The SCBD Guy (2)

"'What you choose to wear or not to wear has become a political statement,' the SCBD guy went on. 'You don’t buy clothes—you buy an identity,' that's an expression to show the correlation between fashion brand and its origin. And it would be foolish of us to underestimate the importance of fashion in society. Clothes and accessories are expressions of how we feel, how we see ourselves—and how we wish to be treated by others.

This identity is linked to brand values that have been communicated via marketing. 'Are you elegant, flighty, debonair, streetwise, intellectual, sexy. . . or all of the above, depending on your mood? Don’t worry: we’ve got the outfit to match.' That's what they offer.

But it’s not only the outfit that is on offer. Over the past decade or so, fashion has stolen into every corner of the urban landscape. Our mobile phones, our cars, our kitchens, our choice of media and the places where we meet our friends – these, too, have become subject to the vagaries of fashion. It’s not enough to wear the clothes; you have to don the lifestyle, too. Fashion brands have encouraged this development by adding their names to a wide range of objects, fulfilling every imaginable function, and selling them in stores that resemble theme parks.

People will go to extreme lengths to consume fashion. Not so long ago, there was a clutch of articles about kids being mugged—even killed—for their sports shoes. While there was an uncharacteristically sensationalist article in the French newspaper, Le Figaro, suggested that teenage girls were selling their bodies to raise enough cash to satisfy their addiction to fashion. On a less dramatic scale, few teenagers are unaware of the importance of the right brand, in the right colour, worn in the right way. And, as we’re all teenagers these days, adults are becoming just as obsessive. The caprices of

fashion are both exasperating and alluring. Its alchemy is mysterious. Most people, even if they refuse to be seduced by it, are intrigued by fashion.

Fashion is a factory that manufactures desire. In fashion, one thing is certain: even at the top end of the scale, fashion is increasingly about big business. Designers are admirably creative people, but they work for an ever-shrinking number of global conglomerates. Most experts agree that fashion, as we know it today, was born in the French capital. Even later we'll turn to New York and Milan, to London and Tokyo, everything began in Paris.

From the days when the couturier Worth designed dresses for Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III, to the final episode of Sex and the City—surely the most fashion-conscious television series of recent times—Paris has been a byword for style. As Bruno Remaury, social anthropologist and lecturer at the Institut Français de la Mode, the leading French fashion school, points out, ‘The very word 'fashion' comes from the French: façon means to work in a certain manner, and travaux à façon is the traditional French term for dressmaking.’

Fashion brands employ many techniques to persuade us to part with our hard-earned cash in return for the transient thrill of wearing something new. In our hearts, we know it’s all smoke and mirrors—most of us have plenty to wear, and none of it is going to fall apart for a while yet. So, why do we keep buying clothes? Can it really all be about marketing?

As fashion scholar Bruno Remaury points out, ‘Traditional marketing is based on need. You take a product that corresponds to an existing demand, and attempt to prove that your product is the best in its category. But fashion is based on creating a need where, in reality, there is none. Fashion is a factory that manufactures desire.’

Fashion originated in Paris at the end of the 19th century. That was when the first designer label was created. Although its main market was France, its founder was English. Charles Frederick Worth changed the rules of the game. Before he came along, dressmakers did not create styles or dictate fashion; they were mere suppliers, who ran up copies of gowns that their wealthy clients had seen in illustrated journals, or admired at society gatherings. The clients themselves chose the fabrics and colours, and dresses were constructed around them, rather like scaffolding. Worth was the first couturier to impose his own taste on women – in effect, he was the prototype celebrity fashion designer. If we follow Worth's life journey, then we will know about: many of the ingredients of contemporary fashion marketing: runway shows, celebrity models, elitism, and, of course, a charismatic brand spokesman. Worth was born in the town of Bourne, Lincolnshire on 13 October 1826, and by the time he died, on 10 March 1885, Worth had established a pattern for all other designers to follow. Certainly, he exhibited a high level of artistry, but of all the dressmakers of that period, he was the first to wrap his own name in a fairytale, and resell it at a profit.

Worth left his business in the capable hands of his two sons, Gaston and Jean-Philippe, his brand could not remain at the forefront of style for ever. Worth followed by a young designer Paul Poiret, recruited to Maison Worth by JeanPhilippe. But despite his talent, his marketing prowess and his influence, Poiret could not halt the onward march of fashion. His star was already descending after the First World War, and by the 1920s, he was locked in bitter rivalry with the woman who was to become the fashion icon of the era, Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel.

Gabrielle Chanel considered that Poiret’s dresses were costumes rather than clothes, and a growing number of women seemed to agree with her. ‘Eccentricity was dying: I hoped, by the way, that I helped to kill it,’ she said, as quoted in the book L’Allure de Chanel by Paul Morand. Rubbing salt into the wound, she added that it was easy to attract attention dressed as Scheherazade, but a little black dress showed more class. ‘Extravagance kills personality,’ she pronounced. Whatever the truth of these claims, there is no arguing with the fact that Chanel took fashion into the 20th century.

