In yesterday’s New York Times, Arts and Style journalist Vanessa Friedman writes of how in the days after last week’s terrorist attacks, luxury brands were at odds over how to handle the unsettling event. In many cases, they canceled or cut back on major marketing initiatives.
The Times’ own luxury conference which was to be held at Versailles, was canceled. A black tie dinner for the exhibition, Jacqueline de Ribes: The Art of Style, is reduced to a casual cocktail. And a lavish Cartier diamonds reception became a “breakfast open house.” Hold the pancakes. Not exactly luxe.
“There’s a temptation,” writes Friedman, “when confronted with fear, sadness and human loss, to turn away from luxury; a natural instinct to dismiss frivolous subjects as inappropriate at such a serious time.”
Retail is always fragile when faced with a global crisis. Consumer confidence dips and “frivolous subjects” like shopping for the latest Chanel gown seems much less easy to condone.
As expected, tourism has dropped. Airlines are experiencing hundreds of cancellations, and the recent bomb threats to Air France flights has only elevated traveler anxiety. Tourism represents 8-percent of the French economy.
Will we face a major luxury retail slowdown, and can Paris regain its image as the fashion capital?
More than likely, France’s top luxury brands will put a bigger emphasis on boosting other markets like the Middle East and Asia, even though with the latter, China’s sagging sales has hit Louis Vuitton in particular, quite hard. This week, the brand closed two stores in Guanghzou along with stores in Harbin, and Urumqi. Hermès, Versace, and Giorgio Armani have been shuttering stores in China since 2013.
Overall, global sales of luxury goods is beginning to limp.
Nevertheless, brands can still turn to other strategies. They should push clienteling and drive sales associates to connect with their customer database, even if only to “check in” to see if clients are safe. e-commerce, always the luxury brand’s Achilles heel, should be ramped up with communications that remind shoppers that “we’re still here for you,” and that premium service will not stop in the face of terrorism.
The truth is, the successful luxury brand is able to transcend even the horrors of terrorism and engage customers in the idea of the brand purchase as a show of nationalism and support. But luxury brands, with their specialty of fantasy, don’t always like to deal with reality.
Still, they made an effort. On social media, Brands like Berluti, Lancome and their corporate headquarters like LVMH and Kering, changed their cover photos on Facebook to solid black. Karl Lagerfeld’s online presence became his iconic profile in blue, white, and red. And Louis Vuitton deftly used its LV logo as a symbol for LOVE.
The Times‘ Friedman is clearly on the same bandwagon. She rallies with the idea that now is the time for the luxury consumer to make a political statement with a purchase. But with the New YorkTimes, it could equally be a play to the luxury brands who advertise within the pages of T magazine.
On the day of the attacks, we visited a U.S. Hermes boutique and found one customer who had stopped in to express his sadness and disbelief. “I’m friends with a sales associate here and I just felt like I needed to come in and talk about what happened.”
Today’s world of communications is one where zeroes and ones rule. For the most part, Digital has replaced what once happened only in print, and that fact is increasingly evident in how brands are choosing to connect with customers.
Few firms of any kind bother designing and developing great print collaterals and in my view, that’s a huge missed opportunity – especially now, when electronic communications are so ubiquitous.
Even business cards are dispensed as more of an afterthought than an obligation.
Holding a big event? Mailing an invitation via conventional post seems almost quaint. Why bother when digital communications accomplishes the same thing, right?
Wrong.
Quite simply, digital – no matter how “responsive” and clever – is cold and flat. In contrast, print offer an even richer brand experience because it not only showcases a company’s aesthetic in three-dimension, it more insistently invites the customer to pause and engage with the brand, thanks to the hand-crafted quality of textured papers, bold layout, and unique type design.
Nevertheless, when marketing budgets are downsized, print tends to be the first on the chopping block. Even luxury fashion brands have resorted to emailing look books and invitations rather than printed ones.
It’s not the Internet’s fault. It was in the early part of the 21st century that concerns over the environment quite justifiably created a revolution in communications. Customers demanded that brands stop wasting paper with so many catalogues, brochures, and receipts.
For marketers, the tidal effect became: why only “cut back”? Let’s get rid of all of it. Do you want me to email you your receipt?
