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Fashion as a work of art

admin — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 14:27:34 +0000

Other, more pragmatic industries might have shied away from the idea of artistry to promote a product. In fashion, however, it has traditionally been seen as a brand value. But Vincent Peters fears that, in the advertising field, photographers now have fewer opportunities to take risks:
‘The fashion business, like Hollywood, is increasingly controlled by people who don’t come from the creative tradition. It’s a stock-market product.’ This, he believes, encourages blandness and fuels criticism that all fashion advertising looks alike. ‘Nobody wants to throw money away, so of course they’re going to look at what’s worked before and go down a similar route. Fortunately, there are still enough clients left who want something challenging.’
In terms of trends, he believes that fashion photography has become less narrative and more conceptual: ‘[Advertising clients] are looking for the big idea. This is a huge challenge for the photographer, because sometimes you’re called upon to invent a brand with a single image. At the same time, it’s good for us, because it makes us indispensable to the process.’
Art director Thomas Lenthal would agree. During our conversation about his work for Yves Saint Laurent, he said, ‘I’ve always advocated the fact that if you’re working for a brand, you’ve got to build a visual alphabet for it. Within that framework you can tell a great many stories, but I think it makes sense to link them through that visual alphabet – and the easiest way of doing that is to use the same photographer.’ Having said that, a fashion photograph is a collaborative effort, requiring the participation of art directors, stylists, make-up artists and assistants, all bustling around the central figure of the model. As Vincent Peters confirms, ‘It takes an incredible amount of time and finesse, almost like making a movie. A lot of money is being spent on this one key image, so you have to get it right. Is the sun shining, is the hair and make-up the way you want it? Every detail counts. When people outside fashion say that all the advertising looks the same, they aren’t paying attention to the details. But at the luxury end of the market, where I tend to work, consumers notice details.’
He adds that the life of a fashion photographer is not always an easy one: ‘Don’t forget, we’re all freelances, and in fashion your fortunes can change very quickly. There’s always somebody standing behind you. To a certain extent, you’re only as good as your last piece of work. It’s a delicate balance, because you want to maintain a personal style, while striving to provide something different each time. If you do three shoots in the same way, people think you’re getting lazy. So we’re under a great deal of pressure.’
For a while, it looked as though photographers might be losing ground to fashion illustrators. Established artists such as François Berthoud, David Downton, Charles Anastase, Jordi Labanda and Yoko Ikeno became increasingly influential, both in publishing and advertising circles. In 2002, Stella McCartney engaged the artist David Remfry to create an advertising campaign, sparking numerous articles about the trend. One of them, in The Observer, opined that this approach was ‘valued for being warmly personal’ and went on to explain that ‘the expressionist, abstract aesthetic of illustration is increasingly seen as a fresh, more subtle – and attention-grabbing – alternative to computer graphics and photography’. (‘Sketch show’, 29 June 2003.) In the same piece, Alice Rawsthorn, director of London’s Design Museum, commented, ‘It’s part of the general trend towards a richer, more romantic aesthetic. We’re yearning for the individuality of hand-drawing at a time when our lives are more automated.’
For now, though, the yearning seems to have passed. Although fashion illustration has rightfully regained the respect it had lost over the previous decades, it is unlikely to replace photography as the medium of choice for fashion branding.
Fashion photographers, in any case, often take their cues from artists. Although Vincent Peters’ work is frequently artistic – his prize-winning 2002 ad for Dior’s Poison scent, for instance, was a painstaking recreation of a 19th-century Gothic illustration – he sees no contradiction in using his skills for commercial purposes. ‘Quite honestly, when I was involved in the art scene, I found it more superficial and pretentious [than fashion]. Again, I don’t think people realize how much effort we put in to what we do. The people I work with have a real appreciation of beauty. It’s something of a paradox. When you shoot a fashion picture, whether for an ad or a magazine, you’re trying to create something beautiful. That depends, of course, on what your concept of beauty is, and we all have different sources we’re feeding off. My own are quite classical, because my mother was an art teacher and I take a lot of inspiration from paintings.’
He adds that, in any case, great art has often been commercial: ‘Look at Renaissance painters, or look at Mozart: their best work was commissioned by wealthy patrons.’

A Guide on Fashion Photography

admin — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:51:44 +0000

‘Fashion photography is about translating a brand into a concept,’ says Vincent Peters, the German-born, London-based photographer whose list of credits includes British, Italian and French Vogue, Arena, Dazed and Confused and Numéro, as well as ads for Dior, Bottega Veneta, Celine, Miu Miu and Yves Saint Laurent. ‘Often, when a client comes to you, they have a product and a brand identity, but they aren’t certain how to combine the two. Your job is to achieve that transition; to create the image that brings the brand to life. Sometimes the client has a reasonable idea of how you’re going to do it – after all, that’s why they’ve hired you – but in my experience they like to be surprised. This means that the photographer has an enormous influence on the branding process.’
Peters began taking pictures on a trip to Thailand in the 1980s, with the results being published in a travel magazine. In 1989 he moved to New York, where he got a job as an assistant photographer. Soon he branched out on his own, moving into fashion photography. After a while, though, he developed an ambition to become an artistic photographer, and relocated to Paris to pursue his goal. Although his work was exhibited throughout Europe and published in leading art photography magazines, he grew disenchanted with the scene and decided to refocus his efforts on fashion photography: ‘I remember I had a season when it all suddenly began happening for me. I shot a campaign for Miu Miu, and that made a difference.

Things evolved quite quickly after that.’ Fashion photographers have always combined commerce with art. The earliest practitioner with something of the star status accorded today’s snappers was one Baron Adolphe de Meyer, nicknamed ‘the Debussy of the camera’. (Although he was not from an aristocratic background, he married into nobility.) From 1913 to the early 1930s he brought an other-worldly lustre to his photographs of socialites, actresses and dancers, first for American Vogue and then for Bazar (which later evolved into Harper’s Bazaar, picking up an extra ‘a’ along the way).
In 1923, de Meyer was replaced at Vogue by another pioneer, Edward Steichen, whose pictures already looked more crisp and modernist than the soft-focus confections favoured by his predecessor.

