Milan
People who know me well will not be surprised to learn that I attended men’s fashion week in Milan this year. They will quickly perceive that while the leading members of the global fashionocracy flock to the city to review the new lines, none brings my unique perspective — a total lack of any sense of style.
Every other year or so I drag myself out to buy a new suit, and when I come back my wife greets me with, “What shade of gray did you buy this time?” Some years, I swear, I go out with the full intention of buying a suit that isn’t gray. But then I get to the store and look at the suits, a rainbow of gaudy navy blues and garish blacks. Too loud. Then I notice a gray one fading modestly into the background on some distant rack, and I admire its self-effacing dignity. I live in Washington, which has got to be the most sartorially unimaginative city in the world not excluding Tehran under the ayatollah. And I like to think of myself as a fashion vacuum even by our local standard. If you catch me not wearing a blue shirt, a red tie, and a gray suit, it’s probably because the dry cleaner sent back the wrong items by mistake.
Nevertheless, there I was jetting into the brand new Milan international airport (which, judging by the time it took to get to the city, seems to have been located in southern Norway). No sooner did I arrive downtown than I was whisked over to a fashion house, where I found myself sitting at a table with a hot designer on the eve of his winter show.
The designer’s name is Gigi. He is about 35, balding (he styles his remaining fuzz in a little pyramid on the top of his head), and slightly built and frisky, sporting the three-day growth of beard that Italian men do so well and Yasser Arafat does so badly. We were surrounded, and I am not exaggerating, by nine publicists for his company — two from the United States, two from Germany, one from Japan, and four from Italy. The firm’s French publicist phoned to say she wasn’t going to be able to make it because of traffic. This seems to be the ratio in the fashion business — about a dozen publicists for every actual designer.
Gigi is a passionate man, and he leapt up from the table to show off the menswear he had designed for the season. “This is my life! This is my passion! This is my work! I work all the time! I see something and I just have to sketch it down!” he exclaimed. People who know their fashion would be able to describe his stuff in evocative terms. Let me just say first off his clothing is brown. Gigi pointed to all the publicists sitting around the table: “These fabulous, fabulous women,” he called them. He pointed out that almost all of them were wearing brown, whereas eight months ago they would have been wearing black. I made a little note to myself: Brown is in. I even considered returning home and buying a brown suit. Nope, too loud.
We were going through Gigi’s line of travelwear for next fall. There were sweaters, hooded parkas (artificial fur for environmental reasons). Last year, Gigi explained, the look was “technological.” The colors were black and the materials artificial, so everybody walked around looking like they were wearing a laptop travel case. But this year the trend is a natural look on the outside, and high-tech on the inside. Gigi had racks of knitwear, all nubby and textured. One jacket was made out of some fuzzy wool — shorn from the Phyllis Diller of sheep — with a lining of one of those high-tech polyesters. Gigi was so proud of the little thermometer mounted inside the jacket that I didn’t have the heart to point out to him that a thermometer pressed against a human body won’t give you much useful information about the weather outside.
Gigi showed me luxury sweatshirts with four or five different fabrics in them ranging from wool to distressed leather, for people who can afford the best but want to hold onto that just-out-of-art-school look. He showed me rich chocolate colored corduroy jackets and intricate herring-bone cardigans with little pockets for your cell phone. Gigi’s line is rich, layered, and a little intellectual. If you were a dashing young anthropology professor who had just won a MacArthur grant, this is how you would dress on your way to a corporate-funded technology conference on Lake Como.
In fact, Gigi’s clothes were so nice, and yet in a tasteful sort of way, I began wondering, Why don’t I have a look? Why don’t I try to express anything with my costume, anything beyond pure nullity? And the more I thought about it, the more I began to be amazed at the stunning conservatism of American male fashion, which has silently shaped my wardrobe, and probably yours, too. There was a brief moment around 1972 when Joe Namath was wearing fur coats, when American men dressed creatively (and horribly, it must be said). But aside from that, we are an unbelievably demure lot — even in supposedly arty neighborhoods like Santa Monica and Soho, where brown would be a daring departure from the normal black on black.
