosensitive pigment that resulted in an even more stunning color-changing effect. This ultimately piqued the interest of popular labels Nike and Supreme that pursued collaborations with Stone Island. The brand has attracted high caliber fans, such as contemporary musicians Drake and Travis Scott, who are tastemakers for both men and women. The third example to illustrate how the ASCEND framework can be used to classify the relative positioning of luxury brands is Comme des Garçons. To those following luxury fashion, it is well known that Japanese-born designer Rei Kawakubo (1942–) is the brainpower behind the successful label. Kawakubo eloquently summarizes her design philosophy in that she wishes “to suggest to people different aesthetics and values. I want to question their being.”20 Originally trained in fine arts, Kawakubo had a short stint in the advertising department of chemical company and acrylic fabric manufacturer, Asahi Kasei, where she stayed for three years, 1964–1967, following her graduation from university. Immediately after, she made the transition into freelancing as a fashion stylist, understood to be purely a means to an income that supported her independence. In two short years, she had already started producing garments under the label Comme des Garçons, a name under which she formed her limited company in 1973. Her first collection was shown in Tokyo in 1973 and since then she has been impressing fashion critics both in Japan and the West, where her approach to fashion was perceived as particularly challenging and intellectual. Staying away from overt sexuality that had been the norm for several Western labels, Kawakubo offered an alternative view that was cerebral and antagonized mainstream fashion labels in the West. In fact, the designer has recognized in her own work a coherence that stems from a well-articulated alternative aesthetic that characterizes anything that is produced or happens under the name

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Comme des Garçons. “Everything that I do or that is seen as the result of Comme des Garçons’ work is the same. They are all different ways of expressing the same shared values, from a collection to a museum, a shop or even a perfume.”21 This is not to say that the brand does not experiment with new textiles, complex methods of patternmaking, or a blending of hand craftsmanship and technology. It does all that while it remains a strong proponent of its own artistic values, the elegance of abstract thinking, and the articulation of controversial views before they become mainstream. Or as British journalist and fashion critic Suzy Menkes succinctly summarized Kawakubo’s work for Comme des Garçons, it brought “ideology in the industry.”22 In other words, Comme des Garçons’ success relies on how the principal designer activates two of the proposed fields intentionally, design and art, while also keeping herself informed in terms of innovations in science and engineering. In fashion, a field that deals with materials by default, science and engineering are always relevant but don’t have to be the main focus of the designer’s design philosophy.

Conclusions While the ASCEND framework is not simple in its application to assessing the competitive advantage of individual brands, it supports rather than contradicting the quantitative results that measure consumer spending. If anything, this type of assessment can help brands ascertain what their unique elements of specificity are and clarify for them how to focus on the processes that make them unique in the market. The three case studies that were chosen to demonstrate how brands that appear similar are different (for example North Face compared to Stone Island) highlighted an additional benefit of using the ASCEND framework: brands that have clearly focused on expanding a second field (other than design) are brands that capitalize on the first manifestation of weak signals of changes in consumer behavior in the market. Post that initial expression of changing currents, these brands are considered to be the catalysts that introduced views that disrupted the status quo and ultimately facilitated the smooth integration of these novel lifestyles in mainstream fashion. For example, Stone Island singularly focused on the idea of utilitarian design at an aesthetic level that was unique and appealed only to a subculture of urban men in 1982 but has turned to mainstream fashion in 2020. In other words, uncompromising dedication to a field outside of design allows a

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brand to discover material changes long before they become common knowledge. It also allows the brand to reflect on the future of humanity outside the strict (and often limited) confines of the fashion industry. This realization may be used by brand owners as a tool that allows them to assume a clear positioning in the industry, in the competitive landscape, and in the world, in general. In conclusion, a luxury brand’s specificity can be defined by examining which fields other than design are activated on the ASCEND framework. This specificity can become a competitive advantage by a singular focus on this particular field that may or may not be directly related to fashion. Finally, a brand’s ASCEND specificity can help with its pricing strategy because it provides a clear narrative through which the brand can justify its prices for competitive advantage in the luxury market.

Notes 1. Joseph A. Schumpeter. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Florence: Taylor & Francis Group, 2010. Accessed April 14, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central. 2. Marshall Fisher and Ananth Raman. The New Science of Retailing: How Analytics Are Transforming the Supply Chain and Improving Performance. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2010, p. 4. 3. Ibid., p. 8. 4. David Aaker. Building Strong Brands. New York: Free Press, 1996. 5. Ibid. 6. For an elaborate discussion on how culture alters our behaviors in a variety of networks and situations see Pierre Bourdieu. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. London: Routledge, 1986. 7. The “shoulds” of luxury brands are discussed extensively in Chapters 3 and 4 in Jean-Noël Kapferer and Vincent Bastien. The Luxury Marketing Strategy: Break the Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands. London: Kogan Press, 2012. 8. Highsnobiety. The New Luxury: Defining the Aspirational in the Age of Hype. Berlin: Gestalten, 2019, p. 8. 9. Thomaï Serdari. “Experiments in Suchness: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Silk Shiki for Hermès.” In Critical Luxury Studies: Art, Design, Media, edited by John Armitage and Joanne Roberts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. 10. Ibid., p. 143. 11. Ancient Greek philosopher Socrates attempted to define an ethical system of questioning (rather than a uniform doctrine imposed on individuals)

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12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

having understood that what motivates humans to question anything is their desire to find happiness. More in Debra Nails “Socrates.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Spring 2020 edition. Last visited on March 19, 2020. https://plato.stanford.edu/arc hives/spr2020/entries/socrates/. What keeps human endeavor manifesting in this clockwise movement seems to agree with Nietsche’s maxim that “art is the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity in this life.” Eric Deudon Hollingsworth. “Nietsche et ses premiers critiques français (1891–1900).” Revue De Littérature Comparée 59, no. 1 (1985): 43. Suzy Menkes. “High on Haute Couture and Luxe Summit.” International Herald Tribune, July 22, 1991. Collins English Dictionary Online. Last accessed on March 28, 2020. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/ana morphosis. Thomaï Serdari. “Experiments in Suchness: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Silk Shiki for Hermès.” In Critical Luxury Studies: Art, Design, Media, edited by John Armitage and Joanne Roberts, 131–50. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Dario Borthino. “Artificial ‘Spiber’ Silk Is Tougher Than Kevlar.” Last accessed on March 28, 2020. https://newatlas.com/spiber-syntheticsilk/28267/. Kevlar is a heat-resistant, strong synthetic fiber that was developed by Stephanie Kwolek at DuPont in 1965 and was first used commercially in the 1970s. Other than a fiber for textiles for gloves, bulletproof vests, and combat helmets, Kevlar was introduced as a replacement for steel in racing tires. Last accessed on March 28, 2020. https://hypebeast.com/2019/8/spi ber-the-north-face-2019-moon-parka-jacket-collaboration-release-info. Highsnobiety. The New Luxury: Defining the Aspirational in the Age of Hype. Berlin: Gestalten, 2019, pp. 215–20. Ibid., p. 220. Susannah Frankel. Visionaries: Interviews with Fashion Designers. London: V&A Publications, 2001, p. 158. Ezra Petronio, Self Service 13 (Autumn/Winter, 2000), p. 154. Claire Wilcox. “Comme des Garçons,” Bloomsbury Fashion Central. Last accessed on March 28, 2020. https://doi.org/10.5040/978147426 4716.0003594.

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References Aaker, David. Building Strong Brands. New York: Free Press, 1996. Borthino, Dario. “Artificial ‘Spiber’ Silk Is Tougher Than Kevlar.” Last accessed on March 28, 2020. https://newatlas.com/spiber-synthetic-silk/28267/. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. London: Routledge, 1986. Collins English Dictionary Online. Last accessed on March 28, 2020. https:// www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/anamorphosis. Fisher, Marshall, and Ananth Raman. The New Science of Retailing: How Analytics Are Transforming the Supply Chain and Improving Performance. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2010. Frankel, Susannah. Visionaries: Interviews with Fashion Designers. London: V&A Publications, 2001. Highsnobiety. The New Luxury: Defining the Aspirational in the Age of Hype. Berlin: Gestalten, 2019. Hollingsworth, Eric Deudon. “Nietsche et ses premiers critiques français (1891– 1900).” Revue De Littérature Comparée 59, no. 1 (1985): 43. Hypebeast. Last accessed on March 28, 2020. https://hypebeast.com/2019/8/ spiber-the-north-face-2019-moon-parka-jacket-collaboration-release-info. Kapferer, Jean-Noël, and Vincent Bastien. The Luxury Marketing Strategy: Break the Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands. London: Kogan Press, 2012. Menkes, Suzy. “High on Haute Couture and Luxe Summit.” International Herald Tribune, July 22, 1991. Nails, Debra. “Socrates.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Spring 2020 edition. Last visited on March 19, 2020. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/socrates/. Petronio, Ezra. Self Service 13 (Autumn/Winter, 2000): 154. Schumpeter, Joseph A. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Florence: Taylor & Francis Group, 2010. Accessed April 14, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central. Serdari, Thomaï. “Experiments in Suchness: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Silk Shiki for Hermès.” In Critical Luxury Studies: Art, Design, Media, edited by John Armitage and Joanne Roberts, 131–50. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Wilcox, Claire. “Comme des Garçons.” Bloomsbury Fashion Central. Last accessed on March 28, 2020. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474264716. 0003594.

PART II

Production and Consumption of Luxury Fashion

CHAPTER 4

The Producers of “Newness” in Luxury Fashion

Abstract The fashion industry has renewed itself with the help of different types of agents that shape material form into new object types. Tailors, designers, creative directors, fashion collectives, and collaborations are the agents that describe how the field of fashion has evolved over the years. These groups of creatives give us an indication of where fashion is heading in the future. Post-2020, newness in fashion will stem from the work of creatives who are familiar with culture and create culture-specific work that is more experimental. Keywords Tailoring · Fashion design · Creative direction · Creative collectives · Fashion collaborations

Understanding the creative process in any design field presents numerous challenges. Yet, articulating its elements clearly and succinctly presents an opportunity for academics to know progressive, empowering ideas from bad ones; for practitioners to challenge their work toward meaningful results; for brand executives to prevent commercial failures before they hit the market, ideally before they leave the “drafting board,” so to speak. In the realm of luxury fashion production, the complexity of design is amplified to live up to the definitions of luxury fashion as discussed in the first chapter. And while scarcity and aesthetics are elements upon which critics can comment with confidence, novelty within a specific culture © The Author(s) 2020 T. Serdari, Rethinking Luxury Fashion, Palgrave Advances in Luxury, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45301-5_4

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is perhaps where the maker is faced with unknowns. These unknowns can only be resolved during the creative process and sometimes they do. When this is the case, the maker has met the task at hand with success. But other times, most often than not, the unknowns remain unresolved. When they do, everyone knows it. It is much easier to distinguish bad design and faulty making than it is to recognize quality. In luxury fashion, materiality (and this includes anything from natural fibers to lines of code) results in both a product and an experience that impacts the individual on an “emotional, intellectual, and physical level.”1 It is precisely the creative process, the search for innovation that thrusts the maker in a situation where the boundaries of emotions, intellect, and physicality disappear and all three states blend into one. The inescapable encounter with craft led me to Glenn Adamson’s critical work The Invention of Craft,2 which allowed me to reclassify the various types of luxury fashion producers based on their relationship to craft or workmanship. Adamson’s careful reading of the concept of craft, which “is intrinsic to what it is to be human,”3 allowed me to consider his perspective of “shifts in design agency,”4 in other words how separated or not the creator is from the making of the object itself. In reviewing the field of luxury fashion making, I noticed two prevalent types of reasoning: first chronology, which always works well when trying to organize clusters of information; secondly, the degrees of fashion’s agents distancing from the physical making. The two worked well together because as a field of cultural production, fashion, similarly to other production fields such as literature or architecture, evolved from post-industrialization, through modernity and post-modernity, to post-postmodernity (meta-modernity). Fashion has transformed from an objective (dressmaking), to a utilitarian activity (fashion commerce), an intellectualized mode of life organization (lifestyle creative direction), enlightening rebellion (fashion with a cause), to a playful scientific pursuit (augmented creativity). It will keep transforming proving that as part of the greater context of material culture fashion is much an interpreter of the prevailing culture as it is an agent of culture. Its efficacy has to do with the nature of the tools deployed by its creators as they seek to innovate a discipline that has proven its influence on the individual, collective, social, and even ethical body. What follows is a classification of the main actors who have shaped the field of fashion based on Adamson’s shifts in design agency.

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Tailors “Tailoring” is a charged word. In the popular imagination, tailors are male, have special tools, engage in workmanship, and work for male clients. On the other hand, seamstresses are female, have special tools that often include a sewing machine, and work for female clients or under the supervision of tailors. Allow me to challenge this common interpretation of both terms. This is not with the intention to undo a substantial body of scholarship that covers tailoring in its historical and social context where gender roles are rightly discussed based on historic evidence.5 In today’s world, it is best to strip all crafts from their implied gender and treat them exactly for what they are, namely terms that describe a special type of work that takes place in the studio regardless of how the practitioner chooses to identify themselves in terms of gender. In doing so, I am proposing a collapsing of two terms into one: craftworkers who practice tailoring will be referred to as tailors, gender notwithstanding. Practice, however, remains a keyword in this discussion. Fashion design scholar Zoya Nudelman lucidly describes the skills of basic tailoring in her book The Art of Couture Sewing.6 For example, knowing how to cut and apply pockets (with or without a flap, welt, inseam, straight attached or facing attached, lined on the hip and so on) on a garment or how to prepare any type of fabric before applying the pattern to make a jacket, just to name a couple of processes, are all forms of engineering. They require the use of mathematical principles to both design and build the garment. Put differently, tailoring is rigorous, scientific work the efficacy of which depends on the initial conceptualization of the final piece, the process of breaking it down into its individual components, and most importantly in the seamless assembly of all the parts into one garment. The tacit knowledge that tailors apply when bringing the whole together makes it greater than the sum of its parts. This is why, according to Nudelman, engineering of tailored garments constitutes the foundation of high-class dressmaking. Other than facilitating an association between high-quality tailoring and luxury fashion, the nature of tailoring as craft implies a direct connection to personal agency. Simply put, just because tailoring is governed by a multitude of rules, as all engineering processes are, it does not mean that tailoring itself excludes newness. On the contrary, and to paraphrase philosopher Boris Groys, it is the tradition already in place that confers value to the “new” in any cultural context or market. The new is not just

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different; it is valuable because it is of social significance and expresses the moment, “[aspiring] to being the truth of its time.”7 To extrapolate, newness in tailoring is the result of the individual’s questioning of that which is already in place. A great example is the work of late fashion designer Alexander McQueen, who, as a high school dropout, and with minimal qualification in art became an apprentice in Savile Row tailors Anderson & Sheppard.8 His tenure there and additional years of apprenticeship with tailors Gieves & Hawkes gave him enough expertise to take his craft to renowned theater costume makers, Angels. During these six formative years in the world of tailoring and costume making, McQueen had been steeped in the traditions that defined the craft of garment construction so much so that all he wanted to do was to break free from this type of constriction. This will to innovate was nurtured and expanded during his master’s studies at Central Saint Martins. The work he showcased in all his runway shows from 1996 forward was a deliberate attempt to create controversy by introducing new elements he found in cultural domains different than fashion. For example, McQueen broke the singularity that characterizes body types on the runway by featuring the first Indian model; he reversed the established association between fashion and celebration of life by exploring the subject of death and so on.9 However, no matter what he chose to introduce into his work, the garments themselves maintained the excellent quality of craftsmanship he had internalized earlier. Which is also why his ideas maintained staying power. In Groys’s words, McQueen used tailoring to invent “the new [that] allows an individual author to proffer his own life as a value in historical time, freeing himself from the power of the past; universalistic, future-oriented utopias; and the indifferent present with its myriad differences which, basically, mean nothing to anyone.”10 In other words, McQueen, as a tailor, was the most skilled in introducing new elements from different realities into fashion without burdening anyone with prophecies about the future or any other ambitious narrative. He recounted what he saw taking place in other cultural fields. In his work, he described “what was” using tailoring as his medium.

Designers Post Second World War, the public’s infatuation with fashion has been so strong that most understand the noun “designer” to mean “fashion designer.” It is all the other inflections of design (jewelry, furniture,

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interiors, garden, landscape, light, etc.) that require a qualifier in front of the word. Contrary to the tailor who begins the process of manufacturing a garment by thinking about structure and relationships between the various elements that make up the whole, a designer is in charge of creating a specific style for each garment. This style is the result of a long list of choices the designer must make about the garment’s shape, color, fabric, volume, decorative elements, trimmings, and so on. The fashion designer begins with an idea of how the garment should look and then translates this idea into an illustration or sketch that specifies how the design can result in the physical piece of clothing. By giving specifications of how aspects of the piece should look exactly, the designer in essence assigns the work to other experts who can see in the original sketch the potential for a specific pattern, a novel way of cutting the fabric, or perhaps the need for trimmings that will only enhance the designer’s original idea. Very much like the conductor of an orchestra, the designer understands all processes of garment making but does not necessarily execute them herself. A designer ideally separates her ego from the process and is able to ascertain the value of any modifications that are by-products of the work the area experts do when they transfer the idea from original sketch to formal maker’s documents. Nevertheless, she remains a practitioner who has mastered the relationship between the idea and its physical manifestation. In the fashion history literature, the designer that has been credited with the origin of haute couture as we know it is Charles Frederick Worth, who opened his couture house in Paris in 1846. Similarly, Jeanne Paquin, Jacques Doucet, and Jeanne Lanvin are considered to be among the first designers of modernity as opposed to dressmakers of premodern times.11 While Paris remained the center of fashion design until the Second World War, American designers received recognition during the war and made a significant contribution to the postwar economy. The novelty in the American market had more to do with how retail worked and the fact that designers were asked to identify consumers’ preferences before taking their designs into production. This resulted in a close collaboration between designers and store buyers both aiming at identifying successfully the novelty that their customers would crave next.12 The commercial success of the fashion industry in the United States for about four decades (from the 1950s through the 1980s) solidified the

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idea that American fashion was innovative, sharp, and practical, much more in tune with the evolution of consumers’ lifestyles and, in that sense, much more receptive to cultural shifts that originated outside of fashion. The opening of the global markets in the 1990s and early 2000s and the quest for cheap labor and inexpensive manufacturing completely restructured the American fashion industry. Entire design teams were reduced down to teams of two to three people that consisted of the designer, perhaps an assistant, and a technical designer tasked with creating tech packs. A tech pack includes the designer’s original sketch but also the tech designer’s resketched drawing that clearly communicates the garment’s specifications and construction documents. Tech packs are sent to factories abroad (China, Hong Kong, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, etc.) where apparel is manufactured.13 This, unfortunately, completely divorces the designer from the making process and leaves no opportunity for the designer to revisit parts of the process that could still be altered without additional costs. In essence, the quest for cheaper manufacturing has completely removed the designer’s ability to infuse the design with culturally relevant details. Ironically, this often results in great numbers of inventory that remains unsold because it does not resonate with what the consumer wants. The other side of this scenario is that, since the mid-2000s and definitely post the financial crisis of 2008–2010, many more smaller fashion brands have launched in the United States with the goal to provide premium and luxury fashion to customers who still crave the type of novelty that comes with a manufacturing process that is much more flexible and allows for iterations that make the final product unique and interesting. Seemingly, the fashion design profession has gone full circle from the posh beginnings of Parisian ateliers and the edgy innovations of American design rooms, through the whirlwind of globalization, outsourcing, and loss of control, back to a consumer base that craves newness designed in small scale and locally, no matter where local is. The key to understanding why this is happening has to do with the idea that in fashion design one cannot separate conceptual thinking from workmanship. To separate the two results in stale, unwanted inventory. Newness in fashion design has a lot to do with just in time tweaks for which the consumer is willing to pay a premium.

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Creative Directors The role of Creative Director developed in the late twentieth century out of necessity. As brands shifted their manufacturing overseas but were also growing in the global market by launching new product lines and several collections per year, the corporations heading these fashion brands decided to divide the very complex and long process of creative development of collections in two branches: Creative Management and Brand Management. While the two are fundamentally two aspects of the same coin, namely the creative content that is produced under one brand in all its iterations (apparel, accessories, brand messaging, advertisements, boutique design and so on) they depend on different types of inputs. For example, in HUGO BOSS, a prominent European high-end fashion brand with strong product focus, the Creative team develops all its fashion statements whereas the Brand team oversees all developments of the brand in the market. One year before the collection is launched, the Creative management initiates research on a variety of sources (books, films, trade shows, other political or social events covered by the press, etc.) and develops a theme that will inform the story around the collection. The Brand management will then do market analysis based on that theme and will come back with data that reinforces or corrects the specific thematic approach. It all feeds back into the work of the Creative management, who then, under the guidance of the Creative Director, refines the concept and develops mood boards with colors, textures, story bites, etc. which the Creative Director uses to communicate the collection theme orally during the first style meeting of the season.14 A search in the Bloomsbury Fashion Central databases retrieves 51 fashion houses that have employed Creative Directors. Some of these are Alexander McQueen, Burberry, Calvin Klein, Chanel, Dior, Dries Van Noten, Givenchy, Gucci, Lanvin, Louis Vuitton among others. But in our culture of streetwear fashion brands and media companies that drop merchandise when their following reaches critical mass, the term Creative Director has replaced the one of fashion designer. A Creative Director is a conceptualist rather than practitioner, the way tailors or fashion designers are. As a conceptualist the Creative Director aspires to oversee the launch of new apparel collections and truly prepares her audience for a lifestyle intervention. The role has gained appeal among younger Millenials and GenZ because social media have contributed in popularizing the profiles of several Creative Directors who have made

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their mark from inside influential brands. Some of them had been trained in fashion design while others came to Creative Direction with a very strong point of view. A great example of a luxury lifestyle brand is GOOP , actor Gwyneth Paltrow’s brainchild and ultra-controversial media company, which was very successfully transformed under her direction into a platform that fashions more than clothing. Paltrow is the Creative Director who has managed to conceptualize our wardrobe choices but also our wellness, fitness, medical, and spiritual choices for a premium price. Virgil Abloh, currently Creative Director at Louis Vuitton, and Raf Simons, newly appointed Creative Co-Director at Prada, are very successful and influential but pale in comparison to Paltrow in terms of what Creative Direction can do for the consumer who needs to fashion their lifestyle after someone’s advice.

Creative Collectives While the idea of the collective brings us back to the analysis of fashion from a classical sociologist’s perspective, and specifically Herbert Blummer whose view we discussed in the first chapter, the term Creative Collective or Fashion Collective has not become the subject of any academic inquiry yet (other than the present). Yet, the idea of groups of fashion designers working together trying to promote a strong point of view has gained some popularity in the last decade. A strong voice is, in fact, the raison d’être of a fashion collective. Strength is not about numbers. Fashion collectives may usually have three or more creative heads who have equal power in terms of creative vision, but this is not what makes them powerful. The power of a fashion collective stems from the clarity of ideas that brought the designers together in the first place and which was fundamental in order for the creatives to coexist in a productive space. The first modern design collective that united many creative practitioners across several professions was the Arts and Crafts movement founded by William Morris (1834–1896) in the 1860s in England.15 With an exceptionally clear theoretical spine that reassigned value to the handcrafted (as opposed to the machine made and industrially produced), the practitioners who identified as proponents of the movement did not have the opportunity to work together other than when William Morris invited a few of them to collaborate with him on building his own Red House in Bexleyheath, England. The contribution of individual artists’ works in the Red House has survived as a surprisingly unified whole which

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is what gave this movement its power as a new paradigm in aesthetics and organization of labor in Europe, the USA, and Japan during a very long span (from the 1860s to the end of the 1920s).16 The two other prominent examples from the history of ideas in the twentieth century are the Constructivists in post-revolutionary Russia (1917–1929) and the Bauhaus in interwar Germany (1919–1933). The former gave a handful of progressive thinkers the incentive to meet and learn from each other while they were trying to produce forms of design that were integrating several aspects of life (for example architecture and engineering but also painting, sculpture, and costume design) but unfortunately succumbed to the much stronger voice of the Bolshevik rhetoric.17 The latter attracted an equally multidisciplinary group of practitioners who were developing their theories in the studio while perfecting the workmanship in their respective disciplines. Their goal was to bring good design to the masses even though they never had the opportunity to scale up the production of the luxury items produced in the studio.18 The Guerilla Girls is perhaps the most prominent late twentieth art collective. Founded in 1985 in New York City, the anonymous group of female artists are devoted to feminism and to fighting racism in an effort to bring equality to the greater arts community. They remain vocal and assertively combative in the visual arts.19 All these examples have maintained their power in the narrative of nineteenth and twentieth century art and design without erasing the individuality of the designer—with the exception of Guerilla Girls who have chosen to remain anonymous. The most commanding trait of these collectives is their well-articulated rhetoric. They have disseminated this with conviction and optimism. In addition to their craft, members of these collectives have practiced a determined advocacy which is why rather than practitioners or conceptualists, I call them evangelists. In the last ten years, three fashion design collectives have risen to prominence: threeASFOUR, Vetements, and Coleville. threeASFOUR define themselves as a “trio of transnational artists based in New York City who use fashion as their primary medium.”20 Gabriel Asfour (b. Lebanon), Angela Donhauser (b. U.S.S.R), and Adi Gil (b. Israel) founded the fashion collective in 2005 and have made it their mission to use advanced technology in combination with traditional craft methods to create garments the aesthetic of which is based on the “universal language of sacred geometry” so as to explore “themes of consciousness and cultural coexistence.”21 Their designs belong to

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the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, CooperHewitt National Design Museum, and FIT in New York City as well as Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Additionally, several of their pieces have been exhibited in a long series of exhibitions all over the world,22 which further legitimizes their practice as the intersection of a fluid materiality that keeps gravitating between the traditional and the futuristic and a well-defined conceptual position from which the trio advocates their take on cultural identity. This was most probably the point of convergence with artist/musician Björk with whom the collective collaborated in 2011. Earlier artist collaborations include Yoko Ono in 2009 and Matthew Barney in 2007. The innovations in both materiality and design have been celebrated by the authorities of design. The type of newness produced by this collective has become part of the visual arts canon. Vetements is a streetwear label co-founded in 2014 by two Georgian brothers, Demna and Guram Gvasalia, Creative Director and CEO, respectively. It was launched with a remarkably controversial first show at the Parisian sex club Le Depot. The label capitalized on the power of social media, and particularly Instagram, in creating memes around their product and in promoting it through important fashion editors and influencers for extraordinary prices even though neither the products nor their design revealed anything new to the market. On the contrary, Demna had become a master of manipulation of familiar streetwear staples which he would then sell for extravagant prices. When four years later, an anonymous industry insider declared the label “dead” in an article that fired up the fashion media, Demna defended his work for Vetements as the “mission of [a] conceptualist and design innovator at [an] exceptional brand.”23 On the one hand, Vetements pales in comparison to the researched conceptualism of threeASFOUR. On the other hand, without Vetements the streetwear movement would not have infiltrated the prestigious luxury fashion houses who took their cues from the overnight commercial success of Vetements. Even though it turned to be a meteor rather than a shining star, Vetements was the catalyst that helped push the rest of the fashion industry closer to streetwear and to relaxed modes of dressing in general. It is no accident that Demna was hired as the Creative Director of Balenciaga, a heritage brand that completely shed any influences of its renowned founder Cristobal Balenciaga, master of exquisite craftsmanship, virtuoso of draping, and design innovator who led the field of haute couture throughout his career. Balenciaga under the creative direction of Demna Gvasalia is a brand that has nothing

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in common with haute couture as the world knew it even though the designer announced that Balenciaga is returning to haute couture for the fall 2020 season.24 While, at the moment, it is not clear whether this will go ahead because of the pandemic of COVID19 that has resulted in a slew of show cancelations,25 the matter that remains provoking is whether Demna will manage to bridge his version of conceptualism with some of the practices that take place in an haute couture atelier and whether he will show the world where haute couture might be heading in the future. If so, it will be the perfect example of an orchestrated “trickle-up” movement in fashion where street culture might poke a few holes in the sequestered world of high fashion. Coleville is a British brand, the brainchild of former British Vogue fashion director Lucinda Chambers and designers Molly Molloy and Kristen Forss. The three creatives found themselves in this opportunity after long years of collaborations in other roles. Chambers had been with British Vogue for 36 years and stepped down in 2017. She had also been working concurrently as the creative director of Italian brand Marni alongside Consuelo Castiglioni who also stepped down from his leadership role in 2016. Molloy and Forss had been working with Chambers at Marni for over ten years. During this period of consecutive changes, the three contemplated founding a brand of their own to “create a wardrobe we all three wanted to wear,” Molloy explained in an interview for online retailer Matches Fashion and continued “I can’t intellectualize it.”26 Yet they did. The brand takes its name from a West London street where celebrated contemporary artist David Hockney spent time during the 1970s. Coleville’s aesthetic is true to Hockney’s aesthetic, its muse. It is colorful and eclectic. In Chambers’s words “it’s a real reflection of how we all dress. It’s about the mix of that and the joy of it – and about putting the unexpected together.”27 Moreover, the brand comes with a manifesto, “Additive thinking.” It proclaims “[a] sum of individualities addressing a plurality of individuals. Colville is the creative encounter between three different minds and three personal points of view. A sum, not a mix, the irregular and the imperfect put-together are integral to the outcome: a collection that’s a sum of pieces, that is eclectic and idiosyncratic.” Colville is about the subversion of fashion norms: perfection is rejected; individual genius is abandoned for the pleasure of three professionals cocreating together; age becomes irrelevant; longevity is encouraged in an

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industry that thrives on ephemerality—Colville pieces can be disassembled, reassembled and repurposed antagonizing the idea that one needs an entirely new wardrobe every season; authority is overturned—the wearer decides what to do with the pieces the brand brings to market. Chambers, Molloy, and Forss are the evangelists of a new era in a post-postmodern world where references come from both the material and the virtual worlds, where people innovate in teams, where consumers slow down to savor this particular texture, or color, or visual reference. It is a new culture that Colville founders envisioned in 2017, long before COVID19 brought the fashion industry to a halt and forced everyone to reexamine fashion’s established practices.

Collaborations This is a trend that has been growing in fashion since Karl Lagerfeld did his first collaboration with H & M in 2002.28 Since then, there are very few brands that have not ventured into some sort of collaboration or another. The roster of fashion brands that have augmented their creativity by offering a co-branded product or collection, what is known as (brand name) × (brand name), is quite long. Here are just some of the fashion collaborations that happened last year: Uniqlo and Lemaire, Alexander Wang and Adidas, Palace and Adidas, Gigi Hadid and Tommy Hilfiger, Guess and A$AP Rocky, Raf Simons and David Sims, Raf Simons and Robert Mapplethorpe, Riccardo Tisci and Nike, Gucci and Gucci Ghost, Balmain and H&M, Rihanna and Puma, HBA and PornHub, Christopher Kane and Crocs, and Christopher Raeburn and MCM. In addition, brands such as Vetements (2017 seasons) and Supreme, a niche urban brand for male skateboarders that became a household name after collaborating with heritage brand Louis Vuitton, have consistently launched all their products in collaboration with other artists, designers, or brands.29 In other words, this is not simply about a luxury fashion name bringing allure to brands made for the masses (as Lagerfeld did with H & M, Comme des Garçons with TopShop, Martin Margiela with H & M, etc.). It is a phenomenon that has overtaken the luxury fashion industry and continues strong into 2020 even for mass market retailers as for example Adidas and Pharell or g-star raw x Pharell.30 The list is endless. Many have tried to contextualize these initiatives by tracing the most prominent historic precedents such as the collaboration between surrealist artist Salvador Dalí and Elsa Schiaparelli. This was indeed the first

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time an interdisciplinary collaboration took place but Dalí and Schiaparelli would not have used any such term to describe it. They were friends, well aware of each other’s ideas and artistic production and they were both on a mission, to shock the bourgeoisie. While other late twentiethcentury fashion designers found inspiration in other artists’ work to create original pieces, for example Yves Saint Laurent’s Mondrian dress and Moschino’s Roy Lichtenstein shirt dress, today’s collaborations are of a different nature that has a lot to do with which tenets of culture are more popular in general. Musicians tend to have a very large following and regularly craft messages that are clearly articulated through their song lyrics. They resonate with the audience as more authentic expressions of culture compared to efforts by a visual artist or even fashion designer, both of whom are understood to work in a bubble, insulated from everyday people’s raw feelings and hardships. This of course is not necessarily the case but both fashion and the visual arts are perceived as elitist fields that exclude the hoi polloi as opposed to music that mainly explores aspects of the human condition and as such is perceived to be a direct extension of the common folk’s soul. Designers who collaborate with other tastemakers of significant cultural clout do so to highlight a specific message, to better align with a point of view, and to explore someone else’s creative methods. Brands that join powers may have similar objectives but mainly try to implement this strategy to enter a new market segment and to be noticed. In all cases, collaborations bring about the benefit of augmented creativity both in technical/material and conceptual levels. For example, Los Angeles based artist Joshua Vides has collaborated on product with Nike and Converse and on brand design with Fendi for which he completed a customized bar and temporary Fendi Caffe at London’s Harrods in summer 2019. The positive reception of his work ignited a new collaboration with Fendi for an entire range of apparel and accessories coming out in 2020. Karl Lagerfeld’s death may have made the opening an easier target for a young artist like Vides. Clearly brands are looking for something in these projects that they cannot get out of their internal marketing teams. Fresh creative ideas that authentically spring from contemporary culture is a currency that places artists in high demand. Notably, collaborations have introduced the idea that the solitary character of the fashion designer who spins in a whirlwind of market-imposed calendar obligations with at least six collections per year is not sustainable any longer. Their vision is augmented through co-creation and one

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hopes that the exchange that happens between the two main creative agents stays with them as a new way to look at the world even after the collaboration is over.

