When Women’s Wear Daily features ‘Cheap Week’ as a branded theme, that’s a sure sign of the times. Rosemary Feitelberg writes Frugality in Fashion Amidst Economic Slump:

While restrained spending has always gone hand-in-hand with a shaky economy, now, more than ever, Americans are bragging about their rock-bottom fashion finds.

Really? I’ve been doing that with my friends since the 80s. Apparently cheap chic has gone fully mainstream. And ‘fast fashion’ outlets are all too happy to provide alternatives to the traditional department store outlets.

Forever 21 - Times Square flagship store from Sugar Rock Catwalk

While the average American may not be glued to London’s FTSE or Japan’s Nikkei, he or she is more inclined to acknowledge the reality of his or her own financial situation. At Forever 21’s new 90,000-square-foot Times Square flagship Friday with her teenage daughter, Donna Georgio said she is definitely shopping at stores such as Marshalls and TJ Maxx more than Bloomingdale’s like she used to. “Part of it is due to clothes being too expensive and I’m afraid of losing my job or getting into debt,” she said. “I’m 50 years old. I’ve had all the clothes and have gone from having Audis and BMWs to a Volkswagen. My priorities have changed. But I can still hook it up and look good.”

What is interesting to note is that nowhere in this article does Feitelberg mention, even in passing, the essentially slave labor necessary in this race to the rock bottom price. Not that designer labels are above exploitation, mind you. It’s just that, ironically enough, the big names have been the target of enough high profile anti-sweatshop campaigns to force them to implement at least minimal supervision of their subcontractors. But the Forever 21 customer is highly unlikely to care about much beyond getting that trendy dress for $12.

Consumers have plenty of reasons to be frugal and will keep trading down and saving money for years to come, according to Howard Davidowitz, chairman of Davidowitz & Associates Inc., a New York-based retail and consulting banking firm. “People are looking for value and the consumer mind-set has changed forever. All you have to do is look at what’s going on with Mango, Zara and H&M [financially],” he said. “The most dramatic example is Japan. I have a home there. It used to be the biggest place for luxury [shopping]. Everything has changed there because the standard of living is declining and that’s what is going on here.”

W. David Marx noted this shift in Japan back in 2008 at Businessoffashion.com in a blog post titled Japanese Women: From Luxury to Yuru Nachu:

Just five years ago, the Japanese luxury market looked like it was headed for an era of permanent dominance. The economy had finally started to uptick after a long decade of recession in Japan. In came a relatively-unprecedented New Rich — mostly, internet millionaires and employees at foreign investment banks — who ushered a wealth-obsessed zeitgeist into the popular culture. Conspicuous consumption was in.

As an analogue to this movement, female style gravitated away from the street fashion of the 1990s to a style called O-nee-kei (“big sister style”), popular among mainstream females in their early twenties. The O-nee-kei girls were convinced that the only chance at future happiness was a rich suitor, and the bibles of this fashion movement — magazines CanCam and JJ — told them exactly how to dress in order to snag a man in a decent income bracket. The styling was mostly cute office conservative, but instead of designer fashion like in the 1990s, the clothes came mostly from cheap domestic labels. Handbags, however, needed to be from Louis Vuitton or Gucci, and jewelry meant Tiffany, Bulgari, and Cartier. The bling was all in the accesssories.

These O-nee-kei girls would not think for a microsecond about Parisian mode. In fact, these girls started to openly preach a love of “real clothes” — a term to describe inexpensive, trendy apparel from exclusively Japanese companies, mostly designed by young women the same age as customers. Although CanCam‘s focus on looking “classy” to attract rich men kept the luxury handbag on the menu, the “real clothes” rhetoric of “unreal foreign fashion labels vs. real Japanese brands” offered omens of wide-scale luxury rejection.

Ah ha. Keep the easily recognizable status symbol, but skimp on the quality couture clothing that the men they were chasing didn’t care about, anyway. What happens, however, when the supply of rich young men dries up with a global recession? While some girls just step up their game, all too many decide to play a different one.

Yuru Nachu style featured on Businessoffashion.com. W.David Marx photograph

With the less robust economy and a visible rise of underpaid young workers, the New Rich Pageant of 2003 has gone out with a whimper, making the princess-y O-nee-keilook appear somewhat shallow. In this recession-adjusted cultural atmosphere, everyone wants inexpensive, low pressure, and comfortable clothing. This year has thus seen the rise of the Yuru Nachu (“relaxed, natural”) style, which could be a long-term challenge to previous luxury attitudes. This “fashion ethic” is based on relaxed silhouettes, muted colours, and layering organic textiles. From loose “Bohemian” flower print dresses to off-white linen tunics, young women from all taste and consumer subcultures have embraced some variation of this fashion look.