Men in the rest of the world are not like this. In Germany and Holland the newsreaders on the nightly news wear bright plum sport coats. In France they are French. And even in Britain they wear those electrocuted pinstripe suits, with vibrating striped shirts and oversized cuffs. The quintessential American designer, on the other hand, is Ralph Lauren, a Jewish guy trying to succeed in the world by mastering the art of Anglican restraint.
In Milan, I came across men wearing an incredibly wide variety of looks, and not only among the fashionista types. The rule seems to be that if you are beautiful you can be yourself, but if you are ugly you must be interesting. The underlying clothing might be brown or black, but half the men I ran into this week had some sort of obsession with florid scarves. There was a profusion of male brooches — sophisticated clusters of gold and silver — sprouting on their lapels. In eyewear, I saw a range of colors beyond all describing. Some go for green glasses, some bright orange, and a handful favor the chunky black that suggests intellectual seriousness. There was also a stunning diversity of facial hair. Few men wore the standard issue goatee that relief pitchers in America tend to adopt. Instead people had strips of carefully shaped fuzz slicing from sideburns to chin, vaguely suggesting the roadmap of a large central city tapering off into a peninsula on either end.
We stolid Americans are supposed to look at all this as decadent frippery. We’re simple cowboys who drive cars with names like Yukon, Expedition, and Durango. What manly American man would want to have to go up to one of his hunting buddies and say, “Excuse me, I think I left my brooch on the floor of your Yukon.” We don’t have time to spend agonizing in front of our armoires, trying to figure out if the green in our silk chemise brings out or overpowers the blond tinting in our hair. We’re substantive, sensible folk, after all, with more important things to think about. We’re used to regarding the fashion world as a frivolous carnival, a sideshow to the really important parts of life.
But I wonder who is being delusional here. For when you actually look at the fashion world, you see two things. First, and most obviously, you see what is indeed a decadent floating party cycle for Eurotrash. One of the perplexities of my week in Italy was that I repeatedly found myself deep in cocktail chatter with semi-beautiful women with no fixed address and no clear occupation, talking about, say, the wonders of homeopathic jet lag remedies. But second, and more ominously, you see the shape of things to come. For underneath the glitter, fashion is a highly competitive industry. In fact, this is the quintessential industry of the Information Age.
The experts who write about the global economy point to the emerging trends: away from industrial production and toward the manufacture and marketing of ideas and images; away from national industries and toward transnational hybrid firms; away from rigid hierarchies and toward flexible teams; away from patient verbal communication and toward fast-paced visual communication. When you look at the fashion industry you realize that the people who dominate these companies have been operating in a new-economy mode for decades. The industry is already a highly evolved version of the global Information Age economy, and the people you see in the fashion industry are highly evolved products demonstrating what it takes to thrive under the new rules.
Consider some of the operating principles of the fashion world:
* The workers are free agents. The day before Gigi’s show, I walked into the space where the “installation” was to take place. (Not all designers have traditional catwalk shows. Some prefer to set up sprawling exhibits, with models standing around like sculptures and the rest of the clothes displayed on the walls and racks like pieces of environmental art at the Guggenheim.) The room was bare except for a few raw boards and lots of technicians running around. Most of these freelancers had been flown in at the last moment to build the show: a producer from New York, models from Paris, lighting people from Italy, others from Britain. In the middle there was an old woman in black peasant garb shouting orders to everybody. It looked like Mamma Leone running a design revolution.
In other words, this show was put on by an ensemble of free-agent consultants who were called together to complete this one high-pressure project before dispersing to the four winds, or the next show. They worked all night, building and painting the sets, arranging the footwear, organizing the catalogues for the press, making the hors d’oeuvres, and by early the next morning they had transformed the room into a weird glowing space full of earth-tone clothes and lines of footwear, soon to be occupied by hundreds of milling fashionistas chatting over their champagne glasses. This is exactly the sort of high-pressure teamwork that they rave about in Wired and Fast Company magazines. It’s the economy peppered with consultants and freelancers that economists have been noticing. It’s the sort of temporary arrangement that sociologists worry about in essays on the “Death of Loyalty.”
