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.

  • The future of fashion + more things

    Are sneakers the future of fashion? – i-D – not a bad article. Native advertising for Christian Louboutin’s sneaker collection – though they remind me a lot of various vintage of ASH and Alexander McQueen sneakers. More on the why of streetwear and sportswear merging with luxury. The reason why the future of fashion is more casual is because the big markets are in East and Southeast Asia. They are younger, often the scions of first generation money.

    French Billionaire Arnault Calls Greta Thunberg ‘Demoralising’ | News & Analysis | BoF – interesting commentary with a philosophical angle

    Volvo is asking people to share seat-belt selfies so it can improve safety in future cars | AdAge – Grand Prix for Creative Strategy – interesting approach to norming

    Black & Abroad, Volvo grab Grand Prix glory at Cannes | AdAge – Forsman & Bodenfors achieved something similar, but with a completely different message to a entirely different audience. The agency was tasked with promoting equal road safety for men and women, and set about sifting through decades of crash data that Volvo had been collecting since the 1970s. It found that women are more likely than men to suffer injuries from a crash, in part, because most auto companies use male crash-test dummies to test their cars—which over the years has hindered how car manufacturers design safety features for their vehicles.

    Dentsu creative: Ill-conceived purpose campaigns are ruining the industry | Advertising | Campaign Asia – good point by Toshihiko Tanabe. 16 out of 21 Grand Prix awards at Cannes were social purpose / cause campaigns

    UK ministers accused of sealing Thomas Cook’s fate | Business | The Guardian – “Two governments were prepared to back a British brand, the UK government wasn’t,” said the source. “Without that, there wasn’t enough confidence around the table to make it work.” 

    In a separate move, the German government were providing Thomas Cook subsidiary airline Condor with a bridging loan, allowing the company to keep flying.

    U.N. postal union clinches deal to keep U.S. in club – Reuters – interesting move given the subsidies Chinese companies are given on postage for small things sold in Amazon Marketplace, eBay etc

  • Snowden revelations + more things

    Looking back at the Snowden revelations – A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering – The brilliant thing about the Snowden leaks was that he didn’t tell us much of anything. He showed us. Most of the revelations came in the form of a Powerpoint slide deck, the misery of which somehow made it all more real. And despite all the revelation fatigue, the things he showed us were remarkable – this is such a good read. I suspect that the level of surprise expressed is mostly a US thing. I was disappointed, but not shocked by it all. Back in the day the NSA used to publish one of the best guides to ‘hardening’ macOS – documents that they no longer seem to host online. The Snowden revelations were nothing new. I grew up in Europe when:

    • GCHQ were tapping all of Ireland’s overseas telecoms and data traffic via the Capenhurst tower. Having lived in the neighbourhood of Capenhurst during the 1980s and 1990s, this was well known but only confirmed in the media in 1999
    • The ECHELON network was hoovering up microwave, fax, satellite and telephone calls

    After Duncan Campbell’s lifetime of work, the Snowden revelations are part of a decades long pattern of behaviour. Admittedly the US’ rivals will be up to the same things and worse.

    Luxury watch maker Patek Philippe and Leagas Delaney launch new Generations campaign – Marketing Communication News – the most interesting aspect of this to me is the way its looking to address a younger audience. Secondly, if you look at the background with the plants and rain its moved the look and feel to more tropical than their previous campaigns that were northern European in feel. (It was actually shot in Italy). Because? My guess, China. Younger rich people due to second generation wealth. Two children reflecting the recent law changes around family size in the country

    Is the era of the $100+ graphing calculator coming to an end? | The Hustle – don’t feel too sorry for Texas Instruments: over a 20-year period, TI set out to manufacture demand by making its calculators mandated classroom tools. The company established partnerships with big textbook companies that integrated TI-specific exercises (complete with screenshots of buttons) into classroom curricula. It sought approval for standardized test use from administrators like the College Board. And every time a competing tech innovation came along, it lobbied to maintain its perch atop the parabola. According to Open Secrets and ProPublica data, Texas Instruments paid lobbyists to hound the Department of Education every year from 2005 to 2009 — right around the time when mobile technology and apps were becoming more of a threat. The company campaigned against devices with touchscreens, internet connection, and QWERTY keyboards” – hate the game, not the player etc. etc.

    Snap Detailed Facebook’s Aggressive Tactics in ‘Project Voldemort’ Dossier – WSJ – which is being used in an antitrust investigation. No real surprises for anyone who has followed Facebook over the years. This negates Facebook’s main defence of ‘if it wasn’t us, it would be China’

    The Dark Side of Techno-Utopianism | The New Yorker – the sub heading ‘Big technological shifts have always empowered reformers. They have also empowered bigots, hucksters and propagandists

    New York in 1984 was the time, and the place, dance music became a culture – Features – Mixmag – great write up, the only thing missing is a name check for the Latin Rascals, Cutting Records and the Freestyle scene

    Jason Dill HYPEBEAST Magazine Interview | HYPEBEAST – great interview, partly due to the car crash of journalist interviewing technique

    Parenting’s New Frontier: What Happens When Your 11-Year-Old Says No to a Smartphone? – Vogue – my son had decided three things about smartphones. 1. They’re infantilizing, a set of digital apron strings meant to attach you to your mother. (He was onto something there.) 2. They compromise a boy’s resourcefulness because kids come to rely on the GPS instead of learning Scout skills. 3. They make people trivial. This final observation bugs me the most, because he still expresses it whenever he sees me jabbing at my own device: “Texty texty! Emoji emoji!” And when I play my word games, he shouts, “GAMER!” That hurts. In short, my son says, he doesn’t want a phone because he wants to be free

  • Zara model controversy & things I made last week

    Chinese netizens on Zara model controversy. I love Asian Boss’ qualitative interviews. The Zara model controversy happened only because its in China. Chinese netizens over react to anything they perceive as a slight. Fashion isn’t about ‘beauty’, but that subtlety sailed past Chinese netizens. Freckles indicate age and peasantry in Chinese culture. Beauty is porcelain flawless skin.

