Ged Carroll

Category: style | 時尚 | 유행 | ファッション

Why did I chose style over fashion as a term here? Before the internet fashion meant a series of serial clothing trends. Before the second world war, this went across both young people and adults depending on their income.

After the war, you started to see the rise of teenagers as a distinct consumer group with their own fashions and disposable income. Over time youth as a concept began to become attenuated and society started to discriminate against older people.

As I write this some of the luminaries of streetwear are in their late 50s and 60s. Shawn Stüssy will be 68 this year and was designing streetwear for Dior for their fall and winter 2020 collection. I know the Dads of college age kids who still skateboard and working in the creative side of advertising I still wear streetwear myself.

Japan’s style bible Hail Mary features models and style icons who are at least that age or even older.

At the same time, culture and fashion have become massively parallel. On the one hand you have brands selling timeless workwear, on the other you have companies like Shein and Boo.com who have been turning out new fashion ranges in a matter of weeks by carefully scrutinising Google search data and social media content.

All of this has created massive waste, despite the supposedly environmentally concerned high anxiety younger generations who feel that they are facing an existential crisis.

Fashion doesn’t neatly cover all of these tensions that are driving the apparel industry at the moment. And I haven’t even talked about body positive extending sizing that suppliers are now starting to address.

  • Sean Coombes reinventing his label

    The New York Times has an interesting article about how Sean Coombes is trying quite successfully to walk his urban fashion label out of the cliche it had become. Though his business is worth some 400 million USD annually, Coombs has seen the writing on the wall of the scene and rather than cater for the limited market of Ali G impressionists is trying to move more upmarket. The urban fashion scene has become as tired as the sound of R&B and rap music, in the way that 80’s rock got into treading the same groove over and over again to make money.

    In the US, labels like Ecko, Sean John and Phat Farm have been co-opted by preppie clientele. There is a certain irony in this as Phat Farm often aped preppie and collegiate looks for the hip-hop community. Now Phat Farm has been co-opted by desperate brands such as Motorola looking for a hook-up, Russell Simmons sold out leaving the company to an international conglomerate. Brands like Gap and Abercrombie and Finch have stolen much of the look. While in Europe, genuine workwear brands like Carhartt and Dickies that were part of the real prison yard baggy look have combated the new pretenders by acknowledging their fashion customer base and participating in associated activities like music and extreme sports.

    Coombs is using his womenswear range as a Trojan horse to get into the department stores that otherwise would not have carried his usual clothing range. More on fashion here
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  • PSP + more news

    PSP

    The PSP has fired the imagination of grass roots developers already, which bodes well for its competition from Gizmondo – the Tiger and Microsoft-backed alternative. Nintendo’s DS doesn’t make claims to be any form of ‘convergence device’, but an honest mobile games console which focuses on playability rather than speeds and feeds. iPSP allows you to synch music with iTunes, carry your iPhoto library around with you and back up game data on to your Macintosh. Whilst Sony would probably not approve of this close linkage between the PSP and Apple’s iLife suite, it will not harm sales of the device amongst generation iPod.

    Expect sales of PSP movies and Sony Connect sales to be on the low side as PSP early adopters rip from their DVD and MP3 collections instead. Sony’s best option as with games is to go for exclusive movie and music content for the PSP.

    Folksonomy

    Folksonomy seems to have caught the imagination of both News.com and Charles Arthur’s contribution of netimperative. Yahoo’s purchase of Flickr is seen not only as a way of getting hold of a great info-imaging service, but also of harnessing a grassroots approach to creating true contextual searching.

    Mobile TV

    According to the Global Telecoms Business top five stories newsletter that NTL and O2 have announced which TV channels will be available to the 350 test subjects during their six month-long trial in Oxford. The 16 channels involved come from BSkyB, Chart Show TV, Discovery Networks Europe, Shorts International and Turner Broadcasting.

    Customised Nike sneakers

    In New York, Nike has extended their design your own trainer programme to billboard signs that you can manipulate via phoning a free phone number. Your specification can be shared via an SMS message. There is still no option to allow people like Jonah Peretti have Sweat Shop sewn on his set of trainers.

    8vo: On The Outside

    Finally ‘8vo: On the Outside’ is going to be launched. Written and designed by Mark Holt and Hamish Muir, based on their work designing for the likes of the famous Hacienda nightclub and changing and its influence in the emergent typographically-led design movement in the UK during the late 80s and through the 90s.

  • G Collection

    Godiva have come out with some bling-bling chocolates designed by a pastry chef appropriately named the G collection. The G collection moves Godiva deeper into luxury territory than it already is. It also marks a change in luxury that started with premium fragrances. Luxury is now about (relatively) accessible experiences, rather than its traditional space of luxury goods. 

    This kind of chocolate is designed to evoke the bespoke chocolates that would be available at the best restaurants and hotels. Obviously Godiva might be making this at a slightly more industrial scale.

    Godiva is thinking about the G collection as a halo brand. Think about the relationship between a Mercedes-AMG GT and the Mercedes A-Class saloon. Both have prestige positioning, but there is a world of difference in price and what the car says about you.

    They were ostentatious in nature. They are statement chocolates. It is an ostentatious enough for a statement gift and highly Instagrammable. The G collection are impressive, well crafted but not necessarily any better than other premium chocolates. It is much more about appearance, or more precisely about being seen. That being seen is important. I wouldn’t be surprised if you had many people gift the chocolates to themselves so that they can show on their social channels that they are living their best life. 

    The real question is who is the customer base who would pay for these chocolates. If you are really that well off, you would be able to get access to an artisan chocolatier and that does make you wonder about the seriousness of the product launch. The prices are that eye wateringly expensive. Godiva are looking to have the chocolate equivalent of Cristal or a bottle of Grey Goose vodka, so expect to see them in a Snoop Dogg video soon. Kudos to Trendwatching for the heads up. More luxury related posts here.