Tokyo: Hundreds queued for the launch of the Jimmy Choo for H&M collection at the Shinjuku store*

A fashion earthquake shook the world on Saturday.

New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Berlin, Stockholm… Hundreds of people lined up in cities across the world last Saturday in front of H&M stores – the Shinjuku, Tokyo store pictured above had a 500-strong queue – for the launch of the Jimmy Choo for H&M collection. (It’s a lovely collection with broad popular appeal – bling, electric blue, zebra, cheetah, gorgeous shoes, slinky dresses, bags, accessories, and even some men’s stuff.) And when the doors were flung open, the same scene repeated itself in store after store around the globe – a mad frenzy of grab, giggle, glee, the shelves plucked bare of merchandise as if decimated by a hoard of locusts. At many stores the women’s collection was over in less than an hour.

Here’s my friend Sooheang’s experience from Hong Kong: “Accidentally I was at H&M on Saturday when Jimmy Choo’s shoes was first introduced in Hong Kong H&M. Little did I know that for die-hard fashionistas it was the must-have moment of the year. What madness. It could be a scene from Sex and City. The girls were opening their bags outside the shop to show off their catch to each other. The register line was soooo long that I had to push people through to get to the elevator so that I could go to the top floor (the kids section where I bought my sweater).”

Manolo Blahnik, Christian Louboutin, Jimmy Choo, these heady heels – with stratospheric prices to match – are what girlish dreams are made of. And now suddenly one of them has broken ranks and has offered up the legendary Choo’s at one-fifth the price. Call it luxury on a shoe-string. Call it luxury for the masses. Call it McLuxury.

Jimmy Choo and H&M have plenty to smile about too. Ringing cash registers aside, Jimmy Choo has extended its reach to the H&M masses, and H&M has a new luxe sheen on its brand image.

Importantly, Jimmy Choo has dipped its toes into the clothes and accessories business and judging from the way they were snapped up in minutes, I don’t think Jimmy Choo is going to be just-a-shoe-and-bag brand for long.

Whether you are in the luxury business or not, there are provocative questions this episode throws up.  What would be the equivalent of McLuxury for your business? Would it extend the reach of your products many times over? How many of them could possibly enter your consumer base for good?

Happy thinking, and click here if you’d like to have Tamara Mellon, the founder of Jimmy Choo, take you through the collection.

*Photo from http://tokyofashion.com/hm-shinjuku-opening-day-pictures-video/

A Revolutionary Moment in Fashion History

Miranda Priestley wouldn’t have taken kindly to this seating arrangement – and poor Andy (her rookie assistant in the film) would have had hell to pay for that hunched-shoulder, T-shirt-wearing, laptop-wielding young fashion oddity sitting within breathing distance of her majesty – except this isn’t a scene from any movie, this is a real life picture of the front row seats at D&G’s Spring/Summer 2010 show in Milan.  The real-life inspiration for Devil Wears Prada, the editor of Vogue, Anna Wintour – her signature blonde bob turned 90-degrees away in the opposite direction – is sitting just one place away from Bryanboy.

Who is Bryanboy?  That’s exactly the point, a virtual nobody operating out of his bedroom in Manila until his blog by the same name gained so much popularity that it catapulted him to the front row of luxury brand fashion shows, rubbing shoulders with old world fashion media heavyweights (albeit only size two in the case of Wintour) like Suzy Menkes, the legendary fashion editor of the International Herald Tribune (extreme left in the picture, full marks to her for sporting a laptop).  A nod from these ladies could send the career of a fashion designer soaring, and oh no, you definitely don’t want to be on their wrong side.

In the case of Bryanboy, of course, he is neither on the wrong side or the right side, he is smack in the center.  While Wintour and Menkes have formidable nod-and-veto power amassed over decades of fashion pronouncements from the lofty pages of Vogue and IHT, Bryanboy has oodles of squishy soft power thanks to his quirky blog replete with weird-and-wonderful videos (check out the ode to Marc Jacobs, it is a scream) and his with-it take on the fashion world, all underpinned with a huge passion for fashion.  To understand the kind of effortless power that Bryanboy carries on his slim shoulders you have to look at the statistics: his blog gets 215,000 unique visitors a day, whereas a magazine like Vogue sells 200,000 copies a month in an established market like UK*. (BTW, Marc Jacobs called within hours of that video, they have become such good friends that Jacobs has named a bag after him.)

