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.
The politics of Prada challenged what I knew about the luxury brand. I knew that Prada started off as a handbag company that then pivoted into apparel. I also realised that some Prada items probably borrowed from military clothing design and fabric technology, such as Prada’s iconic black Pocono fabric backpacks.
This is pretty common across Italian design with Stone Island CP Company being prime examples. If you would have asked me about the politics of Prada, I would have expected it to be part of the wider anarcho-far left hatred of all prestige brands.
I didn’t realise that Miuccia Prada’s clothing designs reflected her own left wing, pro-feminist politics. The connections of Prada with yachting has less to do with the politics of Prada and more to do with the passion of her husband and business partner Patrizio Bertelli.
One forgets how politics in Italy, had elements of the far left with the Communist Party and the Red Brigades pitted against reactionary right including the Propaganda Due (P2) masonic lodge and the Bologna central station bombing on August 2, 1980. The politics of Prada is by its nature Italian. More related content here.
Aimé Leon Dore x DJ Stretch Armstrong
Aimé Leon Dore got Stretch Armstrong in for a set playing sublime vintage soul 45s.
Scott Galloway on the intersection of economics and technology
Professor Scott Galloway on the intersection of economics, social trends, consumer trends and technology.
Iran-Contra affair
The Iran-Contra affair was how the president Reagan administration, specifically ‘rogue’ elements within it like Oliver North and John Poindexter, came to swap heavy weaponry with the terrorist sponsoring government of Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages, and how money from these deals came to be diverted to a secret and illegal war in Central America.
Sean Munger provided one of the best accounts of it that I have seen outside of the Congressional report.
The most Hong Kong thing I saw all week
HKIB News – a cable and online TV news channel featured a news story about the first trip of local bus company KMB’s electric double decker bus. At the bus stop was a mix of young and middle aged (mostly) male business enthusiasts. In Hong Kong, bus enthusiasts is much more mainstream in the UK. There are shops that sell die-cast scale models of buses in different liveries, so you can get an exact period-correct bus. Bus enthusiasm and the continued popularity of radio controlled car builds as mainstream hobbies were two distinctive aspects of Hong Kong culture for me.
Much of this is down to the limited size of Hong Kong and the public transport infrastructure. Generations of small children have enjoyed some of their happiest memories starting and ending with a bus trip. Buses are the first line of public transport. Hong Kong, (and Singapore) have a good number of young men and women for which it is the dream career. Which is remarkable given that these are part of the developed world and have a good education system.
Instead in the UK, you have a job that pays minimum wage that no one dreams doing.
An interesting documentary from 1971 that explores the idea of ‘The Irish Race’ – it is one episode in a 10-part documentary series ‘We The Irish’. It features some of Ireland’s leading public thinkers at the time including Conor Cruise O’Brien and Seán Ó Faoláin. ‘Race’ as a term is more problematic now than back then as there were so few Irish people who weren’t white European looking as Ireland was a next exporter of people rather than welcoming inbound migrants until recent decades. Secondly, the Irish people were constantly having to establish their identity, culture, language and accomplishments in the shadow of their former colonial rulers.
Ó Faoláin an internationally famous short-story writer, a key part of the Irish arts establishment and a leading commentator and critic – a role played by the likes of Fintan O’Toole today.
The discussion about the Irish race was an essential part of decolonising the Irish identity; by emphasising Irish distinctiveness and salience rather than reinforcing racial superiority. A process that countries like Singapore and Malaysia would wrestle with in subsequent decades too.
Tracing The Irish Race
Ó Faoláin starts his discussion with the book Facts About Ireland that was published for over three decades by the Irish Government. The book itself is like a more in-depth version of the CIA World Fact Book profile on Ireland. It was available in souvenir shops up and down the country, my parents probably have my copy of the 1979 edition that I purchased from Salmon’s newsagent and post office in Portumna
O’Brien was part of the Irish elite. His father was a journalist for a Republican newspaper pre-independence and he married into the political establishment of the Irish Republic. But that shouldn’t take away from his achievements in the various facets of his career by turns was an Irish diplomat, politician, writer, historian and academic.
The series also marks a different kind of high brow factual television than we are used to seeing now.
The Case for a Hard Break With China | Foreign Affairs – U.S. theorists and policymakers ignored the potential risks of integration with an authoritarian peer. Globalization was predicated on liberal economic standards, democratic values, and U.S. cultural norms, all of which were taken for granted by economists and the foreign policy establishment – the arguments in the article are not new, what’s interesting is that they are being run in Foreign Affairs magazine and that should worry China
Tesla’s secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints | Reuters – Tesla years ago began exaggerating its vehicles’ potential driving distance – by rigging their range-estimating software. The company decided about a decade ago, for marketing purposes, to write algorithms for its range meter that would show drivers “rosy” projections for the distance it could travel on a full battery, according to a person familiar with an early design of the software for its in-dash readouts. Then, when the battery fell below 50% of its maximum charge, the algorithm would show drivers more realistic projections for their remaining driving range, this person said. To prevent drivers from getting stranded as their predicted range started declining more quickly, Teslas were designed with a “safety buffer,” allowing about 15 miles (24 km) of additional range even after the dash readout showed an empty battery, the source said – fundamentally dishonest
Six Bubble Tea Chains Plan IPOs in Bet on China Consumer Revival – Bloomberg – Firms with fast franchise growth not allowed to list onshore. Mixue, ChaBaiDao, GoodMe among firms weighing listings. Who is to say that these businesses won’t be like Luckin Coffee? If the Chinese government won’t allow them to list at home and they don’t want to list in Hong Kong, one has to wonder about the state of these businesses
A couple of things about this video. Major Australian TV network asked YouTuber ColdFusion to make this documentary. YouTubers are now competing against TV production houses for production briefs. Secondly, the video offers a positive take on how machine learning may impact healthcare.
