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 does the UK rank as a knowledge economy? – Soft Machines – The big story is the huge rise of China, and in this context, inevitable that the rest of the world’s share of the advanced economy has fallen. But the UK’s fall is larger than competitors (-46%, cf -19% for the USA and -13% for rest of EU) – the definition of knowledge economy used in the research doesn’t play to the UK’s strengths in areas like financial services, education, legal services, accounting services and advertising. But there is no denying the overall pattern, that the UK failed to make the knowledge economy work for it in the same way that China, the US or the EU have managed to do over the last decade
Cultural institutions in crisis | Financial Times – Financial losses from Covid-19 are not the only challenges museums face. Well before the pandemic, environmental and social activists were holding western institutions vigorously to account. Museums were already struggling with issues of diversity — both in staffing and, more importantly, in representation in their collections — the status of objects in those collections and calls for restitution. The situation is further complicated by criticism of many traditional sources of philanthropic funding and ongoing concern for the environment. The Black Lives Matter movement and other world events put a renewed spotlight on racism, illuminating the “white gaze” of western institutions. Even as museums scrambled to promise that change was afoot, they found themselves ensnared in further criticism. “Did our lives matter when you STOLE ALL OUR THINGS?” retorted writer Stephanie Yeboah when Hartwig Fischer, director of the British Museum, tweeted solidarity for Black Lives Matter (paywall)
As Understanding of Russian Hacking Grows, So Does Alarm – The New York Times – By staging their attacks from servers inside the United States, in some cases using computers in the same town or city as their victims, according to FireEye, the Russians took advantage of limits on the National Security Agency’s authority. Congress has not given the agency or homeland security any authority to enter or defend private sector networks. It was on these networks that S.V.R. operatives were less careful, leaving clues about their intrusions that FireEye was ultimately able to find. By inserting themselves into the SolarWinds’ Orion update and using custom tools, they also avoided tripping the alarms of the “Einstein” detection system that homeland security deployed across government agencies to catch known malware, and the so-called C.D.M. program that was explicitly devised to alert agencies to suspicious activity (paywall)
Why 2021 will be a bumper year for M&A | Vogue Business – the big three trends for M&A in 2021: conglomerates looking for an opportunity to consolidate, luxury brands stepping up vertical integration by investing in distressed parts of their supply chain, and a focus on investment in digital expertise and the APAC region. – more luxury related content here.
How “God Makes God” is a 1993 CD ROM about probability, game theory, genetic algorithms, and evolutionary strategies | Boing Boing – I remember having my mind blown by this CD ROM at college. It reminded me of Jostein Gaarder’s book Sophie’s World in terms of its approach to making philosophy entertaining and accessible. I remember reading Sophie’s World around the same time as having played How God Makes God. There was something about HyperCard and the CD ROM authoring tools that followed. Amidst all the brochureware there were creators who drove extraordinary media projects, most notably for me was the game Myst, which I don’t think has been bettered. I suspect part of it was the excitement of new ‘hyper-media’, the limitations of the tools (though 640MB storage at the time seemed vast when I was using an Apple PowerBook 165 with 4MB of RAM and an 80MB hard drive at the time) and the media economics of the time. CD-ROM authoring tools were becoming more sophisticated. CD manufacturing plants were proliferating, lowering the cost per CD ROM disk and CD recordable drives were relatively affordable in the price range of $10,000 – $20,000. Still eye wateringly expensive, but this was a vast improvement from just two years before and allowed for better prototyping, small production runs and testing across devices.
Instacart Is a Parasite and a Sham | The New Republic – The gig economy company, like many of its peers, has seen business skyrocket during the pandemic—while exploiting workers and even failing to turn a profit. That last bit reminds me a lot of the first generation dot com companies who tried to break through the wall of economics and succeed by moving at internet speed. This time they seem to have supplemented the usual ‘throw money at it’ approach with a lack of morality
Regulators tell Jack Ma’s Ant Group to rectify five problems – the five areas included: Ant’s inadequate governance; regulatory negligence; unlawful profit-seeking; monopolistic practices and; infringement of consumer rights, said China’s central bank vice governor Pan Gongsheng.
China orders Ant Group to rein in unfettered expansion as regulators put up fences around financial risks | South China Morning Post – Ant must return to its origins in online payments and prohibit irregular competition, protect customers’ privacy in operating its personal credit rating business, establish a financial holding company to manage its businesses, rectify any irregularities in its insurance, wealth management and credit businesses, and run its asset-backed securities business in accordance with regulations, the People’s Bank of China’s deputy governor Pan Gongsheng said in a statement on Sunday.