Steichen may have taken the first colour fashion photograph, but he was far more interested in the art of photography than in fashion. In the early 1900s he’d been a friend of the sculptor Auguste Rodin, and he later cofounded, with Alfred Stieglitz, Photo-Secession, an organization whose sole aim was to elevate photography into an art form. Between 1947 and 1962 Steichen was director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York Another founding father of fashion photography, whose background was almost as aristocratic as that of de Meyer, was George Hoyningen-Huene. Born in Russia, he had escaped the revolution with his family and pitched up in London before moving to Paris after the First World War. He started out as a backdrop designer for shoots before moving on to photography with the encouragement of French Vogue’s editor, Main Bocher. Hoyningen-Huene, too, was later lured away to Harper’s Bazaar.

His photographs of Josephine Baker, Joan Crawford and the model Lee Miller – eventually an influential photographer in her own right – have a frosty monochrome poetry about them. In this respect, Hoyningen-Huene’s work resembled that of his protégé, Horst P. Horst, who was inspired by Greek statues and Renaissance art. Technology had not yet freed the camera from the studio, so their pictures inevitably look stiff and enclosed, and reliant on props and backdrops for atmosphere. Cecil Beaton, the final member of this precursory quartet, used props to sometimes surreal effect, deploying sculptures of papier-mâché and aluminium backdrops. Born in London in 1904, Beaton had been captivated as a child by postcards of glamorous society women; and this influence is still apparent in his costume designs and art direction for films such as My Fair Lady, for which he won an Academy Award in 1964.

By the Second World War, Leica was producing cameras with faster shutter speeds – an advance that urged fashion photography outdoors and encouraged breezy spontaneity. This ushered in the era of Irving Penn, Richard Avedon and Norman Parkinson. There is the gulf of a generation between Horst’s stony goddesses and Avedon’s early photos of models frolicking on a beach; or Parkinson’s exotic, sun-drenched location shots.

Parkinson, known to one and all as ‘Parks’, formed a stylistic bridge between the pre-war practitioners and the emerging generation of the 1960s, who added sexual liberation to photography’s physical freedom from restraint. Working for British Vogue, Parks brought an impish spirit to his pictures of strong, provocative women, which did not look at all out of place beside the images being turned out by the rebellious trio of David Bailey, Terence Donovan and Brian Duffy (see Chapter 9). With their unambiguous, cool-yet-accessible aesthetic, these photographs look as innocent now as they must have seemed decadent at the time. In the 1970s, a seismic shift caused tremors that are still being felt today. It was provoked by Bourdin and, of course, Helmut Newton.

Vincent Peters cites Newton, who died in early 2004, as one of a handful of icons who sought to change fashion photography in particular, as opposed to photography in general: ‘Guy Bourdin’s world was not about fashion. What makes Helmut Newton so irreplaceable is that he really was about fashion photography – he was determined to push it as far as it could go, to make it sexy and dangerous rather than cold and bourgeois. He did for dresses what James Bond did for suits. In the 1970s there were no rules, no formulas, so if you had the talent you were free to experiment.’
In the 1980s, fashion photography benefited from an evolution within the fashion media itself. New magazines such as Blitz, The Face and i-D – the latter started by Terry Jones, a former art director at British Vogue – had an irreverent, slash-and-paste style that owed far more to punk than to catwalk shows.

They proved fertile ground for photographers like Nick Knight, Corinne Day, Juergen Teller and Terry Richardson, whose pictures pushed clothes – and sometimes models themselves – further into the background, relegating them to mere ingredients in entertaining tapestries. Photography took on a hyper-real, snapshot air, with the merciless light of the flashgun illuminating seedy domestic scenes, drug-fuelled nightclubs, or parties that seemed to have dragged on far too long. These pictures were personal and observational, pulling the viewer into the world of the individual who had taken them.
Corinne Day became notorious for creating the so-called ‘heroin chic’ look, with a series of photographs featuring Kate Moss.

The pictures, which appeared in the June 1993 issue of British Vogue, showed the model looking wan and undernourished, clad in vest and knickers and posing in a dingy flat. The shoot, which spawned hundreds of pale facsimiles, contributed to the ‘grunge’ fashion trend. Richardson’s lurid, funny, blatantly sexual pictures – famously shot on an old Instamatic – continue to provoke controversy today. In an interview with online fashion magazine Hint, he refers to his playfully erotic advertising work for the fashion brand Sisley. ‘We tried to put a picture of a girl with pompoms over her tits on a poster in Soho [New York]. They said no, because a little of her areola was showing. . . They said it was too sexy and it would be too close to a church and a school.

It’s all so silly and conservative.’ Despite his involvement in fashion, the photographer’s attitude to clothes has a timeless ring about it: ‘To me, photographs are more about people than clothes. I’m not one of those photographers who says, “Ooh, that dress is just making me crazy.”’ (www.hintmag.com/shootingstars/terryrichardson) Photographers can take comfort in the existence of magazines such as Visionaire, a format-shifting blend of fashion publication and portable art gallery in which clothes definitely take second place to ideas. It has occasionally provided a setting for the work of photography duo Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, who utilize digital technology to produce the kind of images Bourdin might have come up with, had he used a computer.

Disturbing and disorienting, the pictures are filled with digitally contorted limbs, manipulated expressions and artificial landscapes. All of these photographers have lent their talents to advertising, as well as contributing to fashion magazines. And with their peers, they continue to blur the boundaries between art, fashion and marketing.

Photographer and fashion

admin — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:46:38 +0000

Flashback to June 2003. I’m standing under the portico outside the Victoria & Albert Museum, sheltering from a summer storm that has raced in from nowhere to dash the streets with raindrops the size of boiled sweets. Beside me, tourists mutter exclamations and unfurl umbrellas, or haul vivid cagoules over their clothes. Frankly, I’m grateful for the enforced pause in the day, because it gives me time to think. I’ve just seen an exhibition of fashion photography so disturbing – so downright weird – that it has shaken up my idea of what the alluring metier of snapping models in dresses is all about.

A couple of days earlier, the photographer’s name, Guy Bourdin, had been only vaguely familiar to me. But a friend recommended the show, and I’d found the promotional poster intriguing. It was at the same time compelling and repellent, showing a girl’s long white legs splayed over a sofa as if she had collapsed face down. She wore scarlet high-heels. The sofa was orange, and so was the bottom of her very tight, very short dress, which along with the curve of her buttocks was all that remained visible before she was cut off by the frame. The image was strongly ambiguous: could this be a corpse; or was she in an alcohol-induced coma? It certainly didn’t look like standard fashion photography. The other pictures reinforced this idea.

