Over the space of 20 years, luxury changed enormously. The Japanese had been a set of new consumers for luxury, but in terms of numbers they hadn’t eclipsed the US as the biggest market for luxury.
China’s ascent into the WTO (World Trade Organisation) made a lot of business people and politicians a lot richer. China challenged the US in terms of luxury market size. On their rise, Chinese consumers changed a lot in their sophistication as they educated themselves on luxury consumption.
These new consumers picked up new traits such as wine drinking. This also meant that luxury goods became new asset classes as Chinese money looked to acquire only the best. Chinese culture in turn impacted luxury design. Chinese new year became more important than Christmas.
Then there was the second generation money. Young rather than old consumers. Consumers who were looking for something less formal, either because they didn’t wear anything but streetwear or they worked in the creative classes rather than the traditional professions and high finance.
The industry had traditionally avoided rap artists and R&B singers, now Jay Z and Beyonce are the face of Tiffanys and Fendi had collaborated with Rihanna.
They no longer wanted to have to wear a jacket and tie to have afternoon tea at the Mandarin. They took an eclectic look more attuned to the Buffalo Collective than Vogue Italia.
You had hybridisation with the street to create a new category of luxe streetwear in a way that also owes a debt to football casual terrace wear and the pain.
Now you have Zegna badge engineering approach shoes from alpine brand La Sportiva and Prada has done a similar thing with adidas’ iconic Stan Smith tennis shoes. Balenciaga with their Speed Sock looks like a mix between Nike’s flyknit football boots and the Nike Footscape sole.
Luxury has traditionally reflected status. Goods of a superior nature that the ‘wrong sort’ of people would never be able to afford. Luxury then became a symbol that you’d made it. In Asian markets, particularly China, luxury became a tool. People gifted luxury products to make relationships work better. It also signified that you are the kind of successful business person that partners could trust. You started to see factory managers with Gucci man bags and premium golfwear to signal their success. Then when the scions of these business people and figures in authority were adults, luxury has become about premium self expression.
How China’s Beauty Calendars Defined an Era’s Aesthetics | SixthTone – the history of China’s beauty calendars is the history of China opening up and closing back down again. The beauty calendars aren’t high art or pornography like the Perelli calendar of old. But for the time, they were at the bleeding edge of changing social norms after Mau. The calendars declined when the Xi administration stopped state owned enterprises giving or receiving calendars.
The UK Is Trying to Stop Facebook’s End-to-End Encryption | WIRED – THE UK IS planning a new attack on end-to-end encryption, with the Home Office set to spearhead efforts designed to discourage Facebook from further rolling out the technology to its messaging apps. – Unsurprisingly Patel is using child molestors as its excuse. No words about how metadata and good police work can get around the limitations of encryption. When you take this in account with the new police bill going through parliament, it all looks exceptionally authoritarian in nature
Elite wars – The Ruffian – I understand why campaigners and commentators are upset by Sewell’s tone and by the over-managed press launch. But loudly complaining about this kind of thing while refusing to engage constructively with the arguments of the report seems irresponsibly trivial. After all, what’s at stake here is far more important than a dispute between elites over tone, terminology and media management. Everyone is in agreement that racism is a serious problem in Britain. Shouldn’t we focus our disagreements on what to do about it? – well worth reading the whole article and the reports that it links to. The Conversation covered most of the opposing views high points here: Race commission report: the rights and wrongs | The Conversation
The split economy is used a term differentiate from the sharing economy. I first heard of it on the Robin Hood Snacks Daily podcast. The sharing economy has been discussed ad infinitum and is very popular. It encompasses high growth businesses like AirBnB, Uber and DoorDash.
The split economy is used to differentiate itself from the sharing economy. They have some elements in common. Like the sharing economy, the split economy focuses on maximising the utilisation of assets. The difference is that the consumer isn’t paying for a just a service, but also fractional ownership of an underlying asset.