Although Yuru Nachu reflects many of the global industry’s spring trends, the look has succeeded wildly thanks to its ability to connect with young women’s need for a less consumerist take on fashion. Out with the exclusive leather handbag, and in with the $12 “eco bag.”

When the cheap canvas tote replaces the Louis Vuitton as the anti-status status symbol, something is afoot. Back to WWD:

“If you look back at the boom years, a lot of that spending was accessed through credit. Debt-fueled affluence or aspirational consumerism is going to be challenged to return and is not about to get us back to where we were.”

Needless to say, he is not counting on shoppers to start spending more freely anytime soon. “From a big-picture macroeconomic standpoint, we are expecting a very sluggish recovery in the economy that is probably not conducive to consumers waking up one day feeling a lot better about everything and willing to spend again,” said Tuhy

This is bad news for big name ‘luxury’ brands that depended on the aspirational consumer to provide the bread and butter by overpaying for logo laden bags cranked out in third world factories.

“Conspicuous consumption is not very chic right now,” Christopher said. That behavior is counter to the Veblen effect, named after economist Thorstein Veblen, who first noted that decreasing the value of high-end goods only decreases people’s interest in buying them, he added.

Obviously Veblen wasn’t around long enough to witness The Gilt Groupe website. What’s different about now versus Veblen’s Victorian age is that the ‘democratization of fashion’ has 21st century ‘aspirational’ (translate - can’t really afford it but buy it anyway) consumers going after the same luxury brands as the actually rich, which in the long run turns into a cannibalistic effect of sorts. Decreasing the price doesn’t necessarily increase the interest - for it’s safe to assume that, by definition, far more people are interested in these items than can afford them - but instead increases the accessibility of the brand. Which will, in time, decrease the interest of the truly rich who establish the status of the item in the first place.

Consumers are kidding themselves if they think fast fashion distinguishes them from the masses, said Ellen Ruppel Shell, author of “Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture.” Topshop may have certain status for being London based and the same might be said of the Swedish chain H&M, but the reality is that neither is all that different from Wal-Mart, she said. “Frugal chic is kind of a label in itself now. But I would argue that we are deluding ourselves. These goods are mass produced, sold all over the world, available to everyone and they don’t involve a lot of creativity,” Shell said. “Truly fashionable people are able to go to thrift stores to find something stylish.”

Yes! Count me amongst the truly fashionable, then.

My friend Malissa Long produced a fashion show held on the south steps of the Texas State Capitol and asked me to say a few words. Here’s the text:

Good evening, everybody.

My name is Claire James and Malissa has asked me to say a few words about the fashion climate here in Austin, TX (my home town) and how that might interface with the global fashion phenomenon at large. I do believe that right now and especially in the coming decade that Austin, along with the rest Texas, will offer a unique set of opportunities based on a combination of economic factors and cultural influences you won’t be able to find anywhere else.

But what I’m not going to do is stand here and tell you that if you just do what you love and believe in yourself and visualize success that all of your dreams will come true.  No, think of me more as the critical naysayer of the fashion industry - trying to cut through the hype and glamour and PR and tell it straight about what’s really going on.

Photo: Wendy Corn

While on one hand I’m going to try and offer some useful advice for those of you motivated and determined to try to make a living (or at least a side income) as a fashion designer I’m also going to try to encourage many of you to stop worrying altogether about extracting dollars and cents profit from your creative endeavors and just enjoy designing and creating fashion for its own sake. That the amateur do-it-yourselfer has just as much - and in some instances more - to contribute to the collective visual sartorial culture as the professionals.

So, what business do I have making such proclamations? Let me share a little of my background. Currently I write a blog  - collectiveselection.com. - which is a byproduct of my masters thesis work in the Textiles and Apparel Program at Cornell University. Collective Selection is a discourse analysis of what other writers and journalists are saying not just about the fashion trends themselves, but the intersection of culture, economics and politics that together create the zeitgeist - or spirit of the times - that those trends reflect.

So today here in 2010 I now have the luxury of watching, wearing and enjoying fashion in the evenings and weekends I’m not at my nice secure business casual day job. But from 1995-2002 I did manage to just barely eek out a living as an independent craft artisan - designing, producing and selling a line of hand dyed wearable art.

The name of my micro business was Colorwheels, and maybe some of you (or your parents) bought a tank top or baby romper from me at the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar or any number of local craft shows.

Like many of you, my love of fashion and costume (because for me the line was always pretty blurry) was sparked in high school. Luckily for me, my mother had started teaching me to sew in the second grade, and as soon as I was introduced to the glorious, yet still untapped motherlode of thrift stores in the 80s, it was all over.

