Managing Luxury Online

After the New York, London, Paris and Milan Fashion Weeks – which Dazed condenses into some key trends – comes the hard sell. We know that increasingly people are shopping online, not only while in the comfort of their home but also while out and about, with 25% of shoppers on their phone looking at a store’s website at the same time as they are in a physical shop, according to ForeSee. The stats for those luxury demographics bear even more consideration; Luxury Daily recently reported that 20% of those earning $150k p.a. or more shop via their phones.

As usual the Louis Vuitton show in Paris was streamed live online. The brand was one of the leaders in pioneering the idea of making such events available to hoi polloi. While some esoteric fashionistas may turn their noses up at the democratisation of luxury, they are increasingly swimming against the current as such efforts become more commonplace. Mere days after Marc Jacobs had taken his bow at the end of his latest collection for Louis Vuitton, the site fashionshow.louisvuitton.com was alive with myriad content, including in-depth interviews with Jacobs et al. It’s a beautiful microsite and worth checking out. At the weekend Zeitgeist decided to browse the Vuitton website from the comfort of his bed on his iPhone. One of the nice little things about the Louis Vuitton website is that to navigate there, all you need type in is “lv” and you are redirected to the site. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the mobile internet, where Zeitgeist was instead directed to a website for car insurance. Not a pleasant experience. It’s all the more important to have bought these keywords for mobile devices when the user will find typing less easy and is also likely to have less time than when they are using a desktop computer. It’s a shame because otherwise Vuitton’s digital presence is above reproach.

Worse still was when Zeitgeist then tried to visit Gucci by typing in “Gucci” into their Safari browser on the iPhone. The Gucci logo appeared and all seemed well until it transpired that he had arrived at the German site. Rookie mistakes like this do a disservice to a brand, and hurt it all the more the more luxurious it is.

On the more impressive side, the always admirable Lanvin, doyenne of Mount Street and invader of Savile Row, has finally launched a European e-commerce site, showcasing, as Luxuo puts it, “Lanvin’s dynamic style, the spirit of Alber Elbaz, and the creative wealth of its collections”. The site as whole manages to convey elegance, insouciance, history and contemporary style. Luxury brands have had a hard time adjusting to the online revolution, uncomfortably wondering how to translate the rarefied atmosphere of a boutique into the world of the Internet. Fashion’s Collective puts it best, in an article on redefining exclusivity,

The answer is to redefine what exclusive means. Rather than exclusive being the clientele the brand attracts, it should instead be the experience the brand conveys. Here, the focus shifts to the brand to provide value online just as they do offline. By curating the images, videos, copy, content and experience a brand publishes online, exclusivity is created.

While others have floundered, Lanvin passes the test with flying colours. Very impressive and very distressing news for the Zeitgeist credit card.

Fashion’s digital moves

Both parts of Zeitgeist may be out of the office at the moment, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t kept our nose to the grindstone, our ear to the ground, our eye on the ball, our finger on the pulse and our foot wedged in the door.

Last week, Zeitgeist was fortunate enough to attend the International Herald Tribune’s Heritage Luxury conference at the InterCon on London’s Park Lane. While the Missoni clan waxed lyrical on the importance of keeping it in the family, after such luminaries as Paul Smith and Alber Elbaz had already spoken, the real highlight was seeing the legend that is Karl Lagerfeld, designer for Fendi and Chanel, as well as his own eponymous collection. Karl spoke on a variety of subjects. He even offered his take on the LVMH / Hermes debacle, which Zeitgeist wrote about recently, suggesting that Hermes keep their earnings private, as Chanel does, so as not to encourage hungry buyers by “putting the milk out”.

Host Suzy Menkes asked Karl to talk about Coco herself, which he did with no subjectivity, criticising her knee-jerk dislike of blue jeans and miniskirts, and failing to adapt. It is this same failure to adapt that is causing many businesses – or even entire industries, such as books and music – to suffer massive losses, with Chanel itself a “dowdy dowager”, as the Wall Street Journal once described it. Indeed, when the managing director of the reputable Brown’s stores asked Karl what how important he thought the digital world was for luxury brands, Karl was unequivocal, saying Chanel the brand ignoring digital would be like Chanel the lady ignoring miniskirts and blue jeans. He was also talked about the increasing binary pull of fashion, where inexpensive and expensive rule, with no middle ground. Businesses in that middle ground – think FCUK – will not fare well in the future he intimated. If one thinks of this from a branding perspective, it is perfectly understandable. Selling your product as the best you can get, or, conversely the best you can get at the cheapest price, is a robust selling point. Anything between becomes undefinable and wishy-washy; at exactly what point has quality been sacrificed for expediancy in x product? Chanel have done a fair job so far of embracing the digital world, with an engaging iPhone app as well as an e-commerce section on their site.