Conclusions It is convenient to work through the various types of agents that have transformed what fashion labels produce and how the public thinks about fashion as a creative field and to organize them chronologically. This chapter’s overview highlighted the public’s perception about innovation in fashion and how this takes material form via a process that has gradually progressed from a practitioner’s tools (tailors); a complex technical knowledge that is infused with artistry and managerial acumen (designers); an all-encompassing conceptualist worldview that may remain dissociated from manufacturing in a big company, be partially dependent on it in medium size fashion enterprises, or completely integrated with it in smaller brands (creative directors); an evangelical approach to a clearly articulated mission that defines the core of the brand (creative collectives); to, finally, a culture of co-creation that flourishes both from an artistic (qualitative) and a business (quantitative) perspective to culminate in augmented creativity (collaborations). In today’s post-postmodern reality, fashion benefits from the resurgence of any of the five aforementioned creative types even if these were originally strongly associated with a particular time frame. This means that moving beyond 2020, newness will be produced by the creatives who are better acquainted with areas of contemporary culture and dare to experiment in a new field in order to cross-pollinate their traditional “tools” with new ways of thinking and doing.

Notes 1. Thomaï Serdari. “Experiments in Suchness: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Silk Shiki for Hermès.” In Critical Luxury Studies: Art, Design, Media, edited by John Armitage and Joanne Roberts, 131–50. Edinburgh University Press, 2016. 2. Glenn Adamson. The Invention of Craft. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. 3. Ibid., p. xiii. 4. Ibid., p. 14.

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5. A few of the most important titles that examine this area of fashion practice are the following book chapters: Roberto Cabrera and Denis Antoine. “The Fit.” In Classic Tailoring Techniques for Menswear: A Construction Guide. New York: Fairchild Books, 2017, 2nd edition; Milva Fiorella Di Lorenzo. “Body Measurement.” In Tailoring Techniques for Fashion. New York: Fairchild Books, 2010; Anette Fischer and Kiran Gobin. “Haute Couture and Tailoring.” In Construction for Fashion Design. New York: Fairchild Books, 2017, 2nd edition; John Hopkins. “Tailoring Traditions.” In Menswear. New York: Fairchild Books, 2017, 2nd edition; Jennifer M. Jones. “A Natural Right to Dress Women.” In Sexing La Mode: Gender, Fashion and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France. New York: Berg Fashion Library, 2004; Tone Rasch. “Home Production.” In Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion: West Europe, 159–65, 2010. https://doi.org/10.2752/bewdf/edch8033; Joy Spanabel Emery. “Tailoring and the Birth of the Published Paper Pattern.” In A History of the Paper Pattern Industry: The Home Dressmaking Fashion Revolution. New York: Berg Fashion Library, 2014; Valerie Steele. “Capital of Luxury and Fashion.” In Paris Fashion: A Cultural History. New York: Berg Fashion Library, 2017, 3rd edition. 6. Zoya Nudelman. “The Skill of Basic Tailoring.” In The Art of Couture Sewing, 404–38. New York: Fairchild Books, 2016. Accessed April 1, 2020. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.newschool.edu/10.5040/978 1501316401.ch-012. 7. Boris Groys. On the New. London: Verso, 2014, Kindle edition, p. 51. 8. It is worth mentioning here that fashion scholar Diane Crane argues that in the UK people who enter the fashion design profession tend to come from the lower middle class. This makes the story of McQueen as a high school dropout more of a norm in the UK rather than an exception. His talent was such, however, that this part of his biography has become legendary and aspirational to many eager young fashion designers. More in Diane Crane. “Fashion Design as an Occupation: A Cross-National Approach.” In Creators of Culture, Current Research on Occupations 8, edited by Cheryl L. Zollars and Muriel Goldsmith Cantor, 55–73. Greenwhich, CT: JAI Press, 1993. 9. Aimee Scott. “Alexander McQueen.” In Fashion Photography Archive. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Accessed April 1, 2020. http://dx.doi.org. libproxy.newschool.edu/10.5040/9781474260428-FPA216. 10. Boris Groys. On the New. London: Verso, 2014, Kindle edition, p. 52. 11. Francesca Sterlacci. “Fashion Designer.” In The Berg Companion to Fashion, edited by Valerie Steele. Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010. Accessed April 1, 2020. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.newschool.edu/10. 5040/9781474264716.0006152.

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12. For an excellent discussion of the commercial aspect of fashion design see Gini Frings. Fashion: From Concept to Consumer. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2001, 7th edition. 13. Patty Brown and Janett Rice. Ready-to-Wear Apparel Analysis. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2014, 4th edition, pp. 107–95. 14. Kasper Tang Vangkilde. “Creating a Collection in a Big Company.” In Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion: West Europe, edited by Lise Skov, 121–22. Oxford: Berg, 2010. Accessed April 2, 2020. http://dx. doi.org.libproxy.newschool.edu/10.2752/BEWDF/EDch8026. 15. Charles Robert Ashbee. Craftsmanship in Competitive Industry: Being a Record of the Workshops of the Guild of Handicraft, and Some Deductions from Their Twenty-One Years’ Experience. Campden, Gloucestershire: Essex House Press, 1908. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/gri.ark:/13960/ t85j19x08. 16. Alan Crawford. “Arts and Crafts Movement.” Grove Art Online, 2003. Accessed April 2, 2020. https://www-oxfordartonline-com.libproxy.new school.edu/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/ oao-9781884446054-e-7000004452. 17. Christina Lodder and Benjamin Benus. “Constructivism.” Grove Art Online, 2003. Accessed April 2, 2020. https://www-oxfordartonlinecom.libproxy.newschool.edu/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/978188444 6054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-7000019194. 18. Rainer K. Wick. “Bauhaus.” Grove Art Online. 2003. Accessed April 2, 2020. https://www-oxfordartonline-com.libproxy.newschool.edu/gro veart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-978188444 6054-e-7000006947. 19. Courtney Gerber. “Guerrilla Girls.” Grove Art Online, September 20, 2006. Accessed April 2, 2020. https://www-oxfordartonline-com.lib proxy.newschool.edu/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054. 001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-7002021709. 20. threeASFOUR Website. Accessed April 2, 2020. https://threeasfour. com/pages/about. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Laure Guilbault. “Demna Gvasalia’s Exit from Vetements Marks the End of a Fashion Cycle.” In Business of Fashion, September 16, 2019. Accessed April 2, 2020. https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/ news-analysis/demna-gvasalia-steps-down-from-vetements. 24. Nicole Phelps. “Exclusive: Balenciaga is Returning to Haute Couture.” In Vogue, January 20, 2020. Accessed April 2, 2020. https://www.vogue. com/article/balenciaga-returns-to-haute-couture. 25. Steff Yotka. “Men’s Fashion Week and Couture Week Are Canceled in Paris, Milan to Combine Men’s and Women’s Fashion Weeks

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27. 28.

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in September.” In Vogue, March 27, 2020. Accessed April 2, 2020. https://www.vogue.com/article/milan-paris-mens-fashion-weekcouture-fashion-week-2020-canceled. Accessed April 2, 2020. https://www.matchesfashion.com/us/womens/ the-style-report/2018/05/the-finishing-touches-issue/spotlight-on-col ville-lucinda-chambers-molly-molloy-kristin-forss-ss18. Ibid. “Lagerfeld Designs Boosts H & M Sales.” The Guardian, December 15, 2004. Accessed April 3, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/business/ 2004/dec/15/money2. Felix Petty. “The X Files: When Did Fashion Become so Obsessed with Collaborations?” I -D. January 31, 2017. Accessed April 3, 2020. https://i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/xwdzed/the-x-files-when-didfashion-become-so-obsessed-with-collaborations. Cameron Wolf. “Why Fashion Collaborations Are so Crucial for Athletic Brands.” Complex, August 12, 2015. Accessed April 3, 2020. https://www.complex.com/style/2015/08/athletic-brands-collab orating-with-designers.

References Adamson, Glenn. The Invention of Craft. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Ashbee, Charles Robert. Craftsmanship in Competitive Industry: Being a Record of the Workshops of the Guild of Handicraft, and Some Deductions from Their Twenty-One Years’ Experience. Campden, Gloucestershire: Essex House Press, 1908. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/gri.ark:/13960/t85j19x08. Brown, Patty, and Janett Rice. Ready-to-Wear Apparel Analysis. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2014, 4th edition, pp. 107–95. Cabrera, Roberto, and Denis Antoine. “The Fit.” In Classic Tailoring Techniques for Menswear: A Construction Guide. New York: Fairchild Books, 2017, 2nd edition. Crane, Diane. “Fashion Design as an Occupation: A Cross-National Approach.” In Creators of Culture, Current Research on Occupations 8, edited by Cheryl L. Zollars and Muriel Goldsmith, 55–73. Cantor, Greenwhich, CT: JAI Press, 1993. Crawford, Alan. “Arts and Crafts Movement.” Grove Art Online, 2003. Accessed April 2, 2020. https://www-oxfordartonline-com.libproxy.newschool.edu/ groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-978188444 6054-e-7000004452. Fischer, Anette, and Kiran Gobin. “Haute Couture and Tailoring.” In Construction for Fashion Design. New York, Fairchild Books, 2017, 2nd edition.

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Frings, Gini. Fashion: From Concept to Consumer. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2001, 7th edition. Gerber, Courtney. “Guerrilla Girls.” Grove Art Online, September 20, 2006. Accessed April 2, 2020. https://www-oxfordartonline-com.libproxy.newsch ool.edu/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-978 1884446054-e-7002021709. Groys, Boris. On the New. London: Verso, 2014, Kindle edition. The Guardian Staff. “Lagerfeld Designs Boosts H & M Sales.” The Guardian, December 15, 2004. Guilbault, Laure. “Demna Gvasalia’s Exit from Vetements Marks the End of a Fashion Cycle.” In Business of Fashion, September 16, 2019. Accessed April 2, 2020. https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/news-analysis/demnagvasalia-steps-down-from-vetements. Hopkins, John. “Tailoring Traditions.” In Menswear. New York: Fairchild Books, 2017, 2nd edition. Jones, Jennifer M. “A Natural Right to Dress Women.” In Sexing La Mode: Gender, Fashion and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France. New York: Berg Fashion Library, 2004. Lodder, Christina, and Benjamin Benus. “Constructivism.” Grove Art Online, 2003. Accessed April 2, 2020. https://www-oxfordartonline-com.libproxy. newschool.edu/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/ oao-9781884446054-e-7000019194. Di Lorenzo, Milva Fiorella. “Body Measurement.” In Tailoring Techniques for Fashion. New York: Fairchild Books, 2010. MatchesFashion.com. Accessed April 2, 2020. https://www.matchesfashion. com/us/womens/the-style-report/2018/05/the-finishing-touches-issue/ spotlight-on-colville-lucinda-chambers-molly-molloy-kristin-forss-ss18. Nudelman, Zoya. “The Skill of Basic Tailoring.” In The Art of Couture Sewing, 404–38. New York: Fairchild Books, 2016. Accessed April 1, 2020. http:// dx.doi.org.libproxy.newschool.edu/10.5040/9781501316401.ch-012. Petty, Felix. “The X Files: When Did Fashion Become so Obsessed with Collaborations?” I-D, January 31, 2017. Accessed April 3, 2020. https://id.vice.com/en_us/article/xwdzed/the-x-files-when-did-fashion-become-soobsessed-with-collaborations. Phelps, Nicole. “Exclusive: Balenciaga Is Returning to Haute Couture.” In Vogue, January 20, 2020. Accessed April 2, 2020. https://www.vogue.com/ article/balenciaga-returns-to-haute-couture. Rasch, Tone. “Home Production.” In Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion: West Europe, 159–65, 2010. https://doi.org/10.2752/bewdf/edc h8033.

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Scott, Aimee. “Alexander McQueen.” In Fashion Photography Archive. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Accessed April 1, 2020. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.new school.edu/10.5040/9781474260428-FPA216. Serdari, Thomaï. “Experiments in Suchness: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Silk Shiki for Hermès.” In Critical Luxury Studies: Art, Design, Media, edited by John Armitage and Joanne Roberts, 131–50. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Spanabel Emery, Joy. “Tailoring and the Birth of the Published Paper Pattern.” In A History of the Paper Pattern Industry: The Home Dressmaking Fashion Revolution. New York: Berg Fashion Library, 2014. Steele, Valerie. “Capital of Luxury and Fashion.” In Paris Fashion: A Cultural History. New York: Berg Fashion Library, 2017, 3rd edition. Sterlacci, Francesca. “Fashion Designer.” In The Berg Companion to Fashion, edited by Valerie Steele. Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010. Accessed April 1, 2020. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.newschool.edu/10.5040/978147 4264716.0006152. threeASFOUR Website. Accessed April 2, 2020. https://threeasfour.com/ pages/about. Vangkilde, Kasper Tang. “Creating a Collection in a Big Company.” In Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion: West Europe, edited by Lise Skov, 121–22. Oxford: Berg, 2010. Accessed April 2, 2020. http://dx.doi.org.lib proxy.newschool.edu/10.2752/BEWDF/EDch8026. Wick, Rainer K. “Bauhaus.” Grove Art Online, 2003. Accessed April 2, 2020. https://www-oxfordartonline-com.libproxy.newschool.edu/groveart/view/ 10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-700000 6947. Wolf, Cameron. “Why Fashion Collaborations Are so Crucial for Athletic Brands.” Complex, August 12, 2015. https://www.complex.com/style/ 2015/08/athletic-brands-collaborating-with-designers. Yotka, Steff. “Men’s Fashion Week and Couture Week Are Canceled in Paris, Milan to Combine Men’s and Women’s Fashion Weeks in September.” In Vogue, March 27, 2020. Accessed April 2, 2020. https://www.vogue.com/ article/milan-paris-mens-fashion-week-couture-fashion-week-2020-canceled.

CHAPTER 5

What Do We Really Consume Through Luxury Fashion?

Abstract Fashion can be interpreted with the application of material culture methods. First and second stage analyses undertaken by the individual lead to an intellectual analysis that can be particularly elaborate and complex. It is through this juxtaposition with its context that the fashion piece becomes meaningful. Understanding consumers’ connection with objects through the lens of allied disciplines augments our perception of why certain objects seem to incite a more powerful response in the market. This is the beginning of learning to use culture to interpret consumers’ deeper motivations to purchase. Keywords Material culture · Fashion · Intellectual analysis · Cultural context

The answer to this question holds the key to designing the next big hit in luxury fashion or to, at least, revealing a few new angles of the relationship between consumers and products. When it comes to fashion, consumption happens on many levels as already discussed. It starts at the physical, but at times, it also incites an emotional or intellectual response. If so, the relationship between fashion and wearer warrants an examination based on the methodology of material culture as articulated in full for the first time in 1982 by art historian Jules Prown.1

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To many, especially those trained in business and quantitative analysis, it may seem odd to rely on a methodology that originates in the humanities to analyze, understand, and assess the value of artifacts whose sole purpose is commercial distribution for profit. Having carefully studied Prown’s work and having applied it in my teaching of conceptual design to fashion and product design students at the Parsons School of Design The New School in New York City, I concluded that his framework can be expanded in a way that brings it up to date and also adapted to a new format that will grow its reach outside of the humanities to welcome and include a business audience. Prown was concerned primarily with works of fine art, artifacts from older civilizations or of different cultures. He organized his arguments fully aware that, sometimes, the distance between the perceiver and the object is temporal, as for example when a researcher studies a garment that was worn during the French revolution. Other times, the distance is of a topological quality, as for example when the researcher is analyzing a headdress worn today by Aboriginals in Australia. It is not the actual physical distance that makes the study challenging but rather the distance between the researcher’s own culture and that of Australia’s Aboriginals. This is exactly what inspired the application of Prown’s framework to a business setting. The first chapter enriched our understanding of fashion as a type of material culture valued for its expressive qualities. Luxury fashion in particular is valued both for its high-quality materials and excellence of craftsmanship but also for its sharply differentiated point of view. Well aware of luxury fashion’s power in setting the trends that everyone else follows, consumers, will be argued, seek items or brands that can be organized in three categories: cool, hip, and status. Before presenting examples for each one of these types of luxury fashion, Prown’s framework will be presented in its new expanded format to fit the discussion of contemporary luxury fashion. In its new augmented configuration, the framework is a great analysis tool for business practitioners who wish to evaluate their own or competitive brands and products and better assess their relative positioning in the market. The consumer uses a similar process for product or brand assessment, but she does so mostly subconsciously. What is offered in this discussion is a structured review of the relationship between the perceiver and the object, or else between the consumer and the product or brand (Fig. 5.1).

FORMAL

Fig. 5.1 First stage analysis of a product, brand, or social group based on Jules Prown’s framework and augmented by the author (Source Author’s creation)

SUBSTANTIAL

•lines •color •3D •texture •body language, movement

CONTENT

•dimensions •materials •articulation •number of items/people

•what is it used for? •does it carry messaging? •relationship with time? •hierarchical relationships?

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Let’s assume that the object has been abstracted to the shape of the soft blue circle in the above diagram. The object could be a product, a brand, or even a group of people who appear as a unified ensemble. The less time the viewer spends looking at it, trying to understand it, the smaller the area of the object that reveals itself to her. Therefore, when the viewer first encounters the object, a substantial analysis 2 of it commences automatically. What the viewer perceives are the dimensions of the object, its materials, and general articulation. This is not enough for someone to fully understand what they are looking at. If the object is appealing, the viewer will give it another glance and will go through a formal analysis, which will give the viewer additional information about the quality of the lines of the product, its proportions, color, three-dimensional shape, texture, and so on. If these elements have sparked curiosity in the viewer, then she continues with what Prown calls a content analysis that allows the viewer to think about the object and its function, any potential meaning that is easy to discern, as well as to make a judgment about the object’s newness (i.e., Have I seen this before? Or is this a totally novel product? A newly launched brand? A social group that I have never encountered before?) To know how to ask these questions does not ensure one gets to the answers. Nonetheless, if the viewer has taken this three-stage approach to analyzing what is before her, she has retrieved a considerable amount of information about the object (Fig. 5.2). The second stage of analysis, according to Prown, is one during which the viewer is truly engaged with the object. If the viewer can use her senses, other than vision, to experience the object she will. If she cannot, she will still try to imagine, empathetically, how it might feel to touch it, whether it is light or heavy, how does its texture feel, and so on. Reasonably, this is a sensory analysis. Concurrently, the viewer may have feelings about these sensory inputs. For example, she may really like the color yellow, or find the weight of this bag unpleasant, or the sound of a brand-specific song very appealing, and so on. Therefore, the emotional and sensory analysis may be concurrent, or it may be that the former follows the latter. The viewer engages in an intellectual analysis about the object when she is reasoning through the information she has received. (i.e., Why is the shape of this skirt so different from all the other skirts displayed? Have I seen a skirt of that shape before? Why does this bag have words written on it? What does that message signify? Why is or isn’t there a logo?) To these three types of analysis defined by Prown I added a fourth level of engagement, spiritual analysis. Spirituality in

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spiritual

intellectual

emoonal

sensory

Fig. 5.2 Second stage analysis of a product, brand, or social group based on Jules Prown’s framework and augmented by the author (Source Author’s creation)

this context has nothing to do with religion or rituals. When the late Karl Lagerfeld (1933–2019) joined luxury fashion brand Chanel in 1982, he established the design principles that are unique to Chanel, a complex code of symbols and ideas, which he called “its spiritual patrimony.”3 Spirituality refers to the aspiration that good artists and designers have and that is to address some aspect of the human condition. In doing so, they produce works that may pose questions about various circumstances of life and in certain cases may also offer insights about the human condition. This is facilitated when artists/designers manipulate material into form that other than addressing our senses it also has the potential of being experienced through the senses as a moment of aesthetic experience, a moment when judgment is suspended to perceive a situation or object as

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is without any associations with the social or cognitive.4 In a lecture at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York in 1958, celebrated American Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko (1903–1970) informed his audience that as he had spent years analyzing great works of art, he had concluded that for a work to be remarkable, the artist must address some aspect of the human condition.5 The present chapter is not concerned with art but, rather, with the expressive qualities of luxury fashion, themselves the result of good design. As already argued in the first chapter, good design is a form of art put to good use. In other words, it is a form of critical thinking that is expressed in material form as a means to an end. A fashion designer that always found inspiration in questions about the nuances of society or challenges to humanity and articulated them in his work long before they became part of mainstream conversations, was Lagerfeld. An example of his foresight in defining what the theme of his collections should be is evident in his S/S 2014 collection for which he staged a demonstration about women’s rights in the streets of Paris, which he had turned into a fake stage.6 Many saw this as a precursor to the #metoo movement of 2017, to raise awareness of the pervasive sexual abuse and assault of women in society following the Harvey Weinstein allegations of sexual abuse. This was not the only instance in which Lagerfeld staged shows that eerily and prophetically imagined what was still to come. But this discussion belongs to a later chapter where the focus will be on how to use cultural inputs to define creative strategy. For now, it suffices to say that the term spiritual analysis refers to the engagement of the viewer with an object when she is completely entranced in its beauty or when she is inspired to think about an important theme based on messages or signs the object communicates through its design. As a side note, when I ask my design students to define creativity, almost all of them define it as a type of spiritual experience. In other words, using the word spiritual may come as a surprise to quantitative analysts but is a given in the fields of art and design. Considering that our goal is to understand luxury fashion, itself a distinct design field, and how to produce works that speak directly to the consumer’s soul and wallet, the component of spiritual analysis must be part of the framework. Finally, one needs to know which questions to ask in order to retrieve as much information about the object as possible and to complete the analysis on relative positioning. Once again, the basis for this part of the framework comes from Prown and has been expanded by the author (Fig. 5.3).

STYLISTIC

SEMIOTICS

ALLIED DISCIPLINES

CONTEXT BASED

SYNCHRONIC

COMPLEXITY

EXPERIENCE

PRIOR KNOWLEDGE

Fig. 5.3 In-depth intellectual analysis of a product, brand, or social group based on Jules Prown’s framework and augmented by the author (Source Author’s creation)

QUANTITATIVE

OBJECT BASED

EXTERNAL EVIDENCE

INTELLECTUAL

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The main idea here is to realize that intellectual analysis happens either based on external evidence the viewer receives or prior knowledge and experience with similar objects. External evidence is related to the object or it is related to the object’s context, its environment, its physical surroundings, or perhaps an abstract context in which the object belongs. For example, if the object under observation is a multi-colored, oversized jacket by luxury fashion brand Burberry that looks nothing like the brand’s elegant, slightly conservative, earth-toned traditional trenches, the viewer will be drawn to an intellectual analysis of it as she is trying to understand whether this jacket presents an appealing opportunity for her to purchase. The evidence she receives by looking at the jacket convinces her that this is an anomaly in terms of design traits that Burberry products usually showcase. She will try to understand the reason behind the jacket’s exaggerated dimensions (quantitative analysis ). Is this a jacket for taller people? Is it oversized to grant the wearer better protection? Or is it about occupying as much personal space as possible? But she may at the same time explore questions about style (stylistic analysis ). Is this jacket flattering? Is it imposing? Does it appear dynamic? And she will then attempt to analyze the meaning of these stylistic choices (semiotic analysis ). What does it really mean to wear an oversized jacket when all other brands are producing garments meant to slenderize the wearer? And what is the meaning of deviating from the earth-toned monochromes that Burberry has traditionally produced? These are all valid questions but perhaps this object-based analysis is not providing enough information to reach any conclusions. Therefore, the viewer needs to move her reasoning away from the object and to a greater context. To achieve that, she will probably need methodological tools that other disciplines have developed. For example, is there any psychological evidence that people who wear oversized clothing are communicating something about their confidence? Or maybe, through the eyes of a cultural anthropologist, she could deduct that in dense urban environments people tend to wear oversize clothing to occupy more physical space around their proper body. Or if she adopted the methods of a gender historian, she would understand that the multicolor palette is not just a deviation from the brand’s traditional colors but also Burberry’s concerted effort to be inclusive and celebrate gender diversity. The number of various allied disciplines from which one can borrow a perspective to contextualize and analyze an object is ample. Design schools teach these methodologies, but business schools don’t, except for the curriculum in macroeconomics—but to correctly interpret

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design as a product (and marker) of a specific culture, one needs to go deeper than a macro reading. If the viewer is not simply a consumer of products but also someone with prior knowledge in the field of fashion design, she may be able to recall that there were other designers in the history of fashion who had deviated from their established, somewhat restrained, color palette to embark on an exploration of vibrant mixed colors. Or she may already know that Burberry hired an outside designer to collaborate on that specific jacket. He happened to have built a career around oversized garments. This type of experienced-based analysis can get very complex and multilayered. The more meticulously this is done, the more contextual information the viewer receives about the significance of the Burberry jacket. In building up this kind of contextual data, informed by both history and present, the viewer elucidates the jacket’s appeal to specific customer segments.

Cool In his Dictionary of Contemporary Slang,7 Tony Thorne traces the origins of the word cool to the jazz club scene of the 1930s. When the air in the crowded jazz clubs had become heavy with cigarette smoke, windows and doors were opened to let in the cool air. By that hour of the night, the music performed at the club was slow and smooth and was soon described as “cool,” as were the musicians performing it. By extrapolation, cool came to signify a physically attractive, male jazz musician or equally alluring patrons who would frequent the clubs in the late hours. Cool then also implied a certain element of presenting oneself, dressed in a certain way and probably confident enough to be out at night, even if dressed nicely. Or vice versa, confident enough to show up in the late hours even if dressed differently. Someone who is cool is self-assured and embraces risk: the risk of going to night clubs, looking different, leading a life full of experiences—and ultimately, having an elevated sex appeal. Marcel Danesi, author of Cool: The Signs and Meanings of Adolescence, reminds us that coolness has survived since the 1930s as a transgenerational mark of a “nonchalant and unflappable countenance”8 of a person who capitalizes on all sorts of symbolic language of dress, behavior, language, and identity. Today, products that are truly cool, and not just described as cool euphemistically, are those favored by persons belonging to some type of

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underground culture, usually urban, most often music related, customarily physically appealing, and mostly younger. In his 2000 best seller, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Malcolm Gladwell recounts the story of Hush Puppies, the classic American brushed suede shoes that became cool around 1994/95. The brand was not doing well. Sales were so dismal that the manufacturer, a company named Wolverine, was considering phasing the model out. Gladwell reports that at a fashion shoot, two Hush Puppies executives ran into a stylist from New York who told them that the shoes had become cool in the clubs of downtown Manhattan. The demand for Hush Puppies was so high that pairs from ma and pa stores that carried them found their way to several resale shops that had sprung up in SoHo. The success was phenomenal. Fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi had been seeing wearing them, gallery owners wanted them in multiples, and Wolverine went from selling 30,000 pairs in 1994, to 430,000 pairs in 1995, and close to 1.7 M pairs in 1996.9 Who knows how good-looking that original young man, who wore Hush Puppies for his nights out in Manhattan’s East Village and SoHo, was. He made Hush Puppies so cool that in 1996, it won the prize for best accessory at the Council of Fashion Designers awards dinner. The formula for coolness seems to lie somewhere between urban culture, underground music clubs, and creative crowds. It can happen organically as it did for Hush Puppies. It can also happen by design. When companies wish to increase their cache today, they seek out partnerships with stylists of influential artists to transform an accessory from an interesting looking item into a symbol of coolness. This is exactly the case with a high-heeled Bape Sta pink pair of sneakers10 worn by no other than Beyoncé, a very talented artist and hard-working performer, who promotes body positivity, is the icon of feminine empowerment, and has time to engage in philanthropy as well. Beyoncé is cool and she owns it.11 Everything she touches becomes cool as well. A pair of Adidas Stan Smith has remained cool since the 1970s, when namesake tennis superstar who won the Wimbledon and the US Open endorsed the shoe.12 A tennis sneaker, simple, understated, even austere, is a good-looking shoe. It is versatile, worn by males and females, sometimes as a sporty accessory, others as an attempt to dress down an otherwise dressed up outfit. The Stan Smith can do it all. When it first hit the market, it sold in the tens of millions. It remained a cultural icon even

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through the years Adidas had suspended production. Everyone recognizes a Stan Smith pair by quickly applying (even if subconsciously) a first stage analysis. Everyone reacts to it through a second stage analysis. The sensory and emotional analysis stages communicate information about the shoe’s cache to the wearer. The decision to purchase however is the direct outcome of an intellectual analysis. This is because the wearer receives and analyzes a large amount of data when she encounters a pair of Stan Smith is various New York neighborhoods. Who else is wearing the shoe, and how, is a great contextual factor that weighs on the decision to purchase. In other words, Adidas, the brand, can manipulate the consumer’s desire on the sensory and emotional level primarily. It can also influence the consumer’s desire through ads—if so, these, too, target the consumer’s intellectual engagement. Yet, the fewer the instances of advertising, the greater the chances of the consumer embarking on an intellectual analysis that is both object and context-based, as she is attempting to assess whether this pair of shoes is still cool. For products to remain cool, the consumer prefers to collect data on their own.