JustoffJunction.co.uk – genius app for planning British motorway travel, the reason why you would care would be the inflated prices at motorway services stops
The two stand out films of the summer are Barbie and Oppenheimer . Oppenheimer is a biopic of scientist and Manhattan Project lead J. Robert Oppenheimer, based on the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer went on to lead the projects Los Alamos lab. Los Alamos National Laboratory has gone on to do scientific research on defence projects as well as health related projects. Casting of Cillian Murphy provides a good physical resemblance of Robert Oppenheimer.
J. Robert Oppenheimer biopic
Oppenheimer is a complex film with the story told in the form of flashbacks. It also tries to reinterpret Oppenheimer for the present day, with a sense of guilt that Oppenheimer never personally expressed. But Oppenheimer had been concerned about the nuclear arms race and weapons proliferation. He opposed the subsequent development of the hydrogen bomb. These positions along with his friendships with communist party members in the US, led to him losing his security clearance in 1954.
J. Robert Oppenheimer via the US Department of Energy
Barbie
Barbie looks to bring to life Mattel’s toy characters Barbie and Ken. Barbie was introduced in 1959 as a copy of a German fashion doll line. The fashion doll line came out of a cartoon strip in the Bild tabloid newspaper. Mattel went on to buy the German originator and shut it down. But by this time the German doll moulds were bought or copied by manufacturers in Hong Kong and Spain.
1990s vintage Barbie
The Barbie movie addresses head on the cultural and design legacy of Barbie alongside present-day culture wars
Barbie starts off in a matriarchal fantasy world; Ken is represented as a boy toy
Eventually Barbie and Ken end up in the real world. Barbie meet her owner who accuses her of setting unrealistic beauty standards
Ken learns about the male patriarchy, which means a battle of the sexes ensues when they both return to toyland
Barbeheimer
Both Barbie and Oppenheimer were released in the cinema at the same time going head-to-head with Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One. This led to cinema goers taking advantage and buying a ticket to see each film one after the other. The practice of watching Barbie and Oppenheimer as a double-bill became so common it was given its own name Barbenheimer, when then became a thing in the news, on podcasts and social media. It has been credited with listing the business performance of cinemas, while sit on the edge of a recession. In fact in the UK, for some of the weekend, both Picturehouse cinemas and Vue cinemas websites were having trouble handling customer traffic.
Google Tests A.I. Tool That Is Able to Write News Articles – The New York Times – One of the three people familiar with the product said that Google believed it could serve as a kind of personal assistant for journalists, automating some tasks to free up time for others, and that the company saw it as responsible technology that could help steer the publishing industry away from the pitfalls of generative A.I.
I was taken back to to memories of Skeleton Records in Birkenhead during the early 1990s due to a Taylor Swift album mispress. As a young record buyer I used frequent secondhand record shops to pick up promo copies of records. A rock orientated shop would often not realise what they had, this was before widespread internet access.
The gaunt middle-aged shop assistant was sat behind the counter looking at a picture disc of Fish – State of Mind on picture disc. Fish had recently left then popular rock band Marillion and State of Mind was a single from his first solo album Vigil in a Wilderness of Mirrors.
Apparently one of his customers worked as an assistant shop manager, realised what they had and ‘lost’ the record before the distributor came to collect all the copies of the mispress. The reason why the distributor would want to collect the records? Because they played Madonna’s Cherish instead. The shop assistant said to no one in particular, that will be worth something one day. He wasn’t wrong, I have seen prices quoted as high as 650 dollars paid – if the right Madonna or Marillion completist collector actually finds a copy for sale.
Taylor Swift Speak Now Concert at Heinz Field by Ronald Woan
A similar thing happened to Taylor Swift fans this week, who ordered her latest album and ended up with Taylor Swift artwork, but songs from the early 1990s electronica compilation Happy Lands volume 1 playing instead.
This mispress became know as the ‘cursed version’ presumably because of its dark electronic sounds featuring Cabaret Voltaire and others. They might be able to take heart when they realise the such mispresses have become collectors items in the past with an appreciating value.
Back when I was a child, the oil refinery was a cathedral to industry rather than a climate crime scene and working in the oil industry was a cut above working in other industries.
