Ged Carroll

Category: luxury | 奢華 | 사치 | 贅沢

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.

As I have written elsewhere on this blog:

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.

  • Prada ‘it’ bag + other news

    Prada ‘it’ bag

    Here’s Prada’s New ‘It’ Bag, the Inside – Racked – interesting that Prada is trying to design itself out of its current financial slump due to low demand in Asian markets. Part of the problem that Prada has is retail presence, the poor experiential aspects of the brand and the ease of faking Prada products, especially Prada Sport products. More luxury related posts here.

    Ethics

    The “dreams” of Google’s AI are equal parts amazing and disturbing | Quartz – I can see this taking the place of fractals and stereographs in culture

    Class ceiling? City firms enforce ‘posh’ hiring test | CNBC – and this is news because? It’s been this way for decades

    Gadget

    Apple TV’s 4K Future – I, Cringely – interesting data around bandwidth requirements. More gadget related posts here.

    How to

    Google Trends Now Shows the Web’s Obsessions in Real Time | WIRED – absolutely huge for marketers and PRs

    Luxury

    Montblanc touts adventure with elaborate video campaign – Luxury Daily – interesting how this links back to sales

    Media

    Introducing autoplay video and a new standard for viewability | Twitter Blogs – because consumers want auto-playing video ads (NOT). This is going to be as annoying AF, I am surprised that Twitter learned the wrong lessons from watching Facebook

    Online

    Facebook Moments App Helps Users Swap and Organize Photos | SocialTimes – interesting expansion of Facebook’s app constellation into pictures

    Security

    Why Facebook’s New Photo App Isn’t Coming Out in Europe | TIME – creepy facial recognition technology

    Software

    Android-based Huawei smartwatch delayed in China due to ban on Google services | South China Morning Post – at the moment Huawei doesn’t have an alternative to integrate with, but that may change (paywall)

    Web of no web

    China’s NetDragon makes bid for Promethean World to widen its compass in online education | South China Morning Post – really interesting acquisition. Online games to smart boards (paywall)

  • Corporation tax + more things

    Amazon to begin paying corporation tax on UK retail sales | The Guardian – it is good to see that Amazon is paying corporation tax. But the thing no one is asking is how does this affect businesses that might have ‘global accounts’, for instance Ford, Colgate and HSBC’s relationship with WPP? Does this mean that clients will suddenly start getting bills on a per country basis for corporation tax rather than in one place? What happens when different tax authorities have different views on what is earned where?

    Why We Have an Oversupply of Almost Everything (Oil, labor, capital, etc.) | Our Finite World – some interesting economic data in here

    The Savoy opens take-away eatery to provide entry point to dining | Luxury Daily – interesting that The Savoy feels the need to do local ‘sampling’

    Huawei launches ‘internet of things’ operating system – FT.com – Paywall

    [1501.02876] Deep Image: Scaling up Image Recognition – interesting machine learning paper from Baidu

    Interview: How did an ex UX designer get 50k WeChat fans? – interesting article and plan

    What will happen to Silicon Valley when demographics strangle the global economy | VentureBeat – this isn’t necessarily as bad as this article makes out mainly because many VCs are sitting on more money than they can invest anyway

    The Blogging Dead: WeChat’s ‘zombie relationship’ invasion｜WantChinaTimes.com – sounds like a classic dunbar number problem, but it is interesting that they consider it to be WeChat specific

    Integrated Intelligence: IWC Connect – Luxury News – interesting wearable concept, they seem to have deliberately avoided the mistakes made by others (including AndroidWear and Apple Watch. Still not convinced however. More luxury related content here.

    Seymour M. Hersh · The Killing of Osama bin Laden · LRB 21 May 2015 – I am not surprised, but the damage that this does to US is huge, particularly the body politic. I recommend reading this critique of Mr Hersh’s critics – The media’s reaction to Seymour Hersh’s bin Laden scoop has been disgraceful – Columbia Journalism Review

  • Yakuza Apocalypse + more

    Yakuza Apocalypse: The Great War Of The Underworld

    Awesome trailer for Yakuza Apocalypse: The Great War Of The Underworld from Takashi Miike

    Yakuza Apocalypse is a visceral shock to the system. It strips away the glamour that surrounds the yakuza in Japanese culture, a bit like like the way the Krays are glamourised in British culture. The reality is rather more squalid, like Tadamasa Goto who is known to have provided information to the FBI. While they didn’t get anything, a grass is still a grass.

    Optical data communications technology

    Really interesting Panasonic technology for data transfer, is it more than a less obvious QRcode in terms of the data that it contains?

    Stüssy x Sophnet

    Stüssy have done a really good collaboration with Japanese brand Sophnet which dropped this week. I managed to pick up a Stüssy x Sophnet t-shirt and hooded top. I was surprised by two things. The quality was more up to the old school Stüssy standard than is usually the case now. Secondly, for a Japanese brand collaboration, they both came in western XXL size. We won’t see the like of this collaboration for a good while again, if ever.

    More luxury related content here.
    stussy

    SoftBank changes tack with adverts

    SoftBank seem to have moved away from their kooky ‘family’ adverts using modern samurai Isao Machii cuts many objects with ”Iaido” sword strokes