In the last of this 4 part series, undercover industry writer, Louise Lagosi address the history of fashion marketing, the strategies used to build the perfect consumer while covering up poor quality, and how those tactics have effected us as a society. We also look at how the fashion industry and marketing is changing with the times to keep up with an evolving society of people.

If you read the first three parts of this series, you might be in the mood to avoid the media, shut off your TV, stop shopping, and just give up on fashion. But, other than offering you peace of mind, what would that accomplish? As easy as it is to point fingers, the leaders of the fashion industry are not the only ones responsible for the state of fashion. Society as a whole bought what was being sold without stopping as individuals to question the motives behind the advertisement or wondering if our “consumer” habits were good for us, our neighbors, or the planet.

Unless you want to go back to wearing burlap bags, and go Medieval, we all need something to adorn our bodies. And let’s face it, beautiful clothes, beautiful anything for that matter, really does make life more joyful. That said, nothing can be beautiful if it has a dirty, rotten underbelly it’s hiding. So let’s just get to the core of this thing.

Taking Responsibility

Now that the phrase “Think Globally, Act Locally” has been imprinted on our brains, we all know that shopping with small mom and pops stores, as well as supporting local designers and supply chains is the best thing we can do for our immediate environment, but how can we be effective on a global level? Have you read any articles, or signed any petitions requesting that corporations clean up their acts? Written to your government representative asking for higher international labor standards lately? Not sure who your representatives are? Well, it’s pretty easy to find out. In this age of information sharing with a little due diligence and research it’s becoming increasingly easier to figure out who’s doing business right, and who’s doing business wrong. And it’s even easier to find a petition or even to start a petition asking companies and the government to do business responsibly.

It has become more and more common to share our opinions and knowledge of this kind freely among our friends and associates, on Facebook, Twitter, and various social media sources. As a favor for your sharing the information, they in turn go on and share it with their friends and pretty soon the news has gone viral. Some of your conversations on Facebook might look something like this:

“There’s a joke going around China today that you can tell what colors are going to be in fashion next season by looking at the rivers.“

“I think I’ll opt for a nice neutral, beige from now on, thanks.”

 “Time to Stop the Fashion Pirates again. Forever 21 has gotten caught stealing yet another design from independent designers.”

“I stopped shopping at Forever 21 after my last purchase from there smelled like magic markers and fell apart in the first wash. But I do buy clothes from the local designers in my own town.“

 “Why does Disney still carry polyester jammies for kids coated in fire-retardants? Didn’t they get the memo that it’s been repeatedly proven that both the synthetic fibers in clothing and formaldehyde based fire-retardants are carcinogenic, cancer causing, hormone disrupting, and/or can cause damage to our nervous systems?!

“I wouldn’t know, I avoid both synthetics and Disney like the plague.“

 “Did you hear that Victoria’s Secret were caught slashing and throwing away garments that were returned because donating them to charity was too much of a hassle to organize?”

“I wouldn’t wear Victoria Secret, even if it were free. Let’s just say that I don’t know a single 16 year old whose boobs naturally sit directly under her chin, so why, at any age, should mine?”

Whether or not these conversations in social media and on the street actually sway the decisions of those in power to create a change in the industry, for us to be aware enough about these issues that we feel a little whistle blowing is in order can make us better, more informed, people.

Word gets around fast in this Internet Age and in no time at all, Walmart has a publicity crisis for abusing their laborers, and the Gap is making public apologies for promoting red,white, & blue flag waving products that are made in China. H&M and Nike claim they too are doing their parts, all while receiving raised eyebrows from the sustainable community, for making lofty corporate responsibility initiatives mandated for 2020 that promise unprecedented standards with little or no suggestions on how they might go about doing so. Perhaps H&M & Nike could borrow from their multibillion dollar marketing budgets to fund reaching their 2020 goals.

Are initiatives enough? Hardly, but when you’re a company that’s big enough to consume one third of the planets organic cotton supply, even a small initiative, like H&M’s organic cotton initiative can keep large amounts of fertilizer and herbicide from going into our water, provided it’s an honest effort. “Good” is questionable when you take into account that their organic cotton is not all that organic after all.