Hip Hip is probably older than cool. The Urban Dictionary claims the term was introduced to the United Slaves by slaves imported from West Africa. It entered the mainstream in the 1950s and 60s by way of the Beatnik subculture who propagated racial integration, listened to black music, and borrowed words from black speech.13 Today, hip means the ultimate cool. Scott Schuman, American blogger and fashion photographer, created his blog “The Sartorialist,” in 2005 and catapulted the idea of candid, street style shots of incredibly stylish, hip people in New York, initially and other big cities of the world later, to incredible heights of popularity. The blog became an instant success and has since transferred over to Instagram, where it boasts a following of 1.1 M. The allure of Shuman’s work has to do with the fact that he is not necessarily interested in celebrities, although he will not deny them a flattering shot when their outfit deserves it. Schuman is interested in a person’s style regardless of who the person is. In that sense, he practices an inclusive type of fashion photography that makes fashion appear democratic. Yet, he is one of the photographers who capture all the glamorous moments of each fashion week—New York, Milan, or Paris, Shuman is there. He also records the outfits of other journalists, buyers, and fashion industry professionals on their way to the

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fashion shows. In doing so, he singlehandedly prompted a major shift on how mainstream culture looks at high fashion by creating a second, supplemental catwalk that takes place in the streets of various fashion capitals.14 In the fifteen years that he has been active as a style photographer he has inadvertently uncovered the first weak signals of significant changes in style. In a McKinsey Quarterly article, the authors speak of weak signals as “hidden amid the noise. Arising primarily from social media, they represent snippets—not streams—of information and can help companies to figure out what customers want and to spot looming industry and market disruptions before competitors do.”15 In luxury fashion, the type of cultural uncovering that Schuman practices through his lens has been an established tactic that a lot of designers use to get inspiration and come up with innovative designs that, ideally, are unprecedented in the history of fashion. The freshness of hip styles encountered in the streets originates in the wearer’s imagination, material constraints, access to clothing, personal preference for specific colors, shapes, and textures and so on. In other words, hip style is by definition creative and original. This is exactly what luxury fashion designers ache to discover as the stakes for authoring originality in an era of replication, through pictures that circulate non-stop on a variety of media and in an infinite vortex, are extremely high. To understand “hip” and be “hip,” the wearer is someone who has mastered first and second stage analysis through exposure to fashion and its institutions. She is also someone who distinctly manages the elements of intellectual analysis well and has probably had opportunities to collect “raw data” in the streets of major metropolitan cities so she can quickly spot a genuine hip style from a phony one, one that is contrived and tries too hard to look authentic. Carolyn Bessette, a powerful muse for Calvin Klein in the 1990s, a brand that was trying to find itself and appeal to a younger, freer, and grungier clientele in an effort to save its allure that had been diluted with too many licensing deals in the 1980s, was that type of downtown girl, half-hippie, half-natural, “who loved vodka, Parliaments, and partying at Save the Robots till six in the morning,” according to Maureen Callahan author of Champagne Supernovas.16 Bessette, a deliberate hipster according to Callahan who describes Bessette as someone who consciously observed the downtown scene and effortlessly adopted its cool in an attempt to appear less patrician than she really was, had thrown herself in the heart of the grunge scene of the 90s. She may have been partying all night but she was also probably taking in all sorts of

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contextual information that she then translated into fashion choices for Calvin Klein, a brand that managed to cross the threshold of the early 90s and find itself on the subversive side of culture by hiring Kate Moss for its campaigns. It worked because Moss represented exactly the opposite of what fashion was supposed to be.17 It took hipness to recognize hipness.

Status The idea that has generated the greatest amount of academic papers in the field of luxury fashion, classical sociology, and business of luxury is that of status.18 It goes back to an individual’s desire to integrate into the collective by appropriating signs of status that instantly elevate her to the same level as those with whom she is socially competing. Status can be immediately perceived through special signs or attributes that define a special brand or product (i.e., logo).19 It can also be implied by association with a remarkable person. For example, former first lady Michelle Obama wore a greenish-gold gown by Indian American luxury fashion designer Naeem Khan in 2009, on the occasion of the White House dinner for the Indian Prime Minister. Naeem Khan had been a name known to those who shop at Bergdorf Goodman, New York’s famed luxury department store on Fifth Avenue and 58th Street. Obama’s endorsement of the designer’s work assigned symbolic status to the Naeem Khan brand, a name that became familiar to most American households after her first appearance in his opulent design. The concept of status is intriguing because it has traditionally been studied in association with the idea of conspicuousness, beginning with Veblen’s work and a long line of scholarly work that continues to build on Veblen’s theory. What is proposed here is the reverse of conspicuousness. Status can also be achieved through a language of exclusive signs perceivable only to the initiated, the select few who belong to a certain subculture and who flaunt it only to the members of their tribe. By turning Veblen’s theory on its head, the current phenomenon of fashion brands such as Camp High, a clothing label that fetches high prices thanks to a core community who identifies with its aesthetic and design concept, explains the consumer’s willingness to buy a seemingly overpriced, and otherwise quite ordinary, sweatshirt when, in fact, the merchandize is purely a token instilled with the ideals of a particular design philosophy.20 In other words, while the hoi polloi may reject a Camp High sweatshirt

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based on a first and second stage analysis, the culturally aware, initiated few can justify the label’s positioning by applying an intellectual analysis (less object-based and more context-based).

Conclusions Material culture methods can be applied to interpret the world of fashion. There are two stages of analysis that happen automatically when the viewer encounters a fashion item. The second stage of analysis can also lead to an intellectual analysis that organizes information around an object-based or context-based analysis or one that relies on prior exposure to similar conditions. Considering that hype around specific items or styles come and go, the key to understanding the making of those with staying power lies in practicing a second stage analysis and going deeply into intellectual analysis with ample comparative material. It is the context that best explains the object than just the object itself.

Notes 1. Jules David Prown. “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method.” Winterthur Portfolio 17, no. 1 (1982): 1–19. Accessed February 22, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/1180761. 2. Terms printed in italics in this section are terms that belong to Prown’s original work. 3. M. Gutsatz et al. Luxury Talent Management. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, p. 12. 4. Ingrid Loschek. “When Is Creativity?” In When Clothes Become Fashion: Design and Innovation Systems, 33–86. Oxford: Berg, 2009. Accessed April 26, 2020. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.newschool.edu/10.2752/978 1847883681/WHNCLOTHBECOMFASH0011. 5. Rothko seemed to favor death as the most pertinent question in his work. Mark Rothko. The Artist’s Reality. Edited by Christopher Rothko. Yale University Press, 2004, p. 110. Accessed April 6, 2020. www.jstor.org/ stable/j.ctt5vm20g. 6. Euronews. “Lagerfeld Stages Faux Street Protest for Paris Fashion Show— Le Mag.” Accessed April 6. 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 9XSydj7LEPE. 7. Tony Thorne. Dictionary of Contemporary Slang. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2014, p. 107.

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8. Marcel Danesi. Cool: The Signs and Meanings of Adolescence. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994, p. 37. Accessed April 7, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central. 9. Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. New York: Little Brown, 2000, p. 3. 10. Aria Hughes. “The Story Behind Beyoncé’s High-Heeled Bapestas,” August 8, 2019. https://www.complex.com/style/2019/08/beyoncebapesta-sneaker-heels. Accessed April 7, 2020. 11. Phoebe Macrossan. “Intimacy, Authenticity and ‘Worlding’ in Beyoncé’s Star Project.” In Popular Music, Stars and Stardom, edited by Loy Stephen, Rickwood Julie, and Bennett Samantha, 137–52. Australia: ANU Press, 2018. Accessed April 7, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv301 dk8.12. 12. Lucy Thorpe states that the original endorser was French tennis player Robert Haillet for a court shoe made in leather for the first time. She adds that in 1971, Adi Dassler’s son, Horst Dassler, approached Stan Smith for an endorsement with the hope to gain the US market. Apparently, the shoe carried both Haillet’s and Smith’s signatures for a while and from 1978 forward, Smith was the only one to enjoy a prominent display of his portrait on the shoe’s tongue. Lucy Thorpe. “How the Stan Smith Went from Tennis Court to Fashion Catwalk,” December 26, 2019. Accessed April 11, 2020. https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/stansmith-podcast-why-its-cool/. 13. Accessed April 7, 2020. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php? term=hip. 14. Kristen Joy Watts. “Finding Inspiration with the Sartorialist,” December 13, 2010. Accessed April 7, 2020. https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/ 2010/12/13/finding-inspiration-with-the-sartorialist/. 15. Martin Harryson et al. “The Strength of Weak Signals.” McKinsey Quarterly, February 2014. Accessed April 7, 2020. 16. Maureen Callahan. Champagne Supernovas: Kate Moss, Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen and the 90s Renegades Who Remade Fashion. New York: Touchtone, 2014, p. xvii. 17. Ibid. xix. 18. Yuniya Kawamura. “Adoption and Consumption of Fashion.” In Fashion-ology: An Introduction to Fashion Studies, 89–104. Dress, Body, Culture. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005. Accessed April 7, 2020. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.newschool.edu/10.2752/978 1847888730/FASHOLOGY0008; Yajin Wang and Vladas Griskevicius. 2014. “Conspicuous Consumption, Relationships, and Rivals: Women’s Luxury Products as Signals to Other Women.” Journal of Consumer Research 40, no. 5: 834–54. https://doi.org/10.1086/673256.

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19. Han Jee Young, Joseph C. Nunes, and Xavier Drèze. “Signaling Status with Luxury Goods: The Role of Brand Prominence.” Journal of Marketing 74, no. 4 (2010): 15–30. Accessed April 6, 2020. www.jstor. org/stable/27800823. 20. Jian Deleon. “Careening into Sportswear’s Psychedelic Revolution with Camp High.” In High Style, a Magazine by High Snobiety, Spring 2020, “The Outfits Issue,” 136–39.

References Callahan, Maureen. Champagne Supernovas: Kate Moss, Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen and the 90s Renegades Who Remade Fashion. New York: Touchtone, 2014. Danesi, Marcel. Cool: The Signs and Meanings of Adolescence. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994, p. 37. Accessed April 7, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central. Deleon, Jian. “Careening into Sportswear’s Psychedelic Revolution with Camp High.” In High Style, a Magazine by High Snobiety, Spring 2020, “The Outfits Issue,” 136–39. Euronews. “Lagerfeld Stages Faux Street Protest for Paris Fashion Show—Le Mag.” Accessed April 6. 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XSydj 7LEPE. Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. New York: Little Brown, 2000. Gutsatz, M., et al. Luxury Talent Management. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Harryson, Martin, et al. “The Strength of Weak Signals.” McKinsey Quarterly, February 2014. Accessed April 7, 2020. Hughes, Aria. “The Story behind Beyoncé’s High-Heeled Bapestas,” August 8, 2019. Accessed April 7, 2020. https://www.complex.com/style/2019/08/ beyonce-bapesta-sneaker-heels. Kawamura, Yuniya. “Adoption and Consumption of Fashion.” In Fashion-ology: An Introduction to Fashion Studies, 89–104. Dress, Body, Culture. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005. Accessed April 7, 2020. http://dx.doi.org.lib proxy.newschool.edu/10.2752/9781847888730/FASHOLOGY0008. Loschek, Ingrid. “When Is Creativity?” In When Clothes Become Fashion: Design and Innovation Systems, 33–86. Oxford: Berg, 2009. Accessed April 26, 2020. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.newschool.edu/10.2752/978184788 3681/WHNCLOTHBECOMFASH0011.

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Macrossan, Phoebe. “Intimacy, Authenticity and ‘Worlding’ in Beyoncé’s Star Project.” In Popular Music, Stars and Stardom, edited by Loy Stephen, Rickwood Julie, and Bennett Samantha, 137–52. Acton, ACT, Australia: ANU Press, 2018. Accessed April 7, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv301dk8.12. Prown, Jules David. “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method.” Winterthur Portfolio 17, no. 1 (1982): 1–19. Accessed February 22, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/1180761. Rothko, Mark. The Artist’s Reality. Edited by Christopher Rothko. Yale University Press, 2004, p. 110. Accessed April 6, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt 5vm20g. Thorne, Tony. Dictionary of Contemporary Slang. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2014. Thorpe, Lucy. “How the Stan Smith Went from Tennis Court to Fashion Catwalk,” December 26, 2019. Accessed April 11, 2020. https://www.hig hsnobiety.com/p/stan-smith-podcast-why-its-cool/. Urban Dictionary. Accessed April 7, 2020. https://www.urbandictionary.com/ define.php?term=hip. Wang, Yajin, and Vladas Griskevicius. 2014. “Conspicuous Consumption, Relationships, and Rivals: Women’s Luxury Products as Signals to Other Women.” Journal of Consumer Research 40, no. 5 (2014): 834–54. https://doi.org/ 10.1086/673256. Watts, Kristen Joy. “Finding Inspiration with the Sartorialist,” December 13, 2010. Accessed April 7, 2020. https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/ 13/finding-inspiration-with-the-sartorialist/. Young Jee Han, Joseph C. Nunes, and Xavier Drèze. “Signaling Status with Luxury Goods: The Role of Brand Prominence.” Journal of Marketing 74, no. 4 (2010): 15–30. Accessed April 6, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/278 00823.

CHAPTER 6

How Do We Consume Luxury Fashion?

Abstract A new framework that examines consumers’ interaction with fashion products in-depth is introduced. It is based on the idea of transmedia storytelling, a new academic field that has been growing in the last fifteen years. The framework consists of nodes that describe the forces that shape a consumer’s purchasing process. It is a complex, non-linear, synchronous, and asynchronous description of all the external factors that contribute to the sense of self. Its complexity is counterbalanced by the practicality it presents to managers of fashion brands as they often need to assess the forces that influence consumer behavior in a particular market. The brand manager who drafts strategic plans is better equipped to ascertain the future state of affairs with a framework that tests the interconnectivity of the inputs that breed desire for luxury fashion. Keywords Fashion consumption · Transmedia · Consumer behavior

Consumption is probably the angle that has generated the most prolific number of research questions through which fashion has been studied. It is an area of inquiry that informs the fundamental principles of economics, marketing, sociology, psychology, political science, and cultural studies in general. It would be impossible to even attempt to summarize the field in a short chapter even if the main question here is limited to the consumption of luxury fashion. © The Author(s) 2020 T. Serdari, Rethinking Luxury Fashion, Palgrave Advances in Luxury, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45301-5_6

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Instead, I propose a reading of luxury fashion consumption based on the framework presented below. Two notes on this before I describe it in more detail. First, while this appears flat on paper, it is meant to be read as a three-dimensional construct in space. Second, the notion of time is included in it. By that I mean that all parts of the framework, nodes, evolve in time and, most importantly, not concurrently. In other words, it is not the specific time that interests us (as if we could take a snapshot of the framework that represents a precise moment in time) but rather the respective timeline that defines the evolution of each node. Let’s look at the framework first and return to this idea shortly (Fig. 6.1). The diagram is centered around an individual (SELF), the luxury fashion consumer. Around it, in an interactive system that includes the self and that both dynamically shapes the self and is changed by the self as well, fourteen different nodes have been defined. They all correspond to concrete academic areas of research that will be identified shortly. Each one of these nodes is a distinct system of multiple combined parts, such as individuals, corporations, and institutions, and extends across time. For example, the node called brands includes all the brands that may be known to an individual today but also those that had existed earlier and have left traces of their material culture behind, including products, traces of communications, messages, and signs. Therefore, the node “Brands” includes extinct brands because at some point in time these brands shaped the design philosophy of a fashion designer who is active today. This idea, that time is included in each one of the nodes, makes the framework more complex but also more realistic in capturing the pluralism of human culture throughout modernity. There is a whole new area of research that focuses on the question of transmedia,1 namely the concept that since prehistoric times, stories have been told with words and enriched with a variety of media to enhance the message. The form media take (i.e., images, objects, music, dance, fashion, etc.) is time and culture-specific, an element that has contributed to the original story’s evolution through the use of different media. Today, messages evolve through media as well as via platforms used to disseminate the media.2 For example, a short film created to document Yves Saint Laurent’s creative process has gained a new life through a different audience on YouTube and a completely separate audience on IGTV. While the original film had a singular intended purpose, its transmediated existence may have resulted in an entirely new range of film stills, close-ups, mashed sequences, or memes (in which there is

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Ideology General knowledge, arts

Purpose

Media

Creavity

Brands

Culture

SELF Real life observaon

Time

Social network inherited

Space

Social network acquired

Body Percepon Social norms & narraves

Fig. 6.1 Transmedia luxury fashion consumption (Source Author’s creation)

usually additional language inserted), each one impacting the audience from a new perspective or finding a new audience entirely.3 Another example of transmedia storytelling is Secret Garden, the 2014 campaign by luxury fashion brand Dior.4 The campaign was staged at the Palace of Versailles, outside Paris. While it showcased many beautiful images of attractive models in sharply modern outfits against the background of the eighteenth-century architecture and its surroundings, it included one image in particular that went viral—it was the art historians that had reacted to it and not the fashionistas. The picture showed three

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female models, two wearing dresses and one in a black pantsuit. They were seated on a bed of fallen leaves, under slender, tall trees, and in front of a small pond. The group’s staging and composition as well as the individuals’ postures were lifted off the infamous painting by the great impressionist Edouard Manet (1882–1883) Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1862–1863) currently at the Musée d’Orsay. There are many reasons why Dior’s creative team chose to be inspired by (even plagiarize) Manet’s famous work. It is a token of France’s cultural heritage, is very well known across the world even to those who have not studied art history and has a powerful message about fine art referring to a mundane subject matter that includes nudity for nudity’s sake, thus linking the sacred and the profane. Manet himself had looked at several famous paintings including early Northern Renaissance prints and Late Italian Renaissance paintings picturing the pastoral. Dior’s 2014 image, even though used for product placement, is a direct derivative of centuries of pictorial production of allegorical and moral significance. This campaign would have looked very different without the historical revert. I am using this idea of unfolding across time and across media platforms to define what shapes both the subconscious and the deliberate self, when the individual consumes luxury fashion products or images. The first node is called Space. It describes actual physical space both as a specific location on earth and a specific place, what Prown called a “human shaped landscape” that can be inhabited, studied, and understood with the help of cultural geography, a discipline very similar to archeology. Cultural geography is broader than architectural criticism, urban studies, or media architecture (urban spaces augmented with technology) but relies on all three to uncover the fundamental values of a society at a particular location. A place has the power to shape the aesthetic of the individual and impact her fashion choices. The most evident example would be the comparison of two places, one with a warm and one with a cold climate. The materiality of the built environment is equally significant: a cobblestone street and houses built of bricks are still very close to the idea of nature and inspire the individual to explore natural fabrics, florals, etc. On the contrary, midtown Manhattan or the heart of any metropolis, is artificial, industrially made, perhaps glossy in appearance but also exclusive—it shuts the individual out and inspires outfits that express toughness. Architecture and fashion are considered parallel practices today.5 Historically, several modern architects had aspirations in fashion design including William Morris (1834–1896),

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Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1828–1928), Adolf Loos (1870–1933), Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), Frank Gehry (1929–) just to name a few. The prevalent methodology to study fashion consumption through the lens of “Space” is art historical. A great example in the field is the work of Jess Berry, who provides an in-depth analysis of the connections between Parisian haute couture and modern interiors based on primary research through historical records of the most prominent haute couture houses.6 There is an abundance of contemporary material for researchers to deepen the understanding between consumption of luxury fashion and the modern cultural geography in which consumers act. The node “Body Perception” is a field that has received a lot of attention from fashion studies scholars, mainly because human bodies are dressed bodies. The individual’s perception of their own body, whether accurate or distorted, directly influences fashion choices. Joanne Entwistle’s article “Fashion and the Fleshy Body: Dress as Embodied Practice,”7 summarizes the state of research around questions of the body in fashion and the practice of dressing and offers a thorough framework for further study. Additionally, one’s sensory sensitivity comes into play and this is usually one over which the individual has no control. For example, one may be allergic to certain types of fabrics or particularly enjoy the feel of silk on their skin. The way the body receives fashion and its materials has created a new area of study called haptics. It describes precisely the sensorial subsystem of nonverbal communication that conveys meaning through physical contact. Two prominent scholars in the field are Eugenie Shinkle8 and David Parisi,9 each negotiating a different aspect of the sensory in fashion consumption either in real life or the consumer’s transmediated experience. “Social Norms & Narratives” is the node that corresponds to social structures that impose expectations on the individual in terms of behavior and fashion preferences. An aspect of this could be the restrictions a conservative society places on the individual. In specific religious environments, a person may be called to dress in a way that emphasizes modesty. Combined with views that derive from third wave feminism10 and a newly found empowerment of previously underserved customer segments, “modest fashion,” has already become mainstream.11 The cases of social norms as a determining factor of fashion consumption are numerous. The two nodes of Social Networks, acquired or inherited, take the discussion back to Pierre Bourdieu whose study of how various groups

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(“fields”) define our taste in cultural artifacts (fashion, art, music, dance, etc.) remains valid and relevant today.12 I split Social Networks in two nodes because today other than one’s original social capital that takes her back to her family roots and the extended “fields” that shape her experiences, the individual has many more options to choose her own social capital because of the access that social media provides. The dialectic that takes place between one’s inherited social capital and the self is different in nature and magnitude compared to the one between the self and its chosen social capital (i.e., voluntary associations in real life or on media). The node “Real life observations” refers to a system we discussed earlier when first and second stage analysis was elaborated. Prown’s material culture methodology is an area that has not been explored enough by fashion scholars and would result in a holistic assessment of luxury fashion consumption, a thesis shared by Giorgio Riello13 as well. “Brands” is a node that needs no explanation, as brands are the message amplifiers of fashion producers as well as the connectors between producers and consumers. The strategies brands use to influence the fashion consumer are expounded in Marie-Claude Sicard’s excellent work Brand Revolution: Rethinking Brand Identity,14 in which she also proposes a framework that describes brand design in far more practical detail than the foundational principles that David Aaker established earlier in the field. Yuniya Kawamura’s work speaks directly15 to the ongoing negotiation between fashion producers and consumers and reiterates some of the ideas that have been suggested so far. Other fundamental directions in organizing the literature that examines the relationship of consumers and brands include the work of Colin Campbell on the Sociology of Consumption16 and the vast field of hedonic consumption.17 “Media” is more of a portal that just a node. It can take research into many different directions. Set against this node, the Self is as much an involuntary contributor as a willing participant in a world where even the relationship between body and dress has come into question. Traditional media, social media, new technological platforms, but also augmented reality and artificial intelligence have transformed fashion into a fragmented universe where the idea may be more important than the materiality of the design. An essential reading for grasping the implications of the mediatization of the self is Agnès Rocamora’s “Mediatization and Digital Media in the Field of Fashion.”18

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The node “General knowledge, arts” refers to the vast repositories of knowledge, real or abstract, the individual has access to or may have been exposed to during her life and how these inform her taste in fashion. Here one considers that all fields of knowledge are equally valid. Someone who loves science and astronomy may have a flair for performance textiles (or not) while also being heavily influenced by early nineteenth-century Romantic literature in terms of aesthetics (or not). Pierre Berthon’s work19 is essential in outlining the tenets that define how individual tastes evolve through time and is the only piece in the field of marketing to proficiently incorporate philosophical and sociological theories with the goal to explain consumers’ consumption of luxury and the strategic response of brands. “Ideology” refers to the power of political thought in shaping the individual’s taste in fashion. Fashion and Politics is an edited volume published in 2019 by Yale University Press.20 It comprises essays by leading fashion scholars who cover the topic on a global scale. Its third section deals specifically with the idea introduced in the present framework, namely how bodies are defined by dress and how oppression and expression can coexist or annihilate each other in a particular geopolitical environment. An earlier work by Andreas Behnke21 offers additional evidence that ideology permeates the individual’s fashion tastes and consumption patterns and therefore needs to be treated as a separate dynamic factor of influence. “Purpose” can be approached on the basis of psychology and Abraham Maslow’s classic—even if strongly critiqued—work on the Hierarchy of Needs.22 A recent direction in economics is empirical research on happiness. It offers new insights on how human beings value goods and services in an environment in which social conditions encourage the individual to prosper. Fashion has been studied as a vehicle to prosper for a variety of consumer subgroups.23 “Creativity” is a human trait that will be discussed in the next chapter. For now, it suffices to say that creativity varies in degrees from person to person. Even if all other conditions were the same, a person’s propensity to consume a certain type of fashion or style would have to be explained based on the individual’s level of intelligence in the area that defines creative expression. “Culture” includes all other manifestations of creative or analytical thought that have not already been taken into account with all the other nodes. Culture refers to both macro and micro manifestations of it, which

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evokes manmade types of culture in organizations, markets, and institutions in general. It also refers to any type of work that is the result of creative or analytical thought. All these versions of culture impact the choices of the fashion consumer. Finally, “Time” is the self’s perception of time and her evolution in time. Additional nodes are activated for her simply because she is progressing chronologically or vice versa. The complexity of the framework rests on the fact that each one of these nodes influences the others in addition to influencing the fashion consumer in the middle. The difficulty of grasping the non-linear and asynchronous reactions between nodes as well as between nodes and self, reinforces the importance of defining the context in which the fashion wearer consumes fashion as material, feeling, or thought. Nevertheless, its complexity is counterbalanced by the practicality it presents to managers of fashion brands as they often need to assess the forces that influence consumer behavior in a particular market. While globalization has misled us in expecting a uniformity of consumer patterns shaped by macro trends, the reality of individual markets points to the realization that local context is as powerful as global developments are. The brand manager who drafts strategic plans is better equipped to ascertain the future state of affairs with a framework that tests the interconnectivity of the inputs that breed desire for luxury fashion.

Notes 1. According to Salem Press Encyclopedia on Transmedia Storytelling, “The term was coined in stages. Henry Jenkins, a media scholar and a leading voice in transmedia studies, credits Marsha Kinder, another media scholar, with first using “transmedia” in 1991 to describe the cross-media systems that had developed around popular children’s characters such as the Muppet Babies and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” Jenkins coined the term transmedia storytelling in 2003 and later defined it as a narrative that “unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole.” Wylene Rholetter. 2019. “Transmedia Storytelling.” Salem Press Encyclopedia. http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy.library.nyu. edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ers&AN=108690547&site=eds-live. 2. E. Ibrahim. “Transmedia Storytelling and Transforming Human Imagination.” AJIT -e 7, no. 23 (Spring, 2016): 31–40. http://dx.doi.org.lib proxy.newschool.edu/10.5824/1309?1581.2016.2.003.x, https://login.

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libproxy.newschool.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.libproxy. newschool.edu/docview/1866684980?accountid=12261. Wylene Rholetter. 2019. “Transmedia Storytelling.” In Salem Press Encyclopedia. http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy.library.nyu.edu/login.aspx? direct=true&db=ers&AN=108690547&site=eds-live. Transmedia story-telling became the focus of academic studies very recently but luxury brands have been practicing this type of story-telling for a very long time. For an elaborate discussion of the importance of transmedia in branding see Charmaine du Plessis. 2020. “Prosumer Engagement through Story-Making in Transmedia Branding.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 22 (1): 175–92. Accessed April 14. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877917750445. See “Dressing Up Fashion, Dressing Down Architecture: Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture.” Curated by Brooke Hodge. At the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (until March 5, 2007). Traveled to the National Art Center, Tokyo, June 6–August 13, 2007. Jess Berry. House of Fashion: Haute Couture and the Modern Interior. London: Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2018. Accessed April 19, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central. Joanne Entwistle. “Fashion and the Fleshy Body: Dress as Embodied Practice.” Fashion Theory 4, no. 3 (2000): 323–47. https://doi.org/10. 2752/13627040077899547. Eugenie Shinkle. “Fashion’s Digital Body: Seeing and Feeling in Fashion Interactives.” In Fashion Media: Past and Present. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. David Parisi. Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. R. Claire Snyder. “What Is Third-Wave Feminism? A New Directions Essay.” Signs 34, no. 1: 175. https://doi.org/10.1086/588436. Yasmin Khatun Dewan. “The Co-opting of Modest Fashion: In a World of Long Sleeves and Longer Hemlines, What Does It Mean to Dress According to Religious Rules?” The New York Times, October 15, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/15/style/whatdoes-modest-fashion-mean.html. Accessed April 10, 2020. Pierre Bourdieu. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. London and New York: Routledge, 1984. Giorgio Riello. “The Object of Fashion: Methodological Approaches to the History of Fashion.” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 3, no. 1 (2011): 8865. https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v3i0.8865. Marie-Claude Sicard. Brand Revolution: Rethinking Brand Identity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

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15. Yuniya Kawamura. “Adoption and Consumption of Fashion.” Fashionology: An Introduction to Fashion Studies, 89–104. Dress, Body, Culture. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005. Accessed April 10, 2020. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.newschool.edu/10.2752/978184 788730/FASHOLOGY0008. 16. Colin Campbell. The Sociology of Consumption. London: Routledge, 1995. 17. Elizabeth C. Hirschman and Morris B. Holbrook. “Hedonic Consumption: Emerging Concepts, Methods, and Propositions.” Journal of Marketing 46, no. 3 (Summer, 1982): 92–101; Mark J. Arnold and Kristy E. Ve Reynolds. “Hedonic Shopping Motivations.” Journal of Retailing 79: 77–95. 18. Agnès Rocamora. “Mediatization and Digital Media in the Field of Fashion.” Fashion Theory 21, no. 5 (2017): 505–22. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/1362704x.2016.1173349. 19. Pierre Berthon, Leyland Pitt, Michael Parent, and Jean-Paul Berthon. “Aesthetics and Ephemerality: Observing and Preserving the Luxury Brand.” California Management Review 52, no. 1 (2009): 45. https:// doi.org/10.1525/cmr.2009.52.1.45. 20. Durdja Bartlett, ed. Fashion and Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. 21. Andreas Behnke. The International Politics of Fashion: Being Fab in a Dangerous World. London: Routledge, 2017. 22. Todd Bridgman, Stephen Cummings, and John Ballard. “Who Built Maslow’s Pyramid? A History of the Creation of Management Studies’ Most Famous Symbol and Its Implications for Management Education.” Academy of Management Learning & Education 18, no. 1 (March 2019): 81–98. 23. Daniel L. Purdy. The Rise of Fashion: A Reader. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

References Arnold, Mark J., and Kristy E. Ve Reynolds. “Hedonic Shopping Motivations.” Journal of Retailing 79 (2003): 77–95. Bartlett, Durdja, ed. Fashion and Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Behnke, Andreas. The International Politics of Fashion: Being Fab in a Dangerous World. London: Routledge, 2017. Berry, Jess. House of Fashion: Haute Couture and the Modern Interior. London: Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2018. Accessed April 19, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central.

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Berthon, Pierre, Leyland Pitt, Michael Parent, and Jean-Paul Berthon. “Aesthetics and Ephemerality: Observing and Preserving the Luxury Brand.” California Management Review 52, no. 1 (2009): 45. https://doi.org/10. 1525/cmr.2009.52.1.45. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. London and New York: Routledge, 1984. Bridgman, Todd, Stephen Cummings, and John Ballard. “Who Built Maslow’s Pyramid? A History of the Creation of Management Studies’ Most Famous Symbol and Its Implications for Management Education.” Academy of Management Learning & Education 18, no. 1 (March 2019): 81–98. Campbell, Colin. The Sociology of Consumption. London: Routledge, 1995. Dewan, Yasmin Khatun. “The Co-opting of Modest Fashion: In a World of Long Sleeves and Longer Hemlines, What Does It Mean to Dress According to Religious Rules?” The New York Times, October 15, 2019. Entwistle, Joanne. “Fashion and the Fleshy Body: Dress as Embodied Practice.” Fashion Theory 4, no. 3 (2000): 323–47. https://doi.org/10.2752/136270 400778995471. Hirschman, Elizabeth C., and Morris B. Holbrook. “Hedonic Consumption: Emerging Concepts, Methods, and Propositions.” Journal of Marketing 46, no. 3 (Summer, 1982): 92–101. Ibrahim, E. “Transmedia Storytelling and Transforming Human Imagination.” AJIT-e 7, no. 23 (Spring, 2016): 31–40. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.newsch ool.edu/10.5824/1309?1581.2016.2.003.x, https://login.libproxy.newsch ool.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.libproxy.newschool.edu/doc view/1866684980?accountid=12261. Kawamura, Yuniya. “Adoption and Consumption of Fashion.” Fashion-ology: An Introduction to Fashion Studies, 89–104. Dress, Body, Culture. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005. Accessed April 10, 2020. http://dx.doi.org.lib proxy.newschool.edu/10.2752/978184788730/FASHOLOGY0008. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. “Dressing Up Fashion, Dressing Down Architecture: Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture.” Curated by Brooke Hodge. At the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (until March 5, 2007). Traveled to the National Art Center, Tokyo, June 6–August 13, 2007. Parisi, David. Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. du Plessis, Charmaine. 2020. “Prosumer Engagement through Story-Making in Transmedia Branding.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 22 (1): 175–92. Accessed April 14. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877917750445. Purdy, Daniel L. The Rise of Fashion: A Reader. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

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Rholetter, Wylene. 2019. “Transmedia Storytelling.” Salem Press Encyclopedia. http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy.library.nyu.edu/login.aspx?direct= true&db=ers&AN=108690547&site=eds-live. Riello, Giorgio. “The Object of Fashion: Methodological Approaches to the History of Fashion.” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 3, no. 1 (2011): 8865. https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v3i0.8865. Rocamora, Agnès. “Mediatization and Digital Media in the Field of Fashion.” Fashion Theory 21, no. 5 (2017): 505–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/136 2704x.2016.1173349. Shinkle, Eugenie. “Fashion’s Digital Body: Seeing and Feeling in Fashion Interactives.” In Fashion Media: Past and Present. London: Bloomsbury Academic. 2013. Sicard, Marie-Claude. Brand Revolution: Rethinking Brand Identity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Snyder, Claire R. “What Is Third-Wave Feminism? A New Directions Essay.” Signs 34, no. 1: 175. https://doi.org/10.1086/588436.

