Culture creators get miraculous
how to make meaning in a fragmenting culture
At it’s height, J.Crew was the most important retailer of men’s clothes in the US.
Then it collapsed into bankruptcy.
The man charged with revival is Brendon Babenzien.
In a wonderful essay in GQ, Sam Schube gives us a glimpse of Babenzien at work.
We find Babenzien wondering about the color black.
Should we have a black?” Babenzien asked. “A click of black would somehow give it a different feeling. A different meaning, I guess.”
A member of his team jumped in: “Like a true black? Or like a J.Crew-does-black, which is a washed color?”
…
“No, like a true black,” he responded, authoritatively. “Because I feel like these, by themselves, it’s exclusively prep to me. And I’m into it, I would wear all these colors. But if you put a black in, it all of a sudden becomes…to one person it’s prep, to somebody else it’s a weird fashion choice. It’s almost like a Marni choice or something,” he said, referring to the playful Italian luxury brand. “Which I like. I think that’s kind of cool.”
Babenzien works a miracle.
On the one hand, he is working to preserve the preppie tradition of J.Crew and this means preserving tradition.
On the other, he must connect J.Crew to contemporary American culture, in this case something like “Marni” culture.
And that’s the difference between a J.Crew that is the keeper of its traditions and a J.Crew that is free to move about the cabin of American culture.
Barbenzien is a culture creator finding a way to use colors stored in our culture to activate meanings emerging in our culture.
And this sort of thing will become more and more urgent in the world of culture creator.
As our culture becomes more disaggregated, distributed, and disrupted, we must forsake the big blocks of meaning that used to prevail in the era of mass marketing.
Now we must learn to speak with new subtlety. That’s of course if we wish to have a hope of speaking to those many hundreds, sometimes thousands of consumer groups.
Multivocality, that’s the key. Making one color both traditional and cool, both preppie and a “weird fashion choice.”
Thus do contemporary designers, the really, really good ones like Barbenzien, work the miraculous.
post script on August 1, 2022
I just came across a review on Vulture of Beyonce’s new album Renaissance. Craig Jenkins puts Beyonce in the tradition of Diana Ross. It makes the useful point that we’ve been making messages multiple for a long time.
Nile Rogers, a Ross writer and producer, found himself in
Gilded Grape, the legendary mob-owned drag bar on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan beloved by a colorful cast of regulars that included Andy Warhol. The bathroom, Rodgers would later recall in his 2011 autobiography Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny, was packed with Diana Ross impersonators. “Suddenly it dawned on me that Diana was an iconic figure in the gay community,” wrote Rodgers, who had just agreed to write and produce Ross’s next album. He met with his Chic bandmate Bernard Edwards and hatched a plan “to have Diana talk to her gay fans in a slightly coded language.”
post script:
Looking for something to read at the beach this summer?
Consider my new book, just out:
