COLUMNISTS When you thumb through a magazine or newspaper, what seduces you? Is it the promise by a bank that they know how you like to be spoken to, that they know how you live and that if you bring them your business you’re going to be friends for life? Is it the reassuring image from an insurance company that even in the stormiest of seas, your cargo/ship/life is in safe hands?
When it comes to fashion and luxury goods images, do you want the glossy pages to mirror a slightly improved version of you? Are you more attracted by a model with whom you’d like to spend an extra-long weekend? Or are you drawn to a clothing brand because the dazzling spread offers the promise of a life you just might be able to lead if you buy their too low-cut trousers and bag of the season? I found myself asking these and many other questions on Monday afternoon while sitting at various shows during Milan’s men’s fashion week (see Sabbatical chic).
Fresh from 10 days of sun and warm breezes on Pantelleria, I had started my day on a low-key note with a coffee prepared by mom, a chat with my other house guests on the terrace and a bumpy ride to the airport in a well-worn Land Rover. An hour and nine minutes later, I was in the humidity of Milan, surrounded by legions of US fashion editors living out second childhoods in shorts, blazers, bow ties and penny loafers – a look which is fine if you’re trim and 19 but rather tricky to pull off when you’re over 40 and sporting a paunch.
Fashion weeks are curious affairs at the best of times but veer to the comical when most of the attendees are men trying their best to look chic while the mercury hovers somewhere between 35°C and 37°C. No matter how well air-conditioned your Mercedes S-Class, a wet patch in the small of your back, a glistening hairline and a general aura of damp sets in well before lunchtime. Having been in the zero humidity climate of Pantelleria, I counted myself among the suffering.
The most climatically comfortable were those journalists and buyers who’d already attended the Pitti Uomo fair in Florence (an event which is to men’s fashion what Frankfurt is to cars) and made the journey north to Milan. According to some of the key exhibitors, American retailers and magazine editors were not among the attendees at the fair in Florence this year. “I don’t know why they didn’t show up,” said the marketing director from an Italian knitwear brand. “Perhaps it’s the first significant shift in the world order of men’s fashion?”
With no shortage of summer reading devoted to the end of the American empire and what a post-Bush planet is going to look like, the chief executives of the world’s major luxury goods houses might want to buy such volumes in bulk and demand that their creative teams brush up on world affairs while taking the sun in August.
While senior management at many fashion houses recognise that their poor results in the US are being more than compensated by glowing numbers from emerging markets, this message hasn’t quite hit the people left in charge of producing fashion shows and developing advertising campaigns. Talk to retail planners and finance teams at the major brands and they’ll enthuse about the world as if it were an Emirates route map – units opening in Bahrain, 20 new stores in China, the possibility of shops in the “stans” and freestanding outlets in Mumbai.
To them, the years ahead will be won solely in emerging markets while the pace of European and US openings will slow. Sit front row at the shows of these same brands, however, and the world extends no further than 20 kilometres inland from the shores of the Baltic. The face of menswear is still, after far too many years, tall, slender-hipped, sharply-cropped, aged between 18 and 22 and has a name like Timo or Andreas. Men’s fashion is hoping to attract new buyers in markets like Pune, Almaty, São Paulo, Johannesburg and Busan but the bodies they’re using to bait these new consumers hail from Lübeck, Tartu, Malmö and Tampere.
Which brings me back to my questions. Do you respond to fashion images that are vaguely convincing or pure fantasy? For the better part of a decade, I’ve found it difficult to connect with a £2,000 suit carried down a catwalk by an 18-year-old Finn who is narrow of frame but wide of the core target.
At assorted shows on Monday and Tuesday, I watched the faces of new buyers and press who are now taking up ever-larger blocks of seats and wondered what they made of this somewhat dated look. Where was the strapping lad from Seoul? The athletic young man from Goa? The high-cheekboned chap from Harbin? If I were a shareholder in a major luxury goods company, I’d be asking some sharp questions about the marketing plans of various brands in the seasons to come. The all-white, under-20 face of men’s fashion looked very old-world this week.
Tyler Brûlé is the editor-in-chief of Monocle, www.monocle.com
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