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ETERNAL LIFE
Last Friday we had an interesting moment of reflection with our students on the eternal life of a fashion brand, the relationship between its corporal existence strictly linked to the figure of the founder and its corporate aspects, in particular concerning the kind of management when the founder is alive and the exploitation of his legacy when died, retired, or removed from his own creature by the financial owners of the brand.
Everything started from a massive posting of pictures on Facebook portraying Kate Moss underlined by the claim: “there’s only one Kate in London” in occasion of the English Royal Wedding. Nothing particularly relevant whether the name of the bride wasn’t Kate and her dress wasn’t designed by Sarah Burton, previously Alexander McQueen’s right hand, then chosen by PPR to take his place after he died. This was a so called “internal choice” well explained at that time by Luca Solca, analyst at Sanford Bernstein: “the Group has learned since Tom Ford’s exit from Gucci it was more important to focus on the brand rather than on the enormous visibility of the designer”. Some influential opinion makers asserted that LVMH must have been thinking the same waiting for a John Galliano’s wrong move in order to fire him from Dior and de facto to seize the brand bringing his own name. And McQueen‘s followers must have been comparing the Kate Moss hologram of Weird Science S/S 2009 by Alexander (a massless ghost representing eternity, in fact haunting back as unconscious association) and the Kate Middleton wedding dress by Sarah Burton (a mass zombie, putting back into forced life Alexander McQueen for targeting the audience of the wedding gossipers). The poor Sarah Burton is in a tricky position.
As reported by The Guardian, probably embarrassed, she firstly denied to comment around the decision to make the dress, but at the end she sketched, François Pinault made her the best compliments and, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, Saks wholesalers exulted: “it will have an influence on wedding wear and translate into trends in evening wear”. Now, those claiming of being Alexander’s purists are arguing the designer would never say yes to this commercial operation despite the potential benefit on the sales, because critical towards a certain kind of royal englishness and because accustomed to choose his endorsers not according to their hype but to their nearness to his concepts. Once he told: “I can’t get sucked into that celebrity thing because I think it’s just crass. I work with people I admire and respect. It’s never because who they are (…). What you see in the work is the person itself. And my heart is in my work”. Second, the purists are arguing that the wedding dress is not including any McQueen identifier and could have been designed by anybody for everybody. Something happened also in the official collections in which the identifiers of the house were strongly reduced, when not completely missing. On the other side we have the minority position among our fashion students (who are also the leading voice of the future consumption): business is business, in fashion too, otherwise it was art, so it’s not a cynical affair but only how life goes (and death with it). There’s no conflict between corporal and corporate, design and management, as fashion means commercialization of creativity, so exactly what PPR is doing of Alexander McQueen, LVMH is probably going to do with John Galliano, and more silently what Diesel did with Maison Martin Margiela.
Between a massless ghost and a mass zombie the line is thin but signing out the border. Maximum there’s an ethic distinction, minimum a good/bad taste one. Anyway, let’s be for a moment equidistant between the two positions. In the case of Alexander McQueen, saying “no thanks” to Kate Middleton’s demand for the wedding dress would mean in my opinion generating more buzz than telling “yes, please” and then commenting its a good way to extend the sales to evening dresses. There’s a positive precedent: Christian Dior, when still alive and kicking, denied a dress to Brigitte Bardot acting in the movie “Her Bridal Night” directed by Gaspard-Huit. Scandal and great buzz, but stage and celebrities were to him vulgar representations of a fashion-luxury that should instead stay untouched in its direct relationship between creator and client, person-brand and person-consumer, avoiding to incarnate in the body of a star that is in its nature temporary, falling. It’s also thanks to that strong choice by Christian Dior that LVMH can afford to dismiss John Galliano, become a star more than Dior as a brand. Amongst McQueen followers, those who can spread the seed of their lost hero, a “no, thanks” would be much more appreciated, so it’s also a matter of which kind of awareness, not only in which quantity of it to go and counting on. Brands bring, and should keep on bringing, the founder’s identity and character, penalty having better revenues in the short term due to the mass dilution, but having in the long term a loss of core followers (who start from that moment to do bad mouth) and a dangerous exposition to the extreme competition on attending the territories of mass indistinction. In the next future, people will ask for extremely defining and characterizing products or, at the opposite, basic and mixable ones. In this way they will build up their identities, and brands should take count of this while shaping theirs. In the beginning of the new millennium, deep social and historical changes ask for strong choices again. There’s no more space for the middle ways. Moreover, those choosing the first option (strong person-brand identity into which for the person-consumer to reflect) will be the same choosing the second (mix & matchable basic products with which for the person-consumer to play with). So, also the categories of “mainstream”, “niche” and “alternative” will decrease their effectiveness. Equal and different will be in the same outfit, a brand has only to choose if being the equal or the different, and whether choosing the second, perfectly telling in what the difference is consisting. So, a “de-McQueenized” Alexander McQueen is a big mistake also in terms of marketing and branding, the recidivistic one previously made with Yves Saint Laurent and Gucci by the same Group. Worst than these, because much harder to think at Alexander McQueen as equal rather than different.