Recent New York City H&M window

With their greenwashing marketing efforts these companies still do not get the green light for sustainable shopping. In the same way we shop for food, if we can’t find clear and certifiable labeling on the product, many of us are not buying it. Some consumers are even going so far as avoiding stores with bad track records altogether, regardless of their “eco” initiatives.

In 2009, The Hartman Group’s report, titled Sustainablity: the Rise in Consumer Responsibility stated that 88% of consumers engage in what they consider to be sustainable behavior. Are people hearing concerns about water contamination or global warming and choosing to cut back where they can to help? Are fast fashion fans growing annoyed that their clothes fall apart after a couple washes when the hand-me-downs from their mother’s wardrobe seem to last forever? Have people suddenly realized that they have enough stuff in their closets that they could probably go for years without shopping and still maintain appearances?

Author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, Elizabeth Cline, describes the pivotal moment in her consumer mindset, “When I piled up all of my clothes in the middle of my bedroom, I was astonished that there wasn’t much variety within the mound of poorly made clothing. It was mostly all one color, and I had bought more or less the same few items over and over again. I wasn’t using most of it, and most of it was cheep crap that I didn’t even like very much. Overall, I was unsatisfied with what was in there.”

She explains the transformation that occurred in that moment of realization, “It made me more mindful. I shop my own closet now. I have stopped buying repeat garments. I don’t crave having a million tops. That doesn’t really interest me anymore. I want one or two good garments for each category to make complete outfits within my wardrobe. I want to save my money to buy really nice items to fill in the holes.”

Signs of Change in Mainstream Fashion Media

CFDA Leader, Diane Von Furstenburg, and American Vogue Editor-in-Chief, Anna Wintour, recently released that they support encouraging a cleaner Fashion Industry through an initiative presented by the NRDC called Clean By Design. We’re still waiting to see how they do clean up, but they have taken the first step, which is openly acknowledging the elephant in the room. This is nothing short of a miracle.

Fashion Labels Evolving With the Times

Eileen Fisher

This privately owned company has always taken a holistic approach to designing clothing. The brand carefully chooses fibers for their sustainable, community based, growing methods, natural content, longevity, and feel. They work with collectives and factories around the world that pay fair-trade wages. They design clothes that are timeless and that do not relate to any trends, allowing the clothes to survive as long as their high quality materials do. And through their recent initiatives like Ampersand, they have been educating their customers on why choosing their products supports a sustainable environment here on earth for everyone involved.

Patagonia 

Patagonia also keeps their marketing to a minimum, but when they do promote something, the message is unusual for a clothing company. They promote clean water initiatives, such as Our Common Waters, in their recent Common Threads Initiative, they tell people to stop buying more than they need. They also provide transparency in their supply chain like in The Footprint Chronicles, with this interactive map on their site showing exactly where their factories are located with stats, reports, and a brief on Patagonia’s history with each one. This brand ultimately puts their dollars in recycled materials innovations, such as polar fleece made of recycled bottles, and maintaining factory standards, so they can provide more responsible products to their customers.

Timberland

Timberland is a brand that is committed to the outdoors. Which is why they have made  developed TIMBERLAND RESPONSIBILITY, their plan for significantly reducing their companies emissions through the research, evaluation, and investment in company structures that will allow them to run cleaner and produce products that have a smaller impact on the earth. The company reports are transparent and available to the public on their home site, grading their efforts and describing all the methods used to achieve their challenging goals to reduce their company wide climate impact.

Levi’s 

Levi’s has been doing business with the goal of striving towards sustainability and excellence for over 100 years now. They give cash credits to customers who return their old Levi’s in for their denim recycling programs and they have been working on increasingly finding ways to reducing their water use in their denim production processes. Are they singing about their exceptional practices in their ad campaigns to help better educate their customers? Let’s just say this is one of the places where they still have room to improve.

Pendleton

This nearly 150 year old American company produces much of it’s premium products, from fibers grown, spun, dyed, and woven in America. They keep marketing to a minimum and keep their funding aimed at doing business responsibly and offering the best quality products possible to the customers they serve. Their product’s are so beautifully made, by  that they end up heirlooms in most of the fortunate homes that they grace.