PART III

Cultural Intelligence and Creativity

CHAPTER 7

A Close Look at Cultural Intelligence

Abstract Cultural intelligence, a relatively new branch of scholarship in the field of psychology with applications in government, management, and education is a concept directly linked with the concept of creativity. Both are multidimensional concepts and point us to a strong relation between elaborate processing of information that explains the importance of existing material culture in the generation of new creative ideas, especially as they relate to a variety of creative and design fields, and more specifically to fashion design. This is the first scholarly attempt to link cultural intelligence with the field of fashion. Keywords Cultural intelligence · Creativity · Design · Fashion

Robert Sternberg, Professor of Human Development in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University, has dedicated his career to researching intelligence. Rather than limiting his study to the concept of (g), or else general ability that was first defined in 1904 by British psychologist Charles Spearman as the factor that most accurately describes overall performance on mental ability tests and that defined our understanding and key metrics of intelligence during the twentieth century, Sternberg suggested that intelligence is far more complex. In addition to measuring one’s fluid ability (the ability to think flexibly and originally)

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and crystallized ability (cumulative knowledge), intelligence, and specifically successful intelligence, is, according to Sternberg, “one’s ability to set and accomplish personally meaningful goals in one’s life, given one’s cultural context.”1 In the context of personal intelligence, success is determined, Sternberg theorizes, when the individual is able to ascertain her own strengths and weaknesses in order to capitalize from the former and correct the latter. These strengths and weaknesses are expressions of a four-prong framework, also defined by Sternberg, that distinguishes four areas of skills: creative, analytical, practical, and wisdom-based.2 In addition to being concerned with the mental processes involved in these four areas, Sternberg’s work examines the meta-components of higher or executive judgment that allow the individual to plan, monitor, and evaluate both her thinking and ensuing actions. His augmented theory of successful intelligence has enriched our understanding of human mental functions and behaviors and has presented an opportunity for other scholars to put it to the test through a variety of methods (i.e., reaction-time analysis, cultural analysis, factor analysis, correlational analysis, predictive analysis, and instructional analysis). Of these, cultural analysis is the most pertinent to our discussion and the precursor to an entirely new branch of literature on cultural intelligence introduced in 2003 by Christopher P. Early and Soon Ang, two researchers who focused their experiments and analysis on the previously understudied area of an individual’s ability to successfully manage novel situations in different cultures, or in the presence of others from different cultures. Since 2003, the field of cultural intelligence, the “ability to adapt to various cultural contexts and function in different cultural settings or with those of a different culture in one’s own setting,”3 has become the focus of several academic experiments as scholars recognized that cultural intelligence shares aspects of emotional and social intelligence but neither emotional nor social intelligence take into account the cultural context.4 All scientific papers on cultural intelligence aim at defining new methods of applying this type of knowledge in the fields of education, where cultural context had been largely ignored for the most part of the twentieth century; corporate work environments that were critically impacted by rapid globalization in the last decades of the twentieth century; and government, which has always been affected by the necessity to address a variety of cultures but whose role and responsibility in cultural inclusion has also increased since the later part of the twentieth century.

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Today, people are forced to experience different cultures either at school or work and are expected to be able to collaborate on projects to achieve common goals, even if all other aspects of their lives are still conditioned within a single culture only. Most organizations are globally diverse while social life in most places is defined by increasing diversity. Yet, the Salem Press Encyclopedia entry on cultural intelligence lists fewer than 25 related titles. A great number of them are written by Robert Sternberg and his colleagues while all of them address cultural intelligence in the context of governmental, corporate, and educational institutions. No work that discusses cultural intelligence in the context of fashion has been identified. Before explaining how the concept is remarkably germane to the field of fashion, a couple of additional viewpoints on cultural intelligence deserve examination, namely: the concept of multiple intelligences; differences from emotional intelligence; and aspects of cultural intelligence that can be measured. The concept of multiple intelligences was articulated by American developmental psychologist Howard Gardner who was working on his theory as Sternberg was articulating his own triarchic theory of intelligence. The two academics have followed a parallel track in formulating their research. Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences was published in 1983,5 two years before Sternberg’s triarchic theory. The two are complementary. Similarly to Sternberg’s, Gardner’s work intends to move academic inquiry beyond general intelligence (g), also known as IQ, which Gardner criticized based on two major limitations he identified. The measures used to determine (g) are too variable, Gardner asserted. He also maintained that (g) is a very narrowly defined theory that takes into account primarily Western educational models that test subjects for literacy and mathematical abilities.6 Gardner offered a new model that allowed testing for seven different types of intelligences: verbal-linguistic; logical-mathematical; visualspatial; musical; bodily kinesthetic; interpersonal; and intrapersonal.7 The first two were the ones on which (g) had solely been relying and the last two relate to the notion of emotional and social intelligence. The types in the middle are extremely important in the context of design education and expression and prepare us for a discussion of creativity. Additionally, they directly relate to culture, which, in this book’s first chapter, was defined as the ability of human beings to enact creative and analytical thought. Gardner’s framework allows an effortless link between the

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concept of intelligence to culture and more so to fashion, one of culture’s creative fields. Soon Ang and Linn Van Dyne’s work on cultural intelligence elucidates the subtle differences between cultural and emotional intelligence. The authors describe emotional intelligence as “culture bound” as opposed to cultural intelligence which they see as “culture free.”8 This means that a person with high emotional intelligence in a specific cultural context may not possess it in another one, whereas cultural intelligence is a person’s ability to make choices and act decidedly across cultures. This also reinforces the link between emotional intelligence and its own social setting, further preparing our discussion on why cultural intelligence is particularly pertinent to fashion. Additionally, the scholars articulated four elements that allow to derive measurements of cultural intelligence. These are: Cognitive CQ9 is an individual’s knowledge of different cultures, based on their breadth of experiences. This metric reminds us of Distinction, the seminal work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in which he coined the term cultural capital as the sum of social aspects of an individual (education, intellect, style of speech, style of dress, etc.) that promote an active participation in all types of cultural contexts and allow for social mobility in a stratified society.10 Motivational CQ refers to the amount of effort an individual exerts toward functioning in a new cultural context. Behavioral CQ is the individual’s aptitude in acting suitably in crosscultural situations. Metacognitive CQ is a person’s awareness of culture during crosscultural interactions, which implies that if one perceives the intricacies of a cultural setting, she will probably adjust her behavior to showcase culturally appropriate traits.11 An article on cultural intelligence by scholars P. Christopher Earley and Elaine Mosakowski appeared in the Harvard Business Review in October 2004 and popularized the term, at least among business executives and academics. The authors succinctly summarized the main traits of CQ and highlighted the fact that people with high cultural intelligence, like those with high emotional intelligence, are able to suspend judgment and take time to think on how to act within a specific cultural context. This suspension of judgment allows for the person to register contextual information and adjust modes of speech, gestures, facial expressions, etc. Earley and Mosakowski very clearly break down the concept of cultural

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intelligence in three components: the cognitive; the physical; and the emotional/motivational or else the head, body, and heart.12 The individual conducts an intellectual analysis to assess the situation including all its participants; she observes and prepares to repeat gestures, expressions, and movements that would make her assimilate or respond appropriately to the cultural prompt; she does so while staying open-hearted and confident. The authors enrich their analysis with several examples that demonstrate each of these points. All examples come from the corporate environment since the article addresses a managerial audience. The applicability of the theory on cultural intelligence is further enhanced with a diagnostic test that rates the individual on its cognitive, physical, and emotional/motivational CQ. The authors surveyed more than 2000 managers and concluded that there are six types of CQ profiles that accurately describe most people, even though often a person is a hybrid of two or more types. These are the following: The provincial, a person who is comfortable working with people of similar background but “runs into trouble” when the cultural context changes; the analyst is the individual who carefully decodes a foreign culture and employs a variety of learning strategies to internalize the new code; the natural feels at home at any culture because of her intuition that allows her to quickly adapt and behave appropriately; the ambassador is a person who appears savvy because she can communicate with confidence others’ styles and behaviors but has no intention of being changed by the experience; the mimic is someone with a great degree of control over her actions and behavior and easily picks up cues about appropriateness. In doing so, she facilitates communication and builds trust; the chameleon is a person with elevated levels of all three CQ components. They maintain an outsider’s perspective while showcasing insider’s skills. These six CQ types and their combinations constitute an exhaustive classification of individuals, which, it will be argued, can be transferred to the field of creative industries and specifically fashion design. Before proceeding in this direction, the relationship between the field of fashion and cultural intelligence will be examined. Having traced the development of cultural intelligence as a field of academic inquiry while also highlighting its main theoretical tenets and observing its applications in various organizational structures one wonders whether and how it relates to a creative field like fashion design. The cognitive and emotional components of cultural intelligence are very

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similar in character with the intellectual and emotional analysis, second stage analysis, one conducts in the field of material culture, as discussed in Chapter 5. In other words, the fashion designer has been trained to use the frameworks we have already examined in order to gather information about a material object that inspires new ideas which can easily turn into new products, styles, or brands. Moreover, cultural intelligence and fashion design have another element in common and that is the idea of physicality. Physicality is the area that remains least discussed in the existing literature on cultural intelligence. Most business managers (analytical thinkers) observe its existence but don’t know what to do with it. They revert to solving problems of cultural disconnect primarily via the medium of language, perhaps through control of facial expressions, and occasionally through adaptation of a limited range of gestures. Creatives on the other hand have been trained to gain information from the physicality of objects and people. The latter includes how people move through space because physicality pertains to the idea of rhythm as well.13 In other words, the physicality of objects and people alike extends outside the body proper and into space and time as well. That means that the materiality of everything that a specific cultural context contains manifests itself in many more instances than an analytical thinker observes and absorbs. Creatives change the conditions of their environment intuitively when they seek to connect with their creativity because they have witnessed and internalized the connection between body and cognition. They would more easily decide to go out for a walk to observe, for example, people walking down Broadway in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood. In the process, they would disconnect from cognitive processes and simply allow their senses to absorb new information. On the contrary, an analytical thinker would remain at her desk and would try to be more creative. For Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a leading Hungarian-American psychologist who is primarily known for having defined the concept of flow, the highly focused mental state that leads to increased ingenuity and productivity,14 “creativity is a process by which a symbolic domain in culture is changed. New songs, new ideas, new machines is what creativity is about.”15 In his work on creativity, Csikszentmihalyi, asserted that modern life places a great amount of demands on each person, who then spends most of their life learning survival skills—and these include technical skills that would ensure successful employment for the individual. Most people are concerned with these practical quests in life and have

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little attention left to dedicate to learning the intricacies of a symbolic domain such as music or design. Which also explains why mostly everyone today recognizes that competing in a symbolic domain is much harder than in a different field where the rules are more clearly defined. The psychologist continues that “in cultures that are uniform and rigid, it takes a greater investment of attention to achieve new ways of thinking. In other words, creativity is more likely in places where new ideas require less effort to be perceived.”16 He also maintains that creative individuals love to make connections with adjacent areas of knowledge, which reinforces the framework that was discussed in Chapter 3, in relation to classifying fashion brands based on the fields of knowledge other than design they activate. Csikszentmihalyi is not alone in having concluded there is a strong relationship between high augmented intelligence and creativity. According to Robert Sternberg and James C. Kaufman, creative thinking is unique compared to other cognitive tasks because it is not characterized by an analytical approach.17 The authors view creative thinking as a highly complex task that takes a lot of time with likely impasses along the way and maintain that “composers, artists, and writers describe being inspired by a need to describe the world around them and using emotionally rich observations of their environments—places, smells, interactions—to tell a convincing story.”18 The connection between creativity and culture is fundamental for the authors who conclude that “creativity as a process uses ‘culturally-impregnated materials’ (ideas, signs, objects, values, etc.) to create new and meaningful artifacts that contribute to culture itself (both the macro-culture of entire groups or nations and the microculture of local actors and interactions.”19 Therefore, the most notable researchers of creativity and cultural intelligence are confirming a link between the two that verifies the validity of the Transmedia Luxury Fashion Consumption model (Chapter 6) as a means for an individual to interpret a symbolic field of creativity like fashion. If this individual is a creative person, a designer, namely, someone who uses head, body, and heart to interpret the world around them and uses their observations as catalysts to new design development, the link between creativity and culture can be pictured in the following Transmedia Luxury Fashion Production model (Fig. 7.1). It is precisely a designer’s heightened sensibility in terms of sensory engagement with the world around them that allows them to more easily

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Ideology General knowledge, arts

Purpose

Creavity

Media

Brands

Culture

DESIGNER/ CQ INTEPRETER

Real life observaon

Social network inherited

Time

Space

Social network acquired

Body Percepon Social norms & narraves

Fig. 7.1 Transmedia Luxury Fashion Production (Source Author’s creation)

make connections between the sensory, emotional, or intellectual triggers they receive and the solution to a problem they are working on. Therefore, the cognitive (head) and emotional (heart) elements of high cultural intelligence are traits of creative people who are uniquely positioned to interpret material culture and a variety of symbolic domains in order to contribute to culture with their own creative works. Even the third, and most elusive aspect of cultural intelligence, the physical (body) is particularly heightened in creatives who experience reduced sensory

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gating. This term refers to the neurological processes that filter out unnecessary or redundant stimuli from all possible environmental sources of stimuli. Simply put, creatives are less able to screen out information as irrelevant. On the contrary, their attention is less deliberately controlled, and their perception registers many aspects of the environment that would go unnoticed with an analytical thinker who approaches all environments with high focus and deliberate attention to complete a predetermined specific task.20 The physical aspect of cultural intelligence that is amplified due to lack of sensory gating in creatives, allows fashion designers to use first and second stage analysis of material information with ease. Furthermore, this accelerates their thinking into advanced intellectual analysis that crystallizes a variety of connections between material forms, conceptual differences, semiotics and complex, context-based information that the designer records automatically. Having established this important connection between material culture methods, cultural intelligence theories, and lab-tested psychological traits of creatives, the discussion can return to the six types of CQ profiles as defined by Earley and Mosakowski. A new question about their work is whether it applies in the way creatives record information when they are confronted with a new visual culture. In the fall semester of 2019, this framework was presented to two groups of 18, 36 in total, international undergraduate students at the Parsons School of Design, The New School in New York City. The group comprised 14 fashion design majors, ten communication design majors, eight product design majors, one fine artist, and three undeclared. A ZMET experiment was set up in the classroom where students had access to their own laptops and a connection to the internet.21 The students were asked to think about times they had encountered new cultures and to retrieve images that described these cultures. To facilitate their thinking the prompt encouraged them to think on a macro and micro scale so that they could retrieve images pertaining to ten different cultures they had already experienced in their lifetime. Then they were asked to look at the images they had retrieved and to use words to describe what was familiar in each culture; what was foreign; and how they had overcome the challenge to adjust in the new environment, i.e., what process had they used. Finally, they were asked to give concrete examples of what types of new intelligence they had gained through contact with these new cultures and whether that had occurred before they had decided to

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adjust to the new culture or after. When they finished recording information, their descriptions were clustered in groups that related to Earley and Mosakowski’s six CQ profile types. While this was conducted as a self-assessment test, the results showed that they identified primarily with four of the six types: Analyst, Natural, Mimic, and Chameleon, with the Natural and Chameleon types being overwhelmingly prevalent. This was particularly relevant to them because they felt they adjust the way they dress, speak, and behave when they are with specific groups (microcultures). The concept of belonging through dress and body language was a very prominent feature. They admitted to having changed patterns of movement depending on their friends’ cultural background and even reflected on how their senses of smell and taste as well as their color preferences have been augmented since moving into a new culture. This, they claimed, makes them better designers because they identify design with the process of opening up their receptors to absorbing new information and to using it to contribute to culture with their output. In conclusion, cultural intelligence, a relatively new branch of scholarship in the field of psychology with applications in government, management, and education is a concept directly linked with the concept of creativity. Both are multidimensional concepts and point us to a strong relation between elaborate processing of information that explains the importance of existing material culture in the generation of new creative ideas, especially as they relate to a variety of creative and design fields, and more specifically to fashion design.

Notes 1. http://www.robertjsternberg.com/successful-intelligence. Accessed April 12, 2020. 2. Robert J. Sternberg. Beyond IQ: A Triarchic Theory of Intelligence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 3. Rana Suh Kannan. “Cultural Intelligence.” Salem Press Encyclopedia, 2019. Accessed April 12, 2020. http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy.lib rary.nyu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ers&AN=89164151&site=edslive. 4. Ibid. 5. Howard Gardner. Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences . New York: Basic Books, 2011. Accessed April 12, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central. 6. Ibid., pp. 13–33.

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7. Ibid., pp. 77–249. 8. Soon Ang, Linn Van Dybe, Christine Koh, K. Yee Ng, Klaus J. Templer, Cheryl Tay, and N. Anand Chandrasekar. “Cultural Intelligence: Its Measurement and Effects on Cultural Judgment and Decision Making, Cultural, Adaptation and Task Performance.” Management & Organization Review 3, no. 3 (2007): 335–71. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.17408784.2007.00082.x. 9. CQ is short for cultural intelligence. 10. Pierre Bourdieu. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. London and New York: Routledge, 1984, p. 225. 11. Soon Ang, Linn Van Dybe, Christine Koh, K. Yee Ng, Klaus J. Templer, Cheryl Tay, and N. Anand Chandrasekar. “Cultural Intelligence: Its Measurement and Effects on Cultural Judgment and Decision Making, Cultural, Adaptation and Task Performance.” Management & Organization Review 3, no. 3 (2007): 335–71. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.17408784.2007.00082.x. 12. P. Christoper Earley and Elaine Mosakowski. “Cultural Intelligence.” Harvard Business Review, October 2004. https://hbr.org/2004/10/cul tural-intelligence. 13. Dance for example relies on choreography which is a form of designing the compositional elements of space, time, force, and shape. Within specific cultures walking or gesticulating also include repeated patterns of movement that share common characteristics. 14. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row, 1990. 15. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery of Invention. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2007, p. 8. 16. Ibid. 17. The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity, edited by James C. Kaufman, and Robert J. Sternberg. Cambridge University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebo oks/detail.action?docID=5879502. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2020-04-15 18:24:11. 18. Ibid. 19. The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity, edited by James C. Kaufman, and Robert J. Sternberg, Cambridge University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebo oks/detail.action?docID=5879502. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2020-04-15 19:26:16. 20. The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity, edited by James C. Kaufman, and Robert J. Sternberg, Cambridge University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebo

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oks/detail.action?docID=5879502. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2020-04-15 17:58:03. 21. ZMET stands for Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique. It was developed by Harvard School professor Gerald Zaltman in the early 1990s. It is an open-ended interview technique that aims to discover how individuals think about the material world around them in a practical and philosophical terms. S. Natarajan. “Methodology to Capture the Content of Customer Thought: Review on Application of Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) and Laddering Methodology.” International Journal of Economic Research 13, no. 4 (January 1, 2016): 1511–20; Ellen van Kleef, Hans C. M. van Trijp, and Pieternel Luning. “Consumer Research in the Early Stages of New Product Development: A Critical Review of Methods and Techniques.” Food Quality and Preference 16, no. 3 (2005): 181–201. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2004.05.012.

References Ang, Soon, Linn Van Dybe, Christine Koh, K. Yee Ng, Klaus J. Templer, Cheryl Tay, and N. Anand Chandrasekar. “Cultural Intelligence: Its Measurement and Effects on Cultural Judgment and Decision Making, Cultural, Adaptation and Task Performance.” Management & Organization Review 3, no. 3 (2007): 335–71. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1740-8784.2007.00082.x. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. London and New York: Routledge, 1984. The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity, edited by James C. Kaufman, and Robert J. Sternberg, Cambridge University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/ detail.action?docID=5879502. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2020-0415 18:24:11. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery of Invention. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2007. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row, 1990. Earley, P. Christopher, and Elaine Mosakowski. “Cultural Intelligence.” Harvard Business Review, October 2004. https://hbr.org/2004/10/cultural-intell igence. Gardner, Howard. Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic Books, 2011. Accessed April 12, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central. Kannan, Rana Suh. 2019. “Cultural Intelligence.” Salem Press Encyclopedia. Accessed April 12, 2020. http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy.library.nyu.edu/ login.aspx?direct=true&db=ers&AN=89164151&site=eds-live.

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van Kleef, Ellen, Hans C. M. van Trijp, and Pieternel Luning. “Consumer Research in the Early Stages of New Product Development: A Critical Review of Methods and Techniques.” Food Quality and Preference 16, no. 3 (2005): 181–201. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2004.05.012. Natarajan, S. “Methodology to Capture the Content of Customer Thought: Review on Application of Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) and Laddering Methodology.” International Journal of Economic Research 13, no. 4 (January 1, 2016): 1511–20. Sternberg, Robert J. Accessed April 12, 2020. http://www.robertjsternberg. com/successful-intelligence. Sternberg, Robert J. Beyond IQ: A Triarchic Theory of Intelligence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

CHAPTER 8

Cultural Hyperobjects

Abstract An elaborate analysis of a campaign launched by Gucci in 2018 sheds light on a specific phenomenon for which the term “cultural hyperobject” is coined. Through the details, the reader grasps the nuances of the creative process, itself a state during which creatives may be able to capitalize on the various stages of analysis of the material culture around them. While for most designers this happens on an intuitive level, a methodical practice of the steps involved in the analysis can train anyone to a heightened sensitivity towards societal and cultural changes. It is this constant back and forth between exploring a specific question and then opening up the field for a more holistic approach to design that leads to novelty while also tapping into the undertones of human behaviors. Keywords Gucci · Hyperobjects · Tim Morton · Cultural intelligence · Fashion design

In early February 2018, a melancholic image appeared on Gucci’s website. Set on a table against a dark brown background, a pile of three old leather-bound books were propping up an hourglass. A vibrantly red-colored sand was slowly seeping through to its bottom. The whole contraption was held in a simple, wooden frame. A small apple was resting next to it, perfectly set at the corner of the book pile. A cluster of ripe loquat fruit, a symbol of wealth and prosperity in both Western and © The Author(s) 2020 T. Serdari, Rethinking Luxury Fashion, Palgrave Advances in Luxury, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45301-5_8

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Eastern cultures, was left diagonally on the table next to the books and just in front of two candles, a purple one in a brass candlestick and a black one without a noticeable base. The purple candle appeared used and its shape uneven. The shiny black silhouette of the other candle, still smoking, was smooth and perfectly centered in the foreground. A beautiful orange butterfly was resting on the spine of the middle book as if its flight had been suspended for a long, slow second. Staged in video format, this still-life was the definition of irony. A moving image that depicted such stillness was piercing. The frame felt weighed down by the smell of burnt wax, the smoke a little sticky, the passing of time lingering and slow. Still-life paintings of similar type, called vanitas , were popular in the Renaissance and meant to signify the elusiveness of time, the definite passing of which no human can escape. Painted by old masters, this type of painting meant to recall the fragility of human nature and the inevitability of death. That could have been very depressing for a commercial website’s landing page. Instead, it appeared very mysterious. It was exciting. The #GUCCI name, with a hashtag, was right in the middle, in all caps and an elegant, slender, and contemporary font. Underneath it, the word HALLUCINATION featured prominently and, just below it, a countdown of the number of hours, minutes, and seconds marked the time left before… what exactly? The inaccessibility of that which was to come made staring at the digits electrifying, almost as sensational as a religious experience must be. But if one looked long enough, she was rewarded. In faint text, right above the name #GUCCI the words “LIMITED EDITION ONLINE EXCLUSIVE” made themselves visible to those who allowed their gaze to record this picture’s playful juxtapositions of light against shadow, dimness against vibrancy, lusciousness against fast approaching decay, apparent against hidden. The collection “dropped”1 when the countdown reached 0 hours 0 minutes and 0 seconds. And with it, a whole new world for the Spring Summer 2018 campaign unfolded across media. In a video posted on YouTube, a well-groomed, retro-chic male gallerist welcomes the viewer to the Gucci Gallery. “Sometimes a painting is as much about what it does not show you as what it does,” he utters with confidence after he had just finished designing the layout of a large white sign that read “GALLERY” and pinned it on to the wall. He moves against a background of classical guitar music that is elegant and soothing… its sound is well-spaced, not crowded at all. Its tempo parallels the writing of the camera that smoothly reads the room

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as it stops from painting to painting. The gallerist points out important details. He speaks of color with authority even though the hues he is describing (Italian ultramarine, the tiniest bit of crimson and some catnip yellow, emerald green and a touch of Renaissance gold, and his favorite of all, just a touch of manganese) are made up. The paintings themselves are liberally reinterpreted versions of masterpieces from museum collections—except they also feature Gucci merchandize. To fool the viewer, the brand turns against itself, deliberately spelling its own name Guccy (with a y)—this cannot possibly be product placement when the logo is misspelled. Or could it? The subject matter and composition of the paintings are maintained but the characters are mostly contemporary and dressed head-to-toe in Gucci, accessories included. A couple of Ingres2 lady characters are decked in View-master-like, heavy plastic frame sunglasses in metallic silver and white. Finally, the gallerist pauses in front of a large-format painting reminiscent of “Ophelia” by British artist Sir John Everett Millais, completed in 1852 and now in the collection of Tate Britain in London. In Millais’s work, Ophelia, a character from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is depicted singing before she drowns in a river in Denmark. In the Gucci version, Ophelia wears a contemporary, yellow metallic dress. When the gallerist steps into the frame, a wave of glitter in every color of the rainbow washes over Ophelia and wakes her up. The two look at each other adoringly and smile knowingly. In seconds, he decides to step into the muddy waters, pushes aside a couple of beautiful water lilies and extends his hand to hold hers as he lifts her up and out of the water, ultimately out of her death. The frame freezes as they are caught in an embrace that will clearly last for eternity. The camera zooms out of the frame and back into the gallery space while the wording #GucciHallucination appears for the last few seconds of the video. The transmedia luxury fashion consumption model would show that the Gucci consumer primarily engages with the Gucci brand through the nodes of Media, Brands, and Acquired Social network since these seem to be influencing her the most in her consumption behavior. As an individual, she is also engaged with the nodes of Space (for example, Gucci may be particularly popular in a specific city), Body Perception (reflecting on how the merchandise makes her look), General knowledge, and the art (the more she knows about these fields, the more she appreciates the products), Ideology (i.e., she wishes to be perceived as non-conformist in her taste) and Creativity (i.e., the more she identifies as a creative person or wishes to be identified as one, the greater the chances to purchase

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Ideology General knowledge, arts

Purpose

Media

Creavity

Brands

Culture

SELF Real life observaon

Time

Social network inherited

Space

Social network acquired

Body Percepon Social norms & narraves

Fig. 8.1 Transmedia luxury fashion consumption applied to the Gucci customer (Source Author’s creation)

Gucci products). The rest of the nodes may also contribute in her decision to buy but are tertiary (Fig. 8.1). Based on this transmedia campaign by Gucci (of which we only discussed the website and YouTube video components—there were several other visual pieces of the same narrative revealed concurrently across media) the brand would have us believe that fashion moves slowly. This could not be farther from the truth. In an industry where everything accelerates perpetually, from the number of shows a luxury fashion brand

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is expected to hold each year to the number of drops or capsule collections that fast fashion brands launch per month,3 Gucci went through a dramatic phase: In 2004, within just a few days, the then Chief Creative Director Tom Ford felt out of pace—and perhaps out of grace—with Gucci’s corporate leadership. He stepped down. Frida Giannini stepped into the creative director’s role in 2006 and remained at Gucci until 2014. While Tom Ford has been credited with a signature “vulgar chic” style that defined not just Gucci’s aesthetic but also the fashion ideal in a period where the global economy created (destroyed and then created again) an inordinate amount of wealth and prosperity that whet consumers’ appetite for luxury, Frida Giannini’s tenure at Gucci is characterized by a restrained elegance that shies away from Ford’s exuberance and remains tentative and reticent in demonstrating any type of brilliant emotion. In other words, Giannini’s Gucci looks are not memorable for any particular reason other than perhaps the celebrities who wore her creations in high profile, red carpet events in Hollywood and New York City. Alexander Michele, originally hired at Gucci by Ford and a permanent fixture on Giannini’s side in the leather accessories department for the brand, was serving as an interim creative director after Giannini’s departure when he was asked to put together the entire 2015 fall collection with just about five days of warning.4 François Henri Pinault, chief of Gucci parent company Kering, had been tired of seeing his prized possession hemorrhaging cash and cool, and pushed Michele into the spotlight. He was determined to reposition Gucci in the luxury market by a radical change in the brand’s creative strategy. Michele delivered (Fig. 8.2).5 The preceding discussion is illustrated in this Transmedia Luxury Fashion Production model with Michele in the middle at the cultural interpreter for Gucci. The nodes that were activated by Michele’s ideas are shown in a deeper red color. At that point, Michele was also looking to solidify his position at the helm of Creative for Gucci with a series of new ideas, all capitalizing on his cultural interpretations. The brand’s gift giving campaign for holiday season 2017, by which time Michele had already been orchestrating Gucci’s transmedia content launches with great success, consisted of a variety of merchandise across categories, t-shirts, footwear, handbags, jewelry, children’s wear, porcelain and they were all featured in a book on which Michele collaborated with Spanish artist Ignasi Monreal. The book retold the story of mythological hero Icarus, whose value Monreal recognized in the didactic morals it transmits. Nonetheless, the illustrations included Gucci products

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Ideology General knowledge, arts

Purpose

Media

Brands

Creavity

Culture

MICHELE CQ INTEPRETER

Real life observaon

Social network inherited

Time

Space

Social network acquired

Body Percepon Social norms & narraves

Fig. 8.2 Transmedia Luxury Fashion Production: Michele as CQ interpreter for Gucci (Source Author’s creation)

such as belt-bags around the waist of a classical statue and small leather goods set in a contemporary Renaissance-inspired still-life composition. Monreal collaborated with Gucci on the brand’s Artwalls in Milan and New York, that added brand imagery to public spaces in the two cities. These were boosted digitally through a clone Gift Giving Book and dedicated takeover on the brand’s landing page. Shop windows and app were coordinated so that customers could scan a sticker that appeared on the glass display to generate a personalized greeting card that was shareable

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online.6 The transmedia campaign caught on like fire.7 Illustrations of models wearing the t-shirts were drawn against a natural background, reminiscent of a Renaissance back drop with a lot of puffy clouds on a blue sky. On the illustrations of the graphic t-shirts they were wearing, the models were depicted in a Gucci outfit, creating a trompe l’oeil 8 illusion of a (tautological) image that continued to infinity. Michele’s sense of design echoed between the physical and the virtual in a continuum loop that expanded across all media available. Pinault’s decision had paid off. Creative strategy brought the cool back to Gucci and customers loved it. As illustrated in Fig. 8.3, Gucci had managed to activate all the nodes that pertain to the brand as a cultural interpreter. A few notes are necessary here to explain the lower number of nodes on the brand level. A brand that is a leader avoids looking at other brands for creative ideas because this would make it a follower. The “Brand” node has been eliminated. A brand does not come with social networks, with the practices of which it needs to comply. The nodes “Social network, inherited” and “Social network, acquired” are also eliminated. Finally, a brand is not concerned with body image issues. Therefore, the “Body” node has been eliminated. This leaves the model with ten nodes that can be activated on the brand level. The aforementioned description of the Gucci campaigns validates the brand’s creative content output as the result of a multi-node activation that took place through this complex, transmedia interpretation of culture. The culture Michele interpreted into new designs had nothing to do with the Renaissance specifically or the revival of consumers’ taste for porcelain coffee cups. Michele was on to something bigger. He stumbled upon something that contemporary philosopher Tim Morton (1968–) would describe as a hyperobject.9 A term known in computer science since 1967 denotes n-dimensional non-local entities. Morton uses the term to explain objects that have become massive, cannot be contained, and are transnational. Morton also discusses the hyperobject’s viscosity and the fact that it moves slowly but unseen, which is why it is here before anyone knows it is here.10 Finally, a hyperobject is interobjective, which means that it is formed by relations between more than one object. The financial crisis of 2008, for example, was a hyperobject as is climate change or COVID19. Morton’s work considers hyperobjects that are dangerous, if not, deadly for humanity. The hyperobject that Michele’s