The English brand, acquired by PPR in the year 2000, became profitable in 2007. If not for the charisma of its founder, the property would not have been patient for seven years without heavily intervene. However, the value of this brand was beyond economics because better than any analysis of marketing Alexander as a designer had shown the decadence of the Nineties, denied or hidden by other parties. Death, disease, desolation, alienation, recurring themes in his collections, were a clear reading of the changes of values that would have led to the “trauma”, the crisis then become also economical in the form of a financial collapse. The system had to be able to understand him and enough humble to consider his indications. The company had to encourage him instead of waiting for his profitability and exploiting his legacy after death, moreover going to the opposite direction of his philosophy. This is the clear situation in which design is already marketing and branding, in which the dress is also telling about the society surrounding and, consequently about the way it should be sold or not. Making a brand eternal means having a clear vision, strong values and from here, a mission that is declined to the spirit of the time. Of course a fashion brand has also to sell, it’s depending then on how to do it. Those who are elastically coherent along time will be eternal, the others will be flipping and flopping, screwed up, anaesthetized, killed and artificially put back in life, zombies, or maximum kept alive with marketing injections and ghost designers, in all the evidence, not the same everlasting one by Alexander McQueen with Kate Moss.
As I mourned in my Luxury Hackers, the wicked disjunction between design and marketing made two of the most important designers of our times go out of scene. McQueen imploded and Galliano exploded. In the meantime, the system didn’t create a new movement, a new generation of designers able to sketch down strong statements and to shout them at the megaphone of textiles. We need it. We need new designers and managers speaking the same language, not to repeat the same mistakes of their parents. We need our students to be aware, critical and then creative. What is really missing today is not the power of investment but creativity, also in business. So, we need to think to new patterns and also new ways to think at them, conscious that the newest can be the oldest in different shoes. I think new designers and managers should organize in families or tribes. Small groups able to involve their clients not as mere targets but as shareholders and advocates. Persons with the same passions, believing in the same vision, mission and values. This is a thing that only Comme Des Garçons has been able to do. Rei Kawakubo humble foresight made her promote a group of people bringing on the verb like a pack of hound dogs, helping each other when necessary, playing alone when possible. This is the starting point for a brand for having eternal life, because always kept alive by new comers working according its founding principles and not because dead and celebrated.
Waiting and working for all of this and more to happen in the next future, we welcome the “Savage Beauty” exposition at Met hoping that God, while saving the Queen won’t forget to save McQueen too.