They were often erotic, frequently perverse and mostly eerie; reflections in TV screens in cheap hotel rooms; the suggestion of unseen figures lurking outside the frame; latent violence. Bourdin seemed to be equating fashion with lust, and imagining its potentially terrible consequences. Elsewhere there were hints of dark satire: a group of models striding past a shop window display looked barely more human than the mannequins trapped behind the glass. Each picture was lit with the icy clarity of a crime scene; an idea taken to its logical conclusion with a picture of a discarded pair of shoes next to the chalk outline of a dead body. Some of Bourdin’s work resembled that of another ground-breaking fashion photographer, Helmut Newton; but to me the images had more in common with Hitchcock and Edward Hopper.

Bourdin worked for French Vogue and shot a series of advertisements for Charles Jourdan shoes – a project that allowed him to give full reign to his fetishist imagery. Despite the fact that most of the pictures in the exhibition dated from the 1970s, they had hardly aged. This was not surprising, because I discovered that, although Bourdin died in 1991, his influence continues to saturate fashion advertising today. Contemporary art directors such as Thomas Lenthal and photographers such as Nick Knight acknowledge a huge debt to Bourdin. He is generally regarded as the first fashion photographer to have shifted the focus away from the product and towards the imagery. Before Bourdin, fashion advertising used fairly conventional depictions of female sexuality to sell products. Bourdin subverted the form. Instead of entire bodies, he showed fragmentary images of limbs. Models and actresses were dismembered by his lens, or mutated by make-up into ashen-faced cartoons of femininity.

His fashion spreads were narratives, resembling stills from surreal thrillers. Bourdin realized that fashion advertising was not just a picture of a dress or a pair of shoes; it was an imaginary universe. In doing so, he placed the photographer at the forefront of the process that transforms a garment or an accessory into an object of desire.

The image-makers

admin — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:25:33 +0000

The relationship between fashion brands and other product categories is rather like the one between celebrities and normal citizens: they are aware of one another’s existence, they occasionally share the same space, but they rarely mingle. While other brands hire international advertising agencies such as J. Walter Thompson, Saatchi & Saatchi or BBDO, fashion brands tend to work directly with a narrow pool of freelance talents.
According to art director Thomas Lenthal, who has worked for brands such as Dior and Yves Saint Laurent, ‘In fashion, there are probably only about a dozen well-known art directors, great photographers, stylists, make-up people, and so on. You don’t need an advertising agency: you just need an address book with a handful of names in it.’
Many upmarket fashion brands don’t have a marketing department; or even a person with ‘marketing’ in their job title. The designer – often known as an ‘artistic director’ – is responsible for advertising imagery too. For instance, while Louis Vuitton works with the advertising agency BETC Luxe on several aspects of its communications, its fashion imagery is entirely under the control of the brand’s designer, Marc Jacobs.
With this in mind, a few years ago Hervé Morel set up an organization in Paris and New York called ADM – Art Direction Management. Morel does not have an agency, but he is an agent, handling a group of art directors and other creatives that includes Thomas Lenthal, Donald Schneider (H&M, Van Cleef & Arpels, Vogue Hommes International), Mathieu Trautmann (Oscar de la Renta Perfumes, Issey Miyake Perfumes, Jalouse magazine), Steve Hiett (Kenzo Perfumes), and Laurent Fétis (Cacharel Perfumes, Bless), among others. According to Morel, it was ADM that introduced Donald Schneider to H&M, which eventually led to the store’s publicity-generating partnership with Karl Lagerfeld. Morel says, ‘Designer brands may employ an agency to buy their advertising space, but they don’t work with agencies on the creative side. It’s more cost-effective to work directly with an art director, who can then bring together the other elements – the photographer, the model and so forth. Agencies tend to put forward teams that include a copywriter. But international fashion brands, which use the same images worldwide and work purely with visual stimuli, don’t need copywriters. Plus, art directors have usually gained experience on fashion magazines, so they are comfortable in that world.’ Lenthal echoes his views: ‘The structure of an advertising agency makes it an unwieldy vehicle. The one thing an ad agency fears above all else is losing a client, and in order not to do that it ensures that the creative process is as risk-free as possible. There are a lot of meetings involving eight people sitting around a table with somebody making notes, so everything is agreed with back-up in writing. The agency has a huge team consisting of the creative director, the art director, the copywriter, the account director, the strategic planner. . . they try to mirror the structure of the large corporations they are working for. But a fashion house is a much smaller unit.’
Robert Triefus, executive vice president, worldwide communications, at Giorgio Armani, confirms the approach at many fashion houses: ‘We decide the communication themes, the imagery and the overall strategy at our head office here in Milan. We don’t have an ad agency – we have our own graphics studio covering advertising materials as well as point of sale and store windows. We do, however, collaborate with famous photographers and art directors. It boils down to the fact that fashion is a very particular arena, and the creation of an image that is relevant and appropriate to the fashion world, given that it is a very aspirational product, requires the involvement of people who can really get under the skin of the brand. While I don’t wish to criticize advertising agencies, historically fashion has not been their domain –much to their disappointment. Agencies don’t necessarily have people who understand the nuances of a fashion brand. I’m sure a person from an advertising agency would have thrown your tape recorder at me by now; and certainly it’s a long-running argument. They often claim we don’t know what we’re doing. We disagree.’
Advertising agencies say that the cliquish fraternity fashion brands work with means that their ads are often indistinguishable. And indeed it’s doubtful that many fashion images could pass the marketing test that involves taking a bunch of print ads, covering up their brand names, and seeing which of them has a recognizable visual identity. Advertising for designer brands – whether clothing or accessories – is frequently sensual and elegant, but it can also be clichéd, humourless and chokingly pretentious.
In late 2004, Chanel spent a reported €26 million on a television commercial (the press office called it a ‘mini movie’) and print campaign to re-launch its No. 5 perfume. The TV ad starred Nicole Kidman and was directed by Baz Luhrmann, who was also behind the actress’s hit film, Moulin Rouge. To some, the ad looked spectacular. But was it entirely a case of sour grapes when Trevor Beattie, the well-known adman, wrote in The Guardian that the ad ‘sucks so hard it vacuumed my living room carpet’? (‘The ads that stole Christmas’, 6 December 2004.)
Beattie, the chairman and creative director of London agency TBWA, has had considerable experience in fashion, having helped to create one of the most successful British high-street brands: French Connection UK. The acronym ‘FCUK’ had been used solely on internal mail until Beattie spotted and unlocked its marketing potential. ‘FCUK fashion’, said the store’s advertising, and young consumers quickly bought into the message. Media outrage only fuelled demand. Lately, however, it seems that over-familiarity with the logo has blunted its shock appeal. Experiencing a sales slump, French Connection is downplaying its appearance on clothes and in advertising, at the same time insisting that it hasn’t dumped the brand completely. Nevertheless, FCUK had an impressive run, and is a good example of what an advertising agency can achieve for a fashion brand, as long as there’s a sharp creative at the helm.
And it is by no means the only example. The UK-based agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty has created consistently award-winning campaigns for Levi’s in a relationship that stretches back to the 1980s. Its ability to constantly refresh the brand in the mind of the fickle young consumer – and in a highly competitive market – is certainly admirable. Diesel is another company that has worked with a series of advertising agencies. However, the brand’s creative director, Wilbert Das, has ultimate control over its advertising messages, and admits that he prefers to work with ‘small, energetic agencies’. ‘We’ve worked with one large agency, Lowe Howard Spink, and, while it was an interesting process, I found their structure just too large for us,’ he says. ‘You should really feel that an agency is part of your brand, which is not always possible with a big international network.’ There is also a considerable gulf between a largely British chain store, a hip jeans brand, and a global luxury giant such as Chanel or Yves Saint Laurent. Here, perhaps, a more elitist approach is required.