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Ideology General Knowledge, arts

Media

Social norms & narraves

Purpose

Creavity

BRAND Real life observaon

Culture

Time

Space

Fig. 8.3 3 Transmedia luxury fashion brand model (based on the Gucci example) (Source Author’s creation)

cultural intelligence observed does not seem deadly. It is transformative though because it impacts behavior and thought. Michele grasped Millenials’ fascination with emojis and memes. Emojis were introduced in 1999 by the Japanese telecom NTT DOCOMO that released an original set of 176 emoji (e meaning “picture” and moji “character”) for mobile phones and pagers. They were designed on a pixel 12 × 12 grid and facilitated the emerging practice of texting. Their designer, Shigetaka Kurita, drew on a variety of sources

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for inspiration that included Japanese manga (a type of Japanese comic books and graphic novels for adults) and commonly used emoticons. He made the emojis very simple and elegant which contributed to the explosion of this new visual language. The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired Kurita’s original set of 176, in software and digital files, in 1998–1999. Meanwhile, social media had given Millenials new platforms to experiment with memes, particularly the type that popularized otherwise obscure or esoteric visual works of art from a variety of museum collections. Image and text editors, enabled on Facebook and later Instagram, gave the user the power to superimpose messages that had nothing to do with the original image. A search for memes on the Internet results in millions of highly original and entertaining collages of random ideas that come together as image and text, often completely severed from their original source (both in the physical and digital environment), and take on a life of their own traveling across platforms and media, in an infinite journey. Collages are not new in art. George Braque and Pablo Picasso, two of the greatest artists of modern art, coined the term in the second decade of the twentieth century. Collage describes both the technique of creating an assemblage and the form that has resulted from bringing various disconnected elements together. Modernist collages were made with pieces of newspapers or photographs glued on canvas, or found three-dimensional pieces, like tin, buttons, chicken wire, and driftwood. In both its twoand three-dimensional format, a collage in its final form is more than the sum of its parts. Its intangible value stems from the new meaning that the whole expresses. The newness we experience in memes, as in small scale, rapidly traveling digital collages, relates to the blending of our physical and digital lives. A contemporary artist who works around this concept in his large scale, sensational paintings is Japanese artist Tomokazu Matsuyama (1976–), who lives and works in Brooklyn. His imagery maintains a close relationship with traditional Japanese painting in terms of flatness, graphic elements, and attention to execution. But it also includes characters who have only existed in other artists’ imagination or in cartoons, even though they are painted by Matsuyama. Snoopy11 is the most famous of these characters. In other words, Matsuyama’s collages are conceptual rather than physical and collapse the real and the digital world. Even the titles of his paintings are borrowed, colloquial phrases that add a tongue-in-cheek

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playfulness to his creations for example “Oh Magic Night,” or “We Met on Match.com.” A hasty analysis of Gucci’s strategy, Matsuyama’s visual works, or the countless memes that circulate over the Internet may lead to the conclusion that technology is the hyperobject that enabled the aforementioned to take material expression. But technology is not a new phenomenon. It has been shaping human behavior since the first personal computers were marketed in the mid 1970s. In advanced economies, parts of labor have been steadily shifting since and adjusting to incorporate personal computers. In August 1998, when Apple’s first iMac computer was launched with the slogan “plug and play” it became apparent that computers were not only for office work but also for entertainment and personal distractions.12 This is exactly why one needs to look elsewhere to define the cultural hyperobject that has made Gucci so successful with the new generation of consumers. If technology was what Michele had his eyes on how come that other brands did not see what he saw? Michele focused on a different hyperobject that has defined life in the twenty-first century, and to be exact, since 1998 when the first emojis were introduced. Traditional ideas are defeated when a hyperobject launches its course, Morton asserted. “[It changes] the way we think, how we coexist and how we experience our politics, ethics, and art.”13 Similarly, as a newly acquired visual vocabulary, the use of emojis and memes has been redefining our communication etiquette, our relationships, and ultimately the way we interpret the world around us. Popular and scholarly opinion remain divided. They oscillate between attacking the use of pictograms as the ushering of an age of intellectual laziness14 and defending them as an expanded version of language with an added bonus for facilitating cross-cultural communications.15 In the West, traditional language writing with individual characters reinforces an analytical way of thinking, namely, a step by step process by which meaning is constructed when complex problems are broken down to elementary components.16 However, Asian cultures that have relied on ideograms as a means of communication have produced many more holistic thinkers than the West has.17 Holistic thinkers are able to retain more contextual information around a focal object and thus take into account many other peripheral factors that usually are lost in the way an analytical thinker processes information and attempts to construct meaning. In other words, analytical thinking tends to be precise and

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compartmentalized whereas holistic thinking tends to be inclusive and considers relationships between a focal object and its field. In Michele’s words, “beauty is in between. It’s about the things that are not really clear, not really perfect. The things that make you feel not comfortable but curious, that you want to get closer to so as to understand better why they are different. Why do we have to decide to be just in one place, just one shape, just one state of mind?”18 If this quote is indicative of his creative process, it seems that Michele is indeed basing his fashion designs on his own analysis of the material culture that defines the world around him. In doing so, he intuitively uses first and second stage analysis (Figs. 5.1–5.3) to understand the relationships of people to things and vice versa. It is this constant back and forth between exploring a specific question and then opening up the field for a more holistic approach to design that leads to novelty while also tapping into the nuances of human behaviors. It would be remarkable for one of Kering’s competitors to identify a fashion designer who, similarly to Michele, can respond to a different type of cultural hyperobject that resonates with a large segment of the market. LVMH did exactly that. It entered a joined venture (50.01% stake)19 with talented creative Rihanna (Robyn Rihanna Fenty, 1988–) who is a successful singer, songwriter, actress, as well as pop and fashion icon. She is smart, savvy, powerful, and one of the TIME100 twice: in 2012 and 2018.20 LVMH executives saw in Rihanna her immense talent and strong point of view. They also saw the first woman who would start a new label within the luxury group, the first woman of color, the first woman of color who has not been traditionally trained in fashion design. If this seems like an unorthodox decision for such a conservative group, it is not. The fashion industry has been facing several challenges: mental issues tied to the intense scheduling of fashion shows; criticism against breeding eating disorders among models and beyond; backlash for excluding people of color from the industry; outcry against polluting the planet heavily and for encouraging overconsumption through fast fashion. Rihanna’s brand, Fenty, is addressing all of them and more. LVMH is positioning Fenty for the generation who cares the most about these issues, GenZ (those born between 1997 and 2012). As the main decision maker at Fenty, Rihanna has completely rejected the traditional calendar of runway shows and wholesale deliveries. Selling directly to consumers, Fenty drops merchandise at irregular intervals.21

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Rihanna has been outspoken about inclusivity—she is the voice of inclusivity as it relates to gender, body shapes and sizes, and beauty. Even though 32 years old already, Rihanna is the voice of GenZ who are committed to making positive change in the world by tackling all the issues that plague the fashion industry. Fenty launched on May 12, 2019 and is too young to be tested against the Transmedia production model. However, several nodes (Culture, Time, Space, Social Norms, Ideology, and Purpose) (Fig. 8.3) seem to be part of the brand’s DNA from its inception. It will be interesting to follow Fenty as the brand matures and is presented with opportunities to contribute to culture with new creative content. In Rihanna’s words: “Mr. Arnault has given me a unique opportunity to develop a fashion house in the luxury sector, with no artistic limits.”22

Notes 1. A “drop” is a limited release of merchandise conceived as a marketing technique by streetwear fashion brands. But drop is not just a verb that describes the strategic distribution of fashion items. Drop is a way of experiencing brands and has a cult following. Drop is a culture. 2. Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres (August 29, 1780–January 14, 1867) was a French Neoclassical painter who followed the academic tradition of French painting with exactitude. He became famous for his portraits of significant French aristocratic figures. Several of his works are housed in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Collection both in New York City. 3. The only reality that has managed to put a stop to the fashion industry’s frenzy is COVID19 that we are still experiencing on a global scale. We don’t know yet how fashion brands are going to adopt to the new reality that has broken supply chains, furloughed millions of workers, and brought retail to a halt. In April 2020, no one knows yet how COVID19 will be defeated and when and what will be the total count of lives lost, businesses closed, and department stores gone out of business. No one knows whether the public will be willing to spend the same amount of money on luxury, whether our taste for fashion will be altered to depict a new normal, and whether real pain or fear of pain is going to force manufacturers to reopen production centers that were lost to the Asian continent during the years of globalization and outsourcing. 4. Steff Yotka. “How Gucci Designer Alessandro Michele Kick-Started Fashion’s Genderless Revolution.” GQ.com, October 28, 2019. Accessed April 20, 2020. https://www.gq.com/story/gucci-alessandro-michele-int erview.

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5. Nicole Phelps. “Gucci.” Vogue.com, February 25, 2015. Accessed April 20, 2020. https://www.gq.com/story/gucci-alessandro-michele-interview. 6. Sandra Salibian. “Gucci Unveils Gift Giving Campaign for Holiday Season.” WWD.com, November 14, 2017. Accessed April 20, 2020. https://wwd.com/fashion-news/fashion-scoops/gucci-gift-givingcampaign-holiday-season-11048943/. 7. An elaborate discussion on the importance of transmedia campaigns in retail in Avi Santo. “Retail Tales and Tribulations: Transmedia Brands, Consumer Products, and the Significance of Shop Talk.” JCMS-Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 58, no. 2 (2020): 115–41. Accessed April 20, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2019.0005. 8. Trompe l’oeil is a visual illusion in art used to trick the viewer that the image is three-dimensional and therefore real, physical space appears as a continuation of the space depicted in the image. 9. Although one could argue that the idea of the hyperobject is much older than computer science or Morton’s work, its first seeds having appeared in Nietsche’s 1872 book Die Geburt die Tragödie aus dem Geiste dem Musik in which the philosopher asserted that underneath the reality in which we live and experience our being, another and completely different reality lies concealed (der philosophische Mensch hat sogar das Vorge fühl, dass auch unter dieser Wirklichkeit, in der wir leben und sind, eine zweite ganz andre verbogen liege). 10. Timothy Morton. “Viscosity.” In Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Accessed April 15, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt4cggm7.5. 11. Snoopy (October 4, 1950–) was originally designed by Charles M. Schulz (1922–2000) as a Peanuts character. 12. Gráinne M. Fitzsimons, Tanya L. Chartrand, and Gavan J. Fitzsimons. “Automatic Effects of Brand Exposure on Motivated Behavior: How Apple Makes You ‘Think Different.’” Journal of Consumer Research 35, no. 1 (2008): 21–35. https://doi.org/10.1086/527269. 13. Timothy Morton. “Viscosity.” In Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Accessed April 15, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt4cggm7.5. 14. Joan Gage. “Are Emoticons and Emojis Destroying Our Language?” Huffington Post, August 13, 2015; Ben Smithurst. “How to Use Emoji for Men: Just Say No.” Esquire, January 18, 2013; Anca Violeta Bischoff and Adina Palea. “A Communicational Analysis of the Evolution of Symbolic Language. Case Study: Emojis.” PCTS Proceedings (Professional Communication & Translation Studies) 12 (June 2019): 59. 15. Hamza Alshenqeeti. “Are Emojis Creating a New or Old Visual Language for New Generations? A Socio-Semiotic Study.” Advances in Language and Literary Studies 7, no. 6 (2016): 56–69.

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16. Nicholas W. Twigg and Janice A. Black. “Critical Thinking: The Case for Systems Thinking Over Analytical Thinking: Loopy Thinking Outside the Box.” Global Education Journal 2016, no. 3 (2016): 19–37. 17. Mehdi Tanzeeb Hossain. “How Cognitive Style Influences the Mental Accounting System: Role of Analytic versus Holistic Thinking.” Journal of Consumer Research 45, no. 3 (2018): 615–32. https://doi.org/10. 1093/jcr/ucy020; Liman Man Wai Li, Takahiko Masuda, and Matthew J. Russell. “Culture and Decision-Making: Investigating Cultural Variations in the East Asian and North American Online Decision-Making Processes.” Asian Journal of Social Psychology 18, no. 3 (2015): 183–91. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajsp.12099. 18. Laura Craik. “I’m Still a Happy Child: Gucci’s Alessandro Michele Explains His Midas Touch.” The Telegraph, September 17, 2017. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/luxury/womens-style/still-happy-child-guc cis-alessandro-michele-explains-midas-touch. 19. The Fashion Law. “LVMH: A Timeline behind the Building of the World’s Most Valuable Goods Conglomerate.” Thefashionlaw.com, November 25, 2019. https://www.thefashionlaw.com/lvmh-a-timelinebehind-the-building-of-a-conglomerate/. 20. TIME100. https://time.com/collection/100-most-influential-people2019/?utm_source=time.com. 21. Joshua Espinoza. “Stream Rihanna’s ‘Fenty Social Club’ Virtual Party with Performances by Lil Uzi and Octavian.” Complex.com, April 10, 2020. https://www.complex.com/music/2020/04/rihanna-fenty-socialclub-virtual-party-livestream. 22. LVMH. “LVMH Announces the Fast Approaching Launch of a New Luxury Maison, Developed by Robyn Rihanna Fenty.” LVMH.com, May 10, 2019. https://www.lvmh.com/news-documents/press-releases/ lvmh-announces-the-fast-approaching-launch-of-a-new-luxury-maison-dev eloped-by-robyn-rihanna-fenty/.

References Alshenqeeti, Hamza. “Are Emojis Creating a New or Old Visual Language for New Generations? A Socio-Semiotic Study.” Advances in Language and Literary Studies 7, no. 6 (2016): 56–69. Bischoff, Anca Violeta, and Adina Palea. “A Communicational Analysis of the Evolution of Symbolic Language. Case Study: Emojis.” PCTS Proceedings (Professional Communication & Translation Studies) 12 (June 2019): 59.

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Craik, Laura. “I’m Still a Happy Child: Gucci’s Alessandro Michele Explains His Midas Touch.” The Telegraph, September 17, 2017. https://www.telegr aph.co.uk/luxury/womens-style/still-happy-child-guccis-alessandro-micheleexplains-midas-touch. Espinoza, Joshua. “Stream Rihanna’s ‘Fenty Social Club’ Virtual Party with Performances by Lil Uzi and Octavian.” Complex.com, April 10, 2020. https://www.complex.com/music/2020/04/rihanna-fenty-socialclub-virtual-party-livestream. Fitzsimons, Gráinne M., Tanya L. Chartrand, and Gavan J. Fitzsimons. “Automatic Effects of Brand Exposure on Motivated Behavior: How Apple Makes You ‘Think Different.’” Journal of Consumer Research 35, no. 1 (2008): 21–35. https://doi.org/10.1086/527269. Gage, Joan. “Are Emoticons and Emojis Destroying Our Language?” Huffington Post, August 13, 2015. Hossain, Mehdi Tanzeeb. “How Cognitive Style Influences the Mental Accounting System: Role of Analytic versus Holistic Thinking.” Journal of Consumer Research 45, no. 3 (2018): 615–32. https://doi.org/10.1093/ jcr/ucy020. Li, Liman Man Wai, Takahiko Masuda, and Matthew J. Russell. “Culture and Decision-Making: Investigating Cultural Variations in the East Asian and North American Online Decision-Making Processes.” Asian Journal of Social Psychology 18, no. 3 (2015): 183–91. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajsp.12099. LVMH. “LVMH Announces the Fast Approaching Launch of a New Luxury Maison, Developed by Robyn Rihanna Fenty.” LVMH.com, May 10, 2019. https://www.lvmh.com/news-documents/press-releases/lvmh-announcesthe-fast-approaching-launch-of-a-new-luxury-maison-developed-by-robyn-rih anna-fenty/. Morton, Timothy. “Viscosity.” In Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Accessed April 15, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt4cggm7.5. Phelps, Nicole. “Gucci.” Vogue.com, February 25, 2015. Accessed April 20, 2020. https://www.gq.com/story/gucci-alessandro-michele-interview. Salibian, Sandra. “Gucci Unveils Gift Giving Campaign for Holiday Season.” WWD.com, November 14, 2017. Accessed April 20, 2020. https://wwd. com/fashion-news/fashion-scoops/gucci-gift-giving-campaign-holiday-sea son-11048943/. Santo, Avi. “Retail Tales and Tribulations: Transmedia Brands, Consumer Products, and the Significance of Shop Talk.” JCMS-Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 58, no. 2 (2020): 115–41. Accessed April 20, 2020. https://doi.org/ 10.1353/cj.2019.0005. Smithurst, Ben. “How to Use Emoji for Men: Just Say No.” Esquire, January 18, 2013.

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The Fashion Law. “LVMH: A Timeline behind the Building of the World’s Most Valuable Goods Conglomerate.” Thefashionlaw.com, November 25, 2019. https://www.thefashionlaw.com/lvmh-a-timeline-behind-the-buildingof-a-conglomerate/. TIME100. https://time.com/collection/100-most-influential-people-2019/? utm_source=time.com. Twigg, Nicholas W., and Janice A. Black. “Critical Thinking: The Case for Systems Thinking Over Analytical Thinking: Loopy Thinking Outside the Box.” Global Education Journal 2016, no. 3 (2016): 19–37. Yotka, Steff. “How Gucci Designer Alessandro Michele Kick-Started Fashion’s Genderless Revolution.” GQ.com, October 28, 2019. Accessed April 20, 2020. https://www.gq.com/story/gucci-alessandro-michele-interview.

CHAPTER 9

Luxury Fashion Products Addressing Cultural Changes

Abstract Through a look at the coolest fashion and accessories that drop in limited editions and enthrall consumers, it has become clear that luxury fashion designers are pushing the limits of their imagination by visualizing the endless possibilities of life when driven by thought at the leading edge. This process of collecting creative inputs manifests itself in the specificity of design elements such as line, color, shape, form, texture (and surface design), as well as space. This is how the materiality of luxury fashion becomes specific while remaining at the forefront of innovation. Three additional historical cases, Charles James, Yeohlee, and Rodarte, confirm that the new in luxury fashion has always addressed significant cultural changes which the designers were able to foresee before these issues even reached the awareness of the public. Keywords Charles James · Yeohlee · Rodarte · Luxury fashion · Cultural hyperobjects

Luxury fashion products have traditionally reflected key cultural moments that ushered changes in the way people perceive of or experience reality and helped shape new tastes in being and living. On April 28, 2020, High Snobiety, a “German-based streetwear blog, media brand, and production agency launched in 2005 by David Fischer,”1 announced that a new pair of Nike Football sneakers were © The Author(s) 2020 T. Serdari, Rethinking Luxury Fashion, Palgrave Advances in Luxury, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45301-5_9

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“next level.”2 The news broke on High Snobiety’s most popular section that covers the world of sneakers. Two Berlin-based designers, Lukas Urbicht and Moritz Rose collaborated on a pair of Nike shoes inspired by Tom Sachs Nike Mercurial, a legendary pair of shoes from 2012. Tom Sachs, an American contemporary artist who lives and works in New York, has dedicated a major part of his career building space-related sculptures that satisfy his obsession with the American Apollo program of the 1960s and 1970s, built a 1:1 model of Apollo’s lunar module, fully equipped with a mission control and numerous closed-circuit video monitors. The spacecraft launched at Gagosian Gallery in New York City in October 2007. It successfully landed on the moon and explored its surface through a sequence of historically inaccurate but humorous interpretations of Apollo’s TV footage that had been restaged using sculptures that Sachs had made in his studio. The artist’s work continued with a Space Program 2.0: MARS exhibit at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City in May 2012. In his first Space Program at Gagosian, Sachs had installed two female astronauts for whom he designed special uniforms. It was in 2012 that he collaborated with performance footwear giant Nike to produce the NikeCraft Mars shoe for his 2.0 version.3 The shoe was a great success and relaunched in an improved version five years later, in 2017. In 2020, the artist’s work on space programs continues to fascinate and to generate ideas for new, highly desirable fashion products. Earlier in April 2020, High Snobiety’s Instagram feed, featured an extraordinary group of men’s wristwatches inspired by space-age design. In a time of obsession with fitness performance watches that sync into a smart phone, the resurgence of traditional timepieces on a media website that covers trends in fashion, collectible sneakers, art, music, and culture is remarkable. Make no mistake. “These technical masterpieces that defy the physical constraints of classic watchmaking […] are not your grandfather’s timepieces.”4 In March 2019, Chilean artist Sebastian Errazuris collaborated with the New Museum in New York City to present his work “blue marble,” on Ludlow Street in Manhattan. His work was a live transmission of the planet Earth from space, materialized in a monumental LED structure of 20 feet and meant to remain visible day and night. In Errazuris’s words, the artwork “places our very existence at a global level beckoning us to live fully with an awareness and mindfulness of our limited time on this vulnerable and beautiful planet.”5

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Reviews of SS19 Louis Vuitton collection designed by newly appointed artistic director Virgil Abloh applauded the designer’s “unabated use of color”6 and embraced a vocabulary Abloh created specifically for the runway show. As Max Grobe of Highsnobiety reported “Under ‘R,’ the designer defined ‘rainbow’ as “a kaleidoscopic palette evolving from off-white to polychromatic, synchronously forming a holograph archway known to represent a dream.”7 Abloh was hinting at a futuristic, space-age inspired contemporary fashion design that he materialized on the catwalk with having asked Playboy Carti,8 the popular rapper from Atlanta, to close the show in a silvery foiled cape and an iridescent version of LV’s classic Keepall bag.9 In October 2017, Museum of the Moon, the traveling exhibit by British artist Luke Jerram, made it to New York. The exhibit is a sculpture, seven meter in diameter, that depicts the surface of the moon based on “120dpi detailed NASA imagery of the lunar surface. At an approximate scale of 1:500,000, each centimeter of the internally lit spherical sculpture represents 5 km of the moon’s surface.”10 While interpretation of the moon sculpture differs depending on where the moon is exhibited, the artist’s intention is for the audience to reflect on cultural parallels across the world. The experience strongly highlights humanity’s uniformity across cultural or other distinctions. Overwhelmingly positive, the reception of the sculptural work is a testimony to people’s desire to reflect on the unknowns of the universe. About 15 years earlier, in 2004, Sir Richard Branson, owner of the Virgin Group, announced the launch of Virgin Galactic whose mission was to take passengers to space as early as 2008. In hindsight, one realizes how ambitious this mission was. Yet, it was not an isolated attempt by an eccentric entrepreneur. On the contrary, the “billionaire space race [seems to have] reached a new frontier.”11 British newspaper The Guardian proclaimed. Today, Sir Branson is still competing with Tesla founder Elon Musk, who founded Space X in 2002, and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, who launched Blue Origin in 2000. Who among the three is going to be the first business to take passengers on a commercial flight to space? Calls for astronaut training are proliferating and so are new spots for investors who wish to secure their seat on one of these flights away from planet earth. Meanwhile, test spaceships may crash in the dessert, but the global elite seems to be fixated on visiting Mars and other intriguing destinations of our solar system and beyond.

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Just 250 years earlier, the elite, based mainly in Western Europe and specifically in Great Britain, Germany, and France, were fixated on exploring the ancient world, a world full of secrets, mystery, and perhaps, answers to the most pressing questions about humanity’s trajectory through history. Similarly to Sir Branson, Musk, and Bezos, erudite aristocrats with unlimited funds, extraordinary ambition, and vision set out to unearth some of the most remarkable monuments in the Middle East and around the Mediterranean. Funded expeditions in faraway lands proved dangerous, cumbersome, and time consuming. In the end, everyone was rewarded with new insights about the history of mankind. Artists and draftsmen were part of the archeological excavation with the sole purpose to accurately document the process of excavation, the daily occurrences at each dig, and the precise depiction of anything that was retrieved. These illustrations circulated in Europe to equip academics with evidence and to feed the popular imagination with bits of the otherwise inaccessible, and pretty exclusive, world of archeological discoveries. Archaeology was in fashion. Josiah Wedgwood (1730–1795), English potter and entrepreneur, recognized the magnitude of these breakthroughs. He named his own pottery factory Etruria (after the region in Central Italy that had just been identified as the home to the Etruscans, a remarkable ancient civilization who are known today for their artistic and commercial merits) and proceeded to embellish his pottery with vignettes inspired by the ancient world, a style that is known as Neoclassicism. An imaginative product designer and capable marketer, Wedgwood, launched new brand extensions that allowed him to become a household name in every single social class, from the Emperors of Europe on top to the last hard-working, church-going member of hoi polloi at the bottom. Elaborate dinner sets and furniture pieces were designed for the former, modest buttons for the latter.12 The aspiration was consistent—every owner of a Wedgwood piece felt a little closer to the world of the Ancient Greeks and Romans. They also felt fashionable, part of the present, and part of the future. Any owner of the Tom Sachs x Nike Mercurial sneakers or of the silverfoiled iridescent Virgil Abloh cape shares similar sentiments. The wearer uses avant-garde fashion to distinguish themselves in the now, knowing well that their advantage is going to carry them for a few more seasons or years. By then, new interests will be driving forays into subterranean modes of living or intergalactic journeys, the material culture of which

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will always find its way into the artist’s studio and designer’s toolkit first before the masses fully grasp where it all originated and why. On several instances therefore, some contemporary and some historic, luxury fashion products have addressed advances in technology, life, and human aspiration. The twentieth century is particularly abundant in cases of designers who fully perceived the enormity of specific concepts and managed to express them in material form, forever transforming the history of the medium. For the remainder of this chapter, the discussion intends to elucidate certain aspects of three distinguished fashion designers and brands, Charles James (1906–1978), Yeohlee brand (1981–) Rodarte brand (2005–) as well as highlight their limitations. Other brands who successfully interpret cultural moments in their creative designs will be the topic of a later chapter.

Charles James: Modern Women Living in Movement Practically unknown to the masses today, Charles James was placed on a pedestal by his contemporaries in fashion design. French couturier Paul Poiret (1879–1944) saw in the talented Anglo-Saxon his successor, verifying that leading edge craftsmanship knows no nationality. Elsa Schiaparelli (1890–1973) and Coco Chanel (1883–1971), the two together exemplifying female power in high fashion innovation and entrepreneurship, loved to dress in his clothes. Christian Dior (1905–1957) conceded that his own “New Look,” the post-WWII look of ultra-femininity and opulence that made Dior one of the greatest fashion designers of modern time, owed its seed idea to James’s work. Spanish couturier Cristobal Balenciaga (1895–1972), known as the king of couturiers, recognized in James his equal. In pronouncing James as the only true American couturier, he also inferred that James’s talent raised fashion from “an applied to a pure art form.”13 James proved early on that he was very skilled working with his hands and that he could translate innovative sculptural forms into elegant hats for women. He was not skilled with handling his finances, however, which forced him to move around a lot, leave Chicago, settle in New York and divide the rest of his time between London and Paris where he established his own practice as a couturier. After declaring bankruptcy, he had to close his salon in London’s elegant Mayfair neighborhood and move back to New York in 1933. The next decade was very productive for him. When Harold Koda, former curator-in-chief of the Anna

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Wintour Costume Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, brought to light a remarkable array of material from and about James’s practice in an exhibit that took place in 2014, he also asserted that James was “among the handful of fashion designers who can be said to have transformed his métier.”14 Among his novel creations were the Corselette or L’Sylphide evening dress (1937); the two-pattern piece halter gown (1937); La Sirène evening dress with a pleated front panel (1938); a raised, pouf-fronted gown (1939); and the Figure-8 wrapped skirt (1939). In his frenzied dexterity with form, James focused on perfecting details that required a tremendous amount of material and time for which he double charged his clients, even if he was known not to deliver the work they had already purchased at a premium. Terrible business practices aside, James understood what was fundamentally different about women in the 1930s and beyond. Women moved. They were not confined to the privacy and comfort of their home any longer. While laborers had always been out and about pursuing the next job as a cleaner, cook, nanny, or home manager for aristocratic households, the ladies of the upper crust had no legitimate reason to go out except for limited occasions. By the 1930s, when modernity had already changed the pace of life and the automobile had become a staple of urban life, even entertainment was happening outside the home of the rich. Nightclubs, concert halls, and theaters were all appropriate places for women to be with their husbands or on their own. And they would usually get there in a taxi. This meant that traditional dresses with exaggerated puffy skirts and stiff understructures were a hindrance to fully enjoying one’s privileges. Inspired by the functionality and simplicity of a Lightning Fasteners Ltd. Zipper, James designed his “taxi dress” onto which he had sewed a long zipper diagonally across the torso to allow the wearer to take it on and off easily.15 James came up with the term “metamorphology” to describe his obsession with constant change. He was so driven by the ambition to address design issues that had to do with how the body moves under the dress that he invested time and energy in designing his own mannequin that could indeed rotate and move on the lateral plane thus resembling closely the natural movement of the human body. It was this mannequin that allowed him to continue generating a series of innovative structures through constant experimentation in 3D dynamic forms.16 His solutions were comparable to engineering, an equal investment of intellectual and practical thought. With the foresight of a futurist, James invented designs,

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such as the elastic waist, without which our quality of life would be greatly diminished today. He also broke new ground in reversing the norms of textile manipulation and was the first to design his eiderdown evening jacket in 1938,17 a precursor to Moncler Genius’s evening gowns that took the down jacket from sporty to formal.18 James received several awards by his contemporaries but later returned them when his inability to maintain a successful practice turned him into a bitter man. The variety of garments and accessories he had licensed to several New York merchants did not save him from his own bad business management. This is noted because in order to form a name that is associated with luxury fashion one needs both creative talent and good business sense. It is the successful integration of the two that secures a brand’s name in the pantheon of luxury brands. On the other hand, the success he singlehandedly accomplished was his response to a hyperobject never encountered before, namely the liberating range of activities, constant movement, and accelerating action that modernity sprinkled upon women’s lives in the twentieth century.