War, of course, changed everything again. Although a number of fashion houses sprang up in occupied Paris, Jacques Fath and Nina Ricci among them, the focus shifted to the United States. Until that time, fashionable American women bought expensive gowns that had been imported from Paris, or had more affordable copies run up closer to home. Even before the war, manufacturers on Seventh Avenue in New York had begun experimenting with synthetic fabrics, faster production techniques and light, interchangeable garments. This development accelerated in the 1940s, and New York became the birthplace of ready-to-wear. By the time peace broke out, the hegemony of Paris as the world’s fashion capital was being challenged. Wartime innovations had shown that ‘chic’ need not mean personal dressmakers or ‘haute couture’. For the first time, fashion was no longer the preserve of the wealthy elite.

Not that Paris had relinquished its importance. The 1950s saw the rise of Christian Dior, a man whose fervour for promotion outstripped even that of his predecessors. As well as being a visionary designer, the inventor of ‘The New Look’ was a moneymaking machine. He launched his first perfume in 1947 and a ready-to-wear store in New York in 1948. By the end of the decade, he had licensed his brand to a range of ties and stockings. He opened branches all over the world, from London to Havana. By the time he died prematurely, in 1957, he was employing over a thousand people—a situation previously unheard of for a couturier. More than anybody before him, Dior realized that luxury could be repackaged as a mass product. Not only that, he considered it the key to the survival and profitability of a brand. As quoted by Erner, he once commented, ‘You know fashion: one day success, the next the descent into hell,’ adding, ‘I know lots of recipes, and one day. . . they might come in useful. Dior ham? Dior roast beef? Who knows?’

Perhaps it’s no surprise that, today, the Dior brand is owned by the LVMH (Louis-Vuitton Moët Hennessy) empire – the ultimate expression of luxury as big business. Beyond Dior, the dictatorship of the brand took hold. Even in the 1960s, when fashion was democratized and everyone claimed the right to be stylish, the marketers had the upper hand. When asked who invented the mini-skirt, herself or the French designer André Courrèges, Mary Quant replied generously, ‘Neither – it was invented by the street.’

Another such designer, on an entirely different scale, was Pierre Cardin, a man for whom extending the brand was little short of a crusade. And it’s impossible to talk about the fashion brands of the 1960s—or indeed the 1970s —without mentioning Yves Saint Laurent. Initially the successor to Dior, Saint Laurent quickly broke away to follow his own path, and it soon transpired that he was able to have his cake and eat it too.

As early as 1965, the Italian leather goods and fur business Fendi was working with a talented young designer called Karl Lagerfeld, who helped to turn the small company into a ravishing brand. And Fendi was not the only Italian player; among the many others were Armani, Gucci, Cerruti, Krizia and Missoni, to name but a few. The London of the 1970s boasted plenty of fresh ideas, associated with names such as Ossie Clark, Anthony Price, Zandra Rhodes, and the short-lived concept store Biba, but the real powerhouses of the future were being created in Milan. Until a French tycoon called Bernard Arnault began laying the foundations for LVMH in the 1980s, the Milanese seemed to have the monopoly on luxury as a business. They were traders at heart, and they knew how to marry art with commerce in a way that many French labels hadn’t quite grasped.

When did fashion stop being fashionable? To paraphrase Hemingway, it happened slowly, and then very quickly. Probably the rot set in around the mid- to late 1980s, provoked by a boom-to-bust economy—a series of events in which a rapid increase in business activity in the economy is followed by a rapid decrease in business activity, and this process is repeated again and again—and the emergence of AIDS as a powerful metaphor for the delayed hangover that followed the 1970s. The effect of the disease was terrifyingly real as it tore through the creative economy, robbing it of some of its brightest emerging stars.

Ralph Lauren was the perfect brand for the 1980s, when fashion became less important than ‘lifestyle’. In fact, with the rise of the supermodel, the media seemed more interested in how the models lived than in the clothes they wore.

The glamour factory had been plotting its resurgence all along, humming away in the background throughout the late 1990s, while industry observers fretted about the rising tide of ‘smart casual,’ and our SCBD guy ended the talking."

By the way, I almost forgot to tell you, that our SCBD guy, accompanied by a thin and unkempt looking monkey on his shoulder. So, when he was walking down the road, he passed a policeman who kindly—and seemed to feel sorry for the monkey—said to him, 'Now, now young man, I think you had better take that monkey the zoo.'

Our guy, agreed with the policeman, and moment later, like Michael Jackson, playing with his fedora, rushes to the zoo while singing.

I'm too sexy for my shirt

Too sexy for my shirt

So sexy it hurts

And I'm too sexy for Milan

Too sexy for Milan

New York, and Japan

And I'm too sexy for your party

Too sexy for your party

No way I'm disco dancing

I'm a model, you know what I mean

And I do my little turn on the catwalk

Yeah, on the catwalk, on the catwalk, yeah

I do my little turn on the catwalk *)

Laluna closed the story by adding, "The next day, our SCBD guy was walking down the road with the monkey on his shoulder again, when he passed the same policeman. The policeman said, 'Hey there, I thought I told you to take that monkey to the zoo!' Our guy answered, 'I did! Today I’m taking him to the cinema!' And Allah knows best."

Citations & References:
- Diana Crane, Fashion and Its Social Agenda, The University of Chicago Press
- Mark Tungate, Fashion Brands - Branding Style from Armani to Zara, Kogan Page
*) "I'm too Sexy" written by Fred Fairbrass, Richard Fairbrass & Rob Manzoli

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