Luxury
From TikTok to Depop: Fashion’s new trend funnel | Vogue Business – trends like leather, feathers, neutrals or hot pinks, were relatively easy to follow: the trend funnel moved from runway to rack, with some help from popular culture along the way. This year, Gen Z users on TikTok and Depop jumpstarted a new trend funnel, quickly giving rise to aesthetics like “cottagecore” and “dark academia”, influencing young shoppers’s purchases. “If one of your favourite [TikTok] creators changes their aesthetic due to a particular trend, a whole style can be born out of it,” says Yazmin How, TikTok’s content lead. “The fashion industry is no longer the only voice directing the new season’s trends. People are tapping into TikTok to see what emerging styles are ‘in’ and what previously popular trends are coming back around.” TikTok trends manifest into purchases on Depop, where 90 per cent of users are Gen Z. In step with the rise of the cottagecore trend on TikTok, search for the term on Depop rose 900 per cent between March to August, when it reached its peak. Greater connectivity and increased time at home has boosted the amount of these consumer-led movements, and brands whose aesthetics fit the trends are benefiting, like LoveShackFancy, who specialises in the prairie dresses and gingham blouses associated with cottagecore’s countryside aesthetic – reminds me a bit of the Harajuku trends from the past 30 years. Culture and the trends that come out of it, are now massively parallel in nature
Why Bella Poarch’s “M to the B” video was the top TikTok of 2020 – Vox – TikTok automates the mix of all these topics, going farther than any other platform to mimic the human editor.” At the same time, he says, it’s also “an eternal channel flip, and the flip is the point: there is no settled point of interes t to land on. Nothing is meant to sustain your attention.” The result, he argues, is what essentially amounts to “soft censorship,” or a feed that becomes as “glossy, appealing, and homogenous as possible rather than the truest reflection of either reality or a user’s desires.” How did a perfectly average competitive dancer become the No. 1 internet celebrity in the world? Why did half a billion people watch Poarch’s face bob up and down? Because these two women are the logical endpoint of the world’s most powerful entertainment algorithm: young people centering their conventional attractiveness in easily repeatable formats
Retailing
Amazon and the Rise of the Retail “Sniffer” Algorithm | The Fashion Law – the “sniffer algorithm” – or better yet, “one or more” sniffer algorithms that not only sniff out topics that a speaker is potentially interested in but that also “attempt to identify trigger words in the voice content, which can indicate a level of interest of the user.” For example, as Amazon’s patent application states, “A keyword that is repeated multiple times in a conversation might be given assigned a higher priority than other keywords, tagged with a priority tag.” At the same time, “a keyword following a ‘strong’ trigger word, such as ‘love’ might be given a higher priority or weighting than for an intermediate trigger word such as ‘purchased.’” – when does assistance become creepy?
Insecure wheels: Police turn to car data to destroy suspects’ alibis | NBC News – investigators have realized that automobiles — particularly newer models — can be treasure troves of digital evidence. Their onboard computers generate and store data that can be used to reconstruct where a vehicle has been and what its passengers were doing. They reveal everything from location, speed and acceleration to when doors were opened and closed, whether texts and calls were made while the cellphone was plugged into the infotainment system, as well as voice commands and web histories. But that boon for forensic investigators creates fear for privacy activists, who warn that the lack of information security baked into vehicles’ computers poses a risk to consumers and who call for safeguards to be put in place
Web of no web
Tencent backs Chinese healthcare portal DXY in $500M round | TechCrunch – China has done a lot of work to move towards telemedicine and technology augmented health. Tencent’s WeChat was used by local governments for their COVID certificates, tracking and tracing applications. More Tencent related content here.
Creative agency Endeavour sent out the first Christmas card that I received. This year they focused on content rather than design with everything that you need Christmas 2020 – Endeavour.
There was guidance on how to make paper Christmas trees including a green PDF that you can print out if you don’t like the snow white look of unprinted paper and a Spotify playlist.
The Financial Times have put together a series article looking atThe Future of the City. The City in question being the London’s international financial services sector, whose traditional home is the City of London – think Wall Street in New York, or Central in Hong Kong. I found How London grew into a financial powerhouseparticularly informative and all the articles are chock full of charts.