An example would be fractional ownership of sports cars via ‘clubs’ :
Curvy Road
AutoXotica
Exotic Car Share
Fractional ownership of art:
Feral Horses
Masterworks
ArtSquare.io
None of these are necessarily ‘new’ business ideas, but they are now starting to get heat behind them.
Pacaso
Snacks Daily discusses a company called Pacaso. Pacaso buys high end properties and then divides it up into fractional ownership. They then charge a management fee to configure the home with personal pictures, a full fridge, fresh laundry and extensively cleaned. Its a sophisticated boutique experience, that is cheaper than full ownership, but with all the practical benefits.
Back in the day, Pacaso would have been described as a timeshare business. However the reputation of timeshares has been tainted by high pressure selling and criminality. Split ownership allows Pacaso to put distance between the timeshare sector and itself. It allows the business to ride the coat tails of valuations enjoyed by sharing economy companies.
Adult male virginity soars | Boing Boing – There are far more merciless forces in play, not least dating and hookup success being forced onto the same algorithmic curve as everything else on social media; the increasingly hypnotic impulse to live lives online; and the generally hopeless economic circumstances of young people who are getting very little out of life, but haven’t yet decided to burn it all down – interesting disparity between men and women in the data. I think the reasons behind adult male virginity soaring are multi-causal. I can see how adult male virginity trends will be be endlessly kicked around by a football to suit one viewpoint or another
China
How much will China grow as an export market? | Hinrich Foundation – Policy makers are currently in a conundrum over how best to engage economically with China. Underlying much of the debate is the assumption that China is a huge and rapidly growing market. While that has historically been true, the falling import intensity of China’s economic growth suggests a more limited market than foreign exporters assume
A number of Hong Kong oligarchs brought up in mainland China, initially made their money on smuggling materials into China. This was back when the country was closed off. This included luxury goods, oil, truck tyres, machine parts or antibiotics. For instance, casino magnate Stanley Ho made his first fortune during world war II and the aftermath smuggling luxury goods from Macau into China. So it didn’t surprise me to see Fujianese Chinese connections involved in smuggling crude oil into North Korea.
New York Times YouTube channel
The New York Times Visual Investigations team used a mixture of old school investigative journalism and open source intelligence techniques championed by Bellingcat to blow open the story.
A Brief History of Semiconductors: How The US Cut Costs and Lost the Leading Edge | by Employ America | Mar, 2021 | Medium – As the industry matured and the competitive environment changed, the policy framework shifted as well. Since the 1970s, industrial policy has been incrementally replaced by a capital-light “science policy” strategy, while mammoth “champion firms” and asset-light innovators have replaced a robust ecosystem of small and large production-focused firms. While this strategy was initially successful, it has created a fragile system. Today, the industry is constrained on one side by fragile supply chains narrowly tailored to the needs of a few firms with enormous investment moats, and on the other side by the many asset-light design firms who are unable to generate or capture process improvements – this going into reversal is going to offer a bonanza for semiconductor manufacturing equipment vendors
Hong Kong Cantopop singer Eason Chan cuts ties with Adidas after brands reject forced labour – probably one of the odder celebrity backlashes against western companies not wanting to use forced labour in its supply chains. Chan is a Cantopop singer, he has low to no exposure to the mainland. His fan base is in Hong Kong and amongst the Hong Kong diaspora. On balance, give the age profile most of his fans will be ‘yellow’ in terms of their viewpoint. He is doing himself no favours by putting his head over the parapet. His fan base will shrink because of his hyper ‘blue’ alignment. I wonder what brought about his performative outrage. It carried more weight than Hong Kong politician promising not to wear another Burberry scarf until the brand backtracked on using Uighur picked cotton.
Luxury Brands Are Moving Into Online Stealth Mode. But How Can They Measure Success? – At the beginning of this year, Italian fashion house Bottega Veneta signed off its social media accounts not with a bang, but with silence. The move, which was followed by the removal of its content on its Weibo account, was praised by many and marked a decided shift in the wider luxury market between brands that choose to be more inclusive in mindset, and those that are taking a more exclusive approach with their customers – I was surprised when many luxury brands went on to social media in the first place. On the flipside it makes complete sense for premium streetwear brands like Moncler.