We were even forced to say goodbye to the shopping bag.
Like many luxury brands, Louis Vuitton started cutting back on print collaterals about ten years ago, but I still leaf through a book they produced in 2002 that stands out for its use of gorgeous saturated imagery. It’s the story of a tortured and clandestine relationship, one where an array of products play an important supporting role.
I am not arguing to replace digital with print, but that print still offers a unique format for sophisticated and creative communications and and that depending on the specific marketing program, can connect far better than digital.
By virtue of its rarity, print collateral can command attention more deftly than an email attachment. It tends to linger longer, be it on a coffee table or desk.
Case in point, some pieces I keep simply because they continue to impress: an invitation to a long-ago Maison Margiela fashion show disguised as a credit card. A Givenchy invitation printed on aluminum. Or virtually anything from Hermès, who year after year prints a beautiful magazine and a host of other collaterals.
A recent hardbound book from Bally is bursting with colorful images printed on heavy stock, a candy-colored journey through the brand’s accessories collection. A cold piece of black Plexiglas announces an Yves Saint Laurent store opening, perfectly capturing the essence of then-designer Tom Ford’s aesthetic decadence.
Beautiful collaterals allow one page or several to bring context to a brand’s raison d’être and reinforce other kinds of messaging happening online or in-store.
>> Request one our own print brochures. Email us at info@bonbrand.com.
That these are troubling times for fashion is only underscored by yesterday’s announcement that Lanvin creative director Alber Elbaz had been quite suddenly fired.
The announcement came on the heels of several other major personnel shuffles: Dior’s creative director, Raf Simons, resigned October 22, while in August it was Alexander Wang at Balenciaga. In June, Donna Karan resigned from her namesake brand, while Marissa Webb was sacked at Banana Republic.
There are many reasons why designers are pushed out of fashion houses but lately the shuffles have become more desperate and some would say, worrisome. Granted, there were few tears over Alexander Wang’s departure at Balenciaga.
>> Read our recent blog post, The Final Bow: Will Donna Karan’s Exit Kill the Brand?
Off the record, many agreed that Wang brought little originality to the brand and that he generally did little more than infuse it with the same looks he created for his own brand. His short stint at Balenciaga came to an abrupt end with both parties insisting that the separation was mutual.
Still, there is cause for concern that this game of musical chairs within the upper echelons of major fashion brands is becoming all too common, and highlights the fact that corporate executives are getting impatient for the kind of explosive acclaim that used to be more common in years before. Make that decades: Marc Jacobs, John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Helmut Lang – designers who made headlines long before the internet held the sway it does now.
So who are today’s long-term fashion stars? Are corporate executives putting too much pressure on fashion’s creatives and scapegoating the very people responsible for the future of the world’s most iconic brands?
It’s a notion few will openly admit – not if they want to keep working.
Is There a Dior After Galliano?
At Dior, designer Raf Simons managed to prove that there is a Dior after Galliano. In just a little over two years, he managed to bring new energy to a brand that had been darkened by the drama of John Galliano’s racist rant and his subsequent firing. This past spring’s Bubble House show in Cannes and spring 2016 show at the Louvre only underlined Simon’s ability to ably channel the house’s namesake.
It is well known however, that the Dior brand is LVMH head Bernard Arnault’s “jewel,” and more than likely Simons felt frustrated by the lack of control he was able to exert over the brand. He was blocked, for instance, from having any input on the brand’s men’s wear strategy and the two brands operated as separate entities.
Elbaz Under Fire
Was it the champagne, or did he know the end was nigh?
At the Fashion Group International’s star-studded event, Alber Elbaz decided to get a little too honest and that may have been the icing on the cake for his sudden firing.
It was a speech peppered with his personal musings about the fashion industry – and his frustrations.
“We designers started as couturiers with dreams, with intuitions and with feelings,” said Elbaz, which received nods from many of the designers in attendance. “Then we became creative directors, so we have to create, but mostly direct. And now we have to become image-makers, making sure it looks good in the pictures….Loudness is the new cool, and not only in fashion. I prefer whispering. I think it goes deeper and lasts longer.”