DANILO VENTURI May 9, 2011
SOURCES
Cartner-Morley J., “Alexander McQueen Denies Kate Middleton Wedding Press Reports”, The Guardian.co.uk, March 6, 2011
Evans C., “Fashion at the Edge”, Yale University Press, London-UK, 2007
Friedman V., “Insider Named as Successor to McQueen”, Financial Times, May 28, 2010
Matharu G., “What is Fashion Design?”, RotoVision, Hove-UK, 2010
McQueen A, “Savage Beauty”, Met, NY-US, May 4, 2011–July 31, 2011
McQueen A., “Weird Science S/S 1999”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bCShCcD3N0
Rohwedder C., “Gown Is a Boost for Fashion House”, WSJ.com, April 30, 2011
Sex Pistols, “God Save the Queen”, Virgin, 1977
Venturi D., “Dior Dismissed by John Galliano”, www.luxuryhackers.com, March 19, 2011
Venturi D., “Luxury Hackers”, Lindau, Turin-IT, 2011
Venturi D., “Luxury vs Low-Cost”, Capri Trendwatching Festival, April 29, 2011
Fashion is what everyone want´s to wear til everybody wears it!
For me marketing is the cancer of fashion,let´s hope it will be cured!
If you as a designer decide to sell your creative soul, that´s your choice
to become a slave to current fashion industry!
This industry is going bananas no wonder Miuccia Prada put them in her collection,
in my point of view is one of a few who manages pretty well the balance between
creativity and commercialism.
Wowo
Dear Wowo, maybe you you have an old fashion idea about marketing.
Marketing today is innovation, is creativity and management. The point it’s not anymore between commercialism against creativity.
More than ten years ago Philip Kotler published “Lateral Marketing” based on lateral thinking and creativity. Last year was published “Marketing 3.0″ about innovation. And i could go on more and more for pages…
It’s funny to read your words in a magazine that is an expression even of Marketing Students, the half of participants in Polimoda courses.
Sincerely
Lapo
Roman Empire’s poets were payed by the Emperor to create their poems; then the Medici’s and the Pope payed Renaissance painters and architects for their pieces of art. After the Illuminism, some artists have reached fame and honors while living, some others only after they died.
I do not think we are actually discussing about creativity: the point is whether a Designer could hope to be acknowledged of his art before, or after his death and, just in case it is considered a good thing, who is paying for his art.
My two cents.
Marco
I’m happy to read that my article raised opinions, so I invite all of you to participate to the next meeting of “Attualità”. I’m less happy on reading that we are still far from finding a common language between the two sides, so I would like to add some considerations. An artist who is exposing a work is already marketing and branding, and a man screaming “bananas!” from behind a table of a street market can be creative. Because in the first case how the work is exposed can make the difference, in the second a particular accent or any other particularity invented by the seller can bring to the success or not of those bananas. In any case, if the bananas are not eatable, they are not even sold. I do agree that marketing should be creative, but sorry I still can’t see this creativity in the real practice. Unless we don’t want to affirm that creative marketing means selling art like bananas and bananas like art. In this case I’m totally refusing the idea and adding that this was the scheme that brought to the crisis of values before, to the economical after, and to the financial at the end. When you stop to sell for growing and you start to grow for selling it’s easy to build the famous castle of sand, too fragile to stand the nowadays wind. When you saturate the market with cheap objects claiming to be art, or luxury or fashion, you humiliate art and at the end you don’t even sell the cheap objects. It’s happening in these days to some famous second lines to close, it happened during the last two years also to major brands, some gone into bankruptcy, some others saved by the licenses or by the banks. You know, when Mr. Jones has to give 10 to the bank it’s Mr Jones’ problem, when he has to give 100 it’s the bank’s problem. We can’t hide any longer, beyond the banks interests, according to Altagamma’s data the system was saved by iconic products, by the sales in China and by the small emerging brands filling the depths left empty by the mass merchandisers who were claiming to be luxury. People are not stupid at all, the same ones are applying to the cheapest and to the highest, also in the same day, maximizing emotion and functionality and leaving the “big tales” behind because revealed lies along time. Now, as “fast fashion means slow death” (The Guardian), the time has come to promote fashion with contents, new designers, new brands with new patterns and ideas. Creativity is not dead, while the system is kept artificially alive. In my opinion there is at this point also a generational break, confirmed also by our students in management. During the last “Attualità” they told in their majority of not agreeing with the strategy of Alexander McQueen after Alexander’s death. And they had also doubts about the throw out of