Change is indeed happening all around, but most of all it starts with each one of us. We have to make up our own minds. What type of consumers are we?

Image: oxfam, Fashionista, Last Night’s Garbage,Amy DuFault

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SeriesInundated with marketing messages, Americans adjust their spending belt.

In part 1 and 2 of this series, we looked at the tricks of the trade and the psychology behind the advertising end of marketing. In this article we look at what sales and marketing tactics are covering up: The quality corner-cutting that’s happening as we’re simultaneously being driven into a consuming frenzy.

I love a bargain. This weekend I thought I officially became the queen of treasure hunting when I found a mint condition Christian Dior cashmere coat at the thrift store. When I checked out the label, I found a tiny label stating “Made in America.” Made in America? Christian Dior’s couturier is based in Paris, this little detail gave me reason to pause, and question the authenticity of my find. It could not be coming from the actual Dior couture house with that country of origin label. The question begged to be asked: who designed this coat?

On another day, I headed straight for the sales rack at J Crew, finding three t-shirts for just over the price of one. And on another occasion, when I was strapped for cash and running short of underwear, I’ll admit that I made myself go to T.J. Maxx in search of some fresh pairs among the $6.99 Calvin Klein styles mixed in with the no-name brands for $2.99. I’m totally guilty of buying some of both. But at the moment of that purchase, I was just thankful to find underwear that fit the budget and even some that seemed to save me a few pennies.

Unfortunately, all of the underwear bought that day fell apart faster than any underwear I’ve ever owned. The shoddy underthings went straight into a bag for Goodwill and I had to head to the store once again not long after my purchase. Let’s just say, I had gotten exactly what I paid for.

The Fine Print That Bargain Hunters Miss

There’s nothing like the feeling you get when you find an unbelievable bargain in fashion. Unfortunately, 99% of the time the “unbelievable bargain” is just that. Discounted sales and fashion “bargains” are actually marketing tactics that encourage us to buy more stuff, much of which we don’t necessarily need. The sales tactic: overvalue the nicely displayed full price products in the front of the store so that customers get excited about the discounted stuff on the overcrowded, back sales racks. This encourages us to visit the store more often to look for sales to avoid missing the deal. However, usually when you buy items on sale, you’re in fact paying the price closer to the items actual make-value (just above how much it cost to make it).

Recent reports show that this tactic is now beginning to backfire on the the retailers, especially those who would like to maintain their product quality and regain profit growth to pre-recession profits. Even JC Penny, who in past years held as many as 590 annual promotional, sales and coupon events, has decided it’s time to change their sales tactic.

Not All Designer Labels Are Created Equal

Sales racks aside, what about finding “designer labels for less” in department stores and at discount retailers like T.J. Maxx? What of my “made in America” Christian Dior coat which originally would have been sold in an American department store like Nordstrom’s rather than at the House of Dior? We all equate designer labels with higher quality and value, but in the world of fashion not all designer labels are created equal.

Many successful designer brands have multiple tiers of product qualities that their brands sell to reach a broader market: high end lines for the investment shopper, middle market lines for the value shopper, and low end licensee lines for the bargain shopper. Quality is more closely monitored at the top of the market where the customer is paying a premium and recognizes and expects high quality goods. Quality slides through the middle market where the customer wants better design but is not as aware of the difference in the quality of the make, and the only thing that remains “designer” in the cheaply made bargain basement find is the designer-logo-label stitched in the back.

Vogue, January 1949. Which would you be more likely to purchase: An lower quality no-name umbrella for $15 or a Dior jacquard logo umbrella for $25? The two are probably made at the same place.

That low end product is more or less designed by the factory that works with a brand’s licensing partners. Their only objective is to make easy to produce, lower cost garments for high volume mass production. The designer brands who are named in the labels of these items, in turn, get a nice cut of the sales profit for allowing the use of their logo and brand name. The use of their logo or label in turn push the sales into a frenzy that might not have been possible on an equivalent average or sub-par product.