{ “We became creative directors, so we have to create, but mostly direct. And now we have to become image-makers, making sure it looks good in the pictures….Loudness is the new cool.” }
Some at the event were courageousness enough to vocalize their agreement. Said Jonathan Anderson, the latest wunderkind, “Fashion is moving at the speed of boredom,” while Jason Wu called the industry simply “too serious.”
But shareholders are deadly serious when it comes to running a profitable business and they don’t have patience for fashion that “whispers” — especially when the market is full of brands who have no problem commanding attention with lavish advertising campaigns, celebrity spokespersons, and cavernous flagship stores.
Elbaz reported to one shareholder with colossal expectations : Shaw-Lan Wang, a Taiwanese publishing magnate who, 14 years ago, recruited him to revive the 175 year old Lanvin brand: what she then called “a sleeping beauty.”
In a relatively short time – all things considered — Elbaz made Lanvin one of the most desired luxury brands on the market, but he was often frustrated by Wang’s inability to push the brand to the next level.
She sold the brand’s perfume and cosmetics division in order to raise capital, but it’s unclear if that cash was funneled into the brand. Nevertheless it was an equity sell-out that only diminishes the valuation of a brand.
Lanvin’s sales have dwindled to $221 million compared with a peak a few years ago of $276M, and the brand continues to be over dependent on wholesale partners who make up 70% of the brand’s total revenues.
The Art of Fashion is Business
The fact of the matter is, fashion is serious, to the point where corporate shareholders have become less and less willing to make strategic investments and support the time it takes for a brand to gain momentum. Case in point: Schiaparelli and Vionnet, both “sleeping beauties” in their own right but still very much asleep.
More and more, a healthy network of stores coupled with a rich e-commerce experience has become critical for a brand to gain traction with customers, especially since stores are the most tangible way to communicate the total brand experience.
Stores, however, take capital. Lots of it, and Lanvin has suffered without this presence.
As much as many in the industry denies it, fashion – even haute couture — is not art, it’s business. Today’s creative director must be equal parts designer, showman, marketer, and business strategist. It’s a job description that clearly has caused bitterness within its ranks.
On Instagram, fashion blogger Bryanboy writes, “Maybe it’s time to go back to the essence of being a real designer owning a fashion house, and not this age of ‘creative direction.’”
Francis Kurkdjian never dreamed of inventing fragrances. His dream was to be a dancer, but luck was not on his side. As they say: when one door closes, another opens, and standing at that door was Marie Antoinette.
Well, not really, but almost.
We’ll get to that later. Before the Queen of France showed up, Francis had discovered the magic of fragrance and how it can bring to life a couturier’s vision through scent. Schiaparelli’s Shocking. Saint Laurent’s Opium.
He attended the prestigious ISIPCA, the leading school for perfume and cosmetics, and not long after, created one of the most successful fragrances of all time: Le Mâle by Jean-Paul Gaultier. Suddenly he was 32 and receiving the François Coty Award — for a collective body of work.
Francis wasted little time and launched his own atelier for “custom fragrances,” concocting fragrances for such clients as Catherine Deneuve, for whom he created a scent called Lumiere Noire.
But Francis yearned for other ways to express his passion for fragrance. He wanted fragrance to be a performance, a spectacle for the senses that went beyond the traditional boundaries of the commercial juice industry.
In 2005, he set about to recreated the perfume of Marie Antoinette, drawn from the ancient scribbles of the Queen’s own perfumer. He meditated on her life in Marie Antoinette’s private chambers at Versailles. At launch, the fragrance sold for $900 a flacon.
Today, with Maison Francis Kurkdjian, he continues his sometimes eccentric but always mesmerizing fragrance designs, going so far as to create everything from fragrance “wardrobes” to full-scale art installations built around ephemeral scents, like – money. For Francis, the boundaries of scent are only limited by imagination.
BERTRAND PELLEGRIN: Your approach to creating fragrance is very three-dimensional and passionate. What is your starting point when making a scent?
FRANCIS KURKDJIAN: When I create a perfume, anything can inspire me as long as it becomes the beginning of a story that I can translate into a fragrance. A fragrance is a story that is strong enough to convey emotions.
