Here's a piece by Morgan Gerald, it is an interesting piece so I decided to post it here. So you know, Morgan is an anthropologist (he holds BA, MA and PhD in Anthropology) and has a special interest in youth culture. He spends a lot of time hanging out in malls observing teen and youth’s behavior. Interesting job, right?
In Grade 10, I had a friend who liked to make loud farting noises in French class and who once did something relevant to the current luxury crisis, transformation or challenge.
Over the weekend, my friend visited every store on
Yonge Street in Toronto that sold Zod Lacoste. In dressing rooms and on display floors, he used an exacto knife to perform a little brand surgery and, arriving at school Monday morning, proudly showed us all his new t-shirt, complete with over 100 safety-pinned alligators. Even though he had long hair and listened to Ozzy, we all thought that was pretty fxxking punk rock!
20 years later that same aesthetic is back, maybe in a bigger way than ever. Some hints?
COUNTERFEIT
On Canal St. in NYC or at the corner of Brimley & Sheppard in Toronto, there are more locations selling knock-offs of luxury goods than there are Barney’s, Bloomingdales and Holt Renfrews times 1000. If brands are signs and not just products, need we look for any more proof than here? And if consumers can’t make an authentic connection with a brand (translate, in this case: afford it) you can bet they’ll steal it. Will counterfeit chic come to rear its pirate head in the near fashion future?
THE MECONOMY
A report from Amsterdam-based trendwatching.com predicts 2008 as the year of the ‘meconomy’ (as opposed to the me-too economy of aspirationalism). Why?
- a disdain for big-box retailers
- a loss of faith in the cost of luxury goods.
- a feeling that luxury brands have flopped on their promise by sometimes producing less-than-stellar quality goods
- luxury house are run by brand managers rather than designers
- luxury brands have diluted their exclusivity (Lagerfeld at H&M, anyone?).
One effect, according to the report, is a desire to tell more personal brand stories through odder, more obscure and more curated puchases made from local, independent retailers and designers.
STREETWEAR
With its focus on obscure brands (1-man lifestyles like A-Ron), Customized and Limited Edition and Artist Series remixes of standards (hundreds of Air Force 1 variations since 1982), and personal tweaks on product templates (Nike I.D.), streetwear will drive more consumers towards purchasing personal and defining brand space through exclusivity.
Traditional luxury brands have a place in that space (streetwear’s musical arm, hip hop, made that obvious in breaking Prada, Gucci, LV, Moet to the mainstream), but only if they jive with core value placed on heritage and on the core aesthetic of curating one’s style by mixing & matching high and low cultures of Paris runways and NYC streets.
Online continues driving core consumers towards new products from afar (www.hypebeat.com for the world) but don’t forget the ‘street’ in streetwear: some exclusivities and subcultural luxuries are available only to the hyper-local consumer.
THE 100 MILE CONSUMER
Forget ‘Can I afford luxury?’ With increased environmental and social concerns, more and more consumers could be asking themselves, Can we afford luxury?
Big cities are seeing this with top chefs tailoring (curating, again) menus to fit meat and produce available locally and seasonally. Where a luxury food market has sprouted from the soil of organic green beans grown on farms outside city limits and then sold at the Farmer’s Market in the local park for 3x times the price of green beans in the grocery store, so too might a similar scenario emerge in established luxury brands and products.
Will fashion designer Arthur Mendonca become even more popular among consumers in his home city of Toronto because he and his labor are local? Will future car purchases be influenced by the proximity of the manufacturing plant? Will vacations be taken closer to home so as not to jet-fuel the environment? 
QUESTION OF THE WEEK?
What are the "unobtainables" that your brands or products are based on? I’ll pass on that one when it comes to traditional luxury and where Web 2.0 fits into marketing them because buying online, making messages too public and SNSing with just anybody about the $52,500 Louis Vuitton Patchwork bag seem to contradict the anti-massness of luxury.
Instead, I’ll run with life-caches and life-streams as a luxury performance category.
- start with biographies of clients: income, status, life cycle, goals, social concerns
- meet the needs of clients paring down purchases and simplifying lives by helping them decide what Best Things In Life are worth holding on to or attaining
- help them create ‘most’ experiences (vacations that are the most exotic, extreme, relaxing, educational, wine & food-oriented) and ‘best’ services (financials where stocks and funds are in collaboration with their level of social consciousness)
- customize service in Luxury Offsetting for clients in New York that want to buy German cars, French wine and Italian purses but feel a need to compensate (Don’t plant any tree just anywhere - pay for Pinot Gris vines or a locally-sustaining crop to be planted in the upper New York State region of your choice)
- dig deep into those biographies to curate those ‘most’ and ‘best’ so clients can access not only the cultural capitals of high culture but also the subcultural capitals (coolness, obscurity, localisms, underground-ness, hyper-speed taste-making, activism etc.) of the ‘low’ and ‘mass’ cultures of the street and Internet.
Top Photo: Coolhunter (www.coolhunter.net) Bottom Photo: Louis Vuittin Art Show Paris Store
