"
. With Dept. of Hollow Pronouncements
“Everyone has the right to have great stuff.”
Car parts
Also in the Journal is a story about the “outsider” running Fiat and apparently doing well so far. Part of his cost-cutting approach has been to lay off managers rather than close factories. The story says this guy maintains that: “Labor is only 6% to 7% of the cost of making a car.”
Is that right? It surprised me. Certainly the impression I’ve gotten from the restructuring tactics of the big U.S. automakers has been that labor-related costs are a huge problem. It’d be interesting to see a breakdown of those costs. How much is materials? How much is R&D? How much is marketing? How much is executive/management-related?
Race and races
Interesting bit in a WSJ story today about Tennessee’s Senate race, where Democratic candidate Harold Ford is doing well and may become the first black Southern senator since Reconstruction:
Tennessee has one of the lowest African-American populations in the South — about 16%. Logically, that should put African-American candidates at a disadvantage for statewide office because they can’t count on a massive bloc of votes to give them a head start in a statewide election. But political scientists say the reverse may be true: In states with smaller black populations, whites don’t feel as threatened and the state isn’t as polarized. For instance, African-Americans make up a very high percentage of Mississippi and Alabama — 36.5% and 26%, respectively — and black voters tend to vote Democrat while white voters go for Republicans. The “blacker” the state, the larger President Bush’s margin of victory in 2004.
Pleasing Things Roundup
I wasn’t familiar with Adam Neate before encountering this on the Wooster Collective site a few days ago. Clicking away, I really enjoyed the work. Apparently he’s got a show at Elms Lesters Painting Rooms, a London gallery that’s also shown KAWS, Dalek, and others of note. For those of us not in London, more of Neate’s stuff can be seen here.
Next up: I was looking at Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog, which is consistently interesting, and was struck by the above image. The artist is Esao Andrews, who I’d never heard of. Here’s his site. This was by far my favorite image, but some of the other stuff is cool, too.
And finally: A skateboard as a band-aid. By Thinkmo, via High Snobiety.
Only commune
A new social/community/etc. site called iLike has launched, notes iLounge. It’s another site where you create a profile and bond with others through consumption habits — in this case, music-consumption habits. “iLike will help you find new music based on what you and your friends like,” the site says, promising “a more democratic music industry,” and the slogan: “Music of the people, by the people, for me.”
I think it’s about time for a community-community site. You could go on and create a profile and share with your friends all your opinions about the other community sites you’re part of, and discover the cool new community sites that are enjoyed by other community site members who are just like you. The result would of course be the democratization of online community-ness. Community of the community, by the community. For you.
Tomorrow’s Kitsch Today
Close to a year ago, Inc. asked me to write something with a different point of view about contemporary “good design” mania. I suggested something I called “Tomorrow’s Kitsch Today,” in which I’d ask various clever people like John Jay and Paola Antonelli and ESPO and Jen Bekman to nominate objects along the lines suggested by that phrase: Objects that are celebrated today but that might one day be looked back on as kitsch. I wrote an introduction with some historical context.
Basically it turned out that all this was a little too different to run in the issue it was commissioned for, but it finally surfaced on the Inc. site. Here is the slideshow of picks by the people who graciously helped me out back then. (Thanks again!)
And here’s the essay:
Never before had so many consumers been so savvy and sophisticated, and never before had so many people had such access to so much luxury, so much substantial style. It was a time of progress, good design for the masses, and the democratization of taste.
This sounds an awful lot like the way many gurus and trend-watchers describe the present moment. But, this is actually a summation of what the gurus and trend-watchers thought in the late 1950s and early 1960s — a time of TV dinners, Naugahyde, Formica, huge tailfins, Tupperware, and Con-Tact paper. Which raises an interesting question: Could it be that today’s celebrated evidence of our collective good taste is destined to be laughed off as mere kitsch in the future? Please continue…
How to leverage how-to-ness
Today’s WSJ has an entertaining article on web sites playing to “the next iteration of the burgeoning self-help industry: teaching people the obvious.”
At Video Jug you’ll find films on how to fold a T shirt, and “use the shower.” Other sites include eHow, wikiHow, and ViewDo. The DIY Network and others are sort of getting in on this, blending amateur (I mean grass roots!) advice with that of experts. But as one DIY Network interactive guy notes: “companies need to be careful about how they incorporate tips from amateurs. ‘If someone gets electrocuted or their deck falls down, that reflects poorly on the DIY brand.'” Indeed.
Now at Colette: Gap ads?
Also last week, I was sent the most recent Colette newsletter. I was surprised at the lead item:
“Individuals” – Portraits from the Gap Collection, until October 28th, 2006. A visual exploration spanning the history of GAP advertising campaigns … Limited-edition + numbered copies of the book «Individuals – Portraits from the Gap Collection» are available on the colette eshop in a special luxe, limited-edition format exclusively presented in a denim bag…
Colette is one of the most aura-fied retailers in the world, one of these places that’s always being compared to an art gallery, selling the latest cutting-edge, trend-forward whatever. Past actual art shows there have included exhibitions of work by people like Ed Templeton or Mike Giant.
So why are they flogging Gap ad pictures? Gussied up as “Portraits from the Gap Collection,” no less. Maybe other people are more impressed than I am that the photographers include Annie Leibowitz and Herb Ritts. Not exactly cutting-edge people at this point. Maybe the whole thing is elaborate joke (calling a catalog of Gap ads “Individuals” is sort of funny, given the Gap’s years of success at selling what amount to uniforms).