My inspiration is not driven by raw materials. I first focus on a general feeling. Then I try to envision the final image for the fragrance. I first must dream of the fragrance, only then can I start writing the formula. How can you create something if you don’t know what you want to say? Painter uses colors, musician notes, as a perfumer I use smell. The name of the fragrance always comes first. It sums up what I want to say with my perfume. It’s like the title of a book or the name of a painting. It gives me a guideline, a creative path to follow.
BP: Every brand believes that they need a fragrance in order to communicate their identity. There are over a thousand new fragrances launched every year. Are we in danger of ruining the art, craft, and appreciation of fragrance?
FK: Everything can become a story, so every brand can have its own scent. However, if you want to make a real statement, be unique and different, your story has to be one of a kind.
Twenty years ago, you had fewer players in the industry and it was more Couture and Fashion oriented. Today you have fragrances endorsed by models, singers, actors and even celebrities. You have good and bad ones on each market. For a while, the niche brand market was synonymous of quality and uniqueness. I think this is almost over now. You have so many brands launching so many fragrances, with no legitimacy for some of them, no real creation in terms of fragrances. Some commercial fragrances are just amazing and have changed the market and influenced it. It’s like movies or music. Some blockbusters pieces are just very good, and some are not.
BP: So what was your goal then in launching Maison Francis Kurkdjian?
FK: By launching my own house I wanted to share my vision on scents and luxury with the public. In my mind, there is a unique style in Paris that I have not seen anywhere else in the world. The fragrances are created and blended in France. What is also important for me is to create a fragrance collection that can be seen as an olfactory wardrobe. I want people able to choose everyday a specific fragrance according to their moods… For me, you don’t have to remain loyal to a perfume but to a perfumer and his universe. That’s why I have created a specific line called the fragrance wardrobe, a feminine and a masculine set of 8 different perfumes.
BP: You’ve had such a keen interest in historical fragrances, ones that don’t even exist anymore, like Marie Antoinette’s. How did that fascination start?
FK: History is one of my passions since I was a child. It is also a great source of inspiration in life in general. It all began in 2003 when I met the historian, Elisabeth de Feydeau. She was writing a biography about one of Marie Antoinette’s perfumers, Jean Louis Fargeon. I have recreated the scent of the queen from original formulas. The Queen of France had an inimitable style and liked large floral scents.
I knew quite a lot about Versailles when I worked on recreating the Queen’s scent. The perfume school I attended is based in Versailles and the gardens were a great place to study. This project gave me an incredible opportunity to spend a lot of time in her private apartments in Versailles and to get to know the Queen in a more intimate way.
BP: Talk to me about these multi-sensory installations or performances that you do. Is this the future of the fragrance experience?
FK: Perfume in a bottle, the way we know it, is not an art form in my mind. It’s craftsmanship but not art. The future of the perfumer for the sake of the art is truly outside of the perfume bottle. This is why I started thinking about olfactive installations. Each olfactory installation is the opportunity to engage a dialogue between the public and a place by using smell as an emotional medium.
I have worked with French artist Yann Toma and created a drinkable scented water for an art exhibit in the South of France. I also created the fragrance The Smell of Money for French artist Sophie Calle, as well as olfactory installations for the Castle of Versailles, the Grand Palais, scented couture and fashion shows, and so on.
Right now I am exhibiting an olfactive installation called Stratus 2015 in Milano for the 2015 Universal Exhibition 2015, with the fragrance dispersed in sort of clouds or a fog. I was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci.
BP: From da Vinci to textiles. Your newest scent, OUD Satin Mood, is continuation of your exploration of scents inspired by textiles and this time it is satin. Can a textile really have its own smell?
FK : With the OUD collection, It was my desire to express my reflections of the Orient as kind of fragrance « sensations » — feelings, texture, and yes, fabrics. These scents play on warmth, glamour, comfort and sensuality. OUD cashmere mood, for instance, slips on like a second skin. OUD velvet mood Is fluid and majestic and releases the scent of Ceylon cinnamon. OUD silk mood captures and celebrates the Bulgarian rose. My newest, OUD satin mood conveys the idea of flowing fabrics delicately draped over bare skin, with smooth notes of amber and vanilla.
BP: Wow… quite intense. You get so passionate when you talk about these scents! So tell me, if you were to create only one fragrance that is only yours and which conveys only the essence of you, what would it be composed of?
