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Authors: Christopher Sprigman Kal Raustiala
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her.” 57
One might quibble with the details of when (and, for diehard Uggs fans, even if) Uggs lost their cool. * Nonetheless, Uggs illustrate a basic point about fashion: the ruthless nature of the fashion cycle. In the fashion world, success can lead to the rapid diffusion of a design. But rapid diffusion typically dooms a design to decline and ultimately to death. Debut, diffusion, decline, death: that is the fashion cycle in a nutshell.
Induced Obsolescence
That styles rise and fall is of course not a new observation. Before Cocteau wrote his wonderful apercu about fashion and beauty, sociologist Georg Simmel noted the same process: “As fashion spreads, it gradually goes to its doom. The distinctiveness which in the early stages of a set fashion assures for it a certain distribution is destroyed as the fashion spreads, and as this element wanes, the fashion also is bound to die.” 58 Even earlier than this, Shakespeare declared in
Much Ado About Nothing
that “the fashion wears out more apparel than the man.”
What Cocteau, Simmel, and Shakespeare noticed was not merely the rise and fall of apparel designs. Instead, they highlighted the fact that
the rise actually led to the fall.
The fall was not merely inevitable, in the sense of a ball thrown into the air that gradually succumbs to gravity. They drew a causal connection: as fashion spreads, its distinctiveness is destroyed. That in turn destroys much of its value.
Of course, not everyone seeks distinctiveness in fashion. Just look at America’s political class: for the men, an orange or purple tie is a mark of outright zaniness, and the women largely hew to pantsuits that look more like armor than fashion. But for the class of fashion early adopters, things are different. These early adopters seek to stand out, whereas the next tier of buyers seeks to “flock” to the trend. 59 As the flockers flock, the early adopters flee.
Again, the basics of the fashion cycle are well known. What has not been appreciated, however, is the crucial way that the fashion cycle interacts with the freedom to copy.
Legal rules that permit copying accelerate the diffusion of styles
. More rapid diffusion, in turn, leads to more rapid decline. And the more rapid the decline, the faster and more intense is the appetite for new designs. As they are copied, these new designs in turn spark the creation of new trends—and, as a consequence, new sales.
Copying, in short, is the fuel that drives the fashion cycle faster. It is essential to both the trend-making and trend-destruction processes. Copying speeds up the creative process, spurring designers to create anew in an effort to stay ahead of the fashion curve. This makes copying paradoxically valuable.
Copying also functions, in the fashion context, as a stand-in for something that many other creative industries depend on—improvements to their products. Cell phones clearly get more powerful and useful over time,leading us to discard our perfectly good old phones for the amazing new ones. Clothes, by contrast, do not improve in any clearly defined way. Garment makers rarely can tout the great new features of their products as improvements—and indeed in practice, unlike cell phone makers, they do not claim this season’s offerings are qualitatively better than last season’s. 60 For the most part, clothes just change, and that change is what drives buyers to the stores. In this environment, the rise of a new trend is the functional equivalent of a great new feature on a cell phone: the thing that makes a consumer discard a perfectly useful item and go out and buy something new. 61
We call this process
induced obsolescence
—that is, obsolescence induced by copying. A design is launched and, for some reason that few can predict (or even explain), it becomes desirable. Early adopters begin to wear it and fashion magazines and blogs write of it glowingly. Other firms observe its growing success and seek to ape it, often at
One might quibble with the details of when (and, for diehard Uggs fans, even if) Uggs lost their cool. * Nonetheless, Uggs illustrate a basic point about fashion: the ruthless nature of the fashion cycle. In the fashion world, success can lead to the rapid diffusion of a design. But rapid diffusion typically dooms a design to decline and ultimately to death. Debut, diffusion, decline, death: that is the fashion cycle in a nutshell.
Induced Obsolescence
That styles rise and fall is of course not a new observation. Before Cocteau wrote his wonderful apercu about fashion and beauty, sociologist Georg Simmel noted the same process: “As fashion spreads, it gradually goes to its doom. The distinctiveness which in the early stages of a set fashion assures for it a certain distribution is destroyed as the fashion spreads, and as this element wanes, the fashion also is bound to die.” 58 Even earlier than this, Shakespeare declared in
Much Ado About Nothing
that “the fashion wears out more apparel than the man.”
What Cocteau, Simmel, and Shakespeare noticed was not merely the rise and fall of apparel designs. Instead, they highlighted the fact that
the rise actually led to the fall.
The fall was not merely inevitable, in the sense of a ball thrown into the air that gradually succumbs to gravity. They drew a causal connection: as fashion spreads, its distinctiveness is destroyed. That in turn destroys much of its value.
Of course, not everyone seeks distinctiveness in fashion. Just look at America’s political class: for the men, an orange or purple tie is a mark of outright zaniness, and the women largely hew to pantsuits that look more like armor than fashion. But for the class of fashion early adopters, things are different. These early adopters seek to stand out, whereas the next tier of buyers seeks to “flock” to the trend. 59 As the flockers flock, the early adopters flee.
Again, the basics of the fashion cycle are well known. What has not been appreciated, however, is the crucial way that the fashion cycle interacts with the freedom to copy.
Legal rules that permit copying accelerate the diffusion of styles
. More rapid diffusion, in turn, leads to more rapid decline. And the more rapid the decline, the faster and more intense is the appetite for new designs. As they are copied, these new designs in turn spark the creation of new trends—and, as a consequence, new sales.
Copying, in short, is the fuel that drives the fashion cycle faster. It is essential to both the trend-making and trend-destruction processes. Copying speeds up the creative process, spurring designers to create anew in an effort to stay ahead of the fashion curve. This makes copying paradoxically valuable.
Copying also functions, in the fashion context, as a stand-in for something that many other creative industries depend on—improvements to their products. Cell phones clearly get more powerful and useful over time,leading us to discard our perfectly good old phones for the amazing new ones. Clothes, by contrast, do not improve in any clearly defined way. Garment makers rarely can tout the great new features of their products as improvements—and indeed in practice, unlike cell phone makers, they do not claim this season’s offerings are qualitatively better than last season’s. 60 For the most part, clothes just change, and that change is what drives buyers to the stores. In this environment, the rise of a new trend is the functional equivalent of a great new feature on a cell phone: the thing that makes a consumer discard a perfectly useful item and go out and buy something new. 61
We call this process
induced obsolescence
—that is, obsolescence induced by copying. A design is launched and, for some reason that few can predict (or even explain), it becomes desirable. Early adopters begin to wear it and fashion magazines and blogs write of it glowingly. Other firms observe its growing success and seek to ape it, often at
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