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I wanted to share with you my new Op-Ed piece about whether today a store can still be a taste-maker. I think this is a very zeitgeist topic and I hope the article can start a fruitful discussion.
In a 2012 New York Times article about Barneys, the iconic department store that for decades was Gotham’s tastemaker, Cathy Horyn quoted Gene Pressman, the grandson of Barneys’ founder, about what the ethos of a successful fashion shop should be. “If you give customers what they want, then you die… The fact is they don’t know what they want.” In the pre-Internet and pre-Instagram era this certainly used to be the case, but is it still?
These days the department stores’ offerings seem interchangeable. The Internet has made shopping globalized, and thus even more homogenized. There are web department stores like Net-a-Porter and The Corner, and boutiques like LN-CC in London and Luisa via Roma in Florence that have built their retail models giving priority to their e-commerce rather than the physical store. By significantly expanding availability of fashion goods, this plethora of shopping options has made the price a primary determinant behind a purchasing decision.
For an American it used to be that you went to your local store and bought whatever European designers they had, and if you wanted to get a better price, you would have to get on a plane and go to Paris or Milan. Now you can enjoy the same savings with a few mouse clicks.
Because there are hundreds of boutiques around the world that have launched their own e-commerce sites, several high-end shopping aggregators have emerged using social networking as their platform. Notable among them are Polyvore, that allows you to create shoppable collages, and Lyst, which creates personalized shopping lists while serving as a conduit to various web shops. On both sites, users can follow other users. “Today’s consumer is now influenced by a radically expanded group of tastemakers, ranging from traditional retailers and magazines to bloggers and friends. This shift has been driven by the dominance of social platforms in the content space like Twitter and Pinterest, and in the commerce space, like Lyst,” said Chris Morton, the founder of Lyst.
In such a climate, the role of stores as arbiters of style is fading away and that of celebrities is rapidly rising. Today, Kanye West is undoubtedly responsible for more Givenchy t-shirt sales than anyone else in the world. Riccardo Dalai, the owner of Riccardi boutique in Boston, told me that he cannot reorder them fast enough, and that their five to seven hundred-dollar retail price does not deter his customers. “And these kids, when they come into the store, they already know what they want,” he added.
West is just an extreme example of seemingly countless tastemakers, whose Instagram accounts are followed by tens of thousands, sometimes millions, of people. The explosion of street-style photography has given birth to an array of people who do nothing in particular, except dressing to be photographed. All of a sudden, the actress at the Oscars solemnly announcing on TV the designer of her gown seems impossibly quaint compared to editor Anna Dello Russo cavorting for the cameras in a Moschino outfit fresh off the runway.
In such a climate, shops are increasingly being forgone in order to bridge the gap between the brand and the consumer. Today, brands are racing to open their own e-commerce stores and their designers do more interviews so they can become celebrities in their own right. One high-ranking official of a respected fashion brand, who asked to remain anonymous, told me that opening its own online shop was dictated by the current retail climate and that he viewed it as a do-or-die situation.
Is it all gloom and doom? Alex Kasavin, who is opening a new Williamsburg boutique, Idol, later this month, said, “It remains the role of any fashion boutique to edit and contextualize its products – through merchandizing, editorial strategies, etc. – and in doing so infuse them with greater significance and socio-cultural cachet.” Though he went on to acknowledge that it’s increasingly more than ever up to the brands to create identity of their product and that there is a real danger for a store to narrowly define itself in terms of aesthetic preferences. Lately, we have seen several high-profile examples of failure of such boutiques. Atelier in New York went out of business late last year and LN-CC in London had to be bought out of administration by an Italian company.
The stores are scrambling to adjust to this new reality, demanding exclusive products and often twisting the arms of young designers with impossible sale terms. Last year Barneys saturated the fashion media with their XO (Exclusively Ours) ads to stress exclusivity. This may stem the tide, but not stop it. By and large today’s customers know exactly what they want and where to get it.