John Galliano from Dior. They were not agreeing in transforming everything in “business is business”. It is apparently a paradox because they study management, but it isn’t! We are in the beginning of a new millenium, in the middle of massive social changes and the young generations are thinking like their grandfathers more than like their fathers, with new formats and means of course. They think primitive and technological at the same time. So, the ones who created so many damages among their fathers can’t be also the ones who pretend to recover. And Mr Kotler can’t be the man for all the seasons. In my opinion we need something different, that is not new indeed, but simply the post-modern edition of the primitive. Concepts like form, deform, overform, multiform; construction and deconstruction; subtraction and inversion; compression and decompression; provocation and performance; disjunction and deviation; marginality, subconscious and contrast; life, death and rebirth; pyramid and hourglass; and many others, well, concepts like these can be in design and marketing as well. When a fashion product is conceived, maybe the designer is not conscious, but the product is already containing the information for presenting and selling it. Management has the role to keep the designer shaped and steady in time and space, and to find coherent ways to sell it, with the limits of not pretending to decide the elements of design and of not acting into the opposite direction of the designer’s vision. This is the possible common ground. Our generation has been visibly divided. Well, we are all teachers of the same school, and starting from different points of view we share the responsibility on the future of our students, so it’s up to us not to transfer these divisions to them. Also because, according to the spirit of the time, they are already united. Can we go a step beyond all together? Can we start to talk on how to share and gather instead on how to divide and distinguish? I think so.
Obviously that one who wrote should be coherent with his opinion, now refusing to work for (and earn from) a school and an enterprise (ENTERPRISE, NOT ART STUDIO) that is using cancerous word “marketing” even in his title. Anyway, since we are teaching in the same school, I see a common guide line in on all posts here: isn’t it what Marco remarked in his clear vision, i.e. art has to be (STILL) financed just like ages ago by (new) Lords? Or maybe we should aware that “to market” just means “to put something on the market” and that latest trends, as Lapo remarked, intend to mean market simply as “a group of people to resound with, not target (anymore) to be hit with s.thing” (see Cova et al. 2008). And isn’t it what fashion is trying to do: wearing people, resounding with people, more than hitting target with “commercial suggestions”? It’s one identical basic concept: I personally think that fashion or art aren’t auto-referral when they are a business, as well as an artist, in the, needs to eat just like anyother person. In fact, fashion, or art are to be brought into the market as well (…well fashion is brought also onto the market/group of people as well if meant to wear, as previous post remarked). We should just advise to read both classic and recent publications before posting around “peanuts”, especially when they sound offensive or senseless, especially when someone is discussing about something that he seems to have not any familiarity with.
Hello, dear distinguished colleagues. Are You talking about what? is it fashion industry or fashion art? Are You showing off culture and masterpieces in museums (anyway Picasso had an agent and a marketer), or You, Distinguished Professors, are writing about companies, brands (J.Galliano is a brand, he is a corporate! He designs and produces to market objects with the clear finality to SELL AND EARN, as far as I know. Forgive this old Professor, if it is not right. Anyway I’m pretty sure that it is not so far from truth). Well, let me politely add my few lines: fashion system (or companies), as well as Your Institute, are just economical expressions of society, with the basic and realistic goal of profit, through pleasuring and leisuring activities, or education. Now from my very external point of view, I see that marketing -just like other economic activities- is just one among the many corporate’s functions to get this profit. Sure, such activity and its goal (profit) it is not a sickness needing cures. Maybe, I’d like to add, sickness is making something unsellable and “to be cured” are indeed activities unable to reach a correct financial and fiscal balance at the end of a fiscal year? Are we still talking about fashion companies or benefit for mrs Kate? In this case, I spot an interesting idea under name “Mecenatism”. I’m amazed how I’ll ever let my sonnies studying marketing there (inscription pending), where marketing is boldly sold and so harshly blamed? How could I ever let them learn how-to-do where this knowledge is pissed-off like that? Just one question, if anyone can explain: is in this <> contemplated to make marketing for fashion, then, since it is sounds like being so blamed?