The Path That Leads To a Global Market Profit Is Licensing

So, how does a Dior Coat come to be made in the USA? It all comes down to licensing agreements (that work kind of like fast food franchises) and the label in my coat tells the tale of how this works.
Back in 1947, Christian Dior and his business partner, Jaques Rouet, were some of the first in the fashion business to pioneer license agreements with international factory partner companies. Before then, being a clothing designer/producer meant you either owned a local factory or a couture house and basically did all of the design and production – albeit tightly monitored – under one roof.

For Dior, who owned his own couture house, fashion was his legacy and he intended to see that legacy, as well as his fortunes, grow. By 1947, he had already set up licensing agreements with production partners to manage lines of furs, socks, perfume, ties and clothes in regional production areas around the globe, thus being able to extend his brand and multiply his sales by selling product in local markets all over the globe near his license producers’ locations. Most likely, Dior would have sent a sketch and a swatch of fabric for the factory to follow and the factory would fill in all the blanks of the details on how to make it.

With a status label like Dior, his licensee partners could sell much more product than they might otherwise, because the couture house’s name was well known among the fashionable society and was considered highly desirable. Meanwhile, Dior could turn his focus toward marketing and advertising his house as a high-end, luxury market brand. This new business model allowed him to continue presenting his exuberantly priced couture collections without the pressure of needing to make a profit on haute couture because the licensed products that he barely touched were making enormous profits behind the scenes.

By August 31, 1964, The New York Times reported on a trend which had designers putting their labels into items that they didn’t actually design. What Dior’s business savvy had started almost two decades earlier had evolved and turned into a full scale, industry-wide, fashion free for all. It started with designers lending out a few sketches to a manufacturer with their branded label attached as a stamp of approval, they then collected their fee and let the manufacturers take over from there. But as the New York Times reported, designers had their names on products they didn’t even recognize, let alone would ever admit to designing. One appalled Parisian designer even bemoaned that he had found his name on cotton gloves that were on sale in New York, cotton gloves apparently being something he would never have made.

Some designer brands were more careful than others to avoid the “white glove” scenario by adjusting their licensing contracts so that all products had to be be approved by someone in their company before they headed to the stores. But overall, the fashion industry fully embraced this new business strategy that left the product details up to the factory and licensing partner and let the designer brand reap the profits without having to do all the work. Many successful brands operate through license agreements today.

Couture house, Pierre Cardin, took it particularly far. With over 900 license agreements, Cardin had manufacturers producing everything from paper clips to automobile interiors with his logo stamped on them. His brand eventually flooded the market, so much so, that it lost its appeal to the “designer” customer and was downgraded to Sears status, where it is still sold today. Clearly Cardin didn’t mind. By that point he had become so wealthy building his brand through advertisements and selling his name, that he had no problem leaving the labors, and the quality control of couture behind him.

The fashion industry had finally figured out how to transform from providing a service – making clothes for people to wear – into a highly profitable business. Brands were able to achieve this by focusing on marketing the concept of their brand as a high end status symbol while selling stuff en masse to the middle and low markets through their license agents. The job of the designer now became to present lifestyle products and advertisement imagery through marketing to keep customers believing that even their lower priced lines were worth the higher price tag attached to the brand name.

What we’re left with after all of this are stores like Macy’s who sell “designer” labeled clothes that the designers barely touched, Calvin Klein underwear that has very little to do with Calvin, and stores like T.J. Maxx, Loehmann’s, and Marshall’s full of “designer brands for less” claiming that they’re selling the “real thing” and leftovers from the high end market. Far from the truth, the leftovers were all made specifically for those low end retailers and can be sold for up to twice as much.

Secret License Agents

So who are these secret agents producing the license product for Calvin Klein, Anna Sui, DKNY, Betsy Johnson, Tommy Hilfiger, Michael Kors, Ralph Lauren and friends? The same guys who are in charge of designing and producing all the no-designer-name stuff it sits next to at the stores where you find designer goods for less. Basically you’re just as well buying no-name underwear for $2.99 as paying double the price to have Calvin Klein’s logo. Some stores, like T.J. Maxx, even have a licensee design office of their own, designing products in the name of their licensee partners, like Calvin Klein, and for their own no-name label brands at the same time so they can handle the details on some of the products in their stores themselves.