* Everything revolves around an animating genius. By the morning of the actual show, Gigi was out of his mind. He was bouncing all around the exhibition space, talking to everybody and readjusting everything. There was a press conference at 8:30, which started about 9:15. This was the first time I’d been to an Italian press conference, and it was a little bit different in that nobody stopped talking. While Gigi was talking, the reporters kept up a running commentary with each other about what he was saying. That was good, because Gigi certainly wasn’t going to let them interrupt him to ask questions. Various aides walked up to Gigi while he was talking to tell him things, and one finally told him to pipe down and get off the stage.
But really the whole point was for him to be this way. This whole publicity apparatus had been erected to celebrate him and his ability to intuit the mind of the consumer. The publicists kept telling me what a genius he is. And in his hyper mode, he looked the part.
And that’s the way it is throughout the information economy. Businessmen used to disdain genius. Arthur Schlesinger called anti-intellectualism “the anti-Semitism of the businessman.” In traditional capitalism, the hero is utilitarian and practical. He succeeds through application and industry, not flights of vision. “Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men” was the title of an article in American magazine in 1924. But today, CEOs are no longer just chief bureaucrats. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, and the like are auteurs — visionaries, philosophes, charismatic leaders. Their stock prices rise and fall on their reputations for creativity. They have to write wild books with titles like The Road Ahead. They have to go to tech conferences and make big, 500-year predictions about the sweep of history. Everyone is an auteur.
More broadly, in this economy, a company’s value is measured less by its fixed capital in plants and equipment and more by the talent of the people who temporarily work for it. As the modern cliche goes, the company’s chief assets walk out the door each evening and go home. That means that the workplace is supposed to become a creative workshop, where the masters help their underlings stretch their minds. And ambitious young strivers are supposed to think, in the words of Gary Hamel’s current business bestseller, Leading the Revolution, like “seers” and “heretics.” Their goal is to become the genius around whom a company revolves. Hamel has a little creed in his book: “I am no longer captive to history. Whatever I can imagine, I can accomplish. . . . I am an activist, not a drone. I am no longer a foot soldier in the march of progress. I am a revolutionary.”
Even the fashionistas don’t get this grandiose. But in their world, companies have always been structured like workshops, with teams of creative people striving to implement the vision of one “genius.” The value of the company depends on the mystique that surrounds the genius. So of course Gigi was the center of the marketing effort for his house. Across town, Tom Ford, another more celebrated designer who has worked at Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche, was spoken of in hushed tones. The big designers maintain their prestige not by having any fixed capital, or even by staying at one house, but by sustaining their aura. They are the industry geniuses, like the genius chefs of the restaurant world and the genius analysts of Wall Street. Commerce follows the stars.
* You stay on the cutting edge or die. The Silicon Valley guys talk about the need to stay at the forefront of change. They invent laws like Moore’s Law to illustrate the relentless pace of progress, and they use phrases like “ashheap of history” to situate people who do not stay on the cutting edge. People rush into things like e-commerce willy-nilly because they feel that the cost of missing the next big thing is death.
This is the way the fashion industry has always worked. The people who tell the old fashion world joke — “That’s so 5 minutes ago . . . ” — are scarcely exaggerating. When Gigi made that comment about most of the publicists in our meeting wearing brown instead of black, I noticed that in fact two women at the table were not wearing brown. The next day they both showed up at work in brown.
One night I found myself at a dinner table next to an American named Eric, a big blond guy who looks like a more ruggedly handsome Andy Gibb. He’s worked at Hugo Boss and other houses and said that in his business you get to recognize the signs — the notch in a lapel, the placement of a button — that mark each season’s suits. So you can pretty much tell at a glance how long the person you are talking to has owned his costume. I liked Eric because he was one of the few people who didn’t look at my two-year-old suit with the expression of one who has just passed fresh roadkill. “You forget about wearing anything for a year,” Eric said, speaking of people in his line of work. “You buy something you like. You wear the hell out of it. Then you give it away.” Eric’s brother has a wonderful collection of just barely out of date menswear.
