EVERYTHING DIFFERENT!
by Siems Luckwaldt
If there ever was a more exciting time to be working on any planet of the fashion cosmos, then I haven’t (yet) experienced it.
2010: nothing is the way it was, but everything seems possible. Calling out trends is becoming pointless as society splinters into ever smaller units, stylistically too. Old sales models are crumbling – in the media as well as in retail – while at the same time, new technologies, globalization and channels of distribution are permitting innovations believed impossible up to now and, not least, especially for the aspiring young designers, are lowering the fixed costs. No one can presume to know at the moment how and in what direction all the dice in the “future” cup will roll out. That’s why I’ve decided to pose questions in this column whose answers appear to me essential.
Design
How is it possible to animate saturated consumers depressed by the economic crisis to pull out their visa cards for more that just ‘basic textile provision’ ? How useful should and must fashion be?
Do financial straits leave enough space for fantasy worlds such as haute couture? Or is this legendary Olympics of the handmade art deteriorating into an artistic fig leaf for luxury companies that – using glamorous image of frills, feathers and lace – actually ‘only’ want to sell perfumes and cosmetics? And: Would that be so bad?
Will bodies and clothes merge as much as science fiction authors projected in their books? Or are the iPod cases with their cable guides and gore-tex already the ultimate experience?
Media
Isn’t it about time to revive the word ‘journalism’ in fashion journalism? Should magazines risk more opinion, now, where bloggers and webzines are already ahead on this very point? And: how much opinion can advertising clients stand?
Will we get used to photo shoots on the screen and soon find them as sensuous as the printed page? Is it really the fetish of paper that we should worship and not what we see and read on it? And: doesn’t ‘content’ have a life of its own independent of the medium? Besides: isn’t it perhaps necessary to free the concept of ‘content’ from its stigma as a mere filler for internet sites and, accordingly, also acknowledge it in online editorial departments?
Does it really help print journalists’ self-image in the long run to treat bloggers as second-class colleagues?
Can bloggers really deny journalistic craft and ethics in the long run? Would it be an idea for both groups to start using terms such as “author” or “writer” or “columnist”, no matter where and how the articles appear?
When will fashion magazines finally turn to more important themes, rather than losing themselves in trivial seasonal hype and trend tips that are already out-dated tomorrow? Alongside optical pleasures, don’t readers also want to be mentally stimulated, with humor, with charm, with personality, with authenticity? Does the maxim “platitudinous, more color and louder” really lead to more than just an even finer partitioning of the same market pie?
And: how are magazine titles set up to be able to react to local and micro-trends and to more strategically “pick up” their continuously diversifying readers? How can blogs – which are used to smaller target groups anyway – help here?
Consumers
It the “one size fits all” approach, as Mark J. Penn von Burson Marsteller describes it, is really dead, what does this mean for the consumer? How does design react to the many small trends of desire, the micro-trends? A Renaissance of made to measure, a chance for capsule collections and pop-up shops, or roadshows à la Clemens en August?
Is the fragmented consumer society overrated where, even with the organic food craze and ‘green fashion’, fast food chains continue to do big (fat) business and the textile mass market also need not worry at all?
How do all of the protagonists in the fashion business deal with the fact that – encouraged by the social media – today only one percent of the population or the inhabitants of a big city is needed to start a movement that can be a force for change?
________
This list can certainly be extended almost ad infinitum and in much more detail, and the fact that each one must answer the questions first for himself and his job, his business, is clear. Trade fairs like Premium with its discussion forums and think tank projects have an important, groundbreaking function, for, as Fabienne Goux Baudiment of the World Future Studies Federation has expressed it, “Thinking about the future has bid farewell to the image of a single future”. That makes the answer to the question “who wants what and how does he get it?” increasingly more difficult and all the more urgent – and not just for the fashion industry!
Siems Luckwaldt, 32, was for many years Fashion & Beauty Director of the luxury magazine “how to spend it” of the Financial Times Germany. Since July 1, he is the Senior Social Media Manager of the Burda Style Group; www.siemsluckwaldt.com