An industry friend of mine (who will remain nameless) works in quality control at one of the licensing partners that produce goods for J.C.Penny, Sears, Burlington Coat Factory, Loehmann’s, and T.J.Maxx. She used to manage quality control for brands at factories all over the world. But her new job posed a much more troubling issue than workers not knowing how to hand stitch buttons properly.

“This is the easiest job I’ve ever had. Quality control? What quality control? We get one sample to fit, make color, print, fabric and trim comments on and to approve. Then it goes straight into production. We produce the goods so fast that by the time they hand me a sample to check and approve the quality, the item is already on the factory floor being cut and sewn for the bulk order. My comments can’t even be put into effect,” she says.

“I remember being called into my boss’ office once when there was ‘a problem.’ A jacket had come in with the lining literally shredding on the hanger. This was nothing new. But the real problem was that the item was going to a retailer that required testing (some of the bigger retailers, like JC Penny require every item to have a sample sent in for quality control testing) and this would never pass.”

Was the company going to take a hit and have to absorb the cost of the bum goods? I asked. “Nope. Do you know what they decided to do?” she asked me. “They had me take the sample to a tailor to have the bad lining taken out and replaced with a nicer quality lining. Then they sent that one sample in for testing. Of course it passed, but they just shipped the rest of the product as is, shredded lining and all. I’ve never worked with such unethical people in my 30 years of working in fashion.”

I asked another friend of mine who has worked as a freelance designer in and out of one licensee company that had license agreements with Kenneth Cole and Calvin Klein, as well as producing several no-name lines that would sell at the same retailers that their licensee product would.

“We had to produce designs so fast, we didn’t have time to think about the finishings. Just fabric, sketch, maybe a button. Send it to the factory and leave the details to them to figure out,” she told me. “It was so easy, but the quality was terrible.”

But don’t they get customer complaints about the quality? I asked.

“Why would the stores ever complain? We’re giving them product that’s dirt cheap!” Apparently the customers who frequent these stores just take it for granted that their clothing is disposable. One or two wears out of them is all that is expected. This is also a part of the marketing strategy. It’s rare for anyone to make returns on product at the low end of the market, because it’s just not worth it. None of the product has any value to begin with.

According to Elizabeth Cline, author of Overdressed: the Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, “In 1930, the average American woman owned an average of nine outfits. Today, we each buy more than 60 pieces of new clothing on average per year.” But according to economists, the average American household only spends 3.1% of their income on clothing, which is approximately 22% less than what Americans spent on clothing in the 1970s – this makes sense with 3 for 1 specials and bargain blowouts but when considering how logical it is for the planet, we might want to dive a little deeper.

Editor’s note: Industry insider Louise Lagosi is not the author’s real name and is used to protect her anonymity.

Image: Diego 3336, The Consumerist, Ell Brown

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SeriesInundated with marketing messages, Americans are tricked into believing products equal happiness.

Editor’s Note: This four-part series from a leading industry insider is authored under the pseudonym “Louise Lagosi” for the individual’s protection. The series addresses our engagement with consumer culture and how marketing and advertising can manipulate us – and society as a whole.

Studies On The Development Of Consumerism

“All civilization in a sense exists only in the mind. Gunpowder, textile arts, machinery, laws, telephones are not themselves transmitted from man to man or from generation to generation, at least not permanently. It is the perception, the knowledge and understanding of them, their ideas in the Platonic sense, that are passed along. Everything social can have existence only through mentality.” -Alfred L. Kroeber, The Superorganic

If you took a time machine back to 200 years ago, you would see families living modest lives: busy working at home tending their vegetable patches or livestock, cooking and eating family dinners, making their own soaps, sewing and mending their own clothes, using what they had down to the last scrap, and buying as few products as they possibly could to maintain the comforts of their lives on their modest incomes.

Fast forward to today, where most American households buy everything they own from a store and consume far more than they actually need; nowadays, community refers to our Facebook friends, we home-make almost nothing for own consumption, we have no idea where our food or other products come from and we dispose of barely used products regularly, in order to replace them with something new for the sake of newness. We’ve become a consumer society which currently consumes approximately 1 1/2 times the amount of resources that the planet can produce annually.