THE COOL HUNTER

admin — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:22:57 +0000

I find the prospect of meeting MTV’s cool hunter rather daunting. After all, as somebody who mixes with rappers, graffiti artists and Mexican gang members to get a line on youth trends for a music television channel, Claudine Ben-Zenou has got to be one of the coolest people on the planet. Accordingly, I fix our rendezvous at the trendiest bar I know, and go along dressed in ancient jeans and a black T-shirt advertising the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, as purchased on a market stall there a few months earlier.
I needn’t have worried: Ben-Zenou is not some thrusting style maven in shades, but a friendly, discreetly well-dressed woman in her mid-20s. However, for somebody so outwardly normal-looking, Claudine has some very specialized areas of interest that have made her invaluable to MTV.
‘I’ve always been immersed in subcultures and youth trends,’ she says, without pretentiousness. ‘I’ve been involved in the hip-hop scene for more than 12 years – I was part of a hip-hop collective called Sin Cru when I lived in London. I was also into skateboarding from about the age of 14 and had a lot of friends involved in that culture. Later I got interested in the urban music scene and the rave scene. But, while I found all this fascinating, I didn’t have a clue that I could put it to any practical use.’
She studied marketing and advertising, but at the age of 19, while still at university, she got a job at a small marketing agency in Hoxton. At the time, the area was beginning to emerge after years of neglect as one of London’s most vibrant districts, a veritable Petri dish of trends. ‘The agency specialized in underground and youth marketing, and as I got more involved I realized that I had inside knowledge and connections that could be very useful,’ she recounts. ‘We were working on [beer brand] Fosters Ice and doing lots of stuff with street art and graffiti. It really opened my eyes to the possibility of using subcultures for marketing. Collaborations between mainstream brands like Nike and Adidas and underground designers are very common today, but we were among the pioneers.’
Since that first job, Ben-Zenou has acted as a consultant for global brands such as Levi’s, Casio G-Shock, Pepsi and even Disney, always providing them with the inside track on street culture. ‘The way I position myself is that I’m equally at home in the boardroom and on the street. I’m the connection between the two. I can talk to kids on their own level without coming across as a suit. What they’re doing is not some abstract concept to me – it’s very real.’ She also describes herself as ‘a huge geek’, and she has forged many of her underground connections via internet chat-rooms. ‘A lot of the people I got close to in the early days have since become quite famous in their fields. I’m able to pick up the phone and talk to a friend who’s a graffiti artist or a hip-hop MC. And, as they’re my mates, I’m not trying to interpret these quite complex scenes as an outsider. Youth brands that try to connect with these communities have a habit of getting things wrong and basically getting everyone’s back up. I feel strongly about trying to avoid that.’
Brands who try to target niche opinion-formers without doing their homework often find themselves exposed to ridicule. ‘You can miss a step very easily. The key is to work closely with influential people within the communities, and listen carefully to what they say. Graffiti is a good example. I hear all the time about brands that’ve plucked some random kid off the street. If you’re using somebody who’s not a respected artist, the result may not be obvious to you, but it’s extremely obvious to people within the scene, which undermines your credibility as a brand. It’s very important to develop long-term relationships, rather than just latching on to a scene in the short term and sucking everything you can out of it in a parasitical way.’
I ask Ben-Zenou if she ever feels in danger of being regarded as a sort of double agent – a suit in hip-hop clothing. ‘Most of the people I deal with know exactly what I do,’ she replies. ‘I’ve always tried to make a positive contribution, encouraging brands to create events that will bring money back into these scenes and elevate artists who might not have been able to make it in other circumstances.’ For a while, she acted as an agent for a group of graffiti artists and breakdancers, liaising with brands on their behalf. ‘A common attitude among marketing executives was that they were just dealing with a bunch of kids doing graffiti, so they didn’t need to pay them or even particularly acknowledge their contribution. But these people are extremely talented and often do a lot for brands, so I’m keen to get them the recognition they deserve.’
She originally worked for the MTV website, but talked the broadcaster into creating her current role after observing that ‘although we were very good at mainstream research, we didn’t seem to be monitoring trends’. (And yet the stars of MTV’s music videos have always had an impact on trends – brands such as Tommy Hilfiger and Dolce & Gabbana swear by the access the channel provides to a young, logooriented public.) She is now based in Chicago, although she travels frequently. In addition to providing regular email newsletters, she writes a quarterly trend report called ‘Switched On’, which is sent to MTV’s advertisers and their agencies, as well as acting as an internal primer for staff. ‘It’s a creative tool designed to inspire people and give them a snapshot of what’s happening out there. I pick up on micro-trends rather than huge shifts in behaviour.’ Following her own rule of working within cultures, she often gets hip-hop artists and DJs to write their own articles. ‘I think it’s important to get people to talk about their scenes in their own voices.’
Although she’s one of the global elite of cool hunters, Ben-Zenou doesn’t feel part of any such group. ‘I’m aware of people who do a similar job and I’ve met a few of them, but I always have the impression that I’m taking a somewhat different approach. They tend to come from a research background, while my training is in marketing. I suppose the main difference is that I’m not approaching it objectively – I’m deeply, passionately involved. I still go to hip-hop events, my boyfriend is from that community. . . What some people don’t realize is that you can’t just turn up one day and break into these scenes. I get a lot of respect because I’ve been involved for years. If I didn’t do this for a living, I’d be doing it anyway – always reading magazines, going online, chatting to people at parties and trying to find out how they think.’ Hence her recent brush with Mexican gang members. ‘I met them at a party and got talking to them. It wasn’t a work thing – I just found them interesting. I’m like a cross between a journalist and a sociologist.’
Perhaps because I’m a decade older than Ben-Zenou, it occurs to me to ask if there’s an age limit for being a cool hunter. Isn’t there a danger that, one day, she’ll no longer be able to relate to icons of hip? She says, ‘I’ve occasionally wondered about that myself, but I think attitudes to age are changing. I’ve got lots of friends who are older than me and who are still very much involved in the scene. There’s a graffiti artist called Futura 2000 who’s 50 years old and still considered an icon of cool. He’s recently done some work with Nike. Then you’ve got someone like Vivienne Westwood, who’s still very influential. As for me – let’s face it, I’ve got 200 pairs of trainers. I can’t see myself suddenly giving up everything I love and dressing in beige anoraks.’