Yeohlee: No Waste Fashion “I never aspired to set up a ‘luxury’ fashion label the way a lot of young designers do today. However, the core ideas I have been working on since I first entered the profession are talked about today in the context of luxury. In that sense, I would dare say that I created luxury fashion before the term became so ubiquitous”19 said Yeohlee Teng, American fashion designer of Maylasian heritage and head of the fashion label Yeohlee based in New York City. Since 1981, when the designer incorporated her eponymous brand Yeohlee Inc., Yeohlee (who always goes by her first name) has maintained a very clear positioning defying much of the norms established in the fashion industry. As a young designer from Parsons,20 Yeohlee had a lot of ideas but very little money. Her aspirations then, and still today, were to produce garments that “wear well through time, serve more than one purpose, often wear well through the seasons and offer an individual point of view.”21 In other words, Yeohlee set out to produce multipurpose fashion with the type of longevity that has been lost in the present era of fast fashion. Her clothes can be worn in more than one seasons and draw the right kind of attention to the wearer. This was in the 1980s

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when the entire fashion industry was being restructured to accommodate outsourcing. This major shift of supply chain operations would allow fashion companies to produce larger inventories of items that were defined for a specific use, often were of a lesser quality and would need to be replaced soon, did not work for more than one season, and were mass marketed, thus transforming consumers into hundreds of thousands of clones showcasing a fashion brand’s single vision. A Google search for Yeohlee brings up multiple hits for zero waste fashion. This term refers to garments that generate very little or zero fabric waste in the process of their production.22 It has become an increasingly polemical term for the proponents of sustainable fashion,23 a movement that aims to bring change to the fashion industry and the greater fashion systems that support its distribution in order to bring forth ecological conscience, love for the planet and its natural resources, and pursuit of social justice for those employed by the industry. According to Timo Rissanen, professor at Parsons and author of Zero Waste Fashion, this type of precise calculation of garment patterns that is based on mathematical tessellation24 stems from ancient Chinese traditions in garment making. Nonetheless, Yeohlee’s Asian heritage may be completely coincidental. Her view on zero waste goes beyond what the popular press has retained about the complex method of fabric cutting, which limits its benefits to waste that relates to the material only, the fabric. Yeohlee has often spoken about the advantages of zero waste design in reducing not only fabric but also time and energy wastefulness. She is so impassioned about this design methodology that leads to a sustainable future that she often turns remnants into improbable challenges for herself and her staff. “Could I really turn that remnant into a ‘bellows’ back blouse?” which also happens to have become one of Yeohlee’s signature designs. “It is my core philosophy,” the designer reflects. “Luxury is time and being spare and efficient in every aspect of life is the ultimate luxury.”25 The designer has claimed that it is her bicultural identity, her ability to move in both cultures but not really commit to either that has freed her from any kind of imposed constrictions. What has consistently driven her designs is a quest for quality in the fabrics she is using. Her love for great quality material, that tends to be more expensive, was the instigator of the zero waste pursuit that has defined her career. She began with her Black wool doeskin “one size fits all” cape from her Fall 1981 collection. This piece was worn by artist Robert Mapplethorpe in one of his most famous photographs by Lisa Lyon in 1982.26 Even though the

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methodology behind that collection was indeed based on tessellation and economy, the designer’s aspirations had more to do with art and architecture. In fact, these creative fields have remained constant in her oeuvre as references pop up in a variety of her designs. Whether it is geometric abstraction, spatial perceptions, or Richard Serra’s confident drawing of black planes against the whiteness of the page or the overall grayness of an urban landscape, Yeohlee loves exploring the drama of extreme contrasts such as warm dark wool against icy white in the inside of pleats. Simply put, Yeohlee has a very well-defined design philosophy which she has chosen to execute via zero waste processes. The outcomes are stunning. Her pieces have become beloved garments in many New Yorkers’ closets and beyond, treasured holdings of museum collections, such as the Metropolitan Museum of New York and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, as well as acclaimed parts of fashion design exhibits.27 Yeohlee was the recipient of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in fashion in 2004. The fashion designer explains the consistency of her work as “ideas that are nurtured for a long time.”28 Which is also why she maintains that bigger brands “feed” on independents like her. “When our collections hit the market, we deliver concepts that are part of the cultural context. They are relevant, alive, seductive.”29 The idea of the “urban nomad,” a concept that was very popular in the 1990s, when people were expected to wake up in New York City, attend a meeting, then take a plane and find themselves somewhere across the globe with no time to change in between, represents the type of cultural moment that Yeohlee used as context to develop her designs. The timing relates to the technology boom we discussed in the previous chapter, the sharp increase in the number of people who owned a laptop in the 1990s and later and that eventually led to the adoption of emojis as a new holistic language. For Yeohlee, the constant mobility of many of her clients gave her new problems to solve. For example, what was the frequency of meetings they had to attend? What were the most popular destinations in terms of geography? What were some of the designs that could work across time zones, across climates, and across cultural norms so that her clients appeared well dressed, moved comfortably, and felt confident to tackle the demands of this modern nomadic lifestyle? These are the design questions that Yeohlee’s fashion intended to answer with a collection that became tremendously successful, precisely because it responded to its cultural

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context.30 And so she continues, ever so tapped in the cultural landscape of New York City from her boutique in the NoMad area of the city, executing ideas that express her sculptural sensibilities and her heightened understanding of contemporary ethos.

Rodarte: Slow Fashion Sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy founded fashion brand Rodarte in 2005 in Los Angeles with absolutely no formal training in fashion—just a mother-to-daughter, at-home instruction on how to use the sewing machine. Not a typical path for aspiring designers, the sisters spent three years after college working hourly paid jobs to save money, which they supplemented with funds from a major sale of a rare records collection Kate had owned. Cameron Silver, owner of Decades, an influential Los Angeles vintage store, was seduced into meeting the sisters after they sent him a miniature doll with paper versions of their designs in a mini closet. A few phone calls by Silver to New York fashion industry insiders secured a series of appointments for the two sisters in New York. With an initial collection of just ten pieces, they landed the cover of prestigious industry paper Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) and met with Vogue’s editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. Five years later, they were already the subject of a full-length article in the January 18, 2010 issue of The New Yorker.31 Rodarte garments are not meant to make the wearer pretty or sexy, quite the opposite, an effect that the sisters defend by stating that their work is intended to make people think. Their attitude is the result of a very progressive upbringing in California by parents who encouraged their daughters to devour culture even at the expense of their homework—particularly through the mediums of film, music, and visual arts—and to express their individuality against norms that turn life into the ordinary. So is their personal style—dark goth with a twist. Within a year, their clothes were available for sale at the legendary concept store, and now extinct, Colette, the fashion and accessories powerhouse on the Parisian street Saint Honoré, whose space was as much a breeding ground of weak signals of cultural change as a merchant of trends and newness. Even Karl Lagerfeld, who would regularly stop by to observe the merchandising ardor of Colette’s owners, bought “a black georgetteand-satin dress with high neck and signature Rodarte ‘waves’ fluttering down the bodice and at the cuffs for his muse, lady Amanda Harlech.”32

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Rodarte offers ready to wear produced with haute couture methods. Extreme surface manipulations, hues designed specifically in small batches in collaboration with Italian mills that are willing to deal with independent fashion designers and smaller volume orders, persistently spray painted leather, unorthodox cuts or laser printing on leather, eccentric layering of fabrics that contradict each other (i.e., delicate tulle combined with rough twill), and even revolutionary techniques that push the boundaries of biodegradation (for example burying fabric and letting it decompose organically, then unearthing it to use it in a future collection, an idea that Cypriot fashion designer Hussein Chalayan applied in his work in the 1990s)33 are all processes that decouple Rodarte’s pieces from the feverish pace of the fashion industry, in spite the fact that the two sisters have managed to work the fashion system to their advantage. In essence, with a production of about 1000 pieces per year,34 Rodarte is opposing the impact of fast fashion and inventory overproduction with a positioning that stands for slow luxury fashion based on quality, craft, attention to detail, and knowledge.35 The Mullavey sisters have also been criticized for their lack of technical expertise to which fashion critics have attributed the rather ordinary silhouettes that do nothing other than stand as canvas for a radically painterly treatment of surface that turns fashion into art. They have been disparaged for the fragility of garments that on the one hand assert the designers’ vision with clarity while on the other appear as rags (textiles that have been hand painted, then sandpapered, stained, stained, burned, and treated with razor blades on the edges) and still cost thousands of dollars. In the last ten years, the brand has faced financial difficulties that relate to the complexities of meeting department stores’ inventory quota per collection (a path to scaling up completely contradictory to the slow fashion DNA of the brand); the inability to reach a broader market on their own and the challenge of pricing hand crafted pieces for the mass market; and finally the struggle of balancing an artistic, and highly esoteric approach to fabric manipulation, with the primarily straightforward role of garments as functional extensions of the human body. In spite of (on and off) rumors that LVMH has had an interest to invest in or acquire the privately owned brand, such relationship has not materialized, and the label remains independent. The authority with which the Mullavey sisters have showcased in defending their dedication to slow fashion both as a form of art and a way out of fast fashion that is

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destroying the planet has gained them a place at New York’s finest cultural institutions, i.e., The Museum at FIT, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum. Their work has also been exhibited on various occasions, including at The American Folk Museum and a major retrospective at the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, DC in 2018.36 Perhaps the force that keeps the designers going is the belief that their own “techniques were never meant to overpower the [collection’s] story. In the end, when you [look at our pieces] you understand the world.”37

Conclusions Through a look at the coolest fashion and accessories that drop in limited editions and enthrall consumers, it has become clear that luxury fashion designers are pushing the limits of their imagination by visualizing the endless possibilities of life when driven by thought at the leading edge. This process of collecting creative inputs manifests itself in the specificity of design elements such as line, color, shape, form, texture (and surface design), as well as space. This is how the materiality of luxury fashion becomes specific while remaining at the forefront of innovation. Three additional historical cases, Charles James, Yeohlee, and Rodarte, confirm that the new in luxury fashion has always addressed significant cultural changes which the designers were able to foresee before these issues even reached the awareness of the public.

Notes 1. Highsnobiety.com. https://highsnobiety.com. 2. Fabian Gorsler. “These Tom Sachs Nike Football Concepts Are Next Level.” HighSnobiety.com, April 28, 2020. 3. “Nike and Tom Sachs Introduce the NikeCraft Mars 2.0.” https://news. nike.com/news/tom-sachs-mars-yard-2-0. 4. @Highsnobiety, April 27, 2020. https://www.instagram.com/p/B_eliE tAAu5/. 5. Metalocus.es. https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/blu-marble-new-mus eum-sebastian-errazuriz. 6. Max Grobe. “Virgil Abloh’s Iridescent Louis Vuitton Keepall Bag Could Be the Hottest Accessory of SS19.” HighSnobiety.com, December 20, 2018. https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/louis-vuitton-keepall-bagss19/.

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7. Ibid. 8. Playboy Carti debuted his career in rap music in 2014. He is from Atlanta and his real name is Jordan Carter. 9. The Keepall bag was launched by Louis Vuitton in 1924. Artists Takashi Murakami (1962–) and Jeff Koons (1955–) presented their own take of the famed item with designs that clearly reflected their design philosophy in 2008 and 2017, respectively. 10. Museum of the Moon. https://my-moon.org/about/. 11. Gwyn Topham and Julia Kollewe. “Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic Prepares to Go Public.” The Guardian, July 9, 2019. https://www.the guardian.com/science/2019/jul/09/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-gopublic. 12. Nancy F. Koehn. “Josiah Wedgwood and the First Industrial Revolution.” In Creating Modern Capitalism: How Entrepreneurs, Companies, and Countries Triumphed in Three Industrial Revolutions, edited by Thomas K. McCraw. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, pp. 17–49. 13. Elizabeth Ann Coleman. “James, Charles.” In The Berg Companion to Fashion, edited by Valerie Steele. Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010. Accessed April 2, 2020. 14. Harold Koda. “Introduction.” In Charles James : Beyond Fashion. New York and New Haven: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2014, p. 11. 15. Ibid., pp. 22–30. 16. In 1951, he worked with the Cavanaugh Form Company, a mannequin manufacturer, to produce his uniquely proportioned, papier-mâché dress form that he called Jenny. Elizabeth Ann Coleman. “James, Charles.” In The Berg Companion to Fashion, edited by Valerie Steele. Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010. Accessed April 2, 2020. 17. Ibid., p. 31. 18. Fiona Sinclair Scott. “Moncler Genius: One Luxury Skiwear Brand’s Mission to Reinvent the Model.” Cnn.com, February 21, 2019. https:// www.cnn.com/style/article/moncler-genius/index.html. 19. “Interview with Yeohlee Teng.” Luxury: History Culture Consumption 4, no. 1 (2017): 69–78. 20. Parsons School of Design is a private art and design college located in Manhattan’s West Village and one among the first American institutions to offer a fashion design curriculum since its inception in 1896. Today, it remains one of the most respected design schools globally and has gained increased popularity when one of its fashion design instructors, Tim Gunn, became a celebrity, thanks to his reality TV show “Project Runway.” The show lasted for 16 seasons since its first episode aired in 2004 with Gunn as the main host. When he left in March of 2019 to

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23.

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pursue other opportunities, “Project Runway” entered its 17th season with a new host. “Interview with Yeohlee Teng.” Luxury: History Culture Consumption 4, no. 1 (2017): 70. “Zero Waste Fashion Design from History to Now.” In Zero Waste Fashion Design, edited by Timo Rissanen and Holly McQuillan. Required Reading Range. London: Fairchild Books, 2016, pp. 8–41. Accessed April 3, 2020. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.newschool.edu/10.5040/978 1474222297.ch-001. Sandy Black. “Ethical Fashion and Ecofashion.” In Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion: Global Perspectives, edited by Joanne B. Eicher and Phyllis G. Tortora. Oxford: Berg, 2010, pp. 244–251. Accessed April 3, 2020. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.newschool.edu/10.2752/BEWDF/ EDch10034. Tessellation is the very tight arrangement of geometric shapes on a flat surface that produces a tiling effect without overlaps or gaps. The resulting pattern can be repeating. The key idea in tessellation is that if the flat surface is a piece of fabric, there will be no remainders after the outline of the desired shape is cut along the lines of the tessellation. “Zero Waste Fashion Design from History to Now.” In Zero Waste Fashion Design, edited by Timo Rissanen and Holly McQuillan. Required Reading Range. London: Fairchild Books, 2016, pp. 42–83. Accessed April 3, 2020. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.newschool.edu/10.5040/978 1474222297.ch-001. “Interview with Yeohlee Teng.” Luxury: History Culture Consumption 4, no. 1 (2017): 70. Yeolhee Teng. Victoria: Peleus Press, 2003, pp. 24–25. Alexis Carreño. Folk Couture: Fashion and Folk Art. New York: American Folk Museum, 2014, pp. 78–83. “Interview with Yeohlee Teng.” Luxury: History Culture Consumption 4, no. 1 (2017): 72. Ibid. Ibid. Amanda Fortini. “The Twisted Sisters: The Designers behind Rodarte.” The New Yorker, January 18, 2010, pp. 32–38. Ibid., p. 35. Chalayan’s B.A. thesis at London’s Central Saint Martin’s was titled The Tangent Flows and consisted of garments that had been buried and then exhumed just before the show. Each was presented with a piece of text that explained the process. See: Bradely Quinn. “Chalayan, Hussein.” In The Berg Companion to Fashion, edited by Valerie Steele. Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010. Accessed May 1, 2020. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy. newschool.edu/10.5040/9781474264716.0003083.

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34. Ibid., p. 35. 35. Louise Crewe. “Slow Fashion and Investment Consumption.” In The Geographies of Fashion: Consumption, Space, and Value. Dress, Body, Culture. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, pp. 65–81. Accessed April 3, 2020. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.newschool.edu/10.5040/978 1474286091.ch-004. 36. Brooke Bobb. “In Honor of Rodarte’s First Retrospetive, the Designers Remember Their Favorite Collections.” Vogue.com, November 11, 2018. https://www.vogue.com/article/rodarte-exhibit-national-mus eum-of-women-in-the-arts. 37. Amanda Fortini. “The Twisted Sisters: The Designers behind Rodarte.” The New Yorker, January 18, 2010, p. 38.

References Black, Sandy. “Ethical Fashion and Ecofashion.” In Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion: Global Perspectives, edited by Joanne B. Eicher and Phyllis G. Tortora, 244–51. Oxford: Berg, 2010. Accessed April 3, 2020. http://dx. doi.org.libproxy.newschool.edu/10.2752/BEWDF/EDch10034. Coleman, Elizabeth Ann. “James, Charles.” The Berg Companion to Fashion, edited by Valerie Steele. Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010. Accessed April 2, 2020. Gorsler, Fabian. “These Tom Sachs Nike Football Concepts Are Next Level.” HighSnobiety.com, April 28, 2020. Grobe, Max. “Virgil Abloh’s Iridescent Louis Vuitton Keepall Bag Could Be the Hottest Accessory of SS19.” HighSnobiety.com, December 20, 2018. https:// www.highsnobiety.com/p/louis-vuitton-keepall-bag-ss19/. Highsnobiety.com. Last accessed on April 28, 2020. https://highsnobiety.com. @Highsnobiety, April 27, 2020. https://www.instagram.com/p/B_eliEtAAu5/. “Interview with Yeohlee Teng.” Luxury: History Culture Consumption 4, no. 1 (2017): 69–78. Koda, Harold. “Introduction.” In Charles James: Beyond Fashion, 11. New York and New Haven: The Metropolitan Museum of Art & Yale University Press, 2014. Koehn, Nancy F. “Josiah Wedgwood and the First Industrial Revolution.” In Creating Modern Capitalism: How Entrepreneurs, Companies, and Countries Triumphed in Three Industrial Revolutions, edited by Thomas K. McCraw, 17–49. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Metalocus.es. https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/blu-marble-new-museumsebastian-errazuriz. Museum of the Moon. https://my-moon.org/about/.

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Nike. “Nike and Tom Sachs Introduce the NikeCraft Mars 2.0.” Nike.com. https://news.nike.com/news/tom-sachs-mars-yard-2-0. Scott, Fiona Sinclair. “Moncler Genius: One Luxury Skiwear Brand’s Mission to Reinvent the Model.” Cnn.com, February 21, 2019. https://www.cnn.com/ style/article/moncler-genius/index.html. Topham, Gwyn, and Julia Kollewe. “Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic Prepares to Go Public.” The Guardian, July 9, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/ science/2019/jul/09/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-go-public. “Zero Waste Fashion Design from History to Now.” In Zero Waste Fashion Design, edited by Timo Rissanen and Holly McQuillan, 8–41. Required Reading Range. London: Fairchild Books, 2016. Accessed April 3, 2020. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.newschool.edu/10.5040/9781474222297. ch-001.

CHAPTER 10

Luxury Marketing Strategies Based on Cultural Intelligence

Abstract Cultural intelligence is what has fueled the most iconic brands of the modern times (twentieth century to the present) in generating designs that remain powerfully iconic and timeless. A designer, or team of designers, must be at work receiving inputs from the culture around them and transforming those into a specific creative language that is distinct and can exist uniquely within a specific luxury fashion house. This is what renders true luxury specific and profitable. Keywords Hermès · Chanel · Luxury fashion · Specificity · Culture

For a little over three months, from May 10 through August 19, 2012, the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations”1 offered a spectacular gesture of flagrant fashion cannibalism. The exhibition examined the uncanny likeness between the work of two fashion designers: Elsa Schiaparelli (1890–1973), whose fashion career lasted from the 1920s to 1954 when her Parisian fashion house closed; and Miuccia Prada (1949–), who inherited the eponymous family business of high-end accessories in the 1980s and turned it into a fashion powerhouse that operates Miu Miu as well, a subsidiary fashion business.

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Thematically organized around seven concepts that both designers had explored in their work, the show methodically exposed in a disciplined “compare and contrast” how much Prada had “borrowed” from Schiaparelli, a creative figure whose métier may have been fashion, but her essence was the embodiment of surrealism. An international intellectual movement that originated in Paris, surrealism pondered on questions of creative thought in all its expressions, from literature and cinema to visual arts and fashion. In her review of the movement for the Oxford Art Dictionary, Dawn Ades identifies the birth of the movement when the Surrealists perceived “a deep crisis in Western culture” to which they “responded with a revision of values at every level, inspired by the psychoanalytical discoveries of Freud and the political ideology of Marxism.”2 In other words, if we were to study Schiaparelli as a designer in her original historical context we would activate the transmedia fashion production diagram by coloring all the nodes that can be historically proven to have influenced her designs (i.e., her network of surrealist friends, her time in Paris, the culture of the 1920s the norms of which she wanted to disparage, the role of media in the status quo, her ideological inclinations, etc.) (Fig. 10.1). The same exercise with Prada at the center would reveal that Prada activates primarily three nodes only because she remains intently focused on positioning her fashion against competitor brands, is fully aware of how media enables the fashion system, and, as a true post-modernist, finds inspiration in reciting ideas she locates in the work of others while also adjusting them to fit the codes of her own brand. (Fig. 10.2). In her thought-provoking article “Prada and the Art of Patronage,” Nicky Ryan examines Prada’s strategies in assuming the role of patron of the “avant-garde.” The author explains that the brand’s creative director purposefully developed close relationships with artists and architects, such as Tom Sachs, Andreas Gursky, Elmgreen & Dragset, and Rem Koolhaas, all of whom had already developed considerable symbolic and cultural capital, Ryan concluded with a friendly nod to Pierre Bourdieu. It is the appropriation of that cultural capital, the author maintains that allowed Prada to attain social distinction among competitors and most importantly vis à vis the brand’s customer base who saw in all these collaborations a brand of elevated prominence in the field of “cultural” production, even though Prada, the brand, merely finances or endorses the creative work of others.3

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Fig. 10.1 Transmedia Fashion Production: Schiaparelli as CQ interpreter (Source Author’s creation)

Similarly, in her juxtaposition with the work of Schiaparelli, Prada pales by comparison, as the Met’s exhibit made vividly clear. Miuccia Prada has adopted a post-modern approach in identifying inspiration for her collections but she does so in a single-minded vision, in which she remains gratified with demonstrating links with leading creatives while also eschewing conventional concepts of elegance.4 Perhaps launching her own career in the 1980s, when post-modernism matured across creative fields, makes Prada the most post-modern of all post-moderns. This has

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Fig. 10.2 Transmedia Fashion Production: Prada as CQ interpreter (Source Author’s creation)

rendered the brand fixed to a singular way of renewing itself. Miuccia Prada found a solution out of this inflexible predicament and hired Raf Simmons as her co-creative director in February 2020.5 What is to follow of this new presence at Prada is yet to be seen. This is to say that it is extremely difficult for a brand to operate from a position of fluidity, which would allow the brand to maintain its identity while also renewing itself ahead of the signals of change, to lead its customers to the next phase of the cultural here and now. In searching for

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Fig. 10.3 The luxury business model (Source Author’s creation based on Thomaï Serdari. “Steidl: Printer, Publisher, Alchemist: The Field of Luxury Production in Germany.” Luxury: History Culture Consumption 2, no. 2, November 2015: 33–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/20511817.2015.1099340)

examples that would highlight how cultural intelligence is the main ingredient of a well-defined creative strategy and how, additionally, creative strategy suffices as the brand’s marketing strategy, I would like to present an illustration of the luxury business model part of my previous work that has been published elsewhere6 (Fig. 10.3). Any company that operates based on a luxury business model is primarily a luxury producer, not just a luxury marketer. In other words, the model applies to companies that own their supply chain, or major part of it, and create new products in-house. These companies, such as Dolce & Gabbana,7 Chanel,8 Hermès,9 tend to be private and not publicly traded—at most, they may be partially traded. They are vertically integrated and practically own their supply chain with minor exceptions; they own their production facilities at the place of origin; their employees enjoy tenure longevity; the operation is protected by a private majority holding against corporate raiders; they own proprietary production processes and tools (analog and digital); and they have full control of their intellectual output. These companies invest greater amounts of time, effort, and

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investments in defining a unique creative philosophy that brings about the intangible spirituality of the brand, Karl Lagerfeld had maintained (see Chapter 5). Depending on their production capacity, they predetermine a specific number of units for their product mix. Some of it comes out in limited quantities, some in limited editions, and some for a limited amount of time. These companies have full control over their market strategy (including pricing, communications, and partnerships), except they do engage in wholesale selectively to increase market penetration.10 What makes the luxury business model work as illustrated above is the command the company has over its creative strategy. It is not just a matter of controlling the number of units produced. It is matter of quality, not just quantity. It defines for consumers what they should desire before they have even begun to envision the possibilities. Therefore, from a business perspective, these companies create brands that motivate the consumer to buy because they are ahead of the trends. However, a prevalent misconception in the business literature is that luxury brands should be wary of new media platforms that have a broad reach. This, the argument goes, would make luxury products too available to the masses and the notion of perceived rarity would fail. For example, in the first edition of his seminal work on luxury marketing strategies,11 Kapferer does not even mention e-commerce, even though by 2009, the year his book was published, e-commerce was already another viable distribution channel for many companies. In that edition of his book, Kapferer elaborated on the idea that a luxury brand should “communicate to those whom [it is] not targeting”12 but did not connect the two ideas. Three years later, in the 2012 edition of the same book, Kapferer added a new “anti-law,” namely to “just sell marginally on the internet.”13 “Selling on the internet is hype those days,” he added.14 Nevertheless, hype is intriguing. Even if not immediately adopted, all forms of hype should be further explored because younger consumers always open up to and adopt those technological platforms that serve a purpose in their lives. Figure 10.3 illustrates a luxury business model that clearly underlines the importance of creativity that takes place on the production side of the market, and all the operations that support it. When the focus is on creativity and high quality of execution, luxury brands can achieve scale. The opposite is not true—when scale becomes the focus and is the sole

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reason that pushes a luxury brand onto new media and new distribution channels, failure is inevitable. The question therefore is not about whether to embrace new media but rather on how to embrace them. In fact, a specific subgroup of material culture, luxury brands’ Instagram accounts, offers a great example of how the most creative luxury brands (i.e., Hermès, Chanel, Études, Pigalle, Marine Serre, Coleville) have increased their brand equity by publishing creative content that is not available elsewhere and that fully capitalizes on the specificity of the platform. Similarly, LVMH, the parent company of many luxury brands, experiments with creative ideas that demonstrate the brand’s commitment to excellence and creativity and most importantly its proximity to new ideas that spring up from the bottom up. Additionally, LVMH is the owner of NOWNESS, a digital video channel that was founded in 2010 by Jefferson Haack, that features short creative works by up and coming artists from all over the world. The site has received several awards for best interactive website (CLIO Award 2010), best fashion website (Webby Award 2011 and WWD Japan 2011), best interactive video and lifestyle website (Lovie Award 2013 for both categories), best visual effects (2014 Berlin Fashion Film Festival), and finally, best culture website (Webby Award 2014 and 2017). This is an example of how LVMH, the world’s largest conglomerate of luxury brands, remains tapped into culture, which then is strategically funneled into the individual brands. The luxury business model allows a luxury brand to focus on culture first and to then translate this into strategically measured quantities of product. Now we will look closely at Hermès and Chanel, two companies that do that well. The discussion will demonstrate that their creative strategy is fueled by cultural intelligence.

Hermès15 In 1989, long before emojis had become so ubiquitous and art history memes a fun way to communicate one’s deepest feelings, Hermès launched a new collection of mini-clutch shoulder leather bags, suitably named “Bags of Tricks.”16 The collection was presented under a “Birth” announcement as a group of “mini and mischievous, spirited and seductive”17 elegant accessories that were “carefree, colorful, and light.”18 The basic shape of the bag was a nine inch rectangle with rounded bottom corners. The bag’s slender profile (no more than an inch) made the

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prominent stitching that appeared on top of the leather patches a welcome detail that gave the accessory textural interest and substance. The metal closure on the top was either round or rectangular but was also part of the picture that illustrated each clutch. For example, in “Midship,” a friendly abstraction of a sailor’s face (face made of tan leather, against white background, with incisions for eyebrows, eyes, nose, and mouth that exposed the white leather underneath, wearing a black hat) the rounded metal closure was painted black to appear as the button of the sailor’s hat. In “Circus,” the profile of a gray seal, with a single perforation as an eye and her nose up, was centrally stitched on top of black leather and balanced, with the tip of her nose, the rounded metal closure painted in gold, in lieu of a real beach ball. In “Parachutist,” the yellow painted rounded metal bag closure served as the parachute of a parachutist who was on his way down the center of the clutch, while another one who had just landed on the left hand side corner was, on all four, about to get up, and a third one, on the right hand side corner, seemed to impatiently be waiting for the other two, in a relaxed contrapposto, with his right hand on his waist and the yellow parachute all crumbled under his left arm.19 The ten designs of this mini bag line were promoted as casual in appearance, which emphasized their closeness to a fun, fashion accessory, but also as a fine sample of the “extraordinary handiwork that went into their realization: la “marqueterie” (inlaid work), le “rembordé” (special edging), “l’ajouré” (hemstitching), le “frappé” (embossing)”20 a compilation of mysterious words that emphasized the deep know-how in leather workmanship that Hermès has always been known for. The beauty of the product was brought out with great quality photography that accurately depicted the details of the stitching and the leather grain. Its scarcity was implied by a variety of means: the collection was new and limited in numbers; it claimed renown as it was shown in anachronism on photocollaged images of famous actresses (Rita Hayworth holding the “Champagne” clutch; Marilyn Monroe shown with the “Taxi”; and Marlene Dietrich with the “Steamship”); the language used to describe the collection referred to the time-consuming handiwork that Hermès artisans had mastered over the years. Mostly, the presentation embodied a playful, mischievous attitude to publicize the bags that looked like “postcards bought on impulse, the kind that provoke a burst of laughter.”21 The transmedia fashion production framework (Fig. 10.4) can be applied to understand what types of cultural intelligence spurred the creation of this line of bags at Hermès. The framework is applied to the

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Fig. 10.4 Transmedia Fashion Production: Hermès as CQ interpreter (Source Author’s creation)

brand as whole, and not the individual designer as previously done in the cases of Schiaparelli and Prada, because Hermès is one of the very few brands that have always emphasized the quality of the creative team as a group (under its Artistic Director) rather than the celebrity of a single star designer—which is most often the case for fashion brands.22 Time: Hermès launched the line of bags in 1989 but nodded to the golden era of Hollywood films in the 1940s and 1950s as well as the long history of leather craftsmanship in the brand’s studio. By choosing

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a black and white layout for the main image of each photomontage, Hermès quieted the exuberance of the late 1980s, when mostly everything in popular culture was showcasing a vibrant color palette that had been invented by Princeton professor of architecture and passionate postmodernist, Michael Graves, a color palette known to everyone in the world through the popular TV Series Miami Vice. This choice points to the anticipation of minimalism in fashion, a trend that overpowered the syrupiness of candy colored clothing. Space: Hermès chose the names of each bag to reflect popular vacation spots of the 1980s, such as road trips, cruises, Hollywood and New York, breaking out of its French borders to a broader geography, foreseeing the global world that we have enjoyed from the 1990s to the present. Real life observation: The copy of the presentation spoke of a size appropriate to be carried in a big sack and “pop out at any hour of the day,”23 hinting at real consumer behavior as observed in the streets of Paris. These were not bags designed for “ladies who lunch.” On the contrary, the creatives at Hermès had in mind real women who work during the day, carry a large bag to accommodate all their day activities, and may want to quickly appear more festive during apéritif hour, thanks to the little lightweight treasure that could completely change the appearance of their outfit as well as their mood. Social norms and narratives: Suggesting that the bags are the equivalent of a travel postcard, Hermès made the reader reminisce about past trips or perhaps postcards collected from friends and family members. The nostalgia embedded in this warm social custom is transferred to the perception the wearer forms about her bag. Media: The collection makes a direct reference to the golden era of Hollywood films. It reinforces the brand’s positioning in the timeline of modern cultural production. General knowledge, arts: The layout and graphic design of the ads (black and white background with colorful object in the foreground) hint at a general knowledge and appreciation of the Bauhaus.24 The philosophy principles of the Bauhaus have been a north star for creatives at Hermès and their influence can be observed on several of the brand’s products even today. The most recent example is the Hermès lipstick collection that launched on March 4, 2020.25 Ideology: A prominent positioning of this group of ten clutches is the concerted intent to bridge artistic creativity and manufacturing, two aspects of industry that were broken by the Industrial Revolution and

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were to be broken again in the 1990s, when most fashion companies took operations overseas by outsourcing their production. Hermès has always supported local production and the work of artisans.26 Purpose: A nod to minimalism, away from the excess of the 1980s, these mini bags remain contemporary today. Creativity: The quality of the graphic elements of the bags bring to mind a couple of contemporary artists, whose work I have encountered on Instagram. Specifically, I find these Hermès sketches in leather similar to the work of artists @gastonmendieta and @sebacuri who are active today, thirty years after the bags were launched. This hints at the brand’s foresight in employing artists whose work can stand confidently against what everyone else was doing in the late 1980s. The result has tested well against the passage of time. Culture: The two most prominent features of popular culture in the 1980s were decadence and pollution.27 Here again, the brand seems to deliberately address both, by attempting to counterbalance them, with a product that showcases a return to essential, minimalist design and an evocation of broad open landscapes under blue skies and a bright, yellow sun. In an almost prophetic, brief editorial note, Jean-Louis Dumas-Hermès (1938–2010), President and Artistic Director of the Brand from 1978 to 2006, stressed that in the family of the Hermès brand, “one idea is scorned: that of frontiers, fences, walls that restrain the spirit.”28 The Berlin wall would fall three years later. I was not able to find how quickly these sold. However, this is exactly the advantage of creating products that are beautiful, scarce (they were not highlighted in the following issue, which leads to the assumption that the limited collection had indeed sold in the previous fiscal year), and humorous. They came as a surprise, completely unexpected along with the rest of the product mix that Hermès brings to market on a regular basis. This element of surprise creates suspense, which is a great strategy for enticing the consumer to return. Precisely, it is a strategy directly linked to what happens in the brand’s studio and not one conceived by a merchant trying to unload inventory that has already made it to market. Several elements changed about the publication over the years. It comes out twice a year, Fall/Winter and Spring/Summer calendar; PierreAlexis Dumas, son of the late Jean-Louis Dumas, is now the Artistic Director of Hermès; the brand is more assertive in promoting product categories other than leather, fully embracing in its presentation the

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essence of the Hermès lifestyle that the publication seeks to promote. The magazine has been updated as well, slightly in terms of size, definitely in terms of paper stock, letter fonts, and graphic layout. It also highlights the brand’s connection to the arts, something that was evident since the beginning of the publication but features more prominently today. Pierre-Alexis Dumas’s brief editorial note in the Fall/Winter issue of 2016 responds to the “Call of the Wild,” borrowing a few words from a poem by Henry David Thoreau and the poet’s specks of imagery as he is caught “sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields” in an attempt to “preserve [his] health and spirits.” The issue is filled with beautiful artwork some of it relating to products and some of it gratuitous, but ever so poignant in establishing the brand’s connections to life’s social norms, the physical context around us, our relationship with space, time, memory and creativity. For example, an exploratory essay called “In the pocket!” traces the elements that make the structure of the pocket such a special detail on any garment. “A man invests his pockets with a part of himself,”29 utters the author while he also reflects on how pockets teach us what we need to take with us and what to leave behind. Crumbled secrets, a tennis ball, bits of paper, keys and money make the description of a pocket so vivid in the author’s first paragraph that when he moves on to describing specifically a pocket made by Hermès, in the rest of the essay, we can almost feel the pocket at the tip of our fingers, its lining with dipped lambskin, luxurious and soft. The more succinct a pocket is in terms of design approach, the more it reveals how much time the creative team at Hermès has spent refining its details. A laconic exclamation of a brand’s design philosophy, this type of pocket can be carried out only when the company follows the luxury business model of Fig. 10.3. A longer piece in this issue makes references to the Bauhaus, highlighting “L’Esprit du Bauhaus,” an exhibit organized by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, maintaining the continuity Hermès has shown in creating content inspired by the Bauhaus movement.30 Another article presents the 2016 season of men’s fashion worn by Icelandic fishermen, in empty landscapes, long before social distancing became the norm, in a bold gesture to dissociate Hermès garments from the pretentiousness of congested, urban-chic life. Finally, the cover features nature photography in a color palette that matches the fashion of the 2016 Fall/Winter season, as one learns when perusing the magazine. The landscape is an unfriendly environment of red

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earth and crawling clouds, a place where fear and anxiety reign, a mysterious fragment out of a Caspar David Friedrich31 (1774–1840) painting. Hermès is aligning its creative output to the feeling of the sublime, an aesthetic concept that is greater than beauty as it evokes more intense “emotions by vastness, a quality that inspires awe.”32 The dexterity with which the brand’s artistic team plays with the elements of creativity as discussed in Chapter 7 is remarkable. In doing so, it brings to life content that is distributed across media (print, digital, editorial, ads, social media, product in boutiques, etc.) via a transmedia creative strategy that links the now with the brand’s past while envisioning the future. Having had the opportunity to test a series of Hermès products, stories, editorials, annual themes, and ads in print in their own issues of Le Monde d’Hermès against the Transmedia Fashion Production framework as developed in Chapter 6, I realized that Hermès presents another unique element in the articulation of the brand’s creative strategy. While there has always been an Artistic Director, throughout the history of the brand, the creative work that happens at a conceptual level in the studio is collective in nature. There was a time when both Pierre-Alexis and his cousin Pascale Mussard were artistic co-directors but Mussard launched her own Hermès label, petit h, known as the more playful, innovative, and sustainable Hermès sub-brand. The official YouTube content posted by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès highlights the creative exchanges that take place in the studio, as the creative team is working to meet the theme that has been set each year by the brand’s Artistic Director.33 Other than that, Dumas has often stated in interviews that he offers his designers and artisans complete liberty to build on the codes of the brand. “Creativity is a process,” Dumas notes. “From the initial idea to the finished product on the shelf, that’s the [Hermès] process.”34 For that reason, Hermès has attained facility in preserving its design philosophy over the years. Simply put, the brand’s creative vision is not tied to an individual, as was the case with Schiaparelli, Prada, or Gucci’s Michele, but to a collective whose mission is to preserve the code and aura of the brand. The implications of this element in outlining the future of luxury fashion will be discussed in the following chapter.

