There are reasons why places like Kohl’s are making bank while some designers who are so well respected for their creative genius are not giants in the monetary sense. The first reason is that there is a huge market for mediocrity between the lowest and main common denominators of society. In America alone, the lower middle class to underclass, including the working and working poor classes, make up 84 percent of the population, while the upper-middle and capitalist classes only amount to 16 percent of the total population. There is therefore a tiny market for refinement and the highly aesthetic. Even so, those who can afford it must be willing to spend their money on luxurious items. It is for this reason that places like McDonalds thrive in a relatively health conscious global setting: as the majority of America lives as lower class, the rock bottom prices simply cannot be beaten.
The second reason commerce tends to thrive over art is that a substantially larger amount of time goes into the production of something really refined, and thus more money goes into it as well. Mass-market profits come from large quantities of goods, standard sizes, cheap materials and simpler production techniques compared to higher fashion lines that require more attention to detail and finer materials. Mass-market companies, and the entire industry, can turn out thousands more units to sell, and at the same time, have thousands more people to consume those goods, a principle that remains true in every field. A perfect example of this is that within the last quarter, Kohl’s made $411.7 million, while Alexander McQueen only just made his first profits with his Fall 2008 collection.
There is, however, a symbiotic relationship between mass-market and high fashion. A generation of style ideas has come from high design and has then been filtered into the mainstream market because people generally, if they cannot afford the real deal, want to imitate what is exclusive. Once the general society gets a hold of a certain style of exclusivity, people begin to improvise and expand on what has been given to them. As a style becomes so right for the times, it becomes a part of the cultural expression and the culture at large adopts, and makes adaptations to it. When a certain style becomes enough of a cultural phenomenon, it loops back and influences designers as another form of expression.
This symbiotic loop can be shown in Dior’s 1960’s “Beat” look, designed by a young Yves Saint-Laurent. Here, his daring high fashion line was inspired directly from Paris street fashion; from the existentialists, jazz cats and hipsters at bars in the Saint-Germain-des-Près area. In reality, haute couture, or lines of that caliber such as Giorgio Armani’s Black Label, are not typically influenced by street trends. Rather, it is the prêt a porter market that can be swayed. From the 1930’s through the 1950’s, American women wore little white gloves into town, and men wore a suit jacket and tie to dinner. People wore their best outfits to cultural events or when traveling, and they obeyed this certain protocol until the 1960’s when it was dropped. This 60’s fashion and cultural revolution still affects life in America today as blue jeans are seen in church and gym shorts are seen at Broadway plays.
The distinguishing identifiers of a class and of money, once shown by daily fashion choices, have become blurred, as you can no longer identify people by their clothes. Certain people, however, feel they need to express exclusivity and extravagance. By taking a common denominator item, like the sneaker shoe, they can take a cultural obsession and apply status identifiers to it. Chanel and other high fashion brands have sneakers, and a fantastic example is the Lanvin shoe that hit stores in April. This very popular high-top sneaker, at roughly $700, is strikingly similar to high-top Converse Chuck Taylor’s, and was, more than likely, influenced by its $50 mass-market counterpart. On a creative basis, designers are using a style of the moment as a substrate to apply their sense of special decoration. It is cool to wear sneakers and who is to say they should not be glitzy, both as a form of modern art, and also as a form of customer satisfaction and individuality.
-Eliza Goodman
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