3D printing industry gripped by intrigue, litigation and churn | Financial Times – 3D printing or additive manufacturing is currently used for small batch manufacturing by the likes of GE, Rheinmetall, Airbus and Lockheed Martin. You had a similar set up with CNC milling (including multi-axis machines) and multitasking machines which were confined to manufacturing ‘cells’ until Apple went out and bought thousands of them and had them running in parallel on Foxconn lines manufacturing iPhone chassis’. Additive manufacturing needs its ‘iPhone moment’ to cross the chasm to mainstream use. That is reliant on an innovative client rather than supplier innovation and the current players like Stratasys aren’t in a position to drive this next stage of innovation, but their customers might be.
Letter Statement March2023 | DAIR – Tl;dr: The harms from so-called AI are real and present and follow from the acts of people and corporations deploying automated systems. Regulatory efforts should focus on transparency, accountability and preventing exploitative labor practices.
A number of things have happened that made me think about the idea of the British discount. A fund manager came out and said that UK equities were cheap compared to their counterparts listed on other stock markets and would likely remain so for a long time.
Genuine sale bargains?
There are a number of reasons why these companies may trade at a British discount:
The London Stock Exchanges doesn’t have a reputation for high growth businesses in the same way that the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ does. Instead it has a preponderance of mining companies and similar firms
UK pension funds are discouraged from purchasing stocks
The UK doesn’t foster the kind of businesses that growth investors would want to invest in
British banks don’t particularly want to invest in British businesses beyond property portfolios
Management demonstrate short-termism in their investment approach, as does the banking system
There isn’t a culture of retail share ownership
The UK economy has numerous structural challenges, some of them self inflicted
The British discount goes beyond the stock market, but instead the very nature of the UK itself.
Indebted government
Government debt is ballooning and will continue to do so, yet productivity is stubbornly low meaning the bonds will be ever harder to pay off. Finally as the Liz Truss debacle showed even leadership shows the British discount.
The state Britain has been in
The ideas and concepts the British discount aren’t even new – most of them came from ideas in Will Hutton’s The State We’re In originally published in 1995.
The fund manager can be confident in the British discount to be long-lasting as he knows that neither the Labour Party or their Conservative Party counterparts had managed to address existing structural economic issues. Instead they managed to create new ones.
The Trajectory of China’s Industrial Policies – IGCC – Barry Naughton, Siwen Xiao, and Yaosheng Xu argue that most of the changes in Chinese industrial policy since the mid-2000s can be thought of as being part of a trajectory that seeks to build a policy/planning mechanism, and that shifts the ultimate objective of technology and industry policies from economics to security.
Saudi Arabia’s Barn’s Coffee plans 25 outlets in Malaysia – Malaysia’s Premier Fine Foods plans to establish 25 outlets in Kuala Lumpur as its hub and expand operations to other Southeast Asian countries, including Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, in its aim to have 300 outlets in the next 10 years – interesting franchise coming out of Saudi Arabia
Street Style in Tokyo: “Harajuku Is Like a Fashion Gallery With a Free Entrance” | Vogue – “In present-day Harajuku, there are probably more foreigners walking around than there are Japanese people. They used to be watchers of Harajuku fashion, but now they are players; it’s a new movement in the neighborhood. In this story, there are many Chinese and Korean individuals who seem to enjoy and carry forward the Harajuku fashion of the 1990s and 2000s, rather than simply copying it
Full article: ChatGPT, AI Advertising, and Advertising Research and Education – leading scholars and industry thinkers in our field and neighboring disciplines are actively examining and engaging in debates on AI technologies and their applications to advertising practices and effects. However, we have not imagined such powerful AI technologies as ChatGPT emerging and spreading in the general public so quickly. According to industry estimates, ChatGPT reached 100 million monthly users in the first two months after launch, which makes it the fastest-growing technology application in history, but web traffic has since peaked. ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies in this new phase of AI advancement are expected to completely transform the advertising business and research. More research is urgently needed to gain an understanding of the short- and long-term impacts of this new generation of transformative AI technologies on advertising across the micro, meso, and macro levels
Influence 100: In-House PR Budgets Slashed | Provoke Media – This year, our Influence 100 cohort control a combined spend of $3.7 billion, a drop of more than $1bn on last year’s figure of $4.8 billion and far below 2020’s dip to $4.2 billion, after being at $4.8 billion in 2019. The drop is largely down to a significant dip in the number of our Influence 100 managing top-end budgets. Last year the number who managed budgets of more than $100m was 25% (compared to 27% in 2021), while this year it is down to 17%. The number of CMOs and CCOs managing between $75 and $100m also dropped, from 12.5% last year to 10% (although this is on a par with 11% in 2021), and the next budget bracket, $50-$75m, also saw a drop from 17.5% to 13%, one percentage point lower than 2021. The proportion of communications leaders managing budgets of between $25m and $50m remained the same as last year, at 10%, and the only budget bracket that saw an increase was at the lower end, $10m-$25m, which shot up from 12.5% to 30% – unsurprising given the dip in advertising spend
Materials
Machine learning based design optimisation was used to create additive manufactured brackets for NASA instruments. They feel organic in nature, presumably because they the result of millions of virtual trials, rather like generations of biological evolution.