A relatively modern Carroll family Christmas tradition has been my Dad and I watching the BBC adaptations of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People. It will carry extra weight this year due to social distancing and the recent death of John Le Carre. My Dad read his books whilst working shifts during the late 1960s and early 1970s. He used to buy books second hand from a florrid looking book dealer in the local market. I in turn, read my Dad’s books (Len Deighton, Alistair Maclean, Hammond Innes, Robert Ludlum and John Le Carre) as I went through the early years of secondary school. Le Carre was the only one of these authors that I decided to read more than once.
This time, we’ll both be watching them on Blu-Ray whilst keeping the video open on FaceTime to discuss it as we go along.
It doesn’t get more 1990s than this. A skateboarder reading his self-authored poetry. Mike Vallely a professional skateboarder. If my memory serves me right, Vallely rode for Powell Peralta (Bones Brigade) factory team a few separate times during his career. In this video he gives the poetry reading in a LA skate shop back in 1996.
https://youtu.be/QTr2Mvz873c
The Luxury Society held a panel in Shanghai talking about luxury brands and the digital behaviour of the Chinese consumer. More luxury related content here.
I started thinking about the latest developments in luxe streetwear after leafing through the FT to see the following advert marking the proposed purchase of Stone Island by Moncler. (Stone Island had already sold its parent brand CP Company and intellectual property back in 2015 to Hong Kong manufacturer Tristate Holdings Limited).
R+R SpA – published in the Financial Times – a luxe streetwear merger
It follows hot on the heels of Supreme being purchased by VF Corporation.
Luxury disruption
From the luxury market point of view their customer base over the past 30 years has done three things:
The customers have become younger. Luxury shopping is no longer dominated by dowager heiresses in Europe and the New World. Now the man purchasers of luxury are much younger and are second generation money. They’ve had money in their families for somewhere between 20 and 50 years. They are the scions of political leaders or business leaders. Money has allowed them access to the world’s best education institutions. They might have had etiquette classes, but they’re no more than two generations away from having known deprivation.
The customers are in a different place. Globalisation massively changed their customer base. First it was the Japanese middle classes who picked up a taste for luxury brands whilst travelling abroad. As the Asian tigers took off, you started to see luxury purchases being made in Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea and China. When the Soviet Union fell luxury consumption also sprang up in the East as some people had money to burn. Much of the luxury retail in traditional shopping areas like London and Paris are derived from tourists rather than local purchasers. A change in the luxury tax regime in China has seen more domestic luxury consumption. China is now looking to build Hainan into a domestic luxury shopping and holiday resort.
Luxury serves a different purpose. 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. It has been mixed up with streetwear in a manner reminiscent of the Buffalo Collective.
So from the perspective of the luxury industry, they are feeling a massive amount of disruption going on. And that’s even before you get into digital transformation.
It is this transformation of customer segments, geographies and use cases which is forcing the luxury industry to ‘go casual’ fit in a luxe streetwear space.
Streetwear evolution
The perspective from the streetwear side of the table is more exemplified by my favourite Thai English phrase: same-same, but different. Their market hasn’t been disrupted in the same way as luxury. It has got a lot bigger.
Growth in streetwear
The internet has meant that streetwear culture has become global and trends catch on much faster. It has become more popular around the world and there are thriving secondary markets like StockX and GOAT.
Streetwear has pushed into luxury pricing models led by Japanese brands; who brought a higher attention to detail to the market. It has continued the trend of innovation that companies like Stone Island started. This is best exemplified now by the likes of German label ACRONYM.
From a design perspective right back to the origins of what we know as streetwear by the likes Shawn Stüssy or Harlem’s Dapper Dan co-opted luxury product language. In Dapper Dan’s case using fake fabrics and labels to make clothing. His customer base of African Americans from poor neighbourhoods whether early hip hop stars or criminals didn’t see the items that they wanted in boutiques. And even if they did, many of them didn’t feel welcome in the uptown boutiques.
From Stüssy’s point of view it was the pop art ethos and DIY fanzine culture that infused his work. The reversed double S in a circle is an obvious reference to Chanel’s design language.
Over the space of a decade Supreme went from being sued for aping Louis Vuitton’s design language to collaborating with them. Dapper Dan has recently been collaborating with Gucci.
Does luxe streetwear lack ambition?
Highsnobriety asked the question five years ago and concluded that no streetwear company had shown the serious ambition to become an umbrella brand the size of LVMH or Kering. Skiwear, skate wear and snow sports equipment are sectors that are a tenth of the size of streetwear. Yet they have seen consolidation into larger holding groups. These groups provided the financial cushion for these companies through the 2008 financial crisis.
