I just caught a magazine spread that featured a guy carrying a bright green leather bag, a close-up of disposable-looking flowery flipflops, and a woman wearing obnoxious Eurotrash sunglasses...all featuring the Coach logo.
Clearly, this isn't your mother's 65+ year old leatherware company.
Well, it is, really, since Coach really burst onto the fashion scene in the early 60s as a fashion-forward and design-driven company. Leather goods used to appear mostly in dour blacks and browns (like my wallet from, er, Coach), but design innovator Bonnie Cashin exploded the routine with merchandise in wild shapes and colors, constructed with odd, yet oddly utilitarian, new clasps and closures.
Coach was doing the hip fashion thing back when most hip fashion consumers alive today thought diapers were a statement of individual style.
Since then, fashion has gotten democratized and crude-ified.
Lots of retailers produce funky bags, patterned flipflops, and any number of permutations on Lew Wasserman's eyewear. The same factories in China churn out products with different labels and price-points, leveling the cost and quality of most merchandise that caters to the largest segment of fashion-conscious consumers.
And, every youthful but otherwise sunken-eyed model aside, the poster child for this new fashion reality is Paris Hilton (or Nicole Ritchie, or any member of the O.C./One Tree Hill Diaspora). The drivers of fashion have gotten less relevant to art and design, just as its main market -- again, where most people buy most of their merchandise -- has gotten focused on whatever is youngest, most obnoxious, and usually disposable.
There's no quo with status worth insulting. So most ads seem torn from the latest Paris expose article in People, let alone deliver branding for competing clothing or accessory companies.
Coach isn't priced or targeted at middle-market buyers, but everyone sees the news stories and ads, irrespective of social caste. While fashion consumers' tolerance for expense might be stratified by the color of their credit cards, the category's imagery is one muddle of nonsense and cheap similarity.
Take this test sometime when you're killing a few minutes waiting for a flight: have a friend tear off the identifiers from a half-dozen fashion merchandise ads (try handbags, or shoes). Then see how many ads you can correctly connect to the companies that wasted all that thinking and money on producing them.
In our world, context means everything, which means that most of the fashion branding like Coach's ends up delivering nothing.
Maybe the best way to be forward-looking these days is to look backwards?
Paris, along with all of the merchandise that defines her (and all of the young-at-IQ who emulate her lifestyle), is transitory. She certainly doesn't define "fashion" in any way more profound than wind direction defines weather. The multitude of brands in the, say, handbag or sunglasses categories, can only claim relevance to some nebulous "here and now."
Coach has a past: specifically, 65+ years of it. Can't there be something different to its brand -- and to its expression -- based on this fact?
Just making colorful leather bags, cute flipflops, and those atrocious, thick-rimmed sunglasses does not differentiate Coach (nor does simply charging more for the same "looks" that are available at a dozen knock-off stores in any given mall). Hiring Kate Bosworth as the epitome of its perspective on fashion isn't saying anything differently than any other fashion-of-the-moment retailer could say (retro is cool, but Coach isn't retro, is it?).
Coach must contend with Paris Hilton. And get past...as in before and after...her.
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