For people in the industry, this isn’t frivolous trend-mongering, it’s professional survival. They have to be seen as members of the avant-garde. If Donna Karan designs three-tier shirt collars that look like folded napkins, you’d better not be caught in a single-tier collar. If Christian Dior is doing the trailer trash look, then you’d better get on the Winnebago. The race is fastest at the front. The brave individual stays ahead of society.
* Big brands thrive. In the Information Age we have a set of industries where many people are either free agents or short timers. They hop from job to job, but very often their product is intangible or a matter of taste. A screenwriter can’t measure his or her output in widgets, neither can a computer game designer, a publicist, a graphic artist, or an academic. So how do you attract attention and get hired? You develop your brand. A brand is like an identity or a persona. It is the quality or aura that defines your role in the marketplace. The Brand Called You is the title of Tom Peter’s advice book. If you type “branding” into the Amazon.com search engine, you find 69 recent books with that word in the title.
Milan was full of people nurturing their brand. That’s why they dress so perfectly, to enhance their persona. That’s why they seem to be on a first name basis with race car drivers, club owners, and the best polo ponies. They want their brand to have some of the prestige that rubs off from those glamorous brands. That’s why their dinner parties are always at the “it” restaurants. I went to one that was part-restaurant, part museum, part eclectic lifestyle shop, part hotel, and I knew my hosts were chic because when the main course was cleared (at about midnight), the owner of the restaurant, a big local celebrity, sat down at our table and had the waiter bring her some tea. She was affiliating her brand with our brand, and we all knew something glorious was happening. You could tell by the way our gratitude glowed off the strands of jewelry in her elegantly shaded blond hair.
In his recent book The Future of Success, Robert Reich drops in the stray sentence “Harvard University is becoming the world’s preeminent brandportal for learning,” which is certainly an interesting way of putting it. But maybe it’s essential. The dot-com shakeout underlined the importance of having a big and trusted brand. When the going gets rough, the big brands, like Yahoo! and AOL, survive, and the little brands that are out there competing for recognition perish.
In fashion, of course, people have been competing for eyeballs, as the Internet types say, for centuries. Their whole industry is about cultivating a brand. If you come into a meeting in an Armani suit, that says one thing about you; if you come in wearing Betsey Johnson, that says another. The fashionistas have been climbing the status ladder from one prestigious house (or brandportal) to the next for decades. And the keepers of the brand are quite supple about attending to the care and nurture of their personas. Recently Calvin Klein got into a bitter and public feud with one of its licensees, Warnaco, in part because Klein thought Warnaco was tarnishing the brand. Gucci has shown that you want to leverage your brand into the mass market to make the big profits, but you’ve got to do it without diluting the brand identity.
One of the interesting effects of this brand-consciousness is the way it elevates the cultural power of journalists and celebrities. Journalists and celebrities are the keepers of the buzz. They are the ones who focus attention on one brand or another. If you own a restaurant, you want it to be the place where the supermodels go. If you own a fashion house, you want Madonna at your show. At the fashion events, the pecking order is marked by where you are seated. The high status front row is generally given to celebrities and celebrity journalists. They sit in full view of the crowd, ignoring the show and talking on their cell phones. The next rows are given to the buyers from the big stores, the people who do the millions of dollars of actual business with the houses. Money is important, but apparently it is secondary to buzz, since money follows buzz. Then further back are the non-celebrity journalists, the ones who are not high profile editors but who do the actual writing. They have the worst view of the action. Some journalists specialize in writing about footwear, but they are so low status they have to sit in the back and can’t see the shoes. But at least they get to be in the room. Everybody else has to wait outside.
