Discussions about the fashion industry thread

[LA Guy]

I also hope Unionmade survives. I have never shopped at its retail stores since I don't live locally, but I have bought on-line from them and have been happy with their selection, etc.

The online selection is much better. The San Francisco location is disappointing. I always go for things like Kapital, but there's just things like Alden, LVC, and RRL. The most interesting thing was ts(s).

 

[Epaulet]

I wish them the best of luck too -- Todd Barket is easily one of the nicest guys in our biz, and their employees really seem to enjoy their jobs. They've done a lot for smaller brands and domestic manufacturing over the years.

 

[dieworkwear]

"Alden, LVC, RRL .... Babhu you need more directional lines like Kapital!"

"Kapital, Deveaux, Chimala .... Babhu you need more basic lines like Alden!"

 

[sushijerk]

Supposedly already sold out which makes me very angry and sad and upset.

Drop is supposed to happen on Nov. 9th, but presumably a bunch of friends and family resellers already got their hands on it.

Sold out from which source though? I can understand if the rl side couldn't keep insiders off the collab early but I'm sure other stockists like palace and dover st who've been doing limited drops for ages will have as much as they intended to have on the 9th. Don't get me wrong though you and I will still not be able to cop.

To be honest I don't know how much the collab can do for the actual bottom line of rl or even the image. It can't be revitalized by the 90s resurgence because imo it never became uncool to the select ppl who bought it and made it cool in the 90s. Ralph lauren the man has never not been a legend and the pieces that mattered always have. This isn't like a big flag original Tommy puffer which was worthless 5 years ago and can go for 400 online today but will be worthless again 5 years past the kith collab.

The palace stuff will definitely sell out instantly but imo this means more to palace for finally playing with the big boys than for ralph, who I do not think gains any new traction. The ultra limited stuff (snow beach reissue, palace) sell out instantly but the mall stuff that should synergize off it (America's cup, 92 ski flip pieces) still just sits at Macy's in NJ looking sad. There's dope ralph and there's mall ralph. In the 90s these were briefly the same thing, but is that repeatable in the era where coolness is literally defined by how few people can get actually their hands on it on drop day?

 

[dieworkwear]

Sold out from which source though? I can understand if the rl side couldn't keep insiders off the collab early but I'm sure other stockists like palace and dover st who've been doing limited drops for ages will have as much as they intended to have on the 9th. Don't get me wrong though you and I will still not be able to cop.

To be honest I don't know how much the collab can do for the actual bottom line of rl or even the image. It can't be revitalized by the 90s resurgence because imo it never became uncool to the select ppl who bought it and made it cool in the 90s. Ralph lauren the man has never not been a legend and the pieces that mattered always have. This isn't like a big flag original Tommy puffer which was worthless 5 years ago and can go for 400 online today but will be worthless again 5 years past the kith collab.

The palace stuff will definitely sell out instantly but imo this means more to palace for finally playing with the big boys than for ralph, who I do not think gains any new traction. The ultra limited stuff (snow beach reissue, palace) sell out instantly but the mall stuff that should synergize off it (America's cup, 92 ski flip pieces) still just sits at Macy's in NJ looking sad. There's dope ralph and there's mall ralph. In the 90s these were briefly the same thing, but is that repeatable in the era where coolness is literally defined by how few people can get actually their hands on it on drop day?

I don't know if it's actually sold out. That was just some post on a Palace subreddit, but it could have just been some guy talking crap. Who knows, really.

If i is sold out though, I imagine it's through the usual friends and family back channels. Sometimes stuff sells out before a drop because a friend of a friend of a friend knows someone at so-and-so store and can hook someone up with a pre-order. That happens sometimes with Nike drops.

I think hype and relevancy are really elusive things and no one really knows how to build them (to state the obvious). My theory is that there's a "hierarchy" in fashion where everyone gets their cues from those sitting one or two stations upstream. A hundred years, people copied the dress and manners of their betters. And their betters were usually the aristocracy, who in turn got their cues from monarchy. Now the social stream is defined by a very vague sense of "cool." That can mean anything from streetwear teens to musicians to rich yoga studio moms. But IMO, fashion generally flows from one end to the other. People very downstream might look at the very far, far end of fashion and think "who would ever wear such a thing," but at some point, some diluted version of that thing eventually makes it down market (obviously doesn't happen with everything -- some stuff is too weird to diffuse).

But on the RL side, I think they're looking back at a time when they had tremendous relevancy: the '90s. And it's unclear how to recreate that again. Were subgroups like the Lo Heads a cause of an effect of some of RL's hype?