What’s driving our culture toward consuming is a recipe based on keeping up with the Joneses, a rise in societal shopaholism and our basic survival skills at work within society. It’s also safe to say that in the name of industrial prosperity, the economies of Western civilization have pushed us to this point.

So perhaps it should be no surprise that in the eyes of capitalism, we’ve become trapped. Industry marketers and advertising experts have been able to turn our own survival skills against us in the name of turning a profit.

Consumer Grooming
Ever catch your mind wandering while looking at a fashion magazine or a sexy billboard, thinking, “I wish I could have that…” These thoughts may not in fact be yours, rather a direct product of the marketing industry’s labors to grab your attention. Consumer grooming is the method of applying psychologically embedded imagery, strategically placed where they will be seen by the masses, to influence the purchasing choices of the global population. Our human desires to be loved, respected and admired are played upon through airbrushed images modeling sex, status, wealth, and beauty aspirations. This is not a new thing, it’s been in the works since before the Victorian Period.

A portrait of the Astor family stiffly posing, shows the idyllic life of the extremely rich during the Industrial Revolution. While age perhaps has made this image more elegant to our modern eyes, this would be the Victorian equivalent to today’s Kardashian family Christmas card.

Madeline Levine, modern day psychologist and author of The Price of Privilege, describes in her book the negative effects affluence has on children growing up in wealthy families due to dramatic changes in American culture as “a shift away from values of community, spirituality, and integrity, and toward competition, materialism and disconnection.”

The Psychological Underpinnings Of Advertisements

“Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction and our ego satisfaction in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate“. -Victor Lebrow, Economist, 1955

Consumerism has long had intentional underpinnings. In the 1890s, economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen gave sweeping attacks on production for profit, propelling the rise in conspicuous consumerism in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class. He noted a spreading consumer trend that appeared during the Industrial Revolution with the emergence of nouveau riche moguls who were displaying their wealth and social standing prominently through conspicuous consumption of material goods, ultimately evoking envy among their neighbors.

Apparently their neighbors were taking the bait, right along with the growing middle class. Back in 1899, Veblen, scathingly noted a general trend in society that people were willing to give up their quality of living, their health/family/spiritual life balance, in order to appear wealthy through their dress.

For all his studies and reports, whom did his theories aid the most? It was the industrial businessmen who had much to gain from reading his findings even if he carped at the wealth throughout his work. Many of the conclusions he came to showed that given the opportunity, society could easily be encouraged to consume aggressively through different forms of peer pressure. His theories outlined how wasteful habits of over-consumption was spreading, giving industries, like the fashion and beauty product industries, the key to pushing huge amounts of unnecessary products to unconscious consumers.

By the 1920s, economists such as Paul Nystrom theorized that lifestyle changes brought on by the industrial age were inducing a “philosophy of futility” in the masses, which would only increase fashionable consumption. By the 1930s, advertising executives in a budding industry realized that they could capitalize on the social phenomenon of consumerism by encouraging consumers to compete with their neighbors for social status. In 1932, Earnest Elmo Calkins, a leading ad executive noted to colleagues that “consumer engineering must see to it that we use up the kind of goods we now merely use.”

Study after study has been written about our social tendency to conform to a collective wasteful behavior. While these studies do not seem to be reaching most of the population to educate, economists and businessmen have been eager to read them, continually thrilled to learn more about the harnessing potential behind the phenomenon of consumerism.

The Arsenal Of Advertisement Aimed At Consumers

The advertising, media, and marketing industries work to create and place ads in front of the people who are most likely to imitate and be influenced by it. Namely this would be people interested in anything related to societal activities: those who follow culture through magazines, TV, movies, or by surfing the net, live in an urban environment, or who at very least, listen to the radio.

In order to do accomplish their goal, the ad industry has come up with continually innovative methods that encourage the social drive to “keep up with the Joneses.” Celebrities since time immemorial have been brought in, images of excessive materialism carefully placed for target audiences to see and in turn, a consumer response to go shopping. This method of advertising has been highly effective at driving sales and has become one of the most effective forms of marketing excessively used today.