Since the small allowance from my hard working yet non indulgent parents combined with the meager paycheck earned checking groceries at Randalls couldn’t even get me in the ring with the popular girl mall princesses - and the identical oversized shaker knit sweaters, acid washed ankle zip guess jeans and hair bows they were all wearing were excruciatingly boring anyways, I decided it would be way more fun to spend that bit of cash on giant bags of vintage finds, get out my scissors and sewing machine and see how I could horrify my conservative mother while at the same time making the halls of high school a whole lot more interesting.

25 years ago refashioning vintage was somewhat of a radical and unusual defiance of the corporate mall culture that completely dominated the fashion choices available at the time. How awesome to look around me today and see refashioned vintage sold in stores, taught in classes, featured in television shows. It’s infiltrating and spreading everywhere as an accepted alternative that continues influence the mainstream.

Over the past 15 years I’ve watched the fashion scene in Austin grow exponentially. Every year there are more and more fashion shows on the calendar, more stores featuring local designers and more places to set up a pop up tent and sell directly to the public.

And this explosion of interest in fashion we see in Austin is our own Texas indie flavored microcosm of a global phenomenon. Whether its new green business models of production or an underground line of clothes that editors are buzzing about or a bold and unusual dress turning heads in a nightclub - the momentum is coming from individuals at the grassroots level pursuing their creative visions. The best the corporate conglomerates of brands beholden to the instant gratification of shareholders can do is try to cool hunt and co-opt the authentic innovation of street style and independent upstarts.

And if you’ve been paying attention to the business news and earnings reports of those big labels and retailers you know that the climate can be described as nervous at best. The PR departments might be exuding optimistic messages in an attempt to fake it til they make it, but the reality itself is actually pretty grim.

Now this is where I venture into my Nouriel Roubini style Dr. Doomsday bit, but stay with me if you would because I promise to end on an optimistic note.

Although there’s lots of interest and excitement about fashion in Austin, the level of production and distribution infrastructure designers need to have a viable professional industry does not currently exist here (yet). But I will argue that this might actually be a good thing because the fashion industry proper like we see in New York and LA today is currently in a lot of trouble.

After the economic meltdown in the Fall of ’08, what do you think was the first thing people stopped buying? You guessed it, new clothes and shoes, especially the frivolous and expensive designer kind. I know there’s a lot of economists out there now talking about green shoots and the road to recovery, but my crystal ball tells me that for the immediate future our economy is in for another big hit at worst, and an anemic slump of unemployment at best.

Last year during New York fashion week I found one fashion writer brave enough to say what nobody else would: that at the shows themselves all too many industry veterans were busy working the room looking for gigs. Trouble is, most of their connections were in the same boat.

And more and more the established design houses are eliminating entry level positions and relying on and unlimited supply of fresh fashion school graduates for unpaid internships.

If you are hoping to make it big in the fashion industry as it exists in America today, I’d say good luck and I sure hope you have genius talent, incredible stamina, golden connections and a wealthy patron.

Now for the good news.

The best news I have is for the amateur do-it-yourselfers. The Blue Hangar still has mountains of discarded potential raw materials for $1.25 a piece, old school heavy duty sewing machines can be found used for under $50, (because really, the vast majority of home sewing machines built after 1975 are junk) and classes, books and websites to teach you to sew are within reach.

When you look back at the history of fashion and the changes in the dominant themes, norms and silhouettes, the most dramatic shifts always come in times of economic and social unrest. Now is the time to push it to the walls, and then push it some more. Enjoy the luxury of taking hours and hours, even days and weeks to painstakingly explore and experiment with techniques that may end up producing only one garment. And once you figure that out to the point where it’s efficient….move on to the next thing that catches your fancy.

I also find the social scene in Austin to be more fun and forgiving and far less judgmental and snobbish than cities where the stakes seem to be higher, like New York or San Francisco. The deliberately casual culture promoted by our own Chamber of Commerce means that one tends to find a broader range of social groups and types within the same venue.

At events like the Treasure City Thrift Fashion show everyone is applauded simply for giving it a shot. So go ahead, take a risk. If people think what you’re wearing is amazing, they’ll come up and tell you themselves. And if they think it’s just awful… well at least you’re keeping it weird!

So let’s say you’ve come up with a fun and unique twist on a garment or accessory, you’ve received lots of positive feedback, you’ve made more than you can wear and give away to friends and now you’re ready to try making a little bit of cash on the side to support your habit. The good news is that today there are stores like Parts and Labour and Moxie and the Compound that want to consign your work and have storefronts with systems and clientele already in place.

And of course I’m sure all of you are familiar with Etsy - the online marketplace that’s gotten many a new designer started with a viable business. But you will soon find out that efficient productions systems are essential to maintaining a profitable business of any size. The first hat is fun to make. And the third might be, too. But the thirtieth? Or the three hundredth? Streamlining is essential to preventing burnout.

The other thing essential to getting people to cross the line and fork over their hard earned dollars for your work - instead of just telling you how awesome they think it is - is that it has to be irresistible. And not just to one person, but to lots of them. Your look has to resonate with the tastes and subconscious desires of at least a niche demographic group.

And it must be well made. Period. Or people will pick it up and put it back or pass over the photo or send it back in the mail. Become skilled in your craft! If you’re making garments, learn to sew! I mean really learn to sew.

And what would I say to those of you who will settle for nothing less than making a living as a full time designer? For those of you determined to give it a shot, nothing I can say will talk you out of it because nothing anyone told me was able to talk me out of it. And boy did I show them! But I do believe that at least for me the naivete and boundless energy of being a twentysomething was essential.

Because you are the ones who are going to have to create your own jobs. To be visionary and creative enough to imagine not only new things to wear, but new models of doing business when the old ones are failing. Right now it’s extremely difficult to compete with the fast fashion monster machine churning out mountains of junky clothes at Forever 21 with exploited labor in third world countries. But do realize that this machine is dependent on key factors like the strength of the dollar, the stability of these other countries, and the low cost of international shipping. All of these factors can - and probably will - change into a whole new context in the coming decade.

In my blog I’m continually finding and posting articles about how luxury is being redefined for the 21st century and the focus is away from logos and bling (that’s so 2007) and towards ‘stealth wealth’ and the unique, one of a kind, handmade item that who’s craftsmanship is evident within the piece itself.

So for starters, learn to manage your money and your business. I know, it’s not the fun part. And if your mind is just too creatively oriented to do that well, you must partner up with someone you can trust to help you do it right. Pay your taxes, people.

Second, understand that at least half - if not more - of your time and energy will be spent hustling to get your product in front of your target audience. The marketplace is glutted with stuff, how is anyone going to find your signal amidst all the noise?

Third, go out and get a copy of Kathleen Fasenella’s “The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Sewn Product Manufacturing.” And read her companion blog - Fashion Incubator. Even if you’re a jeweler, she gives you the straight talk about how to get a product manufactured and marketed.

Whatever way you decide to approach making, finding, assembling, deconstructing and reconstructing clothing and accessories, please keep doing it! Give us something to talk about. Give the trend forecasters something to cool hunt and trickle up so it can trickle back down.

What will the fashion scene in Austin look like a decade from now? I’m waiting for you to show me.

I’ve venture to guess that the large majority of investors - particularly the professional ones - might admit to following their gut to some degree, but would still insist their decisions are informed and rational ones. But how different are their purchases and discards than a teen at the mall?

David Doubilet for National Geographic

Jason Zweig explores the latest attention getting scientific theory that everyone is talking about in his article for the Wall Street Journal, So That’s Why Investors Can’t Think for Themselves:

Why do investors so often seem to resemble a school of fish, all changing direction together?

…A study published last week in the journal Current Biology found that the value you place on something is likely to go up when other people tell you it is worth more than you thought, and down when others say it is worth less. More strikingly, if your evaluation agrees with what others tell you, then a part of your brain that specializes in processing rewards kicks into high gear.

In other words, investors often go along with the crowd because—at the most basic biological level—conformity feels good. Moving in herds doesn’t just give investors a sense of “safety in numbers.” It also gives them pleasure.

That may help explain why market sentiment can change so swiftly, why true contrarians are so hard to find and why investors care so much about the “consensus view” on Wall Street.

Most of our brains are programmed to reward us when we swim with the school.

The brain scans showed that as soon as people learned they had chosen the same song as the experts, cells in the ventral striatum—a reward center wired with dopamine neurons that respond to pleasures like sugar and sex—fired intensely.

“If someone agrees with your choice, it’s intrinsically rewarding in the same way food or money is rewarding,” says one of the experimenters, Chris Frith of University College London.

Why might other people’s estimates of what something is worth lead you to change your own? Their appraisal could make you unsure that yours is correct. You might become more popular once you agree with others, or joining the experts may make you feel like one yourself. “We are very social creatures,” says Prof. Frith, “and we are desperately keen to be part of the group.”

In 1969 sociologist Herbert Blumer was the first to publish a theory that the fashion mechanism operated in all fields of human endeavor, not just clothing. I’ve included these quotes from his theory of collective selection (this blog’s namesake) in a previous post on how most economists were fashion victims of their own thinking and completely failed to predict the crash of 08, but they’re so good they bear repeating (emphasis my own):

It is necessary, first of all, to insist that fashion is not confined to those areas, such as women’s apparel, in which fashion is institutionalized and professionally exploited under conditions of intense competition. As mentioned earlier, it is found in operation in a wide variety and increasing number of fields which shun deliberate or intentional concern with fashion. In such fields, fashion occurs almost always without awareness on the part of those who are caught in its operation. What may be primarily response to fashion is seen and interpreted in other ways – chiefly as doing what is believed to be superior practice.

Not only are most investors (and artists and psychiatrists and economists) blind to their immersion in the fashion mechanism, they get downright offended when you propose that their decisions are informed by anything short of ’superior practice.’

…The absence or inadequacy of compelling tests of the merit of proposals opens the door to prestige-endorsement and taste as determinants of collective choice. The compelling role of these two factors as they interact easily escapes notice by those who participate in the process of collective choice; the model which emerges with a high sanction and approval is almost always believed by them as being intrinsically and demonstrably correct. This belief is fortified by the impressive arguments and arrays of specious facts that may be frequently be marshaled on behalf of the model. Consequently, it is not surprising that participants may fail to completely to recognize a fashion process in which they are sharing. The identification of the process as fashion occurs usually only after it is gone – when it can be viewed from the detached vantage point of a later time. The fashions which we can now detect in the past history of philosophy, medicine, science, technological use and industrial practice did not appear as fashions to shoes who shared in them. The fashion merely appeared to them as up-to-date achievements!

Zweig sums up more on the brain chemistry behind this:

The experiment also showed that learning that the experts agree with one another—regardless of whether you agree with them—triggers activity in the insula, a brain region associated with pain and heightened body awareness. This suggests that the agreement of others may have a special ability to grab our mental attention. No wonder a consensus opinion is almost impossible for many investors to ignore.

He also calls out the myth of the market as a rational and impersonal mechanism:

Benjamin Graham, the founder of value investing, wrote that “the market is not a weighing machine, on which the value of each issue is recorded by an exact and impersonal mechanism, in accordance with its specific qualities.” Rather, he added, “the market is a voting machine, whereon countless individuals register choices which are the product partly of reason and partly of emotion.” Herding, Graham understood, is part of the human condition.

Zweig’s prescription? Do everything you can to go against the herd and establish tracking mechanisms for your decisions to go back and evaluate more objectively:

Thus, if you buy individual stocks, you should note which way the herd is moving—and go the other way. You should get interested in a stock when its price gets trampled flat by investors stampeding out of it. The list of new 52-week lows is a rough guide to what the voting machine has been trashing lately. Then run your own weighing machine, studying the company’s financial statements, products and competitors to determine the value of its business—while ignoring the current price of its stock. And make a permanent record that thoroughly details your rationale for making the investment. That way, you set in stone exactly where you stood before the herd began trying to sweep you away.

The luxury fashion industry took a sharp blow following Financial Crisis ‘08 not because the rich stopped buying (they just slowed down a little bit) but because the people that were acting like they were rich, the ones cleverly squeezing the most they could out of that much, much narrower disposable income margin, panicked in the tumble. When you’re all of a sudden underwater on that McMansion, (you know, the one who’s value could only go up) you might give pause to blowing four figures on a handbag or the latest ‘it shoe’ you can only wear if you valet park.

From members only discount luxury site, gilt.com

Reuters gives an excellent analysis:

The world’s wealthiest consumers kept their taste for expensive goods through a global downturn, but their more middle-class compatriots still striving for the good life may take years to return, if ever.

Sales of luxury goods, such as designer clothes, fine jewelry and high-end handbags, slipped last year as conspicuous consumption fell out of fashion in the recession.

They explain the difference between ‘wealthy’ and ‘aspirational:’

Many in the industry view buyers of luxury goods in two different camps: those who are truly wealthy and those who sometimes shop like they are.

“The wealthy haven’t really changed their shopping patterns other than frequency,” said investment banker William Susman, chief operating officer of boutique firm Financo Inc. “It’s that aspirational shopper that we think has really shifted.”

Milton Pedraza, CEO of the Luxury Institute, said “aspirants” are generally shoppers with an average household income of about $150,000 to $300,000. They helped prop up the industry during the economic boom of the previous decade, many by living beyond their means. They cut back suddenly and dramatically after the financial crisis erupted in late 2008.

He said they will only come back fully once unemployment reaches 5 percent, a level he admitted could take five years.

And I’ll bet that 5 year figure is an optimistic one that does not factor in the possibility that the worst isn’t over and we might very well be on the verge of a double dip.

Still, some executives believe there has been a permanent change in the consumer psyche.

“It will be interesting to see five years from now what people say they don’t do anymore, or what they do differently as shoppers,” said Susan Lyne, CEO of Gilt Groupe, which operates a members-only website selling deeply discounted high-end goods. “I’d bet you it will be fairly profound.”

“You can talk to any hundred people on the street and they will tell you they think differently about buying full-price because they’ve seen so many opportunities to buy at a discount,” she said.

The steep markdowns seen in 2008 and 2009 caused many consumers to question the intrinsic value of certain pricey goods, said Coach Chief Executive Lew Frankfort. Now they look for better quality at a better price, he said.

“Consumers are smart and they have long memories,” Frankfort said. “I’m of the view that things have changed forever.”

The customers that can actually afford to pay full price to cover the overhead of glamorous showrooms on high rent streets staffed with armies of sophisticated sales associates (and security guards) are dwindling in comparison to those desperately striving for the appearance of such status. Not to mention the fact that even a lot of those who are flush prefer a bargain… that’s how many of them ended up wealthy in the first place.

All of this is part of the ongoing fallout as schrapnel from the ‘08 meltdown delivered some critical cracks in the hype chimera of the branded luxury logo industry.

“In fashion, one minute you’re in… and the next minute, you’re OUT.” Stephen Foley writes, Why American Apparel is Going out of Fashion:

It is impossible to say if there is a straight line from the salacious gossip – usually culled from the sensational lawsuits that the company attracts – to the financial peril in which American Apparel finds itself, but this much is clear: it is no longer the hottest place to shop. An equally bright and breezy foreign interloper, Uniqlo, is expanding fast on its home turf; H&M and Zara are buzzing with bargain-hunting fashionistas, hip to styles that change in those stores faster than they ever change at an American Apparel.

A fickle hipster clientele has moved on to other things? Never woulda believed it.

From Gawker.com

Foley cites Gawker media as AA’s thorn in their side. American Apparel’s PR department is no match for Gawker’s solicitation of the real story from former employees.

In regard to the recent article about Grooming, it is 100% true. Not only do they have it on paper, they also have a team from “corporate” who come to the stores just to see what we’re wearing. Just a couple weeks ago, a posse of power tripping nineteen year olds came in (literally everyone from this corporate fantasy land is a maximum age of 20) and made me go to the bathroom and wash my makeup off (and by makeup I mean a splash of liquid eyeliner and mascara and nothing at all hooker inspired). And then they scolded me for not being on the sales floor. Also, whenever we get considered for raises/promotions, we’re required to have our photos sent in for approval. My co-worker was recently denied a spot as Manager because she didn’t fit the company image. I have no idea why we continue to work there. And more importantly how are none of us involved in a lawsuit?

And it goes on and on, a litany of examples of an entire company of individuals riding the crest of last decade’s trend waves (and competing with each other to see who could do blow with the boss) with no clue how to evolve the brand into a post boom zeitgeist.

But the financial troubles go deeper. In-store sales are still running down 10 per cent, while the rest of the high street has tiptoed out of recession, suggesting a bigger malaise among shoppers.

Worse, the company jacked up its debt levels to fund its expansion just as the slowdown hit, and its failure to get back into profit means it will almost certainly breach promises to its lenders at the end of this month. London-based investor Lion Capital bailed the company out with a loan a little over a year ago; as it totters under the weight of $91.4m (£64.6m) in debt, Lion will have to decide if it wants to turn that debt into a share of the company, or put American Apparel into bankruptcy.

This is a company that has been built on the personality and creativity of Dov Charney. If his power is waning, there are plenty of critics who will declare that this is no bad thing.

I suppose I’d better invest in that lifetime supply of thigh high socks pretty soon. (the only thing I buy there. If I could find them anywhere else I would.)

Of course the corporate media moguls are going to keep the spotlight on the Tea Party movement; the more they reinforce the meme that government is the one taking liberty, not protecting it, then that much less attention can be paid to the real issue - the consolidated corporate giants that control the mass market of consumer goods directed at the middle class that so many of these ‘activists’ are freaked out about losing. Don Monkerud writes for Counterpunch, Tea Partiers Should Be Picketing the Corporations That Dominate Our Lives:

Tom Tomorrow

“Those who control our corporations managed an Orwellian achievement to redefine the use of brute corporate force as ‘market forces,’” says Lynn. “We still believe in a consumer utopia, but we have an illusion of choice. Corporate powers manipulate our decision-making and direct us to buy certain goods at certain prices.”

Institutional power shifted to Wall Street and large financial institutions. Today a small elite runs corporations to serve themselves as they concentrate their power. Some Americans are waking up to the reality of their situation, but Congress lacks the will to regulate corporate power.

…Although some Americans worry about the growing power of the government, few understand the real power that controls their everyday lives.

Private monopolies determine the brand of breakfast cereal we eat, the type of car we drive, where we bank, the medical treatment we receive, the fashion of our clothes, and the kind of toothbrush we use, in addition to the beer we drink, the health insurance we buy, and what we feed our pets.

…”People say we have an uncontrolled free market but we have the opposite,” says Barry C. Lynn, senior fellow at the New American Foundation. “What we have today is a laissez faire American version of feudalism; a private government in the form of private corporations run by private individuals who consolidated power to govern entire activities within our political economy.”

…

As our government continues to enable ‘too big to fail’ rather than address the banking/financial oligarchy, will a grassroots movement gain enough momentum and participation to force the big bank to address the concerns of their ‘little people’ customers? From an editorial that appeared in The Nation:

The cynics either do not understand banking or misunderstand the widespread public anger. Dennis Santiago, IRA’s CEO and managing director, explained that banks compete fiercely for the “core deposits” provided by individual and small business accounts–this stable money is their preferred base for profitable lending. Take away core deposits, and bankers feel immediate balance-sheet stress. Expand the account base for community banks, and they gain greater stability and greater lending power. “Will moving your money have an effect?” Santiago asked. “And by effect, I don’t mean making a momentary political statement. I mean making a structural difference to the country’s financial system. The answer is yes.”

Time will tell…

Leather for women becomes mainstream everyday wear while young men rebel against their parent’s generation by… wearing a jacket and tie?

http://crossanda.blogspot.com/2008/07/look-of-week.html

Two NY Times articles side by side offer a telling glimpse not only into the generation gap, but into shifting gender roles as well. From David Coleman’s Dressing for Success, Again:

“Today the well-off 55-year-old is likely to be the worst-dressed man in the room, wearing a saggy T-shirt and jeans. The cash-poor 25-year-old is in a natty sport coat and skinny tie bought at Topman for a song. Young men are embracing the “Mad Men” elements of style in a way that the older men never did, still don’t and just won’t. The result is a kind of rift emerging between the generation of men in their 20s and 30s and those in their late 40s and 50s for whom a suit was not merely square but cubed, and caring about how one looked was effeminate….

Between those schlubby baby boomer guys delaying retirement, the fact that Gen Y twentysomethings are the largest demographic group in history and thanks to the successes of feminism young men also have to compete for jobs with their female counterparts in a way their fathers never imagined, the boys motivated to make it in this economic climate have to use every tool they can to distinguish themselves and get ahead.

But what are the girls up to? Ruth la Ferla writes,

Hermes Fall 09 from Style.com

A disdain for such sweetly conventional trappings of sex appeal has trickled down of late from tastemakers like Ms. Watson to scores of followers who are swapping their baby-doll dresses, spindly heels and lace for the flinty attractions of studs and leather, mannish jackets and rock-star jeans. Their embrace of a pointedly aggressive, street-smart style suggests that the more adventurous are rethinking the tenets of female allure.

Hallelujah! I’m having a flashback to my teenage years,

Women now want to project a “more powerful sexuality, not a damsel in distress,” said Sharon Graubard, a senior executive with Stylesight, a trend forecasting firm in New York. The look, streamlined and armored for tough times, reflects a distrust of trends and a skepticism toward traditional gender roles. Most tellingly, perhaps, it also represents a pragmatic response to a hobbled economy.

“So-called luxury — people are tired of it,” said Tatsugo Yoda, the owner of Aloha Rag, a fashionably progressive Honolulu boutique with a New York outpost. “They want more utilitarian pieces — military jackets, track pants and classic white shirts — that they can wear more than twice a year.” The look is assertive, Mr. Yoda said, but recognizable at the same time.

Actually, I’d like pieces that I can wear twice a week, and if my male counterparts can have it, why can’t I? As the propects of a banker boyfriends financing fussy fashion habits grow thin right along with jobs in the fashion industry, it’s not surprising that those still standing carry a survivalist chic aesthetic about them.

These notions of sexual allure can be traced to the utility gear adopted by self-styled survivalists, the funky regalia of old-school rockers, even the lingerie-and-leather of Parisian streetwalkers. More Patti Smith than Fergie, current variations on sultriness are thorny and faintly androgynous. These rebellious, antifashion messages, blunted over decades of exposure, have been picked up, inevitably, by the world of high style.

Today shapeless, and sometimes shredded, T-shirts, combat boots and aviator caps reminiscent of a Mad Max epic, are proliferating on runways, as are leggings, fatigues and bicycle shorts.

Of course, no talk of Mad Max survivalist style would be complete without a nod to Burning Man. But how interesting that while the girls are moving towards the rugged and shredded tough girl look, the boys are getting cleaned and pressed. These two phenomenon side by side also indicate to me another nail in the coffin of a world where modern young women could automatically assume that finding a man as a breadwinner was the rule and not an exception. Given that most of the jobs lost in this recession have been to men and thus women outnumber men in the workplace for the first time in history, young men have another reason to dress for success and it ain’t just in the office. Their dating pool might very well consist of women who are doing better financially than they are, and now it’s role reversal time - they’re the ones playing the looks card.

One thing both genders share is a rejection of disposable fashion. Back to Coleman:

“There’s a sense that this return to style, or to a consciousness of how you look, is an attempt by young men to recover a set of values that were at one point very much present in American society and then lost,” he said. “It strikes me as being of a piece with the way young people buy their coffee or their food: paying attention to authenticity or quality, and to whether something is organic or local. They stand for a rejection of the idea that all consumer goods are ephemeral and inevitably made in China and bought at Wal-Mart.””

Okay, even these ‘let them eat cake’ fat cats at the tippy top of the pyramid are worried that we’re in for civil unrest. In her commentary for Bloomberg Alice Schroeder explores the underlying meaning behind the spike in handgun sales to Goldman Sachs execs.

Has it really come to this? Imagine what emotions must be billowing through the halls of Goldman Sachs to provoke the firm into an apology. Talk that Goldman bankers might have armed themselves in self-defense would sound ludicrous, were it not so apt a metaphor for the way that the most successful people on Wall Street have become a target for public rage.

She points out that it appears to be a slightly irrational symbolic gesture. After all, a non-concealed handgun in the home only goes so far to protect against a true pitchfork wielding mob, and won’t help at all in the commute to the office. Again, the point here is that it’s an indicator not just of the growing gap between the rich and poor (that’s been going on since the 90s), nor even that the public is not only finally feeling the pain, but that they expect it to get worse.

So maybe other senior people at Goldman Sachs have gone out and bought guns, and they know something. But what?

Henry Paulson, U.S. Treasury secretary during the bailout and a former Goldman Sachs CEO, let it slip during testimony to Congress last summer when he explained why it was so critical to bail out Goldman Sachs, and — oh yes — the other banks. People “were unhappy with the big discrepancies in wealth, but they at least believed in the system and in some form of market-driven capitalism. But if we had a complete meltdown, it could lead to people questioning the basis of the system.”

There you have it. The bailout was meant to keep the curtain drawn on the way the rich make money, not from the free market, but from the lack of one. Goldman Sachs blew its cover when the firm’s revenue from trading reached a record $27 billion in the first nine months of this year, and a public that was writhing in financial agony caught on that the profits earned on taxpayer capital were going to pay employee bonuses.

Vanessa Friedman writes for the Financial times, Bernard Arnault: How to manage the transition into quality:

Bernard Arnault, chairman of Möet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the largest luxury company in the world, does not like the word “luxury”.

“I prefer to think of it as quality,” he says, a caveat that may seem semantic, but is, in fact, significant: it speaks to the permanent change in the industry that he sees occurring post-recession.

Why is the word ‘luxury’ so problematic? Couldn’t have anything to do with the past decade or so that his illustrious company spent courting the aspirational upper middle class with celebrity bling associations, could it? The photo to the right was pulled from a blogger named Behonce in Malaysia. I thought the text notable as well:

this bag is like a Christmas ornament or a Chinese New Year fortune cookie; the few things you just wanna show off! Combining the richness of gold and the luxurious nature of Louis Vuitton, this bag screams “I am rich, bitch!”.

Forget about being practical. Forget about not being Over the TOP! Honey, it is all about the bling! Paris Hilton has it. So does Kim K. Why not Behonce B? Costing at about USD2080, that is the reason why NOT, Mr Behonce B!

This is why Stealth Wealth has had an underground appeal all throughout the bling decades. But the fact that it’s rising to the forefront is a strong indicator of a seismic shift in culture and values. Back to Arnault:

“The availability of money not just for consumers but buyers will disappear for a very long time – maybe 10 years, maybe until the next bubble,” says Mr Arnault, who believes sector growth will be driven by the real economy, and will not be much more than 2 per cent a year in developed markets – half the rate of the past. What this means for the luxury industry is more competition, not from more brands, but from a – permanently – more discerning consumer base: one that demands legitimacy in all its goods, from history to conception to manufacturing, along with all the information and communication that implies.