If they're a cause, that means some small, elite group wore RL, made it cool, and then people downstream copied them. And people downstream from those downstream people copied. And so forth. I think there's some evidence of this with brands like Nautica and Tommy Hilfiger, which had much broader reaches because black youths wore them at the time (influencing suburban kids to copy).

If they're an effect, then these groups basically just bought stuff that was hyped at the time and their wearing RL had no real consequence on anything.

Most social phenomena often has a "little bit of both." FWIW, in that Horse Power documentary, some RL execs talk about how the company's design team would sometimes be influenced by the clothes Lo Heads stole. Cause they knew those were the hotter pieces.

Anyway, it seems like RL is trying to forcefully recreate the kind of magic that happened in the '90s. All that stuff 30 years ago happened totally organically, and how that eventually played into RL's relevance is one of those unknowable things because we can't have multiple, identical worlds where we test causal variables. So like, we can't have an identical world where hip hop never picked up RL and see how it affected the brand. Or other leading subcultural groups. But clearly, RL right now seems to think those things had some effect since they're trying to re-create it.

My own feeling is that you need some kind of bleeding edge cultural group to co-sign you in order to be relevant. Or at least for people to think that group has co-signed you. Millions of people buy Hermes cause they imagine rich Western European women are sauntering around with Hermes bags, even if the reality is that those consumers are probably Chinese (a group that has less social cache, which gets into a whole nother discussion about racial views on class). I think this is especially true now when the middle of the market treats everything as a commodity. If you're not differentiable by cultural status, people will discount shop you into oblivion.

There's probably only a few thousand people who even know about or care about this Palace drop, but I think they're important market. Like, how much of Nike's drops are about hyped releases? They're probably a small percentage of the company's total sales, but a larger percentage of their focus and operations. That's because they help build social cache.

 

[winston86dit]

There's probably only a few thousand people who even know about or care about this Palace drop, but I think they're important market. Like, how much of Nike's drops are about hyped releases? They're probably a small percentage of the company's total sales, but a larger percentage of their focus and operations. That's because they help build social cache.

This.

It's the whole reason why someone like Ralph would do a collab with Palace in the first place. Help build that social cache among millennials and gen z-ers, those of whom know of the brand, know some of it's relevance but have maybe never purchased. By tapping into some of the magic that made Ralph a cultural icon in the 90's, it shows these potential customers that, hey, Ralph was doing this **** way before anyone (even if they weren't actually trying).
Then Palace gets the love and co-sign of a fashion icon, putting them in the same sentence as a 100X bigger brand. It's a win win.

 

[clee1982]

I don't doubt you, isn't that same theory as cars (make the cool cars, 6/7/8 series to sell BMW 3 series and everything below), though in the end of the day you still need to make sure you do sell the 3 series... and the SUV...

 

[LA Guy]

You can now invest in Unionmade

https://unionmadegoods.com/pages/invest

If you skim through the pdf slides attached to the web page, they pretty much tell you it is rescue funding.

I don't see how Todd Barket could make this kind of offer in Unionmade unless he is counting on sentimentality, and $200K to $1M is a lot of sentimentality. He is not even offering common stock. Anyone serious I would imagine would want to have a potential to help determine the direction of the company. It's not as though it's a great buy now, and there's a decent chance you are just pouring money into a hole. Only sentimentality or the potential upside in the medium and long-term are going to drive this. Anyway, I do hope that they pull through. It was one of the more interesting stores of the noughties.

 

[dieworkwear]

I don't see how Todd Barket could make this kind of offer in Unionmade unless he is counting on sentimentality, and $200K to $1M is a lot of sentimentality. He is not even offering common stock. Anyone serious I would imagine would want to have a potential to help determine the direction of the company. It's not as though it's a great buy now, and there's a decent chance you are just pouring money into a hole. Only sentimentality or the potential upside in the medium and long-term are going to drive this. Anyway, I do hope that they pull through. It was one of the more interesting stores of the noughties.

i just bought some stock so racists can complain another heritage brand is now owned by asians.

 

[LA Guy]

I don't know if it's actually sold out. That was just some post on a Palace subreddit, but it could have just been some guy talking crap. Who knows, really.

If i is sold out though, I imagine it's through the usual friends and family back channels. Sometimes stuff sells out before a drop because a friend of a friend of a friend knows someone at so-and-so store and can hook someone up with a pre-order. That happens sometimes with Nike drops.