H&M boycott in China intensifies over Xinjiang supply issue | Marketing | Campaign Asia – The statement surfaced on social media yesterday and sparked an online storm of opinions. Comments on Weibo included “get out of Chinese market”, “the company’s clothes sucks, and I will no longer buy”, and “I heard that you are boycotting Chinese cotton, then I will boycott your products”. Chinese actor Huang Xuan has also terminated his relationship with the brand, according to reports. On his Weibo account, he posted a statement that said he was “firmly opposed to any attempt to discredit the country”. Those calling for a boycott claim that international sanctions against China are unjustified and based on “biased reports in foreign media and from international human rights campaigners”. – its a day with a ‘y’ in it, which means that China will be waging war by other means. The most recent high profile example would be the way Lotte was run out of China. The sooner the west start boycotting the Chinese market and supply chain the better. More at the FT – H&M and Nike face China backlash over Xinjiang stance | Financial Times
Technology
Molson-Coors Discloses Cybersecurity Incident that Affected Production in 8-K Filing | Data Privacy + Cybersecurity Insider – Molson Coors Beverage Company (the “Company”) announced that it experienced a systems outage that was caused by a cybersecurity incident. The Company has engaged leading forensic information technology firms and legal counsel to assist the Company’s investigation into the incident and the Company is working around the clock to get its systems back up as quickly as possible.
Porsche enlisted Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter (aka Bill & Ted) to promote their new electric powered sports cars. There is so much to unpack here.
I suspect Porsche wanted to target gen-xers (and more likely early millennials) with a mid-life crisis. They probably wanted something that was memetastic.
While I am in the right age group, I am not necessarily in the right income bracket, so I am not their target market. From my perspective, there was some interesting choices.
Bringing in Alex Winter alongside Keanu Reeves was to signal that this isn’t about the ‘cool’ Keanu of Point Break, The Matrix, Cyberpunk 2077 or John Wick. Instead its closer to the ‘Dad cool’ of Apple executives – not really cool at all, but it might be fun.
The film itself is shot in a style reminiscent of Top Gear, even going as far to feature former Top Gear US presenter Tanner Foust.
This didn’t make Porsche feel like the luxury good that it is. It didn’t make it aspirational to own a Porsche. And I think that’s a problem.
Netscape
Netscape Navigator was the first internet browser that I used on a regular basis. This happened whilst I was at college. There were a few other browsers SpyGlass which was bundled with some internet services (and eventually Microsoft Internet Explorer) and NCSA Mosaic. The word in the college computer lab was that Netscape Navigator was the one you wanted. My first copy was bundled on a floppy disk sellotaped to the front cover of MacFormat magazine.
This video goes into the rise and fall of Netscape.
TeamLab
Experiential agency TeamLab have come up with an amazing experience in central Tokyo sponsored by TikTok. It is held at the Rinkan Sauni in the Roppongi district of Tokyo.
Goddess of Spring
Disney’s Goddess of Spring is set to classical music like Fantasia. It was designed as a short and the study used these series of short films to experiment with animation techniques. This episode of ‘Silly Symphonies’ was the first time they had experimented with human animation. The techniques are gone into more depth here.
MacOS X
The modern Mac operating system is 20 years old this year. I remember getting it to run on the iBook laptop that I owned back then. MacWorld have put a potted history together on how the modern Mac operating system came into being here.
FCA brings money laundering charges against NatWest | Financial Times – UK banks have a reputation for industrial scale money laundering; with the anti-laundering regulations only inconveniencing small players. That the NatWest my only surprise is that it wasn’t HSBC. Why HSBC rather than NatWest? HSBC have long had a reputation for money laundering. Secondly, HSBC’s handling of the Hong Kong protests, and then its strange pivot towards China despite its involvement in Huawei CFO case. Compare this to the NatWest that the UK government still partly owns due to the 2008 financial crisis