In a 2012 New York Times article about Barneys, the iconic department store that for decades was Gotham’s tastemaker, Cathy Horyn quoted Gene Pressman, the grandson of Barneys’ founder, about what the ethos of a successful fashion shop should be. “If you give customers what they want, then you die… The fact is they don’t know what they want.” In the pre-Internet and pre-Instagram era this certainly used to be the case, but is it still?
These days the department stores’ offerings seem interchangeable. The Internet has made shopping globalized, and thus even more homogenized. There are web department stores like Net-a-Porter and The Corner, and boutiques like LN-CC in London and Luisa via Roma in Florence that have built their retail models giving priority to their e-commerce rather than the physical store. By significantly expanding availability of fashion goods, this plethora of shopping options has made the price a primary determinant behind a purchasing decision.
For an American it used to be that you went to your local store and bought whatever European designers they had, and if you wanted to get a better price, you would have to get on a plane and go to Paris or Milan. Now you can enjoy the same savings with a few mouse clicks.
Because there are hundreds of boutiques around the world that have launched their own e-commerce sites, several high-end shopping aggregators have emerged using social networking as their platform. Notable among them are Polyvore, that allows you to create shoppable collages, and Lyst, which creates personalized shopping lists while serving as a conduit to various web shops. On both sites, users can follow other users. “Today’s consumer is now influenced by a radically expanded group of tastemakers, ranging from traditional retailers and magazines to bloggers and friends. This shift has been driven by the dominance of social platforms in the content space like Twitter and Pinterest, and in the commerce space, like Lyst,” said Chris Morton, the founder of Lyst.
In such a climate, the role of stores as arbiters of style is fading away and that of celebrities is rapidly rising. Today, Kanye West is undoubtedly responsible for more Givenchy t-shirt sales than anyone else in the world. Riccardo Dalai, the owner of Riccardi boutique in Boston, told me that he cannot reorder them fast enough, and that their five to seven hundred-dollar retail price does not deter his customers. “And these kids, when they come into the store, they already know what they want,” he added.
West is just an extreme example of seemingly countless tastemakers, whose Instagram accounts are followed by tens of thousands, sometimes millions, of people. The explosion of street-style photography has given birth to an array of people who do nothing in particular, except dressing to be photographed. All of a sudden, the actress at the Oscars solemnly announcing on TV the designer of her gown seems impossibly quaint compared to editor Anna Dello Russo cavorting for the cameras in a Moschino outfit fresh off the runway.
In such a climate, shops are increasingly being forgone in order to bridge the gap between the brand and the consumer. Today, brands are racing to open their own e-commerce stores and their designers do more interviews so they can become celebrities in their own right. One high-ranking official of a respected fashion brand, who asked to remain anonymous, told me that opening its own online shop was dictated by the current retail climate and that he viewed it as a do-or-die situation.
Is it all gloom and doom? Alex Kasavin, who is opening a new Williamsburg boutique, Idol, later this month, said, “It remains the role of any fashion boutique to edit and contextualize its products – through merchandizing, editorial strategies, etc. – and in doing so infuse them with greater significance and socio-cultural cachet.” Though he went on to acknowledge that it’s increasingly more than ever up to the brands to create identity of their product and that there is a real danger for a store to narrowly define itself in terms of aesthetic preferences. Lately, we have seen several high-profile examples of failure of such boutiques. Atelier in New York went out of business late last year and LN-CC in London had to be bought out of administration by an Italian company.
The stores are scrambling to adjust to this new reality, demanding exclusive products and often twisting the arms of young designers with impossible sale terms. Last year Barneys saturated the fashion media with their XO (Exclusively Ours) ads to stress exclusivity. This may stem the tide, but not stop it. By and large today’s customers know exactly what they want and where to get it.
The local ones were always the best and a major way to get introduced to new music, hear about local shows, etc.
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