Some of you may remember that the title of Irvine Welsh's novel Trainspotting was a metaphor to indicate heroin use: the search for the next fix was just an arbitrary way to give the main characters' pointless life a structure and their habit was a past-time to get to the next day.
Welsh's addicts have been a lot on my mind recently: in the last few years the fashion industry has been going through a sort of "trainspotting" phase that should in its case be called "marketspotting". Most fashion houses, brands and labels have been opening new stores or organising catwalk shows and events in exotic places to try and find uncharted waters and unlock virgin markets. Yet this process quite often seemed vapid, empty, almost an excuse to get to the next season.
Paul Smith launched a new flagship store in Beijing in May; Topshop opened last week its first store in Hong Kong; Moschino left the Milanese menswear shows schedule to present its S/S 2014 menswear and womenswear Resort collection (plus some "archival" pieces) last week in Shanghai, an event that also celebrated the opening of two news stores in Hong Kong.
Dolce & Gabbana were the latest after McQueen, Tom Ford, Burberry Prorsum, Jimmy Choo and Rag & Bone to be lured by the "London Collections: Men" event. The Italian design duo launched last Saturday their tailoring collection in their new men’s store in New Bond Street. Incidentally, just a few days ago, Chanel also opened its new grand and redudant flagship boutique in the same street.
Quite a few of these brands and fashion houses seem to be hopping from one place to the next with the same obsessive and enthusiastic passion an inexperienced backpacker may have for exotic, unreachable and unusual locations. Apparently, there are precise reasons behind these itinerant circuses travelling around the globe: moving your show from one city to the next means generating buzz, raising brand awareness (while physically eliminating from your list the critics you don't want to invite as they may be busy somewhere else...now you also have an alibi not to invite them); opening a new store or launching a new product (usually cosmetics/beauty – see Marc Jacobs and Gucci) is about generating more money. But there is also something else: if you analyse the "marketspotting" mania in a deeper way, you easily realise these fashion houses and brands may be displaying disorders from the classical times.
Most of them seem to be the victims of a dichotomic disease that could be described as "Horror Loci Vs Strenua Inertia": they do feel a certain revulsion towards the place where they are (horror loci), a revulsion mainly triggered by the fear that specific place/market is by now saturated/deep in a financial crisis/not interested in the stuff they produce anymore, so they start moving around, almost prompted by the same restlessness/boredom/vigorous lassitude (strenua inertia) that, Horace recounted, pushed the rich Romans to hurry to their country houses because they were bored with life in the city, only to get bored with the country life and go back to the city shortly afterwards.
Opening a boutique implies long market researches based on solid grounds and on numbers, so maybe this mysterious dichotomic disorder may not be responsible for the store openings, but in our age that is all about livestreaming something from one corner of the world to the next, moving a show from one country to another (without showing anything desperately innovative, see Moschino's S/S 14 Menswear/Resort collections) is obviously the ultimate expression of a sort of vigorous lassitude that requires a lot of money and the will to splash it knowing that you will first and foremost generate "media revenues" rather than proper sales.
There is one thing, though, that distinguishes the Romans from the modern fashion houses: the incessant desire for change prompted the former to look for that novelty factor that could distract them from the fear of death; the incessant desire for change prompts fashion houses to look for that novelty factor that can distract not them but consumers from buying less and becoming wiser. And so the circus moves on...
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