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CHANEL The Wertheimer family acquired a 50% stake in the fashion house of Coco Chanel in 1924 and it was only in 1974 that they came to full ownership of the brand, after Coco’s death in 1971.35 Coco had been a visionary in her own right. In the beginning of the twentieth century, she reversed several norms pertaining to women’s wardrobe and lifestyle mainly because this was how she wanted to dress and live her life. For example, she used fabrics that had been traditionally designated for men’s garments; she moved away from accentuated waistlines and puffy skirts; she simplified the codes of dressing throughout the day and across activities by devising a new type of clothing (a little boxier, sportier, and hipper) to allow her clients to show up in smart, albeit, comfortable outfits. Her design philosophy at the time seemed to translate the overarching social trends that had allowed women, particularly those of the upper classes, to enjoy evening entertainment at music clubs without judgment about their moral standing, to pursue their interests outside of the family home including their academic goals in university courses, and, in some countries, the right to vote.36 Coco Chanel had succeeded to activate the Transmedia Luxury Fashion Production model based on how she wanted to consume fashion. The distance between the individual who interprets culture around her and the designer who uses these observations to devise new styles completely collapsed for the first time. As a woman couturier, in a world dominated by male designers, Coco was a first. She was a powerful cultural interpreter who was very adept with her hands. She was the first to turn cultural intelligence into creative strategy for her namesake luxury fashion label. In the decade after the Wertheimers took full control of the Coco Chanel brand, they had mainly achieved two things. They capitalized on the success of the iconic perfume Chanel No.537 and introduced a prêt-àporter line that was based on Coco’s design philosophy and was intended for wide distribution.38 In other words, in the late 1970s, the Chanel name was nothing but a moneymaker for its parent holding company. When Karl Lagerfeld took over Chanel’s creative direction, he had already launched his own private label and had a brief tenure as the chief designer at Chloë.39 Lagerfeld’s biography in the Berg Companion to Fashion states that the designer found in Chanel a “company that had become somnolent, if not moribund, and very quickly made it

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exciting again. Taking the basic vocabulary established by Coco Chanel, he modernized it, introducing new materials, including denim, and exaggerating such details as the “double C” logo. Remarkably, his work for Chanel remained as vital in the twenty-first century as it was in the mid-1980s.”40 These notes on Lagerfeld’s contributions were verified by retrieving all the editorials, articles, features, and collection preview stories (about 1600 items) that were published in Vogue, the original American version. Lagerfeld had already received substantial coverage in the fashion magazine as one of the most promising young European talents whose quirks had won him the title of “public fantasy,” as early as 1979.41 When the Wertheimers were looking for someone to help them understand the market for high quality fashion, develop a strategy to capitalize on the prevalent trends, augment the positioning that Coco had achieved on her own, and build a brand that could take the name of Chanel into the future, Lagerfeld was especially visible because he had already revolutionized the treatment of the silhouette by manipulating the structural elements of the garments he was designing for Chloë. 1983 was the year of Lagerfeld’s first collection for Chanel. From then forward, Chanel was evolving with two strategic goals in mind: to be fully vertically integrated, a strategy on which the owners have been executing successfully by acquiring one artisan studio after another42 ; and to rewrite the rules of fashion while also preserving the brand’s authenticity and heritage. The latter part of Wertheimers’ strategy has been successful thanks to the creative work Lagerfeld did for the brand, mainly interpreting culture around him and turning it into new design attitudes. For example, Lagerfeld noted that in 1980s Paris, women would visit the famous second-hand couture store Didier Ludot at the arcades of the Palais Royal and purchase not one but two or more vintage Chanel suits. Parisian women wore them together to mock the conformity with which a bourgeois wearer would treat them. He also saw that others wore these vintage jackets over jeans. At the same time in New York, he noticed that while American women executives would carry oversize bags to work every day, they would leave their offices for lunch carrying only the smallest of Chanel bags, an item that had fallen out of favor in the preceding twenty years during which time accessories had become extravagantly big. In California, he heard, actresses were eager to find Chanel shoes because, word had it, the black tips made their legs look longer. In Japan,

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he learned, women were obsessed with Princess Diana’s pearls but the only viable solution to them were fake pearls and specifically those long strands that Coco had marketed under the Chanel name.43 Lagerfeld observed carefully how women in major capitals of the world were using Chanel’s existing material culture. Before even beginning his own work for the brand, he had activated several nodes of the Transmedia Fashion Production model (Fig. 10.5).

Ideology General knowledge, arts

Purpose

Media

Brands

Creavity

Culture

KARL LAGERFELD CQ INTEPRETER

Real life observaon

Social network inherited

Time

Space

Social network acquired

Body Percepon Social norms & narraves

Fig. 10.5 Transmedia Luxury Fashion Production: Karl Lagerfeld CQ interpreter, Phase I (Source Author’s creation)

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The researcher who wishes to understand how Lagerfeld managed to create successful designs for Chanel season after season and to unlock the secret of how his design process unfolded in the studio will gain valuable insights from a short interview the designer gave to journalist and Monocle founder Tyler Brûlé in 2015.44 In the course of the interview Lagerfeld revealed that he used to read the main newspapers in three languages, German, French, and English, every day. Rather than projecting the illusion of the disconnected, hyper-intuitive, creative genius, Lagerfeld explained, quite rationally, how he used to start his day by trying to connect to everything and everyone in the world, learning about the news from different cultural perspectives and identifying larger trends of societal change simply by processing reports and ideas consistently. In the same interview, Lagerfeld additionally revealed that he would regularly follow the work of younger designers both to be aware of the competition and to measure how they interpreted culture around them (compared to his own internal process). This is a key difference between a luxury fashion designer who is trying to understand the design process of competitors as opposed to a mass marketed fashion brand who seeks to imitate the forms (rather than the substance) that have made other brands successful in the marketplace. The additional information about Lagerfeld’s creative process indicates that the rest of the nodes are activated on the Transmedia Luxury Fashion Production model with Lagerfeld as the cultural interpreter in the middle (Fig. 10.6). Lagerfeld’s complex, multilayered approach to design also explains why he never risked replicating himself even though he had been the head designer of three different brands, Chanel, Fendi, and his eponymous brand. As a voracious reader and empirical culture observer, he searched for new signs of change within particular segments of the market, and specifically the segments that he knew were loyal to each one of the brands he directed creatively. He then transformed the cultural intelligence he had gathered into new forms via a two-prong approach: he infused the design elements he manipulated within each brand with the cultural insights he had retrieved, and he controlled the results by constricting his design inventiveness by internalizing the codes of each brand. As a result, his creations always appeared to not only respect the DNA of the brand but to also augment it. In essence, his systematic approach to culturally enriching the brand reinforced the sensory, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual impact of the brand on the end consumer.

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Ideology General knowledge, arts

Purpose

Media

Brands

Creavity

Culture

KARL LAGERFELD CQ INTEPRETER

Real life observaon

Social network inherited

Time

Space

Social network acquired

Body Percepon Social norms & narraves

Fig. 10.6 Transmedia Luxury Fashion Production model: Karl Lagerfeld cultural interpreter, Phase II (Source Author’s creation)

Creative strategy at Chanel has been recorded, runway show after runway show, to have prophetically foretold how society is changing and how the brand can be an active participant and galvanizer of the very change. Chanel’s spring 2015 runway show revealed a creative strategy consumed by feminist ideals. This was a modern brand, a self-styled twenty-first-century Marie-Antionette, eager to abandon the pedestal of luxury fashion and mingle with real people in the streets of Paris. It was also a brand that capitalized on the newly found empowerment within

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its core customer segment by bringing to market a clever, yet irreverent, limited edition of a hot pink plexiglass shoulder bag that featured the phrase “Je ne suis pas en solde” a couple of which can still be found in the secondary market for about $8000 each. Lagerfeld transformed the dowdy old Chanel brand into a powerhouse of creative strategy that translates immediately into revenue (Fig. 10.7).

Ideology General Knowledge, arts

Media

Social norms & narraves

Purpose

CHANEL Real life observaon

Creavity

Culture

Time Space

Fig. 10.7 Transmedia luxury fashion brand model: Chanel’s creative strategy activates all nodes of the model allowing the brand to launch collections that are met with great commercial success (Source Author’s creation)

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Conclusions Cultural intelligence is what has fueled the most iconic brands of the modern times (twentieth century to the present) in generating designs that remain powerfully iconic and timeless. A designer, or team of designers, must be at work receiving inputs from the culture around them and transforming those into a specific creative language that is distinct and can exist uniquely within a specific luxury fashion house. This is what renders true luxury specific and profitable.

Notes 1. Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibi tions/listings/2012/impossible-conversations/introduction. 2. Dawn Ades and Matthew Gale. “Surrealism.” Grove Art Online, 2003. Accessed May 2, 2020. https://www-oxfordartonline-com.libproxy.new school.edu/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/ oao-9781884446054-e-7000082410. 3. Nicky Ryan. “Prada and the Art of Patronage.” Fashion Theory 11, no. 1 (March 2007): 7–23. 4. Nancy Diehl. “Post-modernism in Fashion.” Grove Art Online, 2 July 2009. Accessed May 2, 2020. https://www-oxfordartonline-com.lib proxy.newschool.edu/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054. 001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-7002082725. 5. Vanessa Freedman. “Raf Simmons Becomes Co-Creative Director at Prada.” The New York Times, February 23, 2020. https://www.nytimes. com/2020/02/23/style/fashion-prada-milan-fashion-week.html. 6. Thomaï Serdari. “Steidl: Printer, Publisher, Alchemist: The Field of Luxury Production in Germany.” Luxury: History Culture Consumption 2, no. 2 (November 2015): 33–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/20511817. 2015.1099340. 7. Personal visit to the Dolce & Gabbana manufacturing Legnano site on January 22, 2020. https://www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/58/ Dolce-Gabbana-SpA.html. 8. Meira Gebeland Libertina Brandt. “Meet the Wertheimers, the Secretive French Brothers Worth $30.8 Billion Who Control Chanel, Own Vineyards in France and Napa Valley, and Breed Racehorses.” BusinessInsider.com, July 1, 2019. https://www.businessinsider.com/wertheimerfamily-chanel-fortune-gerard-alain-vineyards-thoroughbred-net-worth2019-2. 9. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lvmh-hermes/hermes-family-cre ates-majority-holding-company-idUSTRE6B42DJ20101205.

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10. These two ideas of physical rarity (through control of number of units produced) and perceived or virtual rarity (through product distribution in real life and on media) were first articulated by Jean-Noël Kapferer. See Jean-Noël Kapferer and Vincent Bastien. The Luxury Marketing Strategy: How to Break the Rules of Marketing and Build Luxury Brands. London: Kogan Press, 2009; Jean-Noël Kapferer. Kapferer on Luxury: How Luxury Brands Can Grow Yet Remain Rare. London: Kogan Press, 2015, pp. 41– 61. 11. Jean-Noël Kapferer and Vincent Bastien. The Luxury Marketing Strategy: Break the Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands. London: Kogan Press, 2009. 12. Ibid., p. 69. 13. Jean-Noël Kapferer and Vincent Bastien. The Luxury Marketing Strategy: Break the Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands. London: Kogan Press, 2012, 2nd edition, p. 83. 14. Ibid. 15. This part of my research is based on an archive I personally built over the years with original issues of the Hermès publication Le Monde d’Hermès (1971–). I don’t know of any other luxury fashion brand that launched and maintained a high-quality lifestyle publication with constancy and consistency over the years and from such an early date. Leafing through random issues, one encounters some of the creatives that are still with the brand, as for example, the talented Leila Menchari, in charge of Hermès windows, featured in the 1982–1983 issue in a candid photo while she was working on staging one of the brand’s windows, while four samples of her work (Fall 1981: “Le Vivant Musée”; Winter 1981/82: “Le Petit Théâtre à la Licorne”; Spring 1982: “Les Jeux”; Summer 1982: “La Comtesse de Ségur”) are displayed in horizontal bands from the top to the bottom of the same page. “Le Journal d’Hermès.” Le Monde d’Hermès, no. 11, 1982, p. 15. 16. Le Monde d’Hermès, no. 17, 1989, p. 106. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. The full series included the following bags: “Midship,” “Circus,” “Ice cream,” “Champagne,” “Highway,” “Taxi,” “Sunset,” “Palm Tree,” “Parachutist,” and “Steamship.” Le Monde d’Hermès, no. 17, 1989, pp. 106–11. 20. Ibid., p. 110. 21. Ibid. 22. Another brand that has operated under the same model of collective quality over individual celebrity is The Economist, the international newspaper printed weekly in magazine format. Since its inception, in 1843, The Economist has maintained the anonymity of the writers who contribute

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26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

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with their work as opposed, for example, to The New York Times, where individual authors are listed with each article and even celebrated to the level of stardom in the Opinion pages. Le Monde d’Hermès, no. 17, 1989, p. 110. German school of art and architecture founded by architect Walter Gropius. The school was active in Weimar from 1919 to 1925 and in Dessau from 1925 to 1932 and became famous as the first school to establish studio practice as the core of creative training as opposed to theoretical, purely academic, education. Its influence in the integration of handicrafts and fine arts as well as in the ushering of Functionalism in architecture reverberates even today. Rainer K. Wick. “Bauhaus.” Grove Art Online, 2003. Accessed May 3, 2020. https://www-oxfordartonl ine-com.libproxy.newschool.edu/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/978188 4446054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-7000006947. Jérôme Touron, Creative Director of Beauty at Hermès, consulted the brand’s archives and more than 900 leathers and 75,000 color samples previously used on the famous silks. These have often referenced the Bauhaus and definitely Josef Albers, a very influential visual artist who left the Bauhaus to emigrate to the United States in 1933 to avoid Nazism in Germany. Albers is one of the most important influences on Pierre-Alexis Dumas’s own aesthetic. More details on the launch of the lipstick collection Beautypackaging.com. https://www.beautypackaging. com/contents/view_breaking-news/2020-02-06/hermes-beauty-debutswith-a-67-lipstick-designed-by-pierre-hardy/. “Hearts and Crafts” film produced by Hermès available on Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/160366802. National Geographic. “The ‘80s: The Decade That Made Us.” https:// www.nationalgeographic.org/media/80s-decade-made-us/. Le Monde d’Hermès, no. 17, 1989, p. 3. Olivier Séguret. “In the Pocket!” Le Monde d’Hermès, no. 69 (Fall/Winter, 2016): 52–55. Philippe Trétiack. “The Bauhaus Revolution.” Le Monde d’Hermès, no. 69 (Fall/Winter, 2016): 122–25. Jens Christian Jensen. “Friedrich, Caspar David.” Grove Art Online, 2003. Accessed May 3, 2020. https://www-oxfordartonline-com.lib proxy.newschool.edu/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054. 001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-7000029956. David Rodgers. “Sublime, the.” Grove Art Online, 2003. Accessed May 3, 2020. https://www-oxfordartonline-com.libproxy.newschool.edu/gro veart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-978188444 6054-e-7000082179. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCg7ZqFv_41mlPLrQ1xAysTw.

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34. Steven Schelling. “Hermès Artistic Director Pierre-Alexis Dumas Understands the Business of Fashion: History and Modernity.” NuvoMagazine.com. https://nuvomagazine.com/magazine/winter-2019/her mes-artistic-director-pierre-alexis-dumas-understands-the-business-of-fas hion. 35. https://www.businessinsider.com/wertheimer-family-chanel-fortune-ger ard-alain-vineyards-thoroughbred-net-worth-2019-2. 36. Valerie Steele. “Chanel and Her Rivals.” In Paris Fashion: A Cultural History. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2017, pp. 214–227. Accessed May 3, 2020. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.newschool.edu/10.5040/978 1474269711.ch-012. 37. A look through the Vogue archives reveals that most advertisements and features through 1982 were referring to Chanel perfumes and skin care, and generally speaking to the idea of Chanel beauty rather than fashion. Vogue. https://login.libproxy.newschool.edu/login?url=https://searchproquest-com.libproxy.newschool.edu/docview/904301050?accountid= 12261. 38. “Fashion: Chanel: The Style and the Spirit.” Vogue, August 1, 1985, pp. 302, 303, 304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309. https://login.libproxy.new school.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.libproxy.newschool. edu/docview/879290818?accountid=12261. 39. Layla Ilchi. “Karl Lagerfeld: A Look Back at His Iconic Career in Fashion.” WWD.com, February 19, 2019. https://wwd.com/fashionnews/fashion-scoops/karl-lagerfeld-fashion-designer-timeline-chanel-120 2989974/. 40. John S. Major. “Lagerfeld, Karl.” In The Berg Companion to Fashion, edited by Valerie Steele. Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010. Accessed May 3, 2020. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.newschool.edu/10.5040/978 1474264716.0010276. 41. Joan Juliet Buck. “Fashion: Karl Lagerfeld: The Private Life of a Public Fantasy.” Vogue, August 1, 1979, pp. 222, 223, 270, 271, 272. https:// login.libproxy.newschool.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.lib proxy.newschool.edu/docview/904302101?accountid=12261. 42. https://www.thefashionlaw.com/chanel-mtiers-dart-to-take-place-ton ight-at-the-ritz-paris/. 43. “Fashion: Chanel: The Style and the Spirit.” Vogue, August 1, 1985, pp. 302, 303, 304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309. https://login.libproxy.new school.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.libproxy.newschool. edu/docview/879290818?accountid=12261. 44. Monocle Films. The Big Interview: Karl Lagerfeld, 2015. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=wjVCBewCOgg&t=22s.

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References Ades, Dawn, and Matthew Gale. “Surrealism.” Grove Art Online, 2003. Accessed May 2, 2020. https://www-oxfordartonline-com.libproxy.newsch ool.edu/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-978 1884446054-e-7000082410. Beautypackaging.com. “Hermès Beauty Debuts with A $67 Lipstick, Designed by Pierre Hardy,” February 6, 2020. https://www.beautypackaging.com/ contents/view_breaking-news/2020-02-06/hermes-beauty-debuts-with-a67-lipstick-designed-by-pierre-hardy/. Buck, Joan Juliet. “Fashion: Karl Lagerfeld: The Private Life of a Public Fantasy.” Vogue, August 1, 1979, pp. 222–222, 223, 270, 271, 272. https://login. libproxy.newschool.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.libproxy.new school.edu/docview/904302101?accountid=12261. Diehl, Nancy. “Post-modernism in Fashion.” Grove Art Online, July 2, 2009. Accessed May 2, 2020. https://www-oxfordartonline-com.libproxy.newsch ool.edu/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-978 1884446054-e-7002082725. Dolce & Gabbana SpA—Company Profile, Information, Business Description, History, Background Information on Dolce & Gabbana SpA, Read more: https://www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/58/Dolce-GabbanaSpA.html#ixzz6MMVF4TmP and https://www.referenceforbusiness.com/his tory2/58/Dolce-Gabbana-SpA.html. Fondation d’entreprise Hermès. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCg 7ZqFv_41mlPLrQ1xAysTw. Freedman, Vanessa. “Raf Simmons Becomes Co-creative Director at Prada.” The New York Times, February 23, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/ 23/style/fashion-prada-milan-fashion-week.html. Gebel, Meira, and Libertina Brandt. “Meet the Wertheimers, the Secretive French Brothers Worth $30.8 Billion Who Control Chanel, Own Vineyards in France and Napa Valley, and Breed Racehorses.” BusinessInsider.com, July 1, 2019. https://www.businessinsider.com/wertheimer-family-chanel-for tune-gerard-alain-vineyards-thoroughbred-net-worth-2019-2. “Hearts and Crafts” Film Produced by Hermès Available on Vimeo. https:// vimeo.com/160366802. Ilchi, Layla. “Karl Lagerfeld: A Look Back at His Iconic Career in Fashion.” WWD.com, February 19, 2019. https://wwd.com/fashion-news/fashion-sco ops/karl-lagerfeld-fashion-designer-timeline-chanel-1202989974/. Jensen, Jens Christian. “Friedrich, Caspar David.” Grove Art Online, 2003. Accessed May 3, 2020. https://www-oxfordartonline-com.libproxy.newsch ool.edu/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-978 1884446054-e-7000029956.

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Kapferer, Jean-Noël. Kapferer on Luxury: How Luxury Brands Can Grow Yet Remain Rare. London: Kogan Press, 2015. Kapferer, Jean-Noël, and Vincent Bastien. The Luxury Marketing Strategy: How to Break the Rules of Marketing and Build Luxury Brands. London: Kogan Press, 2009. Le Monde d’Hermès. Paris: Hermès, 1971–. Major, John S. “Lagerfeld, Karl.” In The Berg Companion to Fashion, edited by Valerie Steele. Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010. Accessed May 3, 2020. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.newschool.edu/10.5040/9781474264716. 0010276. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Accessed May 2, 2020. https://www.metmuseum. org/exhibitions/listings/2012/impossible-conversations/introduction. Monocle Films. The Big Interview: Karl Lagerfeld, 2015. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=wjVCBewCOgg&t=22s. National Geographic. “The ‘80s: The Decade That Made Us.” https://www.nat ionalgeographic.org/media/80s-decade-made-us/. Rodgers, David. “Sublime, the.” Grove Art Online, 2003. Accessed May 3, 2020. https://www-oxfordartonline-com.libproxy.newschool.edu/groveart/ view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e7000082179. Ryan, Nicky. “Prada and the Art of Patronage.” Fashion Theory 11, no. 1 (March 2007): 7–23. Schelling, Steven. “Hermès Artistic Director Pierre-Alexis Dumas Understands the Business of Fashion: History and Modernity.” NuvoMagazine.com. https://nuvomagazine.com/magazine/winter-2019/hermesartistic-director-pierre-alexis-dumas-understands-the-business-of-fashion. Serdari, Thomaï. “Steidl: Printer, Publisher, Alchemist: The Field of Luxury Production in Germany.” Luxury: History Culture Consumption 2, no. 2 (November 2015): 33–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/20511817.2015.109 9340. Steele, Valerie. “Chanel and Her Rivals.” In Paris Fashion: A Cultural History, 214–27. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2017. Accessed May 3, 2020. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.newschool.edu/10.5040/9781474269711. ch-012. The Fashion Law. “A Look at the Artisans that Make Chanel’s Métiers d’Art Collection Possible.” Thefashionlaw.com, December 6, 2017. https://www.the fashionlaw.com/chanel-mtiers-dart-to-take-place-tonight-at-the-ritz-paris/. Vinocur, Nicky. “Hermès Family Creates Majority Holding Company.” Reuters.com, December 5, 2010. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lvmhhermes/hermes-family-creates-majority-holding-company-idUSTRE6B42D J20101205. Vogue. https://login.libproxy.newschool.edu/login?url=https://search-pro quest-com.libproxy.newschool.edu/docview/904301050?accountid=12261.

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Wick, Rainer K. “Bauhaus.” Grove Art Online, 2003. Accessed May 3, 2020. https://www-oxfordartonline-com.libproxy.newschool.edu/groveart/view/ 10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-700000 6947.

PART IV

The Future of Luxury Fashion

CHAPTER 11

Step by Step Application of the Framework

Abstract Having studied several examples, historic and contemporary, of luxury fashion brands that have isolated specific elements in the cultural landscape and introduced them into innovative design that changed the course of fashion history, it is time to review the steps one can follow in applying the Transmedia Fashion Production framework to enrich the creative work in a luxury fashion brand. This reinforces the idea that luxury brands are as much culture producers as they are culture supporters. The latter has been the only aspect that has been discussed in the academic literature prior to the current study. Additional details reveal that culture-based creative strategy results in highly desirable content, which, in turn, yields unwavering consumption. Keywords Luxury fashion · Luxury brands · Culture production · Culture consumption · Creative innovation

Cultural Intelligence for Luxury Fashion Brands: Culture Comes First The January 2020 report on high-end cultural and creative sectors by Bain & Co. outlined an entire section on the social and cultural contributions of luxury brands to the European economies. The analysts defined three areas in which luxury brands are fundamental to driving prosperity to several European economic centers, “production clusters and © The Author(s) 2020 T. Serdari, Rethinking Luxury Fashion, Palgrave Advances in Luxury, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45301-5_11

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city ecosystems.”1 These are: the development, preservation, and innovation of talent; investments in cultural patronage initiatives; and promotion of European values and lifestyle throughout the globe. These are indeed areas in which all luxury fashion brands invest heavily. They perceive their own heritage as deeply entwined with that of the surrounding culture (in their respective geographic region), the greater ecosystem, which is directly linked to questions about social consciousness and sustainability, and the human capital associated with it.2 Investing in partnerships with local organizations and governments ensures everyone’s wellbeing, including the brand’s own. Finally, the analysts correctly note, even though not in these exact words, luxury brands are producers of material culture whose footprint encompasses almost the entire world. “While promoting their own brands and products worldwide,” the report maintains, “European high-end and luxury brands inevitably display, celebrate and elevate the values, culture and lifestyle of their own home countries, reaching beyond their direct target customer.”3 The content and communications luxury brands produce is exactly what we defined as material culture in Chapter 5. While this report’s focus is European brands, the same reach is feasible in the context of brands other than European (i.e., American, Asian, African, Australian, etc.).4 Therefore, as a typical treatment of the relationship between luxury brands and culture, this report limits our understanding of this relationship to a one-sided view of it. It only takes into account a nation’s official culture, the type of culture that has already made it into a museum, cultural institution, or list of national monuments. Equally limiting, and typical of several reports on luxury brands and their performance, is the authors’ attempt to define a luxury brand’s aura. This refers, the reader is informed, to the “combination of perceived cultural and creative authenticity, exclusivity, and emotional content associated with the brand, heritage and quality of high-end and luxury products and services.”5 Yet, “creative authenticity” is left unexplained for the rest of the report. Our discussion evolved on the premise that culture is an everchanging setting that is dynamically shaped by people’s actions, which are the outcome of creative and analytical thought, and extends beyond the built environment. In free societies, culture constantly expands. It results in manifestations perceived by the head, heart, and body. This, along with the augmented methodology of material culture, namely first and second stage analysis, intellectual analysis and transmedia consumption/production models, enabled a solid definition of creativity as

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the activation of several types of intelligence (verbal-linguistic; logicalmathematical; visual-spatial; musical; bodily kinesthetic; interpersonal; intrapersonal) across time, through a transmedia processing of noticeable information inputs that correspond to fourteen separate domains of human life. To illustrate how this works from a designer’s perspective, the discussion included an in-depth analysis of the creative differentiation of the luxury fashion houses of Charles James, Yeohlee, Rodarte, Schiaparelli, Prada, and Gucci. The consistency with which the designers searched for cultural signals through identifiable nodes on the transmedia consumption model elucidated the idea of creative authenticity. In other words, creative authenticity is the result of consistency, constancy, and authority all of which are maintained by the designer’s ability to translate new cultural inputs within the limits of the brand’s own codes. The examples of two additional luxury fashion brands, Hermès and Chanel, enriched the discussion by showcasing how certain brands have managed to make the leap from depending on the designer’s cultural interpretation and individual creativity to setting up enhanced in-house processes that enable new creative expressions that incorporate signals from external culture as well as protocols developed internally over the years. Any luxury brand can replicate what Hermès and Chanel have already set in place by following a few steps that have been outlined below (Step 1–4). These chart the process of applying the proposed frameworks in broad strokes, considering that the details and depth for each brand vary depending on its specific conditions.

Step 1 Therefore to consciously develop a refined creative strategy a brand should test how well it has responded to its cultural environment. Depending on how long the brand has been into existence this task can be long and cumbersome.6 It would be helpful to look back at regular intervals. For example, a brand that has existed for thirty years can be dissected five years at a time while one that has existed for a hundred years can be dissected in increments of ten years at a time. It all depends on the type and volume of material culture produced by the brand in the course of its existence.

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Information should be collected about specific products that were launched at specific dates and matched with the corresponding financial performance, if possible. If there has been only one designer, details about this person should be gathered. What were some other works that were completed for other brands? What was his/her design philosophy? Who were the peers that influenced him/her the most? How was the designer responding to his/her cultural environment? The transmedia consumption model will help organize the information around the various nodes. If there had been several designers, the same process must be repeated for each one of them. If the brand has already been operating with a system that supports collective creativity rather than relying on an individual designer, then the brand transmedia model should be used to organize the information around the various nodes.

Step 2 The information collected consists of fragments of material culture, product details (materials, techniques, traits, etc.), communications features, and groups or environments associated with the product. The challenge is not so much collecting the information that exists within the brand but rather connecting this to the broader contemporaneous environment while also making the links between aspects of the brand and general aspects of the external material culture that shaped the product (or brand communications or environments). For this stage of the assessment, the intellectual analysis framework will incite new lines of thought. This task may vary in difficulty from brand to brand depending on how well outlined the creative department is within each brand. It also requires a person or team who are familiar with the types of material culture that have been defined on the various nodes of the transmedia model. In other words, if the brand has been prolific and several nodes have been activated in the process, area experts may be required to be part of the analysis team (i.e., a scientist, visual arts expert, cultural anthropologist, brand historian, fashion studies scholar, etc.).