I think hype and relevancy are really elusive things and no one really knows how to build them (to state the obvious). My theory is that there's a "hierarchy" in fashion where everyone gets their cues from those sitting one or two stations upstream. A hundred years, people copied the dress and manners of their betters. And their betters were usually the aristocracy, who in turn got their cues from monarchy. Now the social stream is defined by a very vague sense of "cool." That can mean anything from streetwear teens to musicians to rich yoga studio moms. But IMO, fashion generally flows from one end to the other. People very downstream might look at the very far, far end of fashion and think "who would ever wear such a thing," but at some point, some diluted version of that thing eventually makes it down market (obviously doesn't happen with everything -- some stuff is too weird to diffuse).

But on the RL side, I think they're looking back at a time when they had tremendous relevancy: the '90s. And it's unclear how to recreate that again. Were subgroups like the Lo Heads a cause of an effect of some of RL's hype?

If they're a cause, that means some small, elite group wore RL, made it cool, and then people downstream copied them. And people downstream from those downstream people copied. And so forth. I think there's some evidence of this with brands like Nautica and Tommy Hilfiger, which had much broader reaches because black youths wore them at the time (influencing suburban kids to copy).

If they're an effect, then these groups basically just bought stuff that was hyped at the time and their wearing RL had no real consequence on anything.

Most social phenomena often has a "little bit of both." FWIW, in that Horse Power documentary, some RL execs talk about how the company's design team would sometimes be influenced by the clothes Lo Heads stole. Cause they knew those were the hotter pieces.

Anyway, it seems like RL is trying to forcefully recreate the kind of magic that happened in the '90s. All that stuff 30 years ago happened totally organically, and how that eventually played into RL's relevance is one of those unknowable things because we can't have multiple, identical worlds where we test causal variables. So like, we can't have an identical world where hip hop never picked up RL and see how it affected the brand. Or other leading subcultural groups. But clearly, RL right now seems to think those things had some effect since they're trying to re-create it.

My own feeling is that you need some kind of bleeding edge cultural group to co-sign you in order to be relevant. Or at least for people to think that group has co-signed you. Millions of people buy Hermes cause they imagine rich Western European women are sauntering around with Hermes bags, even if the reality is that those consumers are probably Chinese (a group that has less social cache, which gets into a whole nother discussion about racial views on class). I think this is especially true now when the middle of the market treats everything as a commodity. If you're not differentiable by cultural status, people will discount shop you into oblivion.

There's probably only a few thousand people who even know about or care about this Palace drop, but I think they're important market. Like, how much of Nike's drops are about hyped releases? They're probably a small percentage of the company's total sales, but a larger percentage of their focus and operations. That's because they help build social cache.

The genius of course Ralph Lauren was that it was a brand that could seem to be something to all people. Frankly, long before the Lo-heads were a thing, Ralph Lauren was hugely relevant. In the 80s, before grunge, Polo was huge with my social group, and it was the preppy, aspirational lifestyle marketing that attracted us.

I came to hate it once I discovered grunge and punk, and re-embraced it in the very late 90s in the form of the earliest RRL as a very LA form of Western, in the dusk of American Rag's designer+vintage look. You seem to have had a very different experience with the brand, hardly surprising since we seem to have little in common other than being overeducated Asian guys with a love for clothing (thank you Styleforum). The point is that the genius of the brand is that it could fill pretty much any narrative, and not as a bit player, supplying high quality basics, but as a star, supplying key pieces in any wardrobe, at pretty much any price point. I can't think of any other brand that can say the same.

 

[LA Guy]

i just bought some stock so racists can complain another heritage brand is now owned by asians.

Xenophobes. It's different!

 

[IJReilly]

The genius of course Ralph Lauren was that it was a brand that could seem to be something to all people. Frankly, long before the Lo-heads were a thing, Ralph Lauren was hugely relevant. In the 80s, before grunge, Polo was huge with my social group, and it was the preppy, aspirational lifestyle marketing that attracted us.

I came to hate it once I discovered grunge and punk, and re-embraced it in the very late 90s in the form of the earliest RRL as a very LA form of Western, in the dusk of American Rag's designer+vintage look. You seem to have had a very different experience with the brand, hardly surprising since we seem to have little in common other than being overeducated Asian guys with a love for clothing (thank you Styleforum). The point is that the genius of the brand is that it could fill pretty much any narrative, and not as a bit player, supplying high quality basics, but as a star, supplying key pieces in any wardrobe, at pretty much any price point. I can't think of any other brand that can say the same.

I have a similar experience, and this post made me think a little about my relationship to the brand throughout my life (which in itself tells you something about just how big RL is). In the wealthy Stockholm suburb in which I grew up, RL was the thing to wear for everyone (this was the 80s and 90s when the US was still considered very cool). It was a huge influence on the overall aesthetic of that place.