Vintage Elizabeth Taylor selling hair cream with a brand slogan attached, appealed to women that wanted to have hair like the  iconic Taylor. They didn’t mention that the cream is made with toxic chemicals or that you might need a team of hair stylists along with the cream to achieve her coif.

And Michael Jordan probably sold more shoes for Nike than anyone in history, while making millions doing it. Like Louis Vuitton’s Tribute Patchwork Bag, Nike turned Jordan’s namesake shoes into a “limited edition” to drive consumers into fearing that they might not get a pair. This effectively allowed the company to raise the prices of the products incredibly to meet their high demand, adding consumer status and “value” to the shoes. Quite often the Air Jordan shoes would be back-ordered for months or until the next edition was released.

The fashion media even invented their own celebrities. In the 1980s and 90s supermodels were born when the industries realized that they could draw attention to images featuring favorite “iconic” models, unusual in their looks, who had loads of attitude and glamour. Glamazons like Cindy Crawford, Naomi Cambell, Claudia Schiffer, and Linda Evangelista became household names and were easy to recognize in fashion spreads.

Women fell in love with the images of their beautiful “lifestyles” portrayed in fashion magazines and they achieved celebrity status for their pretty faces and extraordinary physiques. Women poured over their favorite fashion magazines: playing name that model, studying their make-up, hair and styling in an effort to emulate their style, beauty, and allure. Completely distracted by the pretty faces adorned with cosmetics and designer products, the under laying message that was embedded in the images easily sunk in. Of course, one would have to buy the products these beauties were modeling in order to emulate them.

Reality TV shows, featuring made-up, pseudo-celebs, have been devised specifically for product placement.

Superficiality, rage, greed, jealousy, envy, and competitiveness are now gratuitously displayed, on shows such as Keeping Up With the Kardashians, America’s Top Model, and Jersey Girls. All three shows invite viewers to embrace petty drama into their own lives and suggest that celebrity status might follow, even for people who completely lack talent.

The underlying message in all this media-based imagery is, “If you buy our products, you too will be beautiful and admired,” but the obvious question begging to be asked should be, “What are we hiding?”

Image: Tinou bao

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Editor’s Note: This four-part series from a leading industry insider is authored under the pseudonym “Louise Lagosi” for the individual’s protection. The series addresses our engagement with consumer culture and how marketing and advertising can manipulate us – and society as a whole.

Whether or not you are aware of it, this image of celebrity Jennifer Aniston is embedded with psychological material. Her honey-blond hair and softly-lit, Photoshopped face is childlike and dewy. Her intense attention to the money in her hand while clutching her designer bag loaded with more cash oozes power, sex, wealth, and control. The photograph even uses markers to pinpoint these little features while at the same time promoting the items you might want to buy if you wish to look like this. Celebrity, eternal youth, power, wealth, sex: That’s what this carefully articulated image has to offer up for sale.

But at face value, what is it really giving you?

Now, look at these photographs. What do you see? Realize that any previously presented Anistonian aspirations are absolute nonsense. She’s an attractive woman to be sure, but she’s only human. Even Jennifer Aniston doesn’t live the life that Jennifer Aniston leads in the above glossy magazine image.

Presenting Jennifer looking average or even shabby is playing up the competitive side of our human natures, getting us to compare ourselves to her, picking her apart, and at the same time picking ourselves apart through the comparison. We’re being primed to react defensively to the first image: Go shopping. But, at the end of the day, what does Jennifer Aniston have to do with our personal lives, and why do we find ourselves looking at her and other celebrity personalities with the obsession that we do?

Stuck In An Advertising Ambush

Are we truly tired of the messages that ads and the media are sending us? If you’re falling out of love with your relationship to fashion and shopping in general, join the club. It’s still a small one, but it is rapidly growing as our living spaces and surroundings are cluttered with stuff while our credit cards are maxed out. We need very little and yet we seem to want so much. And everywhere we look we see both evasive and aggressive marketing campaigns which bombard us with advertisements on a daily basis, suggesting that we need to buy more to gain beauty, glamor and fabulosity. In fact, if fashion were a drug, it would be almost impossible to kick the habit; there are pushers on every corner.