The closest that luxe streetwear has got to the holding group is likely to be New Guards Group. New Guards Group describes itself as a contemporary luxury fashion holding group. It owns Off-White, Opening Ceremony and Palm Angels. This in turn was bought out by luxury e-tailer Farfetch. Farfetch in turn has Richemont and Alibaba as minority shareholders.
Surfwear is also described as having a generational strain. Dads keep wearing the gear. Kids no longer want to wear it. Given the commonality with the streetwear lifestyle. You could see similar things happening at even the largest of streetwear brands eventually. Some of the people wearing Supreme in the mid 1990s are still wearing it. The original international Stüssy Tribe are still going strong, repping streetwear in their 50s and 60s.
Luxe streetwear brand A Bathing Ape has definitely seen better days, by the time Nigo sold the business to Hong Kong I.T. Group. The transitory nature of streetwear brands is littered with names that were formerly prominent like XLarge (that came back) or 90s icon Massimo.
Stone Island and luxe streetwear
Moncler get a technically proficient firm in Stone Island. It was built on a foundation of experimenting with materials. It is the only company able to garment dye polyester fabric for lightweight applications like summer jackets.
The brand is widely respected and has collaborated with other innovators like Nike. It has been worn by Drake regularly that opened the brand up to hip hop fans. This has helped the brand widen its association beyond football hooligans and scally culture.
Hyundai and Ineos team up to develop hydrogen future | CAR MagazineBMW details fuel cell plans | EE News – I think that this move to hydrogen fuel cells makes more sense than lithium ion batteries. Hydrogen fuel cells are well understood, having been used by NASA during the Apollo space mission, the main challenge as been the cost of the cell. Hydrogen fuel cells don’t induce range anxiety and don’t have the environmental problems that you get recycling lithium ion batteries.
Panasonic finally looks at European battery gigafactory – but this is happening with hydrogen fuel cells being in a more effective decision. Elon Musk is down on hydrogen fuel cells, but ignores the issues with lithium ion batteries compared to hydrogen fuel cells. Lithium ion batteries have their own dangers. Hydrogen fuel cells don’t have the same recycling issues that spent lithium ion batteries have. Given the strategic hold over lithium mining by China; hydrogen fuel cells offer a better option to reduce dependence. The hydrogen lobby does a better job to combat the Tesla showmanship.
China
EU braces for battle despite new faces in White House | Financial Times – “ There will be a number of easy wins and enhanced co-operation on climate, the pandemic and remedying some of the offences of the past four years,” said Kristine Berzina, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “But there are real dangers that disagreements on issues like data privacy and digital taxation will make it more difficult to get agreements on other issues that are very important for both the US and Europe — particularly China
Germany frets over its corporate dependency on China | Financial Times – Robust Chinese demand has helped Germany’s auto manufacturers and their suppliers to offset weaker European and US markets still afflicted by the pandemic. But it has also revived concerns that German industry is too dependent on China. And it has raised questions about whether Berlin will be willing to respond to growing pressure in the EU for a stronger line towards Beijing and to embrace a new transatlantic partnership on China under a Biden administration. – you can see this in the split between Merkel and her party over China engagement – Daimler, which has two large Chinese shareholders, sells nearly 30 per cent of its Mercedes cars in China. It accounts for about 11 per cent of group revenues. For several companies in the Dax 30 index, China represents at least a fifth of sales including BMW, chipmaker Infineon and plastics manufacturer Covestro. Likewise, Volkswagen is estimated to generate a similar proportion of its sales in the country last year, selling nearly 40 per cent of its vehicles there. All of this leaves you vulnerable to the Australian situation: China sends a message with Australian crackdown | Financial Times – The message is clear. If your media is overly critical, if your think-tanks produce negative reports, if your MPs persist in criticism, if you probe Communist party influence in your community and politics and if you don’t allow Chinese state and private companies into your market, and so on, you will be vulnerable to Beijing’s retribution as well
Red Convergence | China Media Project – media policy in China – with implications domestically and internationally. It outlines how the Chinese Communist Party intends to leverage transformations in global communication, both at home and abroad (though the latter is more implied), to sustain the regime and increase its influence internationally.