FK: You might be very surprise and disappointed, but I do not wear any fragrance any longer. It’s my very own way to be away from my work and feel free!
>> READ MORE. “Francis Kurkdjian and Fabien Ducher, Changing History in a Bottle,” The New York Times, 9/24/15.
>> Maison Francis Kurkdjian fragrances are available at Neiman Marcus, Net-a-Porter, and online at franciskurkdjian.com.
In the 1950’s market research was often called “motivational research,” and it marked a turning point in how advertisers targeted consumers. But “market research” sounded more scientific and less emotional, and so it become the more commonly used term – ironic, since at the end of the day, what we’re talking about is indeed, the emotions of the consumer.
The Science of Why: Decoding Human Motivation and Transforming Marketing Strategy by David Forbes makes a strong case for how the dynamics of psychosocial behavior can impact marketing and that motivational research should be instrumental in determining the scope of a marketing program.
“Motivational research did for marketing what the periodic table did for chemistry: it gave everyone a playing field in which all the squares are networked,” says Dr. Forbes, in a recent interview with b. on brand.
This “periodic table” is the driver for understanding how marketers of all stripes can develop strategies that respond to the human motivations behind our desires, and in turn bring added value to brands and services.
“We have to remember that people have a range of motivations,” says Forbes. “How we understand those motivations is key to how we develop strategies for reaching that particular customer target.”
Intrapsychic motivations ( i.e. the self), include security, identity, and mastery; while Instrumental motivations (the object world) encompass empowerment, engagement, and achievement. Interpersonal motivations often play hand-in-hand with Intrapsychic, they are our social identity and include belonging, nurturance, and esteem.
For marketers, such a matrix is the lens through which any and all products and services can be viewed. Brand perception is based as much on the brand promise of what the product will actually do as it is on who we are as consumers.
Is the BMW really “the Ultimate Driving Machine”? I don’t know, but driving one might make you feel pretty perfect – maybe like an “ultimate human.”
Let’s take another category, that of “home improvement.”
In 2013, Home Depot launched its successful “Let’s Do This” campaign, designed to motivate the Weekend Warrior into boldly attacking their home improvement projects. The television commercials seem to imply that in one weekend, we can easily paint an entire house, install a deck and then plant a garden – with a seemingly innate confidence, emboldened by, yes, Home Depot.
“The truth is, the weekend warrior often doesn’t know what they’re doing at all, so they go to a place like Home Depot in order to get motivated,” says Forbes. “So the idea of ‘Let’s do this’ is as much about a feeling of personal achievement as it is about just getting chores done, and not being afraid of doing something like installing a sink.”
The important point about The Science of Why is that it is meant to be the foundation rather than an actual playbook for building marketing programs and campaigns. Forbes does not delve into the more complex demographic considerations such as class, race, and gender. Still, he presents a compelling set of principles that demand attention, especially at a time when so many retailers, consultants, and strategy firms draw too much of their data from relatively superficial arenas like social media, which is still relatively unreliable as a gauge for consumer behavior.
>> The Science of Why: Decoding Human Motivation and Transforming Marketing Strategy by David Forbes. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Buy it now on Amazon.com.
It is virtually impossible to escape the word “luxury,” so much has it become an almost commonplace word used to describe almost anything. Where once, we felt quite sure of its meaning we are now much less convinced.
The latest exhibition at London’s V&A doesn’t shy away from asking the question – and many more – with the exhibition, What is Luxury? (through September 27, 2015.)
“Definitions of luxury are always changing depending on the condition we are in, which is informed by political, economic and cultural factors,” says V&A co-curator Leanne Wierzba. “By presenting our selection of objects together, the exhibition addresses how luxury is made and understood in a physical, conceptual and cultural capacity and gives many possible options of what luxury could be. We show that luxury is innately personal.”
It is perhaps this that makes the exhibition so compelling, because it forwards the notion that luxury is no longer a universal definition, rather, it is based upon the very personal quest for the rare and elevated experience.
Of course the opulent and exquisite are included: we see an ornate Portuguese crown, a 17th century Venetian Chasuble (priestly robe), or an ornate and lavish 18th century Indian Howdah, a kind of carriage used for riding elephants.