best regards
G. Brown-Aucliffe
There is no denying the face of fashion has changed during these last decades. Haute couture fashion dictators like Poiret and Dior serving only an elite group have long past away, fast fashion chains like Zara and H&M have taken over their rein. But is there really any need to compare this remarkable change to the most terrible disease our society is confrontate with today? Couldn’t we find a way to look at this movement in a positive way? I think we could and should…
Taking inspiration from one of the emerging markets today, I would like to refer to an old and well known chinese symbol and lifestye: ‘Yin and Yang’; meaning there is a negative to every positive, just like there’s a bright side to every dark one. Now I find it quite hard to find the positive aspect of cancer, but I have no trouble detecting the bright side to the imput marketing has in fashion today.
For decades haute couture designers only served or better – dictated – elite groups with, indeed creative, and ridiculously expensive clothing leaving all the ‘normals’ hungry for part of their cake. Nowadays, well oiled production (which also includes a creative designer(s)!), distributing and commercial machines provide every single one of us with part of that same cake. Fashion has become accessible to and affordable for everyone and is that really such a bad thing? Can’t we try to see this as a positive evolution? For decades people felt excluded, not worthy to stroll the streets wearing certain garment, not able to express their hopes and aspirations of being part of society, just because their wallet didn’t allow them to. Fashion has always been a reflection of our society, a mirror to the world, the others, ourselves… A reflection of globalisation, a world growing smaller while population – and markets – keep on expanding. Instead of feeding just an elite group, fashion is feeding everyone now and people have been hungry for so long…
True creative minds and trendsetters will always find a way to express themselves, to individualize from the masses. If there’s even any positive side to cancer it might be the power one gets out of the struggle to survive. The challenge for a creative spirit to let his creativity run wild in order to conquer the pest they consider the commercial and capitalistic beast they call ‘marketing’.
Yin and yang – creative minds and marketeers – might not always be so fond of each other, but it’s a fact that opposites work well together and eventually, lead to the best result. Because what would the world be without a yin to a yang? What would one be without a challenge? Something or someone to give inspiration, motivation? In the end opposites make each other whole and what might have seemed an obstacle at first, a contrary unable to overcome, becomes a source of inspiration and the beginnning of genius.
Creative spirits like McQueen and Galliano might have more trouble finding their way than Dior and YSL did before them, but that doesn’t mean their work is less appreciated. Instead of saving their masterpieces in golden cages in a diva’s mansion, their mindworks are being produced and reproduced, worn and outworn by ‘normals’, commented on, judged and admired, living a life just like everyone of us.
As a student – a young bird in the wild nest called fashion – I still have the power (or naivety if you want to call it that way…) to believe we have to keep on searching for a cure for cancer and eventually one will be found. I believe fashion has never been so alive and the collaboration of creative minds and marketeers can only be a blessing. Commercial instincts have made it possible to provide a creator’s work to the public, to let everyone take part in enjoying and admiring a piece of their persona. Marketing has enabled young and/or aspirational people to take a leap of faith and explore their own (hidden) talents and boundaries through the providing of fashion schools all over the world. Schools like Polimoda where creative minds can blossom and commercial senses can flower.
Blossoms and flowers the perfect recipe for healing…
dear Delphine, thank you for your positive contribution to this topic. I find your reflections interesting and constructive! I would like to continue the debate further, in order to find answers to the development and the future of a sector we all love! Polimoda is a great Institute with great people, all with passion for fashion, ready to find the balance between design, marketing and communication. All together we can contribute strongly analysing the changes in society and therefore also in fashion.
As Dean of Polimoda Institute, my greatest wish is to find all together responsible and professional answers and solution to the many questions of the always changing Fashion world.
thanks a lot,
Linda Loppa.