Of course, some brands – especially luxury ones – revel in their heritage, and so it was on Tuesday night when Zeitgeist attended the evening preview of Dior Illustrated at Somerset House. Illustrator Rene Gruau was still drawing adverts and couture dresses for the company long after other labels had switched to photography. Of course, it is when one can combine the worlds of heritage and keep the brand contemporary that is most impressive. So it was with Ralph Lauren’s 4D presentation, also last week, shown in New York and London, recorded by a friend of Zeitgeist’s. Enjoy.

Justifying Luxury

“Luxury lies not in richness or ornateness but in the absence of vulgarity.” – Coco Chanel

If luxury is mostly defined by what it is not, then one can see how it faces an uphill battle in trying to attract the more cash-strapped among us, especially in economically turbulent times. A large part of a luxury brand’s assets are focussed on upselling to the shopper, but currently a brand has to work harder to justify its prestige (not to mention price tag). The following post looks at how some brands have responded by cultivating their image with top auteurs at the helm, while others have sought to bring the brand down to the masses.

Two of the biggest houses, Chanel and Gucci, both recently launched new ad campaigns to promote a new fragrance. Gucci first released a teaser trailer for it’s perfume, Guilty, which by all accounts went ‘viral’ before a 30-second spot went live on Facebook on August 12th, followed the next day it’s exhibition on TV. As Luxuo points out, what everyone is really waiting for though is the director’s cut of the commercial, which will be unveiled live September 12th at the MTV Video Music Awards. By the end of it, the campaign will have done a good job of building up audience anticipation and suspense. The shoot was directed by Frank Miller, the mind behind such films as “Sin City” and “300”, and the commercial’s aesthetics leave you in no doubt as to its author. The MTV VMA audience should dovetail nicely with the demographic Gucci is looking for with this particular product. As PSFK notes, the results could be mutually beneficial. Meanwhile Chanel, (recently branching out into surfing), has been mostly bombarding the cinema with its own ad for its own new brand of fragance, Bleu de Chanel. This advert was directed by the legend that is Martin Scorsese, whose crisp visuals are tinted blue and who can’t resist adding a Rolling Stones track to the background. It’s interesting to see both these powerful brands collaborating with famous / respected filmmakers in order to justify, endorse and build upon the image they are trying to perpetuate. The life shown through Miller’s and Scorsese’s lenses is an unattainable one.

Meanwhile, other brands have been seeking to do the reverse and making themselves somewhat more accessible, playfully or otherwise. Lanvin, one of the bastions of fashion, is reported by the New York Times to be doing a capsule collection for that bastion of mediocrity and crass capitalism, H&M, following similar collections by the likes of Matthew Williamson, Jimmy Choo and Karl Lagerfeld. Last year Lanvin produced a collection over a period of several months in collaboration with Acne Jeans. The latter brand helped make Lanvin more accessible (in that the synergised collection was cheaper than anything one might normally buy from Lanvin), but retained an esoteric air thanks to the jeans manufacturer’s relative anonymity (relative to H&M, anyway). What benefit does this brand dilution – for that is the only thing it can be described as – bring to the fashion house? Well it puts it on the radar of those 20-somethings who might not be able to purchase something from Lanvin outright on their current salary, but will be store it away for future consideration. Rather more cheekily, Issey Miyake recently opened a pop-up store in Tokyo, decked out not at all how you would expect. PSFK quotes,

“The overall concept derived from the Japanese convenience store, with its constant state of dynamic, fluid change… To highlight this association, the shop’s name is ‘24′, and its logo features the kind of stripes you might expect to find on the facade of a convenience store. The packaging, too, comes from food packaging.”

In this case then, Issey is taking it’s high-fashion image and poking fun at itself in its own retail environment. A dangerous move, but also an innovative one, with enough publicity to gain the attention of those fickle shoppers. It stands out from the more overt attempts at aspiration that Chanel and Gucci are creating, and perhaps this self-parody helps Miyake gains more fans than those who might otherwise be put off the more gilded edges of luxury, vulgar or no.