What, were you expecting a bespoke Louis Vuitton luggage piece or a Harry Winston diamond necklace? Don’t’ be so plebeian.
The exhibition’s goal is more to mine the purest and abstract interpretations of luxury and challenge us to find their often-elusive “luxurious” qualities.
CIS:Loan:Gilbert.69-2008; CIS:Loan:Gilbert.69:1-2008; CIS:Loan:Gilbert.69:2-2008
“Along with our ideas about luxury, the language used to describe it continues to evolve, “says Wierzba. “Today, ideas like privacy, security, well-being and time are becoming important to our understanding of luxury.”
Luxury is also about the ability to retrieve what was once commonplace and is now so terribly precious. One piece entitled ‘Time for Yourself’, by Marcin Rusak and Iona Inglesby, is a survival kit for getting lost with a compass that sends one in random directions and a watch without a dial.
From artist Gabriel Barcia-Colombo, we are presented a vending machine stocked with actual DNA samples, a message about our loss of privacy and the evolution of the designer human.
Perhaps most poignant, however, is our quest for what continues to be the most luxurious thing of all: time.
“Any experience of luxury is fundamentally grounded in space and time, and increasingly space and time are viewed as luxuries in their own right. This has very little to do with expense and comes down to something that is ultimately very humble and human; it is about enjoying special moments and breaking free from daily routines.”
>> What is Luxury?, a V&A and Crafts Council exhibition sponsored by Northacre. Through September 27, 2015 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. For details click here.
While Paris has long considered itself the fashion capital of the world, it has always allowed the fashion industry to operate in its own universe, with little public celebration or efforts to make it more approachable to the masses.
But that will soon change, now that Paris’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, who has decided to fastrack her efforts to amplify how the city supports the high arts in fashion. Her key target is to engage the city’s political institutions that in general, ignore fashion or at the very least, downplay its importance. The general public in Paris is seldom invited to participate in the excitement of fashion week, but Hidalgo wants that to change ASAP.
Sound familiar?
It should, since the mayor and others in her cabinet have taken note of the huge marketing success such efforts have had for the City of New York, making fashion now synonymous with the Big Apple.
In 2012, Mayor Michael Bloomberg launched a series of initiatives designed to boost the city’s image and make fashion events more accessible to the mainstream public. A bigger, bolder fashion week along with a Fashion Incubator has helped establish a global identity for New York as a fashion center.
Say ‘thank you’ to Project Runway, Fashion’s Night Out, and countless other campaigns that have helped make fashion week far more democratic and helped increase interest and acceptance by the proletariat. We call it “fashion tourism,” and it’s working.
Paris is now looking to do the same, with a reported $66million invested in supporting fashion schools and raise funds to turn Paris’ City Hall basement into a museum for permanent collections that are open to the public.
The Eiffel Tower, the eternal icon of the city, will be lit up for fashion week with the slogan, La Mode Aime Paris.
Meanwhile a poster campaign will be mounted throughout the city to encourage stores and restaurants to engage the general public in celebrating fashion week, which has long been considered by most to be a trade show meant only for insiders and the elite.
The renovation of the Palais Galliera, Paris’ primary fashion museum, will also benefit from the Mayor’s marketing efforts, especially since the museum is still off the radar for most visitors to the City of Light. The museum is currently displaying the knockout exhibition of rare archival pieces by Jeanne Lanvin, on display until August 23, 2015. Get Details here.
For the past several years, Macy’s CEO Terry Lundgren has boasted of the massive insight and strategy in place to drive Millenials to Macy’s. Only problem is, it’s not working. Macy’s is… well, Macy’s. The fact is, most department stores and shopping malls are still moving at a snail’s pace when it comes to innovating their customer experience.
Not so for San Francisco’s Westfield Mall, who, along with developers Forest City launched Bespoke, a co-working and retail incubator located on the fourth floor of its historic building on Market Street. The target audience for Bespoke is – you guessed it – the thoroughly modern Millennial. Two weeks ago, the so-called “innovation generation” was handed the keys to a new playground, one where, as is now de rigueur in the tech industry, the office is both a place to grow new ideas, network, and play. Call it the new country club.