They say men’s fashion week in Milan is only a fraction as intense as women’s fashion week. But it was still pretty intense. Living in this sort of industry takes total commitment: cultivating one’s brand, staying on the cutting edge, building up one’s cultural capital, hopping from job to job as the winds of innovation shift. But this is the way more and more people are going to be living. The fashion people have been perfecting for decades the mentality, tactics, and behavior that other Information Age workers are only now coming to grips with. We are all becoming fashionistas.
The essence of this new mode is the competition for attention. We are moving into an overcommunicated world, in which there are too many TV stations, too many websites, too many start-ups, too many commentators, too many conference panels, too many brands competing for eyeballs. The old pioneers faced a daunting wilderness. Industrial age managers were under constant pressure to make their production processes more efficient. But the Information Age johnnies live in a jungle of communication. Each individual and each company has to wade into this tangle of messages and find a sustainable spot where survival is possible.
There’s a reason the new elites revere Picasso. By constantly reinventing himself, he kept himself in the public eye. There’s a reason Andy Warhol is still on people’s minds. He fused the attention-getting techniques of art and advertising, and so created a potent combination for staying famous. Andy Warhol probably didn’t create great paintings, but he created one fabulous brand.
The jungle of communication breeds a certain type of individual. He is not the conformist that David Riesman worried about in The Lonely Crowd. On the contrary, it’s imperative to deviate (within socially acceptable limits) from the norm in order to establish that distinct identity. Nor is he a rugged individualist, as one might have found on the American frontier. On the contrary, he’s got to have antennae finely tuned for others’ reactions. Nor is he a Dale Carnegie gladhander. He’s got to show he is cerebral, edgy, avant-garde.
Instead, he is a protean figure, constantly changing in surprising and contradictory ways in order to win attention. He has a short time horizon, because the great blizzard of messages quickly obscures anything that happened as long as a few months ago. He is a risk taker, saying and doing extraordinary things to win attention, knowing that once you’re famous there are few penalties for being wrong or outrageous. He has a great tolerance for flux and insecurity. He has a genius for reading cultural signifiers, knowing to behave one way with the cowboy hat crowd and another way with the counterculture set. He is always productive, using every social event and chance meeting to build his network and publicize his brand. He has a great rhythmic sense for when people are sick of a cultural trend and ready to hop on a countertrend. He’s unembarrassed by a level of self-promotion that would have seemed distasteful a few decades ago. He is, above all, self-confident.
Stop me if this is beginning to sound too much like Bill Clinton or Tina Brown or Al Sharpton or any of the other titans of buzz. But the Information Age really does pose new cultural challenges. Conservatives are veteran culture warriors. We’re used to identifying the harmful effects of bad ideas. Sometimes if you read conservative literature, you get the impression that the American educational system is absolutely incompetent at teaching students how to read and write, and deviously brilliant at passing along every corrupting idea hatched in a New Left faculty lounge.
But the cultural offensive of the 1960s isn’t the only thing that influences American character. People are more influenced by the way they live than by ideas passed along in a lecture or on a TV show. And if the Information Age workplace threatens to turn Americans into frenetic self-branders, competing for buzz and attention, that’s just as big a threat to virtue as anything the tenured radicals could dream up. The problem is to figure out what sorts of temptations and corruptions the information economy does pose, and then — since we’re not going to abandon the Information Age economy — figure out what sorts of cultural institutions we can set up to remind people how to separate what really matters from the onslaught of ephemera.
The fashionistas don’t write books that you can refute. They don’t quote Rousseau. But if their world becomes the whole world, pretty soon we’ll all be changing scarves and looks and personalities every six months in desperate competition for attention and cool. The trivial will crowd out the eternal. The flood of e-mail and instant messages will be overwhelming. We’ll never remember anything that happened more than a few months back, and we’ll never think more than a season ahead. We’ll all be on the floor of our SUV wondering whatever happened to that damn brooch.
David Brooks is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD and author of Bobos in Paradise, now available in paperback (Touchstone).