Q&A: Gareth Richardson – Western Brands No Longer Have an Easy Ride in Asia | Branding in Asia Magazine – In China, there’s no access to Google and Facebook but consumers are immersed in WeChat. This is a playground where western brands have no inherent advantage. In fact, many Chinese consumers don’t know or much care about where the brand originated (save for a few specific categories such as Infant Milk Powder). In western culture individuals are heroes and this is reflected in the approach to brand storytelling. However, in Asia, the culture is more collectivist and storytelling celebrates multiple heroes. Asian brands should celebrate their cultural values. Examples include brands built on traditional values of Asian hospitality, such as Mandarin Oriental. There’s a paradox though. Asian culture is collectivist and yet Asian businesses are very hierarchical. There’s often a significant power gap between the C-suite and the frontline staff. This makes branding more challenging to implement even when its value is properly understood by the leadership – this also happens within agencies. True story: I was asked to go and present to the Chinese subsidiary of a US multinational. The global digital lead had gone in there previously with the global client ambassador and made a mess that couldn’t be cleared up. Firstly, they hadn’t recognised the great firewall. Twitter doesn’t matter in China. Secondly, they thought that democratic political campaigning experience was an example of great marketing. At the time, the person who was the global data lead had also worked on the first Obama presidential campaign. All of them had come from a political background and were clueless about brand marketing. Finally, they’d unintentionally priced a measurement solution ludicrously low. It was a shit show. We had lost the client already, but the client lead had held out hope that hanging on in there churning out a monthly report with no actionable insight would somehow provide a way back in. But at least I got to Guangzhou for the first time.
Consumer behaviour
Right-wing populism with Chinese characteristics? Identity, otherness and global imaginaries in debating world politics online – Chenchen Zhang, 2020 – The past few years have seen an emerging discourse on Chinese social media that combines the claims, vocabulary and style of right-wing populisms in Europe and North America with previous forms of nationalism and racism in Chinese cyberspace. In other words, it provokes a similar hostility towards immigrants, Muslims, feminism, the so-called ‘liberal elites’ and progressive values in general. This article examines how, in debating global political events such as the European refugee crisis and the American presidential election, well-educated and well-informed Chinese Internet users appropriate the rhetoric of ‘Western-style’ right-wing populism to paradoxically criticise Western hegemony and discursively construct China’s ethno-racial and political identities. Through qualitative analysis of 1038 postings retrieved from a popular social media website, this research shows that by criticising Western ‘liberal elites’, the discourse constructs China’s ethno-racial identity against the ‘inferior’ non-Western other, exemplified by non-white immigrants and Muslims, with racial nationalism on the one hand; and formulates China’s political identity against the ‘declining’ Western other with realist authoritarianism on the other. The popular narratives of global order protest against Western hegemony while reinforcing a state-centric and hierarchical imaginary of global racial and civilisational order. We conclude by suggesting that the discourse embodies the logics of anti-Western Eurocentrism and anti-hegemonic hegemonies. – This is interesting especially when the Communist Party of China is adopting a more Han nationalist stance (and in some respects reaching back into historic integration of Mongol and Manchu rulers). Secondly, Communist Party academics and legal academics from Beijing University have been drawing heavily on the work of Carl Schmitt. As have far right organisations and Russian nationalists. Schmitt was Nazi Germany’s leading legal theorist. He was known to be hostile to parliamentary democracy and supported the power of an authoritarian leader to decide the law. Schmitt’s rejection of attempts to take politics out of the operation of the law or economic policy implementation – have appeals to diverse audiences.
Design
Top 3 reasons why Nokia N97 failed: The “iPhone killer” that actually killed Nokia – Gizchina.com – Nokia N97 has a slide-out design with a three-line QWERTY keyboard displayed below the display. That was an advantage at the time, but it was just another manifestation of Nokia’s outdated ideas. With the improvement of input methods, touch screen keyboards have become more accurate and soon eclipsed physical keyboards. – the keyboard was very poor compared to the Nokia E90 Communicator that I used to use. I also remember that the address book feature used to crash the phone if you loaded more than 999 contacts into it. Even their ‘E’ series business handsets like my E90 Communicator and the later E71 devices. I moved to the iPhone because I wanted an address book that worked. If the iPhone ever came in a Nokia Communicator type format, I would be ecstatic. More gadget related content here.
Ideas
I have been watching more David Hoffman films recently, looking back to the past to try and understand the present. What becomes apparent was that there was a schism of values in the late 1960s America. What’s less apparent was how, or even if; that schism was eventually healed.
Good Collaborations Are Art, Great Ones Are Kitsch | Highsnobiety – “You know it’s art when the check clears,” said Andy Warhol. With Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Indiana, Warhol made his way into museums by turning the mundane world into works of art by enriching it with pop references, connotations and associations. Warhol’s art is commercial and his commercials are art (a Warhol ad launched Absolut vodka in 1986)
