In the previous article I argued that the algorithm can be considered the new designer, and that the data has taken the leading role from the product. The new currency is data, and although we think we pay with money for what we consume, we unknowingly pay much more with the data we provide when consuming.
We are facing a paradigm shift: we come from a materialistic reality that has pivoted towards the immaterial, whether it is data (information handled by an artificial intelligence, from which it draws a conclusion formulated in an algorithm) or values (information that manages the consciousness of the conscious being, the user).
The fashion industry works with an extremely physical product, in direct and daily contact with the users' skin, which, however, incorporates metaphysical values, such as aspirational (social and economic status), differential (being cooler, hipper, more informed than others), emotional (evoking a moment, a person, a generation), and ethical (ecological and social sustainability). We shouldn't be scared when we talk about metaphysics when we talk about design, because it's been a long time since those same areas have been talking about meta-product.
The fashion business is based on these metaphysical values, which are the ones that allow a greater profit margin, since the production costs are those of any physical object, but the sale prices, those of the desire they evoke.
As is widely discussed, it is in the perfume industry where this beneficial equation is most evident, since the cost of a fragrance is very low, and what is sold at a high price is, as the popular expression says, smoke. The Arabs called al-cool that which evaporates, the spirit that leaves the body of the object (hence, alcoholic beverages are called spirits, just as they are called spirits in English). An intangible, embodied in a tangible object that is sold, be it a bottle of perfume, a lipstick, or other more expensive items such as a bag or an item of clothing.
Selling smoke justifies that many firms continue to maintain haute couture workshops, hiring star designers, creating new collections that are presented in extremely expensive parades attended by celebrities and influencers who are better paid for their presence than the models they are going to see parade, everything which would be unfeasible if it had to be financed with the sale of unique pieces.
We had an #amazing Ntsika yeThemba session (down-scaled to due to #level4lockdownregulations) where by a few of our… https://t.co/I1voBqaOCg
— The Justice Desk Tue Jul 20 10:11:53 +0000 2021
It is no wonder that Charles Frederick Worth, who is credited with being the first creator of haute couture to turn fashion on its head, presenting his proposals on real women who paraded through the halls of his atelier at the end of the XIX century, also sold in those first parades the perfume of the house.
In my early beginnings in the world of fashion, when I was still studying design at the French school ESMOD, I attended the world presentation of Poison, in Monaco (invited by the then director of the firm for Spain, Beatriz de Orleans). It was the great bet of Christian Dior, who designed a product to compete with Opium (by YSL) and Obsession (by Calvin Klein). A marketing competition to evoke the seduction of the dark side to such an extent that the name (Poison was registered in 1983) was designed before the aroma (in 1985, presented in 1986). A name that generated controversy (probably sought), as evidenced by the comments made about it by the designer who most explicitly understood that fashion is a matter of emotions and sensations, Halston, still alive then: «Naming Poison is an example of the true decline of the fashion business. I think it's just being done to create controversy. You can't tell people to go in and ask for a bottle of Poison."
Poison helped reposition the House of Dior at the forefront of perfumery for more than two decades, and in 2007, John Galliano was involved in the launch of its update, Midnight Poison, with more interest than the collection itself: in his statements to El País, defined the project as a job of which he felt especially proud. "When creating a new fragrance you can't just think about it: first you have to guess its charm, outline the woman who will wear it and the charm it will give off."
In 2004, the creative director for men at the same firm, Hedi Slimane, had launched the first collection of Christian Dior men's perfumes, under the name of Cologne. A clear vocation for the designer, who, after his next stint at YSL (whose end is largely attributed to his failure to involve the perfumery section), returned to the LVMH group as creative director of Céline in 2018, launching a line of eleven unisex perfumes, which he has called Haute Parfumerie, for a brand that only had one fragrance, Vent Fou, from 1964). Slimane declares that he cannot conceive of working fashion without perfume, and considers the former something ephemeral, while perfume, eternal.
Céline had been acquired in 1998 by Bernard Arnault, who had always understood the importance of the link between fashion and perfume. Arnault pivoted his financial career from the real estate sector to the luxury industry, acquiring the temple of haute couture, Christian Dior, in 1987, from a financial group that did not own the perfumes, and did not give up until they managed to acquire them, in 1989. Since then, it has been incorporating more than 70 fashion, perfume and cosmetics, jewelry, watch, wine and spirits, and retail brands, becoming the largest fashion and luxury corporation. In the first half of 2021, the group's perfumery and cosmetics turnover was 3,000 million euros, with organic growth of 37%.
Arnault, who has built an empire out of something as intangible as luxury, has overtaken Jeff Bezos this year as the world's richest man, and it seems his approach is dynastic: his four sons hold senior positions in the group and its subsidiaries.