Step 3 The goal is to systematically go through this type of qualitative and quantitative information and, once this is organized on the transmedia

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model, to match it with the financial results that each one of these products achieved within a specific competitive environment. What is likely to happen is that brand executives will realize that products that performed particularly well were the ones responding to larger cultural changes that the creative direction of the brand had the foresight to anticipate through the product’s design.

Step 4 A number of similar instances will help brand executives define a brandspecific luxury code that can be applied to future product collections. The question that follows is whether the brand’s creative team is able to tap into the external cultural environment to pick up signals that refer to oncoming change as opposed to signals that refer to current (or even worse) past change. Simply put, even a well-defined brand-specific luxury code that speaks to the creative authenticity of the brand will not bring about innovation by itself. It needs to be infused with cultural intelligence that describes the tiniest bits of future in the now. To sum up, in this work, it is maintained that luxury fashion brands that remain popular and profitable are those whose creative strategy is directly based on cultural intelligence which the brands’ creative teams transform into product design elements. Ultimately, these change consumer behavior. The wearability of Yeohlee’s garments across seasons and time zones, for example, is what gave her clients the confidence to defy existing norms on professional dressing and experiment with items that could carry them through a variety of activities and social networks. Needless to say, athleisure has gained a great following precisely because consumers had long wished for this versatile and comfortable type of dressing. Athleisure is not necessarily sustainable however, which is why Yeohlee and her zero waste methodology is still way ahead of how the rest of the fashion industry operates.

Culture-Based Creative Strategy Results in Highly Desirable Content The success that Karl Lagerfeld achieved for Chanel ignited curiosity in people, who, over the years, have wished to learn more about how this highly skilled, exceptionally imaginative, and hard-working designer came up with the ideas that catapulted the house of Chanel to global success

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and soaring profits. To listen to his interviews online or read others in print leave the researcher with an absolute certainty. Lagerfeld was extremely curious about how people think and behave. He satisfied his curiosity through a voracious appetite for reading, so much so that he launched his own imprint, LSD (that stands for Lagerfeld Steidl Druckerei) in collaboration with legendary German publishing house STEIDL. He opened his own bookstore, 7L, on the left bank of Paris, a passion project and opportunity to bring together other creatives who have a similar love for the printed word.7 He also loved observing the world in search of beauty and did so through his camera’s lens. This is not to say that he had not been a controversial figure. A man of strong opinions, Lagerfeld often expressed his judgments of people or situations without thinking about the consequences. But in the context of our discussion this is irrelevant. The idea that remains pertinent to our analysis is that a designer is not a genius who works in isolation trying to come up with imaginative forms. On the contrary, the more tapped in the world around them, the more successful in observing culture and in bringing to the surface, through their designs, that which describes people’s inner desire and that which would otherwise remain hidden. The numbers that support Chanel’s financial success were revealed for the first time in 2018, after 108 years of secrecy. “We realized it was time to put the facts on the table as to exactly who we are: a $10 billion company with very strong financials, plus all the means and ammunition at our disposal to remain independent,” Philippe Blondiaux, Chanel’s chief financial officer, reported to The New York Times for an article that was published in June of 2018. “We recognize that we are often a subject of much speculation and that people don’t have facts to hand, leading to the circulation of false or misleading information. It was time to let the strength of our balance sheet speak for itself.”8 At the time this article was published, Gucci, which had already entered its renaissance under Michele’s creative helm, had noted $6.2 billion euros in sales. While LVMH, parent company of Louis Vuitton, a brand that has continuously gained favor with accessible and aspirational luxury consumers, does not report sales by brand, analysts believe that Louis Vuitton’s sales are somewhere between $8 and $10 billion euros.9 These numbers bring some scale into the picture when trying to visualize Chanel’s footprint in the world of luxury fashion brands. What we retain is that Chanel is the only luxury fashion brand that manages something that seems impossible, namely, to remain at the pinnacle of luxury. Chanel

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has rendered the ephemeral of fashion into the everlasting of luxury via a creative strategy that seems to break through today’s norms the way Coco had wanted her brand to appear irreverent at the beginning of the twentieth century. Additionally, Chanel follows the Luxury Business Model as defined in Fig. 10.3. Hermès, the second example to support this chapter’s thesis, has been at the forefront of creativity since Jean-Louis Dumas became the Chairman of the Hermès group and the Artistic Director in the late 1970s. His son, Pierre-Alexis, as well as several commentators have noted that Jean-Louis was a person who was gifted both as a creative and an analytical business thinker. The combination of the two reminds us of Sternberg’s definition of holistic intelligence (Chapter 7), a mix of analytical, emotional, and cultural intelligence that is critical for a luxury brand’s long-term success. “The paradox of a luxury brand is that it needs to engender a strong emotional link with its customers, while at the same time being managed as a very complex business,” Michel Gutsatz maintains in his research that offers a thorough examination of successful luxury brands and their management teams.10 Fifteen years have already passed since Pierre-Alexis was appointed Artistic Director at Hermès, a role that has allowed him to reflect on how he can maintain the essence of what the brand has stood for since its inception. It has also inspired him to help it evolve. While his own academic training at Brown University was in visual arts, Pierre-Alexis learned about the fashion business first by working in textile design for other brands and later in managing Hermès branches overseas. Today, he is in charge of augmenting the creative vision Hermès offers to its customers by adding several lifestyle extensions, all of which are based in traditional crafts. In his words, he is building the “superior idea of the house of Hermès.”11 Two ideas are constant and prominent in the interviews Pierre-Alexis has given over the years. The first is that he considers carefully the talent he appoints in the various creative teams that are in charge of the various product lines (for example, beauty versus men’s fashion, etc.). He sets the vision for the year’s collections but allows the teams to innovate by granting them creative freedom. In essence, this enriches the creative work done in house by allowing it multiple opportunities to examine culture through a united spirit of collaboration. Finally, he regularly visits galleries, an activity for which he blocks time out of his

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busy schedule, so that he becomes familiar with the topics that contemporary artists treat in their works. This is his way of bringing cultural intelligence back into the creative studios of Hermès.12

A Method That Yields Unwavering Consumption As spectacular as Lagerfeld’s visions had always been in staging Chanel’s catwalk shows during Paris fashion week, there was one that stood out. For the F/W 2014 show, Lagerfeld transformed the Grand Palais into a giant supermarket and instructed his models to move through the wellstocked aisles as if they were shopping—not merely going down the aisle as is the industry norm. The supermarket shelves featured Chanelbranded real food, such as Chanel bread, Chanel eggs (Le 9 de Chanel), Chanel smoked salmon, Chanel carbonated water, Chanel soft drinks, Chanel sauces, Chanel marmalade, Chanel ham, etc. Reading about the over-the-top branding on paper is tiring. Yet, looking at the images of the show the opposite effect is achieved. One cannot help but notice the excellence of design and execution as well as the creative thought that went into each one of these packaged types of foods. Even the shopping basket, usually a nondescript plastic container painted in loud colors, featured Chanel’s signature bag chain. The models, cladded in Chanel outfits, playfully engaged in leisurely shopping. And when the show was over, the audience was allowed onto the stage to “loot” this Chanel-dream of a supermarket.13 Consumption is an aspect of modern culture that has inspired many artistic works—mainly to oppose it and poke fun at it. The great department stores of the late nineteenth century in Paris, London, and New York, ushered a new era in architecture and helped women break out of the social norms that had them restricted in the privacy of their home. The architecturally innovative arcades and multistory department stores emphasized the concept of strolling in public, albeit reputable. Moreover, they were stocked with material wonders that were part of the new industrial world. The more industrial production methods advanced in the twentieth century the greater the number of goods that flooded the markets. The impulse to shop has been growing since at an exceedingly fast rate throughout the twentieth century. Today, technologically enabled Millenial consumers are training retailers to deliver to them customized goods as instant gratification.

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Artists have observed these rapid changes and their impact on social relations, especially when consumption relates to luxury branded goods. Japanese artist Takashi Murakami even coined the term “super flat” to describe how uninteresting Japanese culture has become because of everyone’s desire to buy the exact same product that features a well recognizable luxury logo.14 From Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, to Andreas Gursky and Tom Sachs, artists have offered their unique entertaining approach to describing how ridiculously obsessed we all are with consuming products for their symbolic value.15 Was Lagerfeld envisioning a plausible future? It depends. Today, due to the consequences of COVID-19, the pandemic that forced several economies into deep recession, it is hard to visualize how quickly consumers will pick up their earlier consumption habits, especially if they are not part of the top 5% of the population, who, according to several news media, are getting wealthier during the pandemic.16 Antoni Tudisco is an award-winning contemporary designer from Hamburg, Germany. He works primarily in 3D illustration and goes by the handle @antonitudisco on Instagram. Tudisco has produced a series of digital 3D illustrations that picture large building complexes in the shape of luxury fashion brands’ logos. On his gallery, there is a surreal picture of a building in the shape of the Nike logo, precariously balancing the lower part of the swoosh on the rounded tip of a green hilltop. Hypebeast, “the leading online destination for men’s contemporary fashion and streetwear,” called another one of Tudisco’s pieces in the shape of the LV logo “apocalyptic.”17 There is of course a third one in the shape of Chanel’s interlocking Cs. Is Tudisco picking up on the public’s general obsession with these three brands in particular? Is the future of luxury fashion some sort of augmented reality where brands design more than products, services, and experiences? Is it possible that they will soon be designing many aspects of our life? It sounds like a probable scenario, especially when considering that the strongest of luxury fashion brands have already transformed themselves into lifestyle brands by launching brand extensions that address several aspects of our life (for example furnishings, restaurants, transportation, etc.) During the COVID-19 pandemic, these very luxury brands offered a material response, producing supplies that the governments were unable to secure (hand sanitizer manufactured at LVMH perfume making facilities; $20M donation to Parisian public hospitals by Hermès; $10M donation to global pandemic relief efforts by Ralph Lauren). Had the market not been

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interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the utopian environment of luxury branded neighborhoods would not have seemed farfetched at all. The symbolic value of luxury fashion brands and their innovative approach to new product launches increase consumers’ desire to participate in their branded world. Consumption seems to rest on well-applied imagination. If consumers’ desire for more branded life experiences continues to match their overconsumption of creative brands, then these brands may break out of the Transmedia Model of Production to contain culture rather than be shaped by it (Fig. 11.1).

Ideology General Knowledge, arts

Media

Social norms & narraves

Purpose

Creavity

BRAND Real life observaon

Culture

Time Space

Fig. 11.1 The future of luxury fashion brands: branded contemporary culture (Source Author’s creation)

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Notes 1. European Cultural and Creative Industries Alliance and Bain & Co. The Contribution of the High-End Cultural and Creative Sectors to the European Economy, January 2020, p. 26. 2. Ibid., p. 28. 3. Ibid., p. 29. 4. A great example of a brand that is changing perception of the Made in China descriptor is Shang Xia, a Chinese luxury fashion brand backed by Hermès. The brand offers high quality products based on traditional Asian crafts with a contemporary aesthetic. See Business of Fashion. https:// www.businessoffashion.com/articles/tags/organisations/shang-xia. 5. European Cultural and Creative Industries Alliance and Bain & Co. The Contribution of the High-End Cultural and Creative Sectors to the European Economy, January 2020, p. 8. 6. For example, the amount of information I collected on Chanel (after Karl Lagerfeld had been hired) by looking at one publication only, the Vogue Archives, rendered about 1600 results. I could have replicated the search by looking at Harper’s Bazaar, but it would not add anything to my argument. A brand, however, should try to locate all traces of material culture that still survive in public collections, the market, in print and on other media. 7. D’Arsy du Petit Thouars. “Inside Karl Lagerfeld’s Bookstore in Paris.” Refinery29.com, December 17, 2013. https://www.refinery29.com/enus/2013/12/58744/karl-lagerfeld-bookstore. 8. Elizabeth Paton. “Chanel Publishes Annual Results for the First Time in 108 Years.” The New York Times, June 21, 2018. https://www.nytimes. com/2018/06/21/business/chanel-earnings-luxury-annual-report.html. 9. Ibid. 10. Michel Gitsatz and Gilles Auguste. Luxury Talent Management. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, p. 16. 11. Robert Murphy. “Hermès’s Pierre-Alexis Dumas Juggles Its Legacy with a New Vision for the Luxury Goods Empire.” Harper’s Bazaar.com, January 9, 2013. https://www.harpersbazaar.com/fashion/designers/g2456/her mes-pierre-alexis-dumas-profile-0213/?slide=1. 12. Ibid. 13. Emily Popp. “Chanel’s Fashion Show Took Place in a Supermarket—See the Pics!” Eonline.com, March 4, 2014. https://www.eonline.com/de/ news/517341/chanel-s-fashion-show-took-place-in-a-supermarket-seethe-pics. 14. Morgan Falconer and Mary Chou. “Murakami, Takashi.” Grove Art Online, 31 July 2002. Accessed May 1, 2020. https://www-oxfordartonl ine-com.libproxy.newschool.edu/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/978188 4446054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-7000097680.

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15. An excellent overview of the idea of consumption in art is presented in Christoph Grunenberg and Max Hollein, eds. Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture. Stuttgart and Berlin: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002. Without having studied Lagerfeld’s personal library, I am convinced he was aware of this book and definitely aware of Andreas Gursky’s 2001 diptych photograph 99 Cent II because the visual similarities between Gursky’s photograph and Chanel’s giant supermarket at the Grand Palais are uncanny. Christoph Grunenberg and Max Hollein, eds. Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture. Stuttgart and Berlin: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002, pp. 214–15. 16. Jack Kelly. “Billionaires Are Getting Richer During the Covid-19 Pandemic While Most Americans Suffer.” Forbes.com, April 27, 2020. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2020/04/27/billionaires-aregetting-richer-during-the-covid-19-pandemic-while-most-americans-suf fer/#2c36cbd54804. 17. @hypebeast, February 29, 2020.

References Business of Fashion. Shang Xia. Accessed April 28, 2020. https://www.busine ssoffashion.com/articles/tags/organisations/shang-xia. European Cultural and Creative Industries Alliance and Bain & Co. The Contribution of the High-End Cultural and Creative Sectors to the European Economy, January 2020. Falconer, Morgan, and Mary Chou. “Murakami, Takashi.” Grove Art Online, July 31, 2002. Accessed May 1, 2020. https://www-oxfordartonline-com. libproxy.newschool.edu/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001. 0001/oao-9781884446054-e-7000097680. Grunenberg, Christoph, and Max Hollein, eds. Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture. Stuttgart and Berlin: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002. Gutsatz, Michel, and Gilles Auguste. Luxury Talent Management. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. @hypebeast, February 29, 2020. Kelly, Jack. “Billionaires Are Getting Richer During the Covid-19 Pandemic While Most Americans Suffer.” Forbes.com, April 27, 2020. https://www.for bes.com/sites/jackkelly/2020/04/27/billionaires-are-getting-richer-duringthe-covid-19-pandemic-while-most-americans-suffer/#2c36cbd54804. Murphy, Robert. “Hermès’s Pierre-Alexis Dumas Juggles Its Legacy with a New Vision for the Luxury Goods Empire.” Harper’s Bazaar.com, January 9, 2013. https://www.harpersbazaar.com/fashion/designers/g2456/hermespierre-alexis-dumas-profile-0213/?slide=1.

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Paton, Elizabeth. “Chanel Publishes Annual Results for the First Time in 108 Years.” The New York Times, June 21, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/ 2018/06/21/business/chanel-earnings-luxury-annual-report.html. Popp, Emily. “Chanel’s Fashion Show Took Place in a Supermarket—See the Pics!” Eonline.com, March 4, 2014. https://www.eonline.com/de/news/517 341/chanel-s-fashion-show-took-place-in-a-supermarket-see-the-pics. Thouars, D’Arsy du Petit. “Inside Karl Lagerfeld’s Bookstore in Paris.” Refinery29.com, December 17, 2013. https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/ 2013/12/58744/karl-lagerfeld-bookstore.

Conclusions

Rather than trying to envision the future of luxury fashion, it is worth considering that luxury fashion may very well be the shaping force of our culture as pictured in Fig. 11.1. In other words, luxury fashion may be the future. Accepting that the Luxury Business Model (Fig. 10.3) defines how luxury brands manufacture their products, one can easily grasp its implications. Production is local and respects traditions that often are hundreds of years old and that may also be part of a country’s cultural heritage (i.e., Italian textile mills, French embroidery ateliers, American weaving centers, etc.). Local manufacturing contributes to the welfare of a region’s inhabitants by making them part of the enterprise. The model forces companies to reevaluate their competitive advantage in terms of supply chain, a glaring question for most fashion executives today who had to reconfigure their supply chain due to the disruption COVID-19 brought upon all types of global operations. When creativity is the cynosure of the business, it sets the pace for ample but slower production. Creativity renews itself based on bits of cultural intelligence that makes products relevant to contemporary ideas and lifestyles. This takes time. It is a process of decoding and re-coding a multitude of signs that are already embedded in our surroundings. Coupled with the specificity of a fashion business supply chain, creativity evokes a well-designed sensory response in the wearer. It may also reverberate to an expanded emotional bond between brand and wearer that is © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 T. Serdari, Rethinking Luxury Fashion, Palgrave Advances in Luxury, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45301-5

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further reinforced when the creative work carries messages with cultural or spiritual meaning. The more refined the messages, the longer the shelf life of the product, as the research verified in the previous chapters. Finally, it seems that the artificial fashion calendar that delivers the winter collection to the stores in July and August and the summer collection in January may not work any longer. Certainly, climate change is impacting the type of garments we need and COVID-19 will be derailing this process for a few more seasons. It is the recurrence of errors as to what consumers may desire in six to twelve months that makes this practice obsolete. In other words, the current fashion calendar is completely out of step with how culture sways personal preferences in an individual’s expression of identity. It is this misalignment between merchandise and cultural awareness that results in excess unsold inventory. A culturally informed creative fashion business will also be more sustainable. Last, but not least, having considered the power of the Transmedia Consumption and Production Models (Figs. 6.1 and 7.1) as well as their complexity, it seems that fashion brands may need to reevaluate what happens in the creative studio. The signs point to a fashion that is based on collective creativity (studios like threeASFOUR, Colleville, or Hermès) where a collective of designers interpret culture and transform it into different media. The future of luxury fashion is collective and comprises a transmedia world that expands into new forms of material culture beyond garments.

Index

A Aaker, David, 29, 37, 86 Abloh, Virgil, 50, 127, 128, 136 Adamson, Glenn, 44, 56 Adidas Stan Smith, 72, 73, 77 Adi Gil, 51 Aimé Leon Dore, Sandro, 19 Alexander, Michele, 113–116, 118, 119, 174 Alexander Wang and Adidas, 54 Altagamma, 19 Amazon, 127 Analytical thinking, 118, 122 Anderson & Sheppard, 46 Angela Donhauser, 51 Anna Wintour Costume Center, 130 Antoni Tudisco, 177 Apollo, 126 Apple, 109, 118, 121 Arnault, Alexandre, 29 Arnault, Bernard, 31 Arts and Crafts, 50, 58 Asahi Kasei, 35 ASCEND framework, 31, 32, 35–37

Asfour, Gabriel, 51 Aura, 8, 153, 170 B Bailey, Christopher, 13 Bain & Co, 20, 22, 25, 169, 179 Balenciaga, Cristobal, 52, 53, 58, 129 Balmain and H&M, 54 Barney, Matthew, 52 Bauhaus, 51, 58, 150, 152, 162 Behavioral CQ, 98 Bergdorf Goodman, 75 Berthon, Pierre, 13, 87, 90 Bessette, Carolyn, 74 Beyoncé, 72, 77 Bezos, Jeff, 127, 128 Björk, 52 Blondiaux, Philippe, 174 Blue Origin, 127 Blummer, Herbert, 4, 50 Boston Consulting Group (BCG), 21, 22, 25 Bourdieu, Pierre, 29, 37, 85, 89, 98, 105, 142

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 T. Serdari, Rethinking Luxury Fashion, Palgrave Advances in Luxury, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45301-5

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INDEX

Brand management, 8, 22, 49 Branson, Sir Richard, 127, 128, 137 Braque, George, 117 British Vogue, 18, 53, 134, 155, 163, 179 Brûlé, Tyler, 157 Burberry, 10, 13, 49, 70, 71 Business of Fashion (BoF), 21, 58, 179

C Calvin Klein, 49, 74, 75 Campbell, Colin, 86, 90 Camp High, 75 Cardin, Pierre, 20, 25 Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge (Kate Middleton), 18 Central Saint Martins, 46, 138 Chalayan, Hussein, 135 Chanel, 49, 67, 129, 145, 147, 154, 155, 157–160, 163, 171, 173–177, 179, 180 Chanel No.5, 154 Charles James, 129, 136, 137, 171 Chloë, 154, 155 Christopher Kane and Crocs, 54 Christopher Raeburn and MCM, 54 Classical sociology, 5, 75 Cognitive Cultural Intelligence (CQ), 98 Colette, 134 Coleville, 51, 53, 147 Collaborations, 33, 35, 47, 52–56, 59, 135, 142, 174, 175 Collage, 117 Comité Colbert, 19 Comme des Garçons, 32, 36, 38 Comme des Garçons with TopShop, 54 Conspicuous consumption, 5, 77 Constructivists, 51 Contemporary sociology, 6

Converse, 55 Cool, xiii, 64, 71–74, 113, 115 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, 52 Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), 19 Courrèges, André, 20 COVID19, vii, xv, 53, 54, 115, 120, 177 C. P. Company, 34 C.P. Snow, 31 CQ types, 99 Craft, 5, 44–46, 51, 55, 135, 162, 175, 179 Crane, Diana, 6, 11 Creative authenticity, 170, 171, 173 Creative Collective, 50, 56 Creative Director, 49, 50, 52, 113, 160, 162 Creative innovation, 31 Creative management, 49 Creative process, 8, 43, 44, 82, 119, 157 Creative strategy, xv, 68, 113, 115, 145–147, 153, 154, 158, 159, 171, 173, 175 Creative thinking, 101 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 100, 101, 105 Cultural geography, 84, 85 Cultural intelligence (CQ), xv, 96–105, 116, 145, 147, 148, 154, 157, 160, 173, 175, 176, 183 Cultural production, 44, 150 Cunningham, Bill, 3 D Dalí, Salvador, 54, 55 Davis, Fred, 6 Decades, 47, 50, 96, 117, 129, 154 Deloitte, 22, 23, 25

INDEX

Design agency, 44 Didier Ludot, 155 Dior, 49, 83, 84, 129 Dolce & Gabbana, 145, 160 Doucet, Jacques, 47 Drop, vii, 49, 113, 115, 119, 120, 136 Duchamp, Marcel, 177 Dumas-Hermès, Jean-Louis, 151 Dumas, Pierre-Alexis, 151, 152, 162, 163, 179

E Elmgreen & Dragset, 142 Elsa Schiaparelli, 54, 129, 141 Emoji, 116–118, 121, 133, 147 Entwistle, Joanne, 85, 89 Études, 147

F Faiers, Jonathan, 9, 10, 13 Fashion collective, 50, 51 Fendi, 55, 157 Fendi Caffe, 55 Fischer, David, 125 Ford, Tom, 18, 113 frappé, 148 Friedrich, Caspar David, 153

G (g), 95, 97 Gagosian Gallery, 126 Gardner, Howard, 97, 104 @gastonmendieta, 151 Gehry, Frank, 85 Gemeinschaft, 5 GenZ, 49, 119, 120 Gesellschaft, 5 Giannini, Frida, 113 Gieves & Hawkes, 46

187

Givenchy, 49 Gladwell, Malcolm, 72, 77 Global Consumer Insights Survey, 23 GOOP , 50 Grand Palais, 176, 180 Graves, Michael, 150 Groys, Boris, 45, 46, 57 Gucci, 49, 109–116, 118, 120–122, 153, 171, 174 Gucci and Gucci Ghost, 54 Guerilla Girls, 51 Guess and A$AP Rocky, 54 Gursky, Andreas, 142, 177, 180 Gvasalia, Demna, 52, 58 Gvasalia, Guram, 52 H Hadid, Gigi, 54 Hallucination, 110 Hamlet, 111 Harlech, Amanda, 134 Harrods, 55 Harvard Business Review, 98, 105 HBA and PornHub, 54 Hedonic consumption, 86, 90 Hierarchy of Needs, 87 High Snobiety, 125, 126 Hilfiger, Tommy, 54 Hip, xiii, 45, 64, 73, 74 H & M, 54, 59 Hockney, David, 53 Holistic thinking, 119, 122 HUGO BOSS, 49 Hush Puppies, 72 Hypebeast, 177 Hyperobject, 115, 118, 119, 121, 131 I Ignasi Monreal, 113 IGTV, 82 iMac, 118

188

INDEX

Ingres, 111, 120 Innovation, 6, 22, 27, 31, 32, 36, 44, 48, 52, 56, 129, 136, 170, 173 IQ, 97

The Luxury Institute, 23, 25 LVMH, 22, 31, 119, 122, 135, 147, 174, 177 Lyon, Lisa, 132

J Jeanne Lanvin, 47, 49 Joshua Vides, 55

M Mackintosh, Charles Rennie, 85 Manet, Edouard, 84 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 54, 132 Marie-Claude Sicard, 86, 89 Marine Serre, 147 Marni, 53 Marqueterie, 148 Martin Margiela with H&M, 54 Maslow, Abraham, 87, 90 Material culture, xiv, 4, 6, 9, 11, 12, 31, 44, 63, 64, 76, 82, 86, 100, 102–104, 119, 128, 147, 156, 170–172, 179, 184 Matsuyama, Tomokazu, 117, 118 McKinsey, 21, 22 McKinsey Global Fashion Index, 22 McQueen, Alexander, 46, 49, 57 Menkes, Suzy, 36, 38 Metacognitive CQ, 98 #metoo movement, 68 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 52, 120, 130, 136, 137, 141, 160 Miami Vice, 150 Millais, John Everett Sir, 111 Millenials, 49, 116, 117, 176 Mizrahi, Isaac, 72 Molly Molloy, 53, 54 Moncler Genius, 131, 137 Mondrian dress, 55 Monocle, 157, 163 Moon Parka, 33, 34 Moritz, Rose, 126 Morton, Tim, 115, 118, 121 Morris, William, 50, 84 Mosakowski, Elaine, 98, 103–105

K Kapferer, Jean-Noël, 12, 13, 17, 20, 24, 25, 37, 146, 161 Kate and Laura Mulleavy, 134 Kawamura, Yuniya, 6, 11, 12, 77, 86, 90 Keepall bag, 127, 136, 137 Kering, 22, 113, 119 Kevlar, 33, 38 Khan, Naeem, 75 Ko, Eunju, 8, 13 König, René, 6, 12 Koolhaas, Rem, 142 Kristen Forss, 53

L 7L, 174 Lagerfeld Steidl Druckerei (LSD), 174 l’ajouré, 148 Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 84 Le Depot, 52 Lightning Fasteners Ltd. Zipper, 130 Loos, Adolf, 85 Louis Vuitton, 18, 49, 50, 54, 127, 136, 137, 174 Lucinda Chambers, 53 Lukas Urbicht, 126 Luke Jerram, 127 Luxury code, 21, 173 Luxury Goods Worldwide Market Observatory, 20

INDEX

Moschino, 55 Moss, Kate, 75 Motivational CQ, 98, 99 Murakami, Takashi, 137, 177, 179 Musée d’Orsay, 84 Museum at FIT, 136 Museum of Modern Art, 117 Museum of the Moon, 127, 137 Musk, Elon, 127 Mussard, Pascale, 153

N NASA, 127 New Look, 129 New Museum, 126 Newness, 45, 46, 48, 52, 56, 66, 117, 134 Nike, 55, 125, 126, 136, 177 NikeCraft, 126, 136 Nike Mercurial, 126, 128 North Face Japan, 32 NOWNESS, 147 Nudelman, Zoya, 45, 57

O Obama, Michelle, 75 Ono, Yoko, 52 Ophelia, 111 Osti, Massimo, 34, 35

P Paco Rabanne, 20 Palace and Adidas, 54 Palace of Versailles, 83 Palais Royal, 155 Paltrow, Gwyneth, 50 Paquin, Jeanne, 47 Parisi, David, 85, 89 Parsons School of Design The New School , 64

189

P. Christopher Earley, 98, 103–105 petit h, 153 Pharell and Adidas, 54 Pharell and g-star raw, 54 Picasso, Pablo, 117 Pigalle, 147 Pinault, François Henri, 113 Playboy Carti, 127, 137 Prada, Miuccia, 50, 141–144, 149, 153, 160, 171 Pratt Institute, 68 Prown, Jules, xiv, 4, 12, 63–69, 76, 84, 86 PwC, 23 R Red House in Bexleyheath, England, 50 Rei Kawakubo, 35, 36 Reiss, 18 Rembordé, 148 Riccardo Tisci and Nike, 54 Riello, Giorgio, 6, 12, 86, 89 Rihanna and Puma, 54 Rihanna (Robyn Rihanna Fenty), 119, 122 Rissanen, Timo, 132, 138 Rivetti, Carlo, 34 Rocamora, Agnès, 86, 90 Rodarte, 129, 134–136, 138, 139, 171 Rothko, Mark, 68, 76 Roy Lichtenstein shirt dress, 55 S Sachs, Tom, 126, 128, 136, 142, 177 Saint Honoré, 134 Saint Laurent, Yves, 55, 82 The Sartorialist, 73, 77 Save the Robots, 74 Savile Row, 46

190

INDEX

Schuman, Scott, 73, 74 Schumpeter, Joseph Alois, 27, 28, 31, 37 @sebacuri, 151 Sebastian Errazuris, 126 Secret Garden, 83 Sensory gating, 103 Serra, Richard, 133 Shakespeare, William, 111 Shang Xia, 179 Shigetaka Kurita, 116, 117 Shinkle, Eugenie, 85, 89 Silver, Cameron, 134 Simmel, Georg, 5, 11 Simons, Raf, 50, 54, 144, 160 Sims, David, 54 Slow fashion, 135, 139 Social media, 18, 49, 52, 74, 86, 117, 153 Space Program, 126 Space Program 2.0: MARS, 126 Space X, 127 Spearman, Charles, 95 Spencer, Herbert, 5, 11 Spiber, 33, 34 Spiritual patrimony, 67 STEIDL, 174 Sternberg, Robert J., 95–97, 101, 104, 105, 175 Stiglitz, Joseph E., 28 Stone Island, 32, 34, 35 Stylus, 23, 24, 28 Super flat, 177 Supreme, 38, 54 Surrealists, 54, 142 T Tailoring, 45, 46, 57 Tech pack, 48 Teng, Yeohlee, 131, 137, 138 Theory of Multiple Intelligences , 97, 104

Theory of the Leisure Class, 7 Thoreau, Henry David, 152 threeASFOUR, 51, 52, 58, 184 Tisci, Riccardo, 13 Tönnies, Ferdinard, 5 Transmedia, 83, 88, 89, 101, 102, 111–116, 120, 121, 142–144, 148, 149, 153, 154, 156–159, 170–172, 178, 184 Trickle-across, 6 Trickle-down, 6 Trickle-up, 6, 53 Trompe l’oeil , 115

U Uniqlo and Lemaire, 54 Unity Marketing, 23

V Vanitas , 110 van Noten, Dries, 49 Veblen, Thorstein, 5, 11, 12 Vetements, 51, 52, 54, 58 Victoria & Albert, 52, 133 Virgin Galactic, 127, 137 Virgin Group, 127

W The Walpole, 19 Warhol, Andy, 177 Weak signals, 10, 36, 74, 77, 134 Wedgwood, Josiah, 128, 137 Weinstein, Harvey, 68 Wertheimer family, 154, 155, 160 Women’s Wear Daily (WWD), 134, 147 Worth, Charles Frederick, 47 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 85

INDEX

Y

YouTube, 11, 82, 110, 112, 153

191

Z Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET), 103, 106 Zero waste fashion, 132, 138