Fashion Trends and Its Consumers

admin — Sat, 17 May 2008 17:36:52 +0000

With fashion in constant flux, there is a strong argument for producing a trend book that can be updated not every season, but every day. An online service called the Worth Global Style Network (www.wgsn.com) has dramatically changed the way trends are monitored. Created in 1998 by the brothers Julian and Marc Worth, WGSN is the Bloomberg of the fashion industry. Based in London, it has more than 150 staff, and outposts in New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Milan, Barcelona and half a dozen other cities. As well as daily fashion business news, it delivers interviews, analyses, surveys, city reports, coverage of trade shows, and thousands of photographs of stores, runway shows and street life from around the globe. With a click of the mouse, its subscribers can see what fabrics were on show at Première Vision the previous morning, or what teenagers on the streets of Shanghai are wearing today. Not surprisingly, its extensive client list covers everybody who is anybody in fashion and retail, from Abercrombie & Fitch to Zara.
The WGSN headquarters on London’s Edgware Road resembles the bustling editorial floor of a major newspaper, with dozens of journalists tapping away at keyboards. And I’m assured that there are many others, out snapping the latest trends with digital cameras. ‘It’s amazing that [the traditional style bureaux] let us into the market without a fight,’ observes Roger Tredre, WGSN’s editor-in-chief. ‘Most of them still don’t have an online service to speak of, while we’ve been around for more than six years.’
But WGSN is no fly-by-night dotcom – it sees the web merely as a means to an end. ‘We’ve never used the term dotcom internally,’ Tredre says, ‘because it has all the wrong connotations for us. We perceive ourselves as a research and information company that just happens to use the internet as the quickest means of diffusion. With the everchanging nature of fashion, speed is of the essence.’
He adds that WGSN does not so much predict trends as provide vital intelligence for a multi-billion-pound industry: ‘But of course, part of our job is to monitor cutting-edge trends, and to explain how these might be interpreted for the mass market.’
Other trend-trackers act not so much as consultants to the fashion industry, but as observers of cultural shifts that may have an impact on product development. One such agency is Style-Vision, founded in 2001 (www.style-vision.com). Alongside its bi-monthly ‘mega-trends’ reports, it produces surveys of individual industries (not just fashion, but also food, personal care and technology, among others) and regularly holds round-table conferences on evolving consumer trends. Usually staged at exclusive hotels or villas in the south of France, these events attract leading marketing directors, advertising creatives, designers, architects, branding experts and journalists.
Style-Vision’s business development director, Genevieve Flaven, says, ‘Our goal is to provide a rational analysis of societal changes, as well as forecasting developments that may have an impact on design. We’re also interested in mixing consumer insights and expertise from different industries. We’re very practical – there’s no crystal ball, and we’re not gurus. The main thing we strive to avoid is treating consumers as if they’re malleable and somewhat naïve. We realize that we’re all consumers – intelligent human beings with highly complex responses to the world around us.’
In fact, says Flaven, the agency is less concerned with predicting trends than in getting inside consumers’ heads. ‘We’re interested in individuals in the context of society. Through our research among consumers and opinion-formers, we imagine future scenarios, how consumers will react to them, and what kind of products and services they might require within those scenarios.’
Ironically, though, the only people really in touch with the latest trends are those who create them – on the streets. Consumers themselves, particularly young ones, are more iconoclastic, inquisitive and inventive than any designer armed with a WGSN password and a stack of trend reports. No sooner has a marketing executive told adolescents that this is the correct way to wear a pair of jeans, than they’ve torn off the waistband and started wearing them differently. The classic argument runs that, once a trend has crossed over into the mainstream, it is already out of date.
The fashion industry is the ultimate fashion victim.