Bespoke is a big, flamboyant roll of the dice for Westfield Group, who worked in partnership with Forest City to mastermind what may be the most luxurious and high-octane model for co-working and innovation the world has ever seen.
But they don’t see it as just a gamble. Look past the obvious cliches — phone booths, designer furniture, open kitchens brimming with snacks — and this could be something that might just help animate the dull shopping mall in a whole new way.
Bespoke is not another experiment in “pop up” retail; rather, it is a very serious strategy to innovate retail from pop up to beyond.
“This presents a ripe opportunity for established retailers to reimagine their in-store experiences and infrastructure,” said a Westfield Corporation spokesperson. “It also serves as a unique testing ground for companies new to physical retail that want the chance to pilot new, exciting retail products and monitor their sales performance.”
As expected, the space makes more than a few nods towards some of Silicon Valley’s celebrated tech firms and their now-famous offices full of comfy furniture, limitless meal service, and multiple work spaces that conform to any given mood. However this 37,000 square-foot space steps it up a notch with a more sleek, contemporary vibe that feels equal parts boutique hotel and nightclub, making Google and Facebook HQ’s look more like Sesame Street (which they kind of did anyway.)
All work and no play? Not here. Here you’ll find a bocce and croquet court, a climbing wall, and sleeping nooks.
The Westfield Mall building was formerly the historic Emporium department store, and Steven Lowy, co-CEO of Westfield, called Bespoke a natural part of the trajectory for the legendary retail space.
“Westfield is one of the greatest downtown retail experiences in the United States. Here the physical, the digital, the retailer and the consumer are all in one place. To take an environment like this that has a history and move it forward is incredible.”
Sound enticing? You’ll need to know now that, with the wild demand for San Francisco office space, there is practically no room at the inn: virtually all of Bespoke’s private offices we saw were full, although Bespoke’s press rep assured us that “office and desk availability are always changing due to Bespoke’s unique flexibility.” Sounds like another way of saying: are you on the list?
Current retail tenants include StyleLend, a peer-to-peer garment lending company (which sounds dicey and makes me itch just thinking of it), Shoes of Prey, a customizable shoe brand, and Rovie Entertainment, Ltd., makers of Angry Birds, who is offering a virtual reality experience of it’s best-selling game.
But this isn’t just for show. Westfield’s strategy with Bespoke is not just to create an incubator for new business but also for new business practice and insight, which is why firms like RetailNext, Inc. are getting the red carpet treatment, and housed in one of the larger private corner offices. Westfield’s aim is to harvest insights that eventually can be applied to its other malls around the world.
“As I think about the future of retail, places like bespoke are going to help that evolution,” said Forest City president and CEO, David LaRue, to a standing room-only crowd of attendees at Bespoke’s lavish opening event. “We want to take the best of what we learn here and translate it into other communities.”
Bespoke’s programming includes four separate retail storefronts that back into the co-working zone, becoming essentially a live focus group for startup executives seated on the other side of the glass.
Across the central esplanade and escalator hall is Bespoke’s huge event space, featuring interactive screen technology and all the amenities one could want for impressing the first-round investors. The space even has the capacity to present runway fashion shows.
The spaces can be rented by the day, week, or month with a wide variety of packages for those who simply want to drop in and work at one of the open desks. With prices hovering around and even above the market rate for San Francisco, Bespoke is no bargain, however for many, it’s an efficient way to bypass typical business startup costs and get in where the action is – especially if that action comes with built-in strategic networks and plug-and-play retail.
>> Learn more about Bespoke at www.bespokesf.co.
Bernard Arnault made an unexpected visit to San Francisco last week, by way of Cupertino – more on that later.
The luxury Major Domo strolled into the Louis Vuitton Union Square store with daughter Delphine and son Alexandre. The CEO interacted with store staff and seemed pleased when one of them welcomed him in French, however Delphine (considered by many to be next in line for the throne) remained chilly and avoided eye contact with staffers.
The reason for their visit to the Bay Area?
Having just attended the LV show in Palm Springs, Papa Arnault suddenly aimed the private jet towards San Francisco because his son is vying for an internship at…. Apple. Our guess is that there will be some interesting cross-pollination going on between LVMH and Apple, and it probably won’t just be an internship for a luxury titan’s son.
