fashionthunder.com

Exploring the fashion world occasionally feels like gate-crashing an exclusive club. At least, that’s the sensation I experience as I climb a spiral staircase in a building near Place Vendôme – the grand Parisian square that is home to the Ritz. César Ritz opened his celebrated hotel on 1 June 1898, and its rich patrons attracted the attentions of Cartier, Boucheron, Van Cleef & Arpels, and the other jewellery and luxury goods boutiques that crowd the square.
This particular building is the headquarters of a publishing firm, but its location is entirely appropriate. Over the past ten years, Assouline has published a series of glossy books, each minutely dissecting the history of a legendary designer label. With offices in Paris, London and New York, it has become a luxury brand in its own right. I reckon that here, at least, I should get my first insight into what makes a fashion icon.
As so often on these occasions, the claustrophobic staircase and labyrinthine corridors of the old building lead to a large office, with a bright picture window overlooking the potted trees and shrubs in the courtyard. Martine Assouline, an elegant French woman, sits me down at a glossy slab-like table and considers her response to my question. ‘At the moment we are in a period where the brand has an exaggerated importance,’ she tells me. ‘Designers like Tom Ford, John Galliano and Marc Jacobs injected new life into fashion. They fused it with the music and film industries in a manner that seemed very new, very attractive. This was not always the case – in the era of the supermodel, nobody really cared about brands. Naomi Campbell and Claudia Schiffer were the brands; the clothes were immaterial. But fashion has come down to earth – it appears more accessible, more affordable, even when this is not the case. People identify with Prada, Dior and Louis Vuitton in a way that they never did before.’
But do these brands have anything in common? What’s the uniting factor that has enabled them to succeed and survive? ‘It’s a heritage that makes customers daydream, and the strength to live up to it. The question of succession is important: Chanel was lucky to have appointed Karl Lagerfeld, just as Dior was resuscitated by the arrival of Galliano. The wrong designer can wreck a brand. It is also vital to achieve the correct balance between marketing and creativity. I don’t think it is fair to say that fashion is based entirely on marketing. You can do as much marketing as you like, but if the final product does not deliver, the brand loses its power. Pierre Cardin made millions licensing his name, but the products were not always of an acceptable quality. And so. . .’ She shrugs.
A few days later, in the rather different setting of a shabby-chic café called Chez Prune near the Canal Saint Martin, I’m sipping coffee with a trend-tracker called Genevieve Flaven, co-founder of Style-Vision, a company that specializes in monitoring and predicting consumer behaviour (see Chapter 6: Anatomy of a trend). Like Martine Assouline, Flaven believes that few consumers are convinced by marketing alone. ‘Every consumer can now decrypt advertising messages, so traditional marketing has become less and less significant. Consumers want to know what’s behind the brand – what it can give back to them. Sometimes it’s just a question of value: the best quality for the price. When people buy a very high-priced garment, they want to see the patience and the craftsmanship that has gone into it. They are paying to possess a beautiful object. And sometimes, when it’s a famous brand, they are paying to be part of the story.’
Flaven explains that iconic brands create – and occasionally rewrite – their own narratives.
‘It resembles a novel that you, the consumer, can enter. Chanel is a good example. First, through her talent and the power of her personality, Coco created her own myth. And now the legend of Coco is inexhaustible. It’s the thread that pulls us into the Chanel universe. Every time Chanel launches a new product, it emphasizes a link with Coco, urging us to own a little piece of the legend. When the jewellery range was launched [in 1993] we were told it was in the spirit of Coco – but in fact she disliked jewellery. In a lot of ways, branding is simply telling a story.’
Few people can create a myth from scratch, which is why many fashion entrepreneurs have chosen to buy in to existing stories. (See Chapter 14: Retro brands retooled.) Take Lambretta, for instance. Like the Italian scooters themselves, the name has plenty of retro buzz: Mods and Rockers battling on Brighton beach, natty suits, sharp haircuts and Cool Britannia all rolled into one youth-friendly package. The scooter launched by Ferdinando Innocenti in Lambrete, Milan in 1947 had long been out of production by the time a UK licensing company acquired the name. In 1997, Lambretta re-launched as a British menswear label with a flagship store in London’s Carnaby Street – Swinging Sixties Central. Playing on Lambretta’s connection with British Mod culture, the store contained a scooter, a Union Jack-patterned sofa and a range of sleek but street-smart clothing. Womenswear followed in 1999, two more stores opened; by 2003 the brand could claim ‘ongoing approval from celebrity wearers in the worlds of film, music and TV, including members of Stereophonics and Groove Armada, Ewan McGregor and Vernon Kay’ (Cool Brand Leaders, 2003). The clothes, the store design and the advertising skilfully edited the Lambretta story, downplaying the brand’s Italian heritage and favouring its role in British popular culture.
Other brands have even more unlikely roots. How to explain the success of CAT, the US-based footwear company that is an offshoot of Caterpillar, maker of lumbering earth-moving vehicles? In fact, the evolution makes perfect sense. CAT boots were originally launched in 1991 as protective footwear for Caterpillar machinery operators. (The Caterpillar brand dates back to 1925, when two tractor makers merged to form Caterpillar Tractor Co, based in California. The name Caterpillar derives, of course, from the ‘crawler and track’ mechanism that allows the vehicles to traverse rugged terrain.) Licensing companies in the United Kingdom and the United States spotted the potential of the brand’s early designs, especially the honey-yellow Colorado work boot, which gelled perfectly with the mid-Nineties ‘grunge’ aesthetic of plaid shirts and cargo pants. Today, a US-based company, Wolverine World Wide, holds the global licence for CAT Footwear. Since 1994, it has sold nearly 50 million pairs of CAT shoes.
‘The fashion aspect of the brand is more pronounced in Europe,’ says Shannon Jaquith, brand communications and international marketing manager. ‘In the US we’re predominantly a work boot business, which makes sense given our heavy machinery heritage. In Central and South America we provide non-slip footwear for people who work in the shipping industry – and there’s a connection because Caterpillar makes marine engines. We didn’t set out to become a fashion brand, which ironically helped us develop into one.’
Jaquith says the brand’s values remain consistent across all its markets. ‘We’re gritty, blue-collar and authentic. People like us because we haven’t tried to portray ourselves as trendy. Our brand image begins with our work shoes – we’re here to protect you. In a world where there are a lot of greedy brands clamouring for a slice of the fashion market, we strike consumers as grass-roots and honest. For instance, when we came out with a vintage collection, it really dated back to the 1920s –it was based on our original designs.’
CAT positions itself as a genuine American icon alongside brands such as Budweiser, Levi’s and Harley Davidson. A typical extract from one of its catalogues tells the story thus: ‘Whether it’s a builder swinging a hammer, a musician strumming a guitar, or a student studying from his local café. . . The toughness, honesty and uncompromising nature of CAT is a badge that represents their preference for cargos over khakis, the warehouse loft over a metro high-rise, and their local garage band over the hottest new dance club.’ It is a perfect piece of branding narrative, together with the slogan ‘No guff since 1904’. This tinkers slightly with historical fact, as the date refers to one of the two tractor firms that later merged to create Caterpillar. However, the core brand ‘promise’ is genuine, because CAT continues to provide robust protective footwear across a number of industries.
‘We don’t have a huge marketing budget, so our main focus right now is in enhancing our retail presence; communicating the lifestyle of the brand at store level,’ says Jaquith. Thus, heavy machinery becomes the perfect backdrop for a fashionable brand extension. The message is clear: the more convincing the story, the more attractive the brand.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.