There is a growing tribe of Bryanboys out there – the D&G show itself had four super-bloggers in attendance, besides Bryanboy, there was Scott Schuman a.k.a The Sartorialist, Tommy Tom from blog Jak & Jil and Garance Dorè – and the question is what should luxury brands do about them.  Give them a warm D&G embrace?  Or a Vanity Fair like cold shoulder? (Michael Robert, Vanity Fair fashion and style director, sitting next to Bryanboy in the picture, didn’t say a word to him

I was at a Luxury Roundtable (during Luxury Week Hong Kong 2009) in August organized by Taubman – it was one of the best I have attended with Asia Chiefs of several luxury brands around the table, and a frank and vigorous discussion of issues facing the luxury industry, the evolving role of the Internet being one of them.  My point then was – and still is – that like it or not, there is little choice but to whole-heartedly embrace the internet, Bryanboy and his colorful ilk included.

The argument that some brands offer about the Internet making luxury “too mass” doesn’t really hold – it is not just the Devil who wears Prada, but millions of internet-savvy Andy Sachs who buy it too. Luxury is hardly an exclusive bastion of a wealthy minority; it has been “democratized”.  In which case, more power to the style bloggers.

This single photograph captures a revolutionary moment in fashion history, when the power equation changed, when the tables (laptop in place) were turned, when the outsider was let in, when the baton was silently passed from the old guard to the Bryanboys.  What do you think this means for the fashion industry?  And indeed, the world at large?

* Style bloggers take centre stage, By Nicola Copping, FT.com, November 13 2009

Five months in India and I had put on 5 kilos, and that’s when I rolled in for my annual medical check up at one of the fancy new hospitals in Gurgaon.  Big wake up call.  I had always got a clean chit in Hong Kong, but this time I had my knuckles rapped.  All the health indicators were veering in the wrong direction – I was borderline this, that and the other – and if I kept up my add-a-kilo-a-month regime I’d be in serious trouble pretty soon.  Knock it off, baby, was the simple prescription, and do it fast.

If you’ve read French Women Don’t Get Fat and Japanese Women Don’t Get Old or Fat you know that adjusting to another culture can fatten you up quickly.  In these two books, the slim authors move to the USA as students and embrace the culture of fatty food, giant portions, driving everywhere, and find themselves transformed into fatsoes in a matter of months. While it is one thing for French and Japanese women to trip and fall on American culture, it is quite another for an Indian to skid and crash on Indian culture.  What’s there not to know? Read more…

Do you remember the time when we fell in love?
We were young and innocent then

I can still see the moves in my mind’s eye, his slim frame moving in that special Jackson way – tightly controlled, economic, intense – and I’d sit mesmerized, watching the video over and over again. I’d pop that video in at dinner times, and my two little kids – naughty, troublesome eaters – would be in a trance while I shoveled food quickly into their mouths. What about us, girl, he’d sing, pointing his finger into the camera. So when the chance came to actually see Jackson in person, I grabbed it.

It was the early 90s. We were young and innocent then. My husband looked after Pepsi marketing, and the Jackson-Pepsi association was at its height. The job at hand was to check out the Michael Jackson show – he was doing a series of concerts in London then – and understand what it would take to get the show to India. So off he flew with me in tow – after all, watching a Jackson concert is the sort of job where an extra pair of ears and eyes could only help. Read more…

Fed up with ever tinier sample clothes being sent to her magazine for photo-shoots, the editor of British Vogue, Alexandra Shulman, has sent out a letter to leading fashion designers – Karl Lagerfeld, John Galliano among them – stating her concerns.

I am hoping this may prove to be a turning point as it is the first time that someone as influential as Shulman has entered the debate – she has been the editor of Vogue for over two decades, and the fashion industry will find it difficult to ignore her views. You may recall that the whole issue of size-zero models got an airing a couple of years ago, but fashion houses seemed to have carried on as before, or going by Shulman’s experience, even taken in the seams a tad more.
Read more…