The Style Bureau

admin — Sat, 17 May 2008 16:10:33 +0000

Sitting in front of me is a man in a sky-blue V-neck sweater. He is casually yet stylishly dressed – but not particularly trendy. And yet he runs one of a handful of companies that, ultimately, have a significant impact on what we wear.
Pierre-François Le Louët is chief executive officer of Nelly Rodi, a ‘style bureau’ (www.nellyrodi.fr). Based in Paris, the company has offices in Italy and Japan and a network of affiliates worldwide. Its clients come from the fields of fashion, textiles, beauty, retail and interiors. They include, in one category or another, L’Oreal, LVMH, Mango, H&M, Liz Claiborne, Agnès B, Givenchy, and a clutch of brands across Asia. There are other, similar agencies, including Promostyl, Peclers and Carlin International, but Nelly Rodi (Le Louët’s mother) was one of the pioneers of trend counselling in Europe. She remains chairman of the company, while he handles the day-to-day running of the business. In the early 1970s, she looked after communications for the designer Courrèges before being appointed in 1973 as manager of an organization called the International Fashion Committee, which had been created by the French government two decades earlier. Nelly Rodi’s son takes up the story: ‘In the 1950s, ready-to-wear was an American phenomenon, and it was felt that the French offering was disorganized and behind the times. Following a trade mission to the United States to see how the industry was structured over there, the French government created the committee, which was essentially a state trend co-ordination agency financed by the textiles industry. Why coordinate trends? Simply, to reduce incertitude: if you give the same intelligence to those who sell the clothes, those who design them, those who buy the fabrics and those who supply them, there are enormous economic advantages for the fabric manufacturers, because they know what material will be in demand and where to concentrate their efforts. Similarly, if the retailers are all stocking violet that year, it inevitably creates a demand for violet, so they sell out their stock. The idea was to reduce the margin for error in the extremely risky field of fashion.’ This was the organization Nelly Rodi joined in 1973, and where she learned many of her skills before quitting to form her own agency in 1985. In 1991, she purchased the newly privatized International Fashion Committee, ensuring beyond a doubt that she would become the trend counsellor of choice. Today, inevitably, the company has a team of trend-trackers who jet around the world monitoring social phenomena, observing the emergence of youth tribes and taking note of obscure trends, which they might pluck from the streets of Rio or Tokyo to turn into global fashions. As well as supplying such information to its clients, the agency can advise on brand strategies, produce marketing materials, organize events, provide stylists, and even design entire collections (its 30-odd staff come from both design and marketing backgrounds). ‘We are the mercenaries of fashion,’ Le Louët smiles. But Nelly Rodi’s most celebrated products are its ‘trend books’. These hefty tomes, filled with photographs, illustrations and fabric swatches, as well as explanatory texts, resemble luxurious scrapbooks. They round up the agency’s predictions of forthcoming trends and act as inspirational tools – or, more accurately, as prompts – for designers looking for the next big idea. Every season, the agency produces a dozen separate trend books covering categories such as ready-to-wear, knitwear, lingerie, colours, prints, fabrics, lifestyle and beauty. It even provides a ‘perfume trend box set’ containing little bottles of notes, blends and scents. Each book costs around €1,400 and only about 200 are printed in each category. Retailers and the beauty industry are the biggest buyers. Le Louët says, ‘The luxury brands don’t often buy them, because they see themselves as trendsetters. Nevertheless, I know that photocopies can be found in many designers’ studios.’ To illustrate his point, he opens a trend book at a page detailing a ‘heritage’ theme. It features an atmospheric photograph of a handsome tan Chesterfield sofa on a carpet with a muted paisley pattern. Then he leafs through a recent copy of Vogue, and shows me an ad for a wellknown Italian designer label. There is the moody photography, the carpet and the Chesterfield sofa – only this time with a lithe model reclining on it. The resemblance is striking. Le Louët grins. ‘And, as I say, they are not one of our clients.’
A team of independent experts helps to create the trend books. Each October, the agency rounds up 18 personalities from the fields of fashion, design, sociology and the arts for a brainstorming session. Smaller meetings, aimed at strengthening the resulting theories and synthesizing them into text, last a month and a half. As Le Louët explains, ‘There is a regular core of contributors, and an outer circle that changes from year to year. We are careful to choose people who can look beyond the media of today and give us an original perspective on the future, without relying too much on their personal opinions.’ The theory is that these people are constantly creating and absorbing fashion shows, art events, exhibitions, literature and social phenomena, and can divine which of these will have an impact on consumers’ appearance and lifestyles in the near future. It’s like watching stones being thrown into a pond, and analysing how far the ripples will spread. As a fictitious example, let’s say we know that a major exhibition about Art Nouveau will be staged at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York next summer. In all probability, as designers often attend such shows, we will see fashions inspired by the style of the early 1900s emerging on the catwalk a season or so later. Visualizations of the resulting fabrics and designs will appear in the trend book. Another trend could just as easily be sparked by street kids in Mexico City personalizing their T-shirts by hacking complex patterns into them. Once all these theories and insights have been gathered, a team of photographers and illustrators brings them to life. The resulting books, as plundered by Nelly Rodi’s clients, have an impact that may trickle down to consumers a year and a half later. Chain stores such as Zara and H&M, with their quick turnaround, can act on the prompts much earlier than designer brands, which is why their clothes are ‘trendier’ than those of their more expensive counterparts.
‘I’m not saying we’re indispensable – some brands are perfectly capable of anticipating or creating trends by themselves,’ stresses Le Louët. ‘But we’re one of the many ingredients that have an impact. It’s also important to note that trends, particularly colours, have expanded beyond fashion to take in beauty products, interiors, and even electronics – what colour is your mobile phone this season?’

Fabric and Fashion Trends

admin — Thu, 01 May 2008 11:31:39 +0000

When a fashion-conscious friend of mine saw a poster of Uma Thurman decked out in a bright yellow motorcycle jacket and matching trousers for the movie Kill Bill, she turned to me and hissed, ‘Shit – that means we’re going to look like bananas all summer.’ Actually, Uma’s violent yellow outfit never quite caught on – although her sneakers, made by the Japanese brand Asics, did. Movies, particularly when they become popular culture phenomena, clearly have an impact on fashion trends, along with the music industry. Apart from these obvious sources, though, where do trends come from? Why are the stores full of pink one season, green the next, blue the season after that? Why does cowgirl follow flapper; 40s take the place of 70s? Is it some kind of conspiracy? Do the fashion companies get together in a top-secret location every autumn and decide what they’re going to foist on us the following year? Not quite – but almost. ‘I’m not always entirely sure where trends come from,’ admits April Glassborow, senior buyer for international designer collections at Harvey Nichols. ‘But I tend to think they’re started by the fabric mills.’ Fabric suppliers are indeed among the first links in the fashion chain. One of the most influential events of the year is Première Vision, the fabric trade show held in Paris at the end of September. As many as 800 fabric manufacturers from all over the world – Italy, France, Japan, Portugal, Switzerland and the UK are some of the most influential markets – display their wares to design teams and buyers. It’s one of the few trade shows where you can spot designers like Christian Lacroix and Dries Van Noten stalking the aisles.
The fabric merchants are armed with formidable marketing skills.
They have regular clients, and new wefts and weaves to sell them. Occasionally they’ll be asked to come up with a specialized fabric for a designer; but they may let slip details of the product to a rival. Similarly, if an influential designer has picked up on a certain fabric, clients who arrive at the stand later may be tactfully encouraged to follow suit. Technology naturally affects trends, too: the resurgence of tweed was provoked by manufacturing developments that made the fabric lighter, more supple and easier to manipulate. Every year there’s a new way of treating denim, to give jeans a look that is subtly different from the year before.
At the other end of the chain, if retailers tacitly agree to support certain colour or fabric trends, it means heightened customer demand, guaranteed sales, and less remaindered stock – which they might have been saddled with if they’d veered off-message. Hence, fuchsia one summer, lavender the next; this season linen and denim, next season velvet and corduroy.
But if the secret meeting suggested above does not actually take place, how do they know to stock similar stuff at exactly the same time?