Yves Saint Laurent was the first modern designer to become a major French luxury brand, and a man who gave new meaning to those three words. Director Bertrand Bonello’s Saint Laurent is as much about the man as it is about the brand, and how commerce can consume creative genius.
Yves Saint Laurent was prodigy, enfant terrible, and tragic hero all rolled into one, so perhaps it comes as no surprise that when it came time to tell his story on film, not everyone agreed on what should and shouldn’t be said.
Unsurprisingly, Pierre Bergé, Saint Laurent’s life and business partner, was first to voice his discontent.
Bergé openly supported director Jalil Lespert’s film of the designer’s life, Yves Saint Laurent, which opened in France only months before Bonello’s film. By all accounts, Berge expected to be consulted with this second film, but when Bonello declined, Bergé balked at supporting it in any way. Bergé is the official guardian of Saint Laurent’s legacy and heads the Fondation Yves Saint Laurent Pierre Bergé.
Nevertheless, Bonello’s Saint Laurent is arguably the better film, simply because it doesn’t gloss over the designer’s demons, of which there were many, and which were intrinsic to his incredible genius as a designer. The film also lays bare the very real business dealings that not only catapulted the designer to fame, but also drove him to paranoid delusion and self-doubt.
While both films discuss Saint Laurent’s drug addiction and to varying degrees, his infidelities, Bonello’s film delves even deeper into the relationship between his creativity and the clinical depression which plagued him his entire life.
Gaspard Ulliel, who portrays the designer, delivers a remarkably nuanced performance that captures the designer’s fragility and child-like innocence. We also come to understand the excruciating torment he felt and could not control.
“He was constantly going up and down and so this is what makes it fascinating for an actor to incarnate,” says Ulliel, whom we met along with director Bertrand Bonello when they were in town to promote the film at the San Francisco International Film Festival. “It is all of these paradoxical aspects of the character. It’s not only about studying what is white or black, but all the shades of grey in-between, all of the colors in-between.”
Unlike Lespert’s film, which focuses on Saint Laurent’s nascent rise following the death of Christian Dior, we meet the designer in 1967 when he is already fully developed and riding a wave of success with his bold ethnic prints, brocades and street-inspired collections. The ’68 riots in Paris only add fuel to his creativity and lead to the launch of “ready-to-wear”, a novel concept at the time, designed to make high fashion more accessible.
We also see how Bergé coddled the prodigy and fashions him into a legend well before such a title is even appropriate. Bergé is the entrepreneur, and even when Saint Laurent misbehaves, his gaze is equal parts heartbroken lover and calculating businessman.
“For me my subject was very much Yves, it was not Pierre and Yves,” says Director Bertrand Bonello. “When the film starts it is 1967 and they are a couple for 8 or 9 years. The brand has already been created so of course there is something very protective about him. At the same time that he [Bergé] saves him, he kills him.”
But Saint Laurent cannot survive without Bergé, and together their relationship grows increasingly symbiotic. Of course there are others who feed off of Saint Laurent’s fame: drug dealers, friends, muses, and doctors who, do little to abate his frantic need to balance those highs and lows.
When a dark and drug addled love affair with Karl Lagerfeld’s paramour, Jacques De Bascher (brilliantly played by Louis Garrel) unravels Saint Laurent to the point of near nervous breakdown, Bergé is forced to intervene –although it is unclear whether it is out of jealousy or to protect the Saint Laurent brand.
Perhaps it is both.
“The whole film is about this dialectic between art and commerce,” says Ulliel. “It is about branding because this specific decade is just the time when branding became so important for the fashion industry, and it is also the beginning of the fashion world we know today. At that time, it was all very different.”
For Bonello, Saint Laurent is about the brand that ate the man who inspired its very creation. “There is a line in the film, he [Saint Laurent] says, ‘Am I just becoming a lipstick?’ and there is something very attractive about that for him but also very depressing, because he was a designer and an artist, and then he is something sold in a supermarket. He is a trademark.”
>> READ OUR FULL INTERVIEW with Saint Laurent director Bertrand Bonello and star Gaspard Ulliel. Click here.