Then I refused to wear the brand anymore in my teens when I got into hiphop, viewing it as a representation of the upper class values and aesthetics that I now despised. Imagine my shock when I discovered Wu-Tang and realized that Polo was a huge deal in this new and exciting subculture. Still, the brand meant something totally different where I lived so I continued to shun it for a long time. Then came the whole #menswear, preppy thing around 2006-2011 and I bought a few classic button downs, thinking of it as a classic and timeless brand (really, the only thing that had happened was that the stores which dictated what was cool to me had started to stock the brand). Then I guess it kind of faded out from hipness again, aside from Gosha R. making the cap briefly cool again by it's association with a post-soviet aspirational aesthetic, which felt fresh. Now I like the brand, but I don't buy anything from it because I perceive it as a tad overpriced. Still wear my button downs though.

 

[crazn]

I have a similar experience, and this post made me think a little about my relationship to the brand throughout my life (which in itself tells you something about just how big RL is). In the wealthy Stockholm suburb in which I grew up, RL was the thing to wear for everyone (this was the 80s and 90s when the US was still considered very cool). It was a huge influence on the overall aesthetic of that place.

Then I refused to wear the brand anymore in my teens when I got into hiphop, viewing it as a representation of the upper class values and aesthetics that I now despised. Imagine my shock when I discovered Wu-Tang and realized that Polo was a huge deal in this new and exciting subculture. Still, the brand meant something totally different where I lived so I continued to shun it for a long time. Then came the whole #menswear, preppy thing around 2006-2011 and I bought a few classic button downs, thinking of it as a classic and timeless brand (really, the only thing that had happened was that the stores which dictated what was cool to me had started to stock the brand). Then I guess it kind of faded out from hipness again, aside from Gosha R. making the cap briefly cool again by it's association with a post-soviet aspirational aesthetic, which felt fresh. Now I like the brand, but I don't buy anything from it because I perceive it as a tad overpriced. Still wear my button downs though.

Polo Ralph Lauren meant something to a lot of people, not just because they had tribes and subculture. My first discernible luxury item was a PRL polo, not the generic uniqlo-ish one with the polo rider but the nautical type you see in Cp-93. Especially during the era when Gucci just started with Tom Ford post-Gucci assasination and Prada started being a wunderkind by using Nylon and Hermes was out of sight and out of mind for most people and Louis Vuitton still only a malletier. PRL was the first true global luxury brand.

I think PRL and I hope PRL will become stable because this is the fire and brimstone every brand must go through when they transition from a fashion brand into a heritage brand. PRL was everywhere and everybody lost interest because it was so ubiquitous and enough time has passed for the nostalgia of PRL to return. PRL was a huge part of Pax Americana and the good decade of the 90s prior to 9/11. And a lot of the folks who could afford PRL in the developing world remember PRL fondly.

 

[crazn]

Worn in context, it's not really that affected. On some of the older Harvard profs, it looked great, and some of them don't even need cames (yet). The younger guys who bought the stuff would pair them with random chinos (no, not high rise chinos from McConnells, usually just stuff from the Gap or Dockers or whatever they had) and white button downs, and usually no ties. The shoes spanned the gamut from Bass Weejuns to brown "dress" shoes to Chuck Taylors.

Guys who are really "into" the trad look strike me as more into the Ivy look than the real Ivy guys, much in the same way that some zeroth and first generation Chinese immigrants are often more into the traditional Chinese foodstuffs than the Chinese in Hong Kong and the big cities in the PRC.

For example, Chinese bakeries in North American cities like Vancouver and Toronoto, and especially the older Chinatowns like that in San Francisco, seem very old fashioned to many Chinese. I had a grad student from China who was amazed that I liked mooncakes with lotus seed paste (yum!) He couldn't stand that old stuff. For his generation, it was all about the chocolate and custard filled cakes, the former of which just seemed like a very odd pairing to me.

I hate traditional mooncakes. mooncakes are now the east asian version of macarons and truffles, the innovative epicenter of french influenced dessert making efforts. Then again, i think i had enough traditional mooncakes in my youth and i stopped even eating it when I could influence mooncake purchasing.

 

[clee1982]

Old school moon cake means a lot different thing to different region though.

Back to RL, childhood memory RL is more just the polo and my father’s tie. When I first start buying nicer suits it was RLBL, and when I start to look for jeans I end up just went for RRL, so RL was definitely a brand that pulls it all together, though haven’t bought anything from them for quite a while.

On the side note I really like RLBL technical stuff and thought RLX was too over lapping (though still very cool looking)