Fashion Consumers and Stores

admin — Thu, 01 May 2008 11:28:42 +0000

‘Maison Hermès understands that the shop window is more than a platform for showcasing the latest bag or belt. The window. . . communicates what the brand represents,’ writes Kanae Hasagawa in the interior design magazine Frame (May/June 2004). ‘At the big Maison Hermès outlet in Ginza, Tokyo, the retailer has worked with no fewer than ten international artists and designers on a series of rotating displays since the store opened in 2001. Designed by Renzo Piano, Maison Hermès is a serene ten-storey edifice wrapped almost entirely in blank façades of glass block.’
As Hasagawa suggests, the communications potential of a store goes way deeper than the window. In keeping with their new status as the outriders of multinational empires, luxury brands are in competition to see which of them can open the most immense, sense-scrambling spaces. In 2005, to mark its 150th anniversary, Louis Vuitton took the wraps off its biggest store so far: more than 1,500 square metres on Paris’s Champs-Elysées, previously hidden behind a colossal monogrammed suitcase while the work was being completed. This followed similarly grandiose projects in Tokyo and New York. The outlets display the entire range of Louis Vuitton products, from handbags to fashion; they are single-brand department stores.
Dior is following a similar route – its store on Rue Royale, Paris, for example, brings together its various lines on four floors: womenswear and jewellery from John Galliano; menswear designed by Hedi Slimane and the jewellery of Victoire de Castellane. In Milan, visitors to the bleached, minimalist Espace Armani in Via Manzoni can stroll through the entire price range, from suits to jeans, while pausing at a café, a bookshop, an exhibition space or Nobu, the latest branch of a restaurant venture between Armani, Hollywood actor Robert de Niro and the chef Nobuyuki Matsuhisa.
‘Stores are the face of a brand,’ confirms Robert Triefus, executive vice-president of worldwide communications at Armani. ‘It is the entire image as we would want it to be seen. Architecture is a very important part of brand communication. When you arrive [at a store] it should conform to your expectations of the brand.’
All these stores are nothing less than brand theme parks. ‘The height of the ceiling, the size of the changing rooms, the smile (or its absence) of the sales staff, the design of the columns and the name of the architect all trace the contours of the brand,’ notes the French edition of Elle magazine. (‘Le temps des cathédrales’, 6 September 2004.) But the most powerful expression of architecture-as-branding comes from Prada, whose Epicentre stores perfectly express its intellectual image. The locations are designed by the hippest architects:
Herzog & de Meuron (best known in the UK for the Tate Modern art gallery) in Tokyo; Rem Koolhaas in New York and then Los Angeles. Exteriors provide no trace of the Prada name – smart Prada consumers, undoubtedly up to their ears in newspapers and architecture magazines, are expected to know where they are headed. This concept is taken to the ultimate degree in Los Angeles, where the entire front of the store is open to Rodeo Drive, taking advantage of the clement weather and tempting passers-by to drop in. A subtle wall of air keeps breezes and raindrops at bay when needs be – and at night an aluminium screen rises from the ground to seal off the space. Shop ‘windows’ are giant reinforced portholes set into the floor, so customers trot over the mannequins. The interior is pure science fiction. Plasma screens blink fragmentary images and clips of the day’s news, and glass changing rooms turn opaque at the touch of a floor-switch. Lighting controls enable customers to see their desired garment at various times of the day. Elsewhere, laminated screens change in tone and hue depending on how many bodies are present. At the press launch, Koolhaas told journalists, ‘We give people the freedom not to shop. . . by devising alternative sources of interest.’ (‘Down with shopping’, The Guardian, 20 July 2004.)
There can be no doubt, however, that the final goal is to sell stuff. One of Prada’s most important experiments is the use of interactive RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) clothing tags. The tags themselves are transparent, revealing a tiny chip inside. Their most basic function is to allow staff to keep electronic track of stock, enabling them to tell customers instantly whether a certain size or colour is available. But they offer more – oh, so much more. When used in conjunction with one of the display screens – and a scanner brandished by a member of staff – the tags can call up catwalk video clips in front of the customer, or provide information about the colour, cut and fabric used to create the garment. In the changing rooms, garments are automatically scanned by an RF detector. An interactive touch screen then allows customers to find out whether the store has alternative sizes or colours. The next step is RFID loyalty cards: when these are scanned, they will reveal an entire record of the customer’s purchases, allowing sales assistants to suggest additional items that may be of interest, based on the profile in front of them.
Being ‘tagged’ by your favourite store is perhaps the most dramatic admission of brand loyalty. There are suggestions, however, that many consumers are veering away from one-brand shopping destinations. If clothing is an expression of identity, then shoppers require a range of brands to choose from, mixing and sampling like DJs until they’ve transformed their selection into something entirely personal. Such consumers wish to peruse items of the highest quality, however, so a vast department store will not do. Instead, they turn to pre-edited collections of brands, chosen for them by one-off stores such as Colette in Paris, 10 Corso Como in Milan and the more recent Microzine in London. These destinations typically also contain gadgets, furniture, CDs, books and art – the keys to a fashionable lifestyle. ‘Such stores are not created, they are curated,’ says Genevieve Flaven of trend-tracking agency Style-Vision.
Carla Sozzani, the founder in 1991 of Milan’s 10 Corso Como, prefers to think of her operation as a contemporary European take on an oriental bazaar. Sozzani’s 4,000-square-metre space fringes a shaded courtyard restaurant, and incorporates a photographic and design gallery, a bookshop, a music outlet, and boutiques selling clothing and accessories.
The ancient concept of the bazaar, or quite simply the market, is exercising the imagination of retailers at the moment. ‘I have always loved the energy and anarchy of good markets,’ Rei Kawakubo, the designer behind Comme des Garçons, told the International Herald Tribune (‘Kawakubo’s commune: a retail rebellion’, 7 September 2004). Kawakubo was speaking at the opening of The Dover Street Market, her eclectic retail concept housed in a six-storey Georgian building in London. Along with clothing created by Kawakubo and fellow designer Junya Watanabe, there are contributions from various ‘guests’: furniture designed by Hedi Slimane; a white collection from Lanvin’s Alber Elbaz; jewellery by Judy Blame; unique pieces from Azzedine Alaïa; the labels Boudicca and Anne Valery Hash; a vintage stand that is an outpost of cult Los Angeles store Decades. The design of the store resembles a stage set, with boutiques housed in battered wooden huts, screened by silk curtains or standing before theatrical backdrops. There is art inspired by Picasso, and even a recreation of a French bakery. ‘Shops are clothes just put in a gorgeous box. But for me, the box itself is as important of the clothes,’ Kawakubo has pointed out.
It has to be said that she is more innovative than most when it comes to creating retail experiences. Running in tandem with the Dover Street venture, she has also introduced the concept of Guerrilla Stores. These hit-and-run outlets will open for only 12 months at a time, taking over semi-derelict buildings in the edgiest districts of cities. After all, if fashion is ephemeral, why shouldn’t stores be equally transient? Advertised by posters pasted roughly to walls in selected areas, the stores are designed to be discovered by word-of-mouth, as their target market chatters about them in clubs and on the web. The strategy acknowledges that, being naturally suspicious of anything ‘corporate’, the new generation of consumers prefers to mine its information from underground seams.
Comme des Garçons’ first Guerrilla Store opened in the Mitte district of Berlin in early 2004. The designer paid around €2,000 to use the site – a former bookshop with the sign still visible outside – and rent of €400 a month. There was little in the way of redecoration, and the place was run by an architecture student. It was followed by similar stores in Barcelona, Singapore, Warsaw, Helsinki and Ljubljana – all selling exclusive new pieces as well as items from previous seasons and unsold stock. As well as aiding the designer’s avant-garde, art-punk image, the stores flatter consumers who take pride in discovering and inventing trends. Fatigued by the infinite buying opportunities around them, they look for the eccentric and the rare.
Whether fashion retail spaces resemble markets, art galleries or palaces, they are being forced to work harder to engage the attention of consumers. This is an era of mix and match, of experiment and personalization, not to mention web shopping. Today’s shoppers don’t like to stay in a box for long, no matter how gorgeous it is.