President of the Marketing Firm Yankelovich, Jay Walker-Smith, stated in a CBS news article, “It’s a non-stop blitz of advertising messages. Everywhere we turn we’re saturated with advertising messages trying to get our attention. It seems like the goal of most marketers and advertisers nowadays is to cover every blank space with some kind of brand logo or a promotion or an advertisement.”

Research from the late 1950s to the 1970s has shown that the average person 40 to 50 years ago was exposed to somewhere between 78-500 ads a day. Walker Smith points out that today we’re exposed to as many as 5,000.

NYC The Blog reports on the first NYC subway train completely wrapped in advertising

The tipping point is coming. Do-not-call. Adblock. “We have to screen it out because we simply can’t absorb that much information. We can’t process that much data,” Walker-Smith notes, “and no surprise, consumers are reacting negatively to the kind of marketing blitz; the kind of super saturation of advertising that they’re exposed to on a daily basis.”

There’s even an advertising company, cleverly called Wizmark, that’s putting advertisements in urinals. “You can’t look left. You can’t look right. You have to look at the ad and listen to it,” Richard Deutch, CEO of Wizmark brags with tongue firmly set in cheek.

Buying Into Luxury Brand Ads

Over the last 20 years, the fashion industry has employed numerous marketing tactics to drive consumers into a shopping frenzy, making industry giants enormously rich. Investing in “brand strengthening,” companies cultivate consumer loyalty which equates to high numbers in sales, quite often, from returning customers who have bought into the message that the brand’s advertisements are selling.

Take, for example, one of the most competitive luxury brands in the world: Louis Vuitton. In 2010, Louis Vuitton spent some $14 million on advertising during the first quarter. Their ad campaign appeared all over the pages of luxury lifestyle magazines, news publications, and across the internet where affluent shoppers would see them while shopping. Surprisingly, it was not enough to stimulate their consumer demand because in 2011, during the same quarter, they increased their budget to $22 million ( a 57% budget increase). The steep increase in ad spend could hardly be considered a coincidence.

The above ads were just about everywhere you looked in New York City during the spring of 2011. Louis Vuitton employed a small army of campaign advertisements to seduce luxury consumers back after the Great Recession.

In 2010, Consumer Reports revealed a noticeable trend that consumers were changing their habits: Shopping less, saving more, and choosing products that they equate with craftsmanship, practicality, and social values (think TOMS shoes) rather than luxury status “bling”. Bling is out. The reports also revealed that this new trend was not likely to go away anytime soon; it wasn’t merely a reaction to economic pressure, this new consumer was an entirely different beast living by a new set of rules. All of those advertisements were the velvet-gloved iron fist of Louis Vuitton attempting to coax the mass of luxury and aspirational consumers back into their former position of brand submission.

If you took eight LV samples and stuck them in a trash compactor, out would pop this expensive little piece of “limited edition” baggage called the LV Tribute Patchwork Bag. This particular bag might have cost approximately $3000 to make, but was sold exclusively to only 20 customers (worldwide) for $42,000 a pop in select stores.

What’s $36 million in advertising? Chump change to a company like Louis Vuitton that wants to ensure a dominant market position doesn’t erode. (In 2011, LVMH, the company that owns LV, boasted in their company quarterly report net profits of over $2 billion in fashion and leather goods sales alone.)

If you’re selling logo-covered, luxury-status, vinyl-canvas handbags with the words “Louis Vuitton” stamped on them, you can charge consumers a premium. The price tag we see can be anywhere between 250-1400% of the expense of making even a very well-made bag. The more expensive price tags (in the $1000+ range) subsidize the basic vinyl tote bags Louis Vuitton offers in the hundreds, allowing the company to lure the aspirational middle class with “affordable” luxury.

To the luxury fashion consumer, the primary value is not in the the design, the materials, or even the quality of labor that goes into the bag – it’s in the social status that the advertisements and exclusive products offer to customers. And over the past 20 years, while there have been many consumers that have bought right into the dream, there are those conscious customers who have simply walked away. After all, who really needs another logo-plastered tote when there are already so many of them out there?

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