Or, perhaps, Colette is pointing the way to the edgiest new trend of all: an embrace of mass brands.
300 Million
So anyway, I’m more or less back from being wherever I was, and getting caught up on things slowly. I have a few slightly out-of-date matters to deal with here.
For instance: Last week I read this little article in USA Today, “Little fanfare to mark population milestone.” In fact this turned out to be the first of many things I heard or read about the U.S. population hitting 300 million. Even so, the article notes that 200 million was marked by “500 spectators jamm[ing] the lobby of the Commerce Department and President Lyndon Johnson stood in front of the ‘census clock’ as it counted the 200 millionth American,” in November 1967. These days, the piece says, population growth fueled by immigration makes the whole subject too politically frought for such an event.
Could be.* In any case, my interests in the milestone are a little different. It seems at least a little amazing to me that the population has grown by 50 percent in about 40 years. In 1965, the story notes:
Johnson signed a law that reopened the borders after four decades of shutting out immigrants. ‘Immigrants were a much smaller share of the population (then), probably smallest in our history,’ says Jeffrey Passel, demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center. Passel’s calculations show that immigrants and their U.S.-born offspring accounted for 55% of the increase in population since the last milestone.
This gets at an aspect of the contemporary, super-niche-y, non-monolithic America I’ve wondered about. Generally discussions of that subject are all about technology that’s set us free from the three-network oppression of mass culture blah blah blah. But perhaps another relevant factor is that the country is a) simply more diverse than it was in the mid 1960s, which makes a certain amount of cultural fracturing inevitable, and b) much bigger, making possible the multiple-mass scenario that I earlier called “the four or five Americas.” I’m not saying technology doesn’t matter, but these more mundane facts seem to me to play more of a role than most discussions of the subject suggest.
* Update: While politicians may or may not want to make much of the 300 million thing, marketers are not afraid. The NYT today noted that Gerber has some kind of sweepstakes website tied to the population milestone; Johnson & Johnson had some related promotions; and Papa John’s, somewhat absurdly, offered free pizzas to the father of American No. 300 million.
I’m not sure exactly why…
… but I like this. I wouldn’t wear it, of course. But there’s something about it I find appealing. Or at least clever. Via: High Snobiety, which describes this T as “VNGRD x Pimpnosis!!!”
Coloring Book Art
Here’s an enjoyable project from Friend of Murketing (and publisher of Letters from New Orleans), Garrett County Press, on the Powells site:
Garrett County Press asked favorite artists to “color in” pages from Kevin Stone’s latest project, The Pat Robertson and Friends Coloring Book. The artists, who range from Philadelphia designers to Bangkok street artists, were given simple instructions: pick your favorite page and have fun.
It’s quite a lineup, and there are links to the sites of most of the artists. Needless to say, I’m partial to the contribution (above) of Josh Neufeld, another Friend of Murketing and the co-creator of Titans of Finance.
Disclosure: This entire item is so packed with self-serving conflicts of interest it would take too long to explain them. But I still mean every word!
Get Your Reek On
As a brief follow-up to yesterday’s column, some highlights from an Unforgivable press release:
To celebrate the success of Sean Diddy Combs’ Unforgivable Fragrance in North America and the UK, Estee Lauder and the international pop icon hosted a private, celebrity-filled dinner in St. Tropez aboard the Unforgivable Yacht …
The dinner, held on an extravagant 300-foot private yacht, the R.M. Elegant, was an ultra-exclusive affair for 50 of the most Unforgivable people in the world, hand-picked by Mr. Combs. …
To recuperate after a long night of partying, Diddy hosted his White Party at Nikki Beach in St. Tropez. Here guests relaxed and soaked in the St. Tropez sun while sitting atop their limited-edition Unforgivable towels and indulging in all-American BBQ fare and ice cream….
The Smell Test
In Consumed: Unforgivable: With the pop culture-ization of the fragrance aisle, it’s harder to make a hit scent linger.
A few years ago, when the fragrance industry was in a slump, the cosmetics company Coty released Glow by JLo, a perfume that served, more or less, as a Jennifer Lopez brand extension. There had been celebrity-linked fragrances before, but Glow’s successful start-up helped spark a kind of beauty-aisle casting call, resulting in deals involving everyone from Celine Dion to Danielle Steele. Perhaps inevitably, the ubiquitous Sean (Diddy) Combs got in on the party this year, in the form of a scent called Unforgivable (produced by an Estée Lauder subsidiary), which costs around $55 for a 2.5-ounce bottle. It is one of the top-selling men’s fragrances of the first half of 2006 and may even end up the year’s most successful launch for men or women, according to NPD Group, the market research firm….
Continue reading at the NYT site, via this no-registration-required link.
The Princess Buy
In Consumed: Tiaras: The quinceañera gains in visibility, and an old tradition creates a new market.
The tradition of the quinceañera, a social and religious celebration of a girl’s transition to womanhood upon her 15th birthday, is believed to date back to precolonial Spain. It traveled the Atlantic and took root throughout what came to be known as Latin America. Today the practice is increasingly popular and well known in the United States. You can find cultural indicators of this, like the recent melodrama set against the gentrification of Echo Park in Los Angeles, “Quinceañera,” which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. And you can find business indicators too: from the existence of Quince Girl magazine and the inclusion of quince-related material in magazines like CosmoGirl! to the fact that big retail chains like David’s Bridal, with 250 stores, now market to the quinceañera consumer directly….
Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site by way of this no-registration-required link.
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