Haute Couture’s Diffusion & pyramid marketing schemes, and Swedish Furniture made in Mexico (update: Jan 15, 2010)
When Kanye West’s Auto-Tune malfunctions in the studio, he resorts to the next best thing: wearing Cher’s Uninhibited.
I was at that rat’s maze some of you know as Ikea. Normally I go there to play “gay couples vs. mail order brides,” tallying up which group has a higher head count before my visit is up. I actually like Ikea’s stuff. Snobs may poo-poo it as disposable furniture, but that is precisely the charm of it. Who wants to live with the same furniture forever unless is it’s an authentic Shaker dresser? Ikea gives you the living space of the season, and it’s affordable enough to toss if you wake up one morning on the wrong side of bed and hit your head on that armoire.
Modern high fashion, another concept that changes with every season, by contrast, is pure smoke and mirrors. That’s why I roll eyeballs and muffle a laugh when I hear our girls go ga-ga over brand labels and furiously name-dropping designers as if being “associated” with those names is a validation ticket to more woman. It’s no different than Asian women purchasing luxury items as simulacrum for an identity.
I tried valiantly to remember a tv documentary I saw almost twenty years ago. It was an incisive and critical look at the fashion industry. This was just at the nascent stages of supermodel worship, so most of the program concentrated on the nuts-and-bolts of fashion marketing. My memory failing me, I dragged out my trusty old Sony Betamax, plugged it in, and who would have known! That very videocassette is still in the player. It is Gina and Jeremy Newson’s The Look (1992) produced by Janet Street-Porter for BBC-2. It’s a fantastic, eye-opening program. I was surprised you can’t even find it mentioned online. When I typed in “fashion industry”+”documentary”+critical, all that turned up were more supermodel infatuation films. I guess people just can’t handle the truth.
Among some of the gems discussed in the program is the notion of seating at a fashion show. Celebrities and magazine editors jockey for the most prestigious front row seats, but they are also the worst seats in the house. All the photographers stand in front of you and you see nothing. But it’s important to be seen in those seats. What’s more, if you’re a magazine fashion writer and you say one bad word about a collection, you won’t be invited back the next show. So in order to give us fashion advice, these editors who crave the most prominent seats have to brown-nose the designers just so they’ll be invited back another season. But in order to get that invite, they can’t say a critical word about the collection. And we’re taking fashion advice from these tastemakers? Isn’t that a conflict of interest?
The concept of diffusion is the most fascinating item for me. A collection showcases a dress for $30,000 on a runway. 6 people (mostly nouveau riche ladies of middle eastern oil tycoons alongside wives of junk bond dealers) can afford it. The label gets brought down a notch to a $3000-$5000 dress and now hundreds of people who want to purchase the simulacra of taste and breeding hand their credit cards over. The designer adds a consumer line to their collection (Emporio Armani, Armani Exchange, DKNY, Lauren, Brooks Brothers 346) and the washed masses rush in to drop $200 -$400 for a simple sweater. Most of the time, the designer themselves don’t even have ANYTHING to do with making the clothes at this level. They merely sell the licensing rights to their name, and some no name clothier from Thailand slaps the purchased logo onto their handiwork and mark it up by 500%. (This aren’t the knockoffs, it’s the *cough* real thing that then gets shipped to U.S. Stores as the genuine brand item.) You wait and you wait for that sale at Macy’s (which comes around approximately every 12 hours). And finally for those who simply need to feel rich and look like Linda Evangelista (oh alright, Gisele Bundchen for you Ugg Boots wearing embryonic fashionistas), they drop what’s left of their week’s pay on a bottle of Eau de Parfum. (Chanel No.5: Total cost of ingredients $3, packaging: $6, Administration $8. Advertising $8. Final price: $62..00 in 1992)
Where do I fit in in this absurdist pyramid? I’d have to say I’ll be at the Goodwill / Oxfam with my trusty measuring tape. And oh can I pick them! My togs are so fetch, when I sashay pass old biddies in Philly, they rise from their wheelchairs in pilled-cardigans grumbling “oh no she didn’t!”
To that I say, “if you think I look antiquated now, wait till you see what I have in store for next season! Grandmama, Please!”
Tags: branding, capitalism, documentaries, fashion, gina newson, haute couture, janet street-porter, jeremy newson, marketing, mythmaking, nouveau riche, perfime, swindle, tastemaking, the look, vogue
