Fashion Marketing: Contemporary Issues, Second edition - Pr School

304 Fashion Marketing
a virus. Because they are new? Perhaps, but not all the time. Gladwell (2000a)
and Godin (2000a) have a much different theory, and one that has given rise to
trendland’s latest buzz phrase, viral marketing, and the launch of a whole new
generation of trends and guerrilla marketing agencies: The Future Laboratory,
Media Street Network, Captain Crikey, Cake, Mother, Headlight Vision.
And in many ways the job of the viral marketeer and the trend analyst is
interchangeable; each, after all, is chasing after the same thing, the Big Idea –
for if Gladwell’s book is about locating the trend and explaining its spread,
Godin’s is about locating it and then telling you how to spread it. And if you
look at trends closely you will see that a trend can only become a trend if
somebody somewhere wants to adopt or adapt it.
Take the Hush Puppies thing (Gladwell, 2000a, pp. 5, 7, 8). Comfortable, the
kind of shoes dad wore at weekends to look casual in. Not exactly a hip and
happening fashion statement, but there you go. And there they went. By 1995,
sales were down to 30,000 a year and falling. Even the backwoods outlets in
America’s mid-west could not get rid of them. Then one fine day, a miracle.
At a fashion shoot two Hush Puppies executives, Owen Baxter and Geoffrey
Lewis, ran into a stylist from New York who told them that the classic Hush
Puppies had suddenly become hip (Viewpoint, 2000), that there were re-sale
shops in the Village, in Soho, where the shoes were being sold. People were
going to the Ma and Pa stores, the little stores that still carried them, and were
buying them up.
As Gladwell (2000a) tells it, these two hard-bitten sales reps were puzzled.
Then came calls from designers like Issac Mizrahi (I think it’s fair to say that at
the time we had no idea who Issac Mizrahi was), John Bartlett, Anna Sui and
LA designer Joel Fitzgerald, all asking for Hush Puppies for their forthcoming
shows. Joel was even opening a Hush Puppies store he told them, gutting
a place next door to his Hollywood boutique he said, and putting a 20-foot
inflatable Basset hound on the roof (the Hush Puppies symbol) because the
demand for Hush Puppies in that area had gone nuclear and he wanted
people to know his was the shop that could satisfy all their cravings.
Naturally, the Hush Puppies people were thrilled, but they still did not
get it. Had no idea why sales had rocketed from 30,000 pairs per year in the
Autumn of 1995, to four times that amount the following year, and the year
after that still more, until Hush Puppies were once again a fashion staple in
the wardrobe of with-it kids from Seattle to St Louis. The publishers of The
Divine Secrets of The Ya Ya Sisterhood were to see similar patterns in how the
book shot from obscurity to become a runaway international best seller overnight.
Ditto Bloomsbury, who publish the Harry Potter tales, and Fendi, whose
Baguette has revived the fortunes of that company almost single-handedly.
Nothing. Then bang. Like a plague, a virus, a hyper-infectious contagion.
And that, according to Gladwell (2000a) and Godin (2000a), is exactly
what it is; not a trend, not a fad, not a mood board idea being slavishly replicated
down the line, but a sartorial or intellectual virus. And Gladwell should
know; for years he did the science and medicine beat for The Washington Post
and encountered viruses and infectious diseases aplenty. What he was not