    Anand Giridharadas on the modern gilded age and how we should be skeptical of plutocrat philanthropy.

    New Balance China tends to march to the beat of its own drum. But even I was surprised by these sweatshirts with new romantic type detailing. China is unique in terms of its faux Korean aesthetic. I just don’t get the sportswear versus flamenco dancer look, I am just speechless at it.

    New Balance does New Romantic

    Samsung’s facial recognition is surprisingly easy to defeat. This is particularly bad for Samsung. Samsung’s other biometric authentication finger print ID isn’t as good as Apple’s. Samsung isn’t even as good legacy finger print scanners found on the back of Android handsets. Users have no reasonably secure option beyond PINs. I knew of siblings (not twins): a sister unlocking her younger brother’s phone at a glance.

    The moral of this story is that physical security of your phone is required to prevent unauthorised access to your device. Regardless of whether its made by Samsung or any other vendor.

    Goldman Sachs have a great (if terrifying) video on the use of biometrics in public places like airports and stadiums. This is really disturbing, nay, dystopian viewing if you care about your privacy at all. The human factors issue of the laptop loss at Clear affected the brand reputation. What’s impressive is the fact that the Clear brand survived disaster. It is rare for lightning to strike twice, even more so in technology.

  • Hasan Minhaj and other things that caught my attention this week

    Supreme by Hasan Minhaj. I hadn’t watched much of Patriot Act mainly because there is more content that grabs my attention on Netflix. This clip is a great dive into hype culture by Hasan Minhaj – often the best humour is that with uncomfortable truths in it.

    Amazon playbook on Amazon Vine. Gartner L2 made this useful clip on the effective use of Amazon’s Vine programme.

    Key take-outs (my observations in italics):

    • Amazon don’t allow vendors any editorial controls over reviews and look to keep them honest and authentic
    • Vine seems to be really good in the process of accelerating product launches for vendors
    • Use Vine BEFORE Amazon’s sponsored products and sponsored brands advertising function; by the sounds of it pretty similar to the way you’d have previously used PR in a product launch marketing campaign
    • L2 recommends ensuring the efficacy of the product; but Vine COULD be used as the last gate in the innovation process before you go gangbusters. Lots of negative reviews could still save you on a massive production run and huge advertising spend

    Sophie Cope (Electronic Frontier Foundation) on digital privacy and the surveillance state. Great video on the World Affairs channel – interesting how this has become such a big issue amongst ‘wonkish’ audiences. More privacy related content here.

    Lynx (Axe for non UK audiences) have latched on to the ASMR meme that has been popular for a couple of years. It feels weird to watch, I am not sure what the strategic insight(s) were for this work beyond the fact that beards are sticking around for a good while yet.

    https://youtu.be/x9T7BJ-jf6o

    The last thing is the positive experience I had with American Express this week when I lost my card. I spoke to a real person on a decent phone line who quickly canceled my old card sent me out a new one that arrived in 48 hours.

  • Yohji Yamamoto & things from last week

    Yohji Yamamoto at the Oxford Union. Yohji Yamamoto provides design and fashion gold in his presentation to the Oxford Union. More related content here.

    Key outtakes from Yohji Yamamoto’s address

    Yohji Yamamoto’s favourite english language words : asymmetric, contradiction, opposite, corruption, immoral, absurdity, idiotic, ludicrous, resist, destroy, destruction, disobey, incomplete, enjoy, poignant, morphing & damage. All of which hint at a wabi sabi type sensibility, despite his well known use of structure and texture.

    Yamamoto focuses on the design through his use of black as a colour, which then forces him to be creative in terms of cut, layering and fabric choices.

    More awesome than your Apple Watch – This Casio G-Shock Watch Transforms into Optimus Prime – Technabob – ok this is very different to an Apple Watch, but I love the way G-Shock managed to do some creative design to make this happen

    To coincide with the publication of Miles Davis – Rubberbrand EP – Amerigo Gazaway has done a remix and a mix of Miles Davis back catalogue. The original Rubberband album was recorded in 1985 and was divisive for both Miles Davis fans and music critics when finally released in 2019. The EP is made up of remixes of the title track of the album.

    Davis had left long time label Columbia and moved to Warner Music. If you like Davis early work, then this is going to be different to what you would expect.

    Kemo the Blaxican – Something about love. Kemo was in the original line up of the Delinquent Habits. He has since gone out on his own and has since put out quality albums under his own name whilst touring with his old colleagues in the Delinquent Habits.

    A very complete archive of radio transmissions from the Apollo 11 mission: Apollo 11 : NASA : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive