The Barbiemania of the First Louis Vuitton Production: Bringing Out the Boom in the Fashion Industry, But Before You Give Up
Creative directors for fashion houses are no longer hired for their design skills but for their marketing prowess. “The marketing guys frankly have invaded the companies,” Sidney Toledano, the former chief executive of Dior, said recently. The most high profile appointment in fashion last year was the rapper and music producer Pharrell Williams and he had a lot of creativity on the runway. The first men’s wear collection presented by Mr. Williams for Louis Vuitton lacked any “new shapes”, ” ways of addressing the body” or thinking about luxury according to the fashion critic and criticCathy Horyn. For Louis Vuitton, however, the show was an unqualified success: The star-studded spectacle attracted over a billion online views.
“Barbie,” the top grossing film of 2023, with nearly $1.5 billion in ticket revenues, was a sensation even before it opened in theaters. It cost an estimated $150 million to market it, and its production budget was less than that. Marketing across sectors averaged 10% of company budgets in a major industry survey. Barbiemania began as a social media meme, and eventually spawned hundreds of items of bright pink merchandise. “It stopped becoming a marketing campaign and took on the quality of a movement,” explained the Warner Bros. president of global marketing, Josh Goldstine.
Source: ‘Barbie,’ ‘Saltburn,’ Vuitton: TikTok Sponsorship Is Consuming Our Culture – The New York Times
The Times of the 21st Century: Reconciling the Electronic Waste of a Simple Time with Modern Fashion and the I Spy Page
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The photos on my family’s old Canon digital camera aren’t better than my iPhone, and in fact, it’s way more cumbersome to use. I took pictures of friends and strangers when I dug it out from storage and brought it to a party. It wasn’t the same as being a kid taking selfies after school that were never posted to any type of feed. But it was fun to remember and to remind others that there was a time all of this was different, and that I was there.
Every time there is a renewed interest in something, I think about what we need to do to get it back. The rediscovered item’s practical utility is less important than the cultural and social signaling of the rediscovery. Will the marker of 2020s tech new generations be resale sites? Maybe the little orange box has buttons and a cute name?
It’s nothing new that junk is becoming valuable and sought after. At a time when the Y2K nostalgia hype cycle is still going strong, Roseberry’s work comes at a good time. The trend isn’t just for fashion, either. Young people are buying old digital cameras, because they don’t like how their new ones look. One user in a TikTok video clips two ipods into her hair. There is a person with a wall covered in old keyboards. The Schiaparelli dress appears to be from the early 2000s. I Spy page is just the trend’s natural progression.
“Now, the technology I grew up with is so antiquated that it’s almost as difficult to source as certain vintage fabrics and embellishments,” Roseberry wrote in the show notes.
The baby and the dress, referred to as “The Mother”, are two objects rising from the past and haunting the future. Assembled using materials from a pre-iPhone era, the pieces seem to warn of an inhuman robot-powered existence. At the same time, they recontextualize the tech waste of a simpler time.
Roseberry, the creative director of French fashion house Schiaparelli, showed the brand’s 2024 couture show in Paris on Monday. Under Roseberry, Schiaparelli shows have become a buzzy event among fashion fans — not just for the A-list front row filled with celebrity clients but also for the unforgettable wearable sculptures that are reposted endlessly in each show’s wake. Lady Gaga wore a Hunger Games-esque ensemble to President Joe Biden’s inauguration and last year’s lion dress may have been seen by those less tapped into high fashion.
When normal people think of couture garments — the extravagant custom designs using all but extinct techniques, materials, and craftsmanship — they probably dream of pieces made with luxurious silks, supple leathers, crystals, and tulle. Daniel Roseberry thinks of your old flip phone.