Harvey Nichols Fashion Display

admin — Thu, 01 May 2008 11:24:28 +0000

April Glassborow, senior buyer for international designer collections at Harvey Nichols, drifted into her career by accident. ‘I’d left university having done a French degree and took a temporary job at Liberty, working in the jewellery department,’ she recalls. ‘At one point the buyer fell ill, so I took over her job for a while. Later, when she moved departments, I took over full-time. Subsequently I bought accessories; then I moved to Harvey Nichols to buy jewellery and womenswear.’ Glassborow says buying for Harvey Nichols involves something of a balancing act: ‘We’re expected to be a step ahead, so we are constantly looking for new labels. We take risks with young designers who may not sell a great deal for three or four seasons, until a buzz generates around them. But at the same time, we want to reflect the demands of our customers, so we stock the more commercial designers too. In general, though, I don’t think our type of customer is content to blindly follow the herd.’
As well as monitoring all the usual sources – magazines, the Web, mutterings on the fashion grapevine – Glassborow receives intelligence from the store’s representatives around the world, who are often its first point of contact with young designers, forwarding photographs and background information. Crucially, she decides where each brand will be located in the store.
‘The amount of space you are going to give to each designer clearly dictates the buying, so it’s impossible to separate the two. Once again, you have to evaluate the “hot” aspect of a designer compared with the commercial reality: just how well is this label going to sell? And then, of course, the decisions you make about placing the clothes affect sales. You are aware that a certain type of customer goes for a certain type of designer, so the idea is to keep them flowing from one boutique to another, almost unconsciously, because they keep seeing things that catch their eye. I can’t tell you how I do that – it becomes instinctive.’ Instinct also drives the work of Janet Wardley, the store’s visual merchandizing controller, who handles window displays as well as interior mannequins and display points. ‘I’m lucky because, at Harvey Nichols, the display function is separated from the marketing department, which is not the case in many places. It means there is no pressure on me to favour certain brands, or to give the entire window display over to one brand because a deal has been struck. We ensure that the Harvey Nichols brand comes out on top. That situation gives me a lot of freedom.’
To celebrate one London Fashion Week, Wardley filled the windows with 15 archive pieces from previous Alexander McQueen collections – in other words, the windows were displaying items that were not even on sale inside the store. ‘Fashion students came and took pictures of it,’ she recalls.
In more usual circumstances, she endeavours to evoke an atmosphere that enhances the clothes, rather than being led by them. At the time I interview her, she’s just created a dark, autumnal theme with Halloween overtones, featuring giant metal insects. ‘For spring I’m picking up on blue, which is going to be big next season. You have to be on-trend, not just in terms of fashion magazines and runaway shows – which of course I study – but also in terms of the general feel of the times. You’re reading newspapers and listening to the radio, soaking up influences. One of the interesting things about Harvey Nichols is that it is considered a trendsetter, so we can’t really get it “wrong”, so to speak.’ Interestingly, Wardley never receives official feedback about whether her displays have driven sales inside the store. ‘It’s considered one of the last artistic professions, so to be monitored in that way would take away our freedom and the ability to take risks. It’s precisely because we don’t have to answer to commercial concerns that we can do something entirely different. After all, we’re supposed to be the leaders in our field.’
Wardley heads a team of ten, including five prop builders and two graphic designers (who take care of signage). Harvey Nichols has its own workshop and, on the rare occasions it sources materials from outside the company, it tends to use the same trusted suppliers. Mannequins get to travel, as they are rotated around the group’s stores. Occasionally they are renovated. Wardley – who rarely looks at the windows of rival stores in case she is ‘inspired by someone else without realizing it’ – has none the less noticed the return of the mannequin, the humble shop-window dummy, as a display device.
‘There was a time when all the chain stores were using posters and bust forms in their windows. I imagine it was because they’d spent so much money on their advertising that they wanted to squeeze maximum value out of it, so they put the posters in the window, too. It was a classic case of what happens when the marketing department drives the display side. Now it seems to be swinging back the other way – you’re seeing mannequins again and more creative displays.’ Of all the marketing tricks in the retail book, window displays are the oldest and, still, the most alluring. Every year in the run-up to Christmas, crowds jostle in front of breath-fogged windows in Regent Street, Boulevard Haussmann and Fifth Avenue. ‘Brightly lit, they. . . exercise their powers of attraction even at night,’ writes Gérard Laizé, in Repères Mode 2003. He adds that, historically, French fashion houses were judged by the sophistication of their window displays. In Paris, the house of Hermès on the Rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré has long been famed for its enchanting fairy-tale displays created by Leïla Menchari – who has been with Hermès since 1977 – which combine silk and leather goods with jewellery, flowers, sculptures, and even leaves and seashells. And all this from a company that claims with a straight face that it does not do ‘marketing’.
But in a world where luxury is big business, even the most exclusive brands rely on marketing – and their stores are the most spectacular manifestations of their ambition.