Judgment calls for the CCO
By
It must be Christmas. The house is filling with catalogues.
One of them is from Saks. It’s called “Beach wear” and it features a model who is painful thin in a couple of shots. She can’t weigh more than 100 pounds and because she is model-tall, she made me wince a little. (It reminded me of that line from the movie Notting Hill. Like Julie Roberts’ character, this girl looks like she has been “hungry for a decade.”)
We use ourselves as instruments. And when we wince at a photo and when we are surprised by this reaction, we’ve been put on notice. Something is changing. A new expectation, a new standard of thinness, is taking up residence in us. And because we pride ourselves on having relatively ordinary tastes, we know that what is happening to us must be happening to others. Our culture is in transit. We are rethinking ideal weights and what models should look like.
The old line was you couldn’t be too rich or too thin. But in the last few years we have heard a protest come from inside and outside the fashion industry. The incidence of bulimia and other afflictions have caused some to accuse the fashion world of manufacturing misery. Silvia Lagnado noticed that only 2% of women believed they qualified as beautiful. And from this came the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. It’s not hard to see some of the things that are moving us to rethink ideal weights and what models should look like.
What a perfect little problem for a Chief Culture Officer. The questions are straightforward. When did we begin to rethink ideal weight? Who and where are the early adopters? How fast is this change moving? What are the things that drive? Is it moving across the world uniformly or does vary according to region, age, income, etc. We need a model and some data, and we need to work with the problem until we get to know what it is as a problem. And then we are in position to say to Saks or any given client, “for these purposes, this is the sweet spot. Model weight should fall in this range.”
I wonder if one of the trends that matters here is a certain retreat from American extremism. In the old model, America the plentiful, the one that celebrated the sheer scale and abundance of the American success story, everything drove to the extreme. No one could be too thin. No cars could be too large. No teeth could be too white. No lifestyle could be too lavish. In the 1950s we were all Texans. (I am of course exaggerating for effect. I’m a Texan too.)
And now that the American dream is looking for ways to mediate and moderate itself, it may be that lots of decisions must now be made as judgment calls. And in that event, we need someone who is prepared to say what the middle is and where the tails now are. After all, if we leave the decision on “how thin” to the fashionistas, some of them of them are likely to create a catalogue that does not merely fail to sells clothing. They are going to create a catalogue that does damage to the brand. As in “Ew, Saks is a slave to fashion and they use slaves of fashion as their models.”
As America continues to change, more and more decisions will call for judgment, not extremes. Call it Aristotle’s golden mean, call it Goldilocks’ preference, new rules will perhaps apply.
7 Comments
December 18th, 2009 at 8:59 pm
Hi Grant,
I agree that there’s a problem, but I also think that things are changing and that fashion models are no longer the role models they’ve been in the past. From a design standpoint I think the designers are motivated to use extremely thin models so that all eyes focus on the clothes. If they could figure out a way to make hangers that walk, they would do away with models all together. Today, as different types of role models (think Beyonce, or Michelle Obama, or Tiny Fey) are rapidly replacing fashion models on magazine covers, and society begins celebrating other facets of female accomplishment, the pendulum will swing the other direction, again. At SF State we have noticed a kind of proud rebellion against the stick figure look which may be culturally based, or maybe our female students are just too smart to believe that they need to look like the models on the runway to feel good about themselves. Let’s hope this is the case.
December 19th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
And, so I wonder if the “too rich” part of the old axiom might also be under review? Madoff, bonuses, bubbles…think those might have a cultural effect like bulimia?
December 20th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Interesting problem; getting to the sweet spot/staying on the sweet spot. That because the sweet spot is in motion – like a racket constantly being restrung. That motion makes the CCO. The CCO respondes to the pulse-based dynamic of change, of culture, in order to focus it down to the culture of the corporate viability and brand.
Just thinking of the questions (in this case strait forward) is perhaps the art of it all. Change and expectation ebb and flow within the potential fractalness of questions. If you say, are measuring a shoreline – the smaller the measuring stick, the greater the length of the shoreline, moving toward the infinite.
2009 and some very simple moments: YouTube’s biggest star of the year was Susan Boyle – definitely not the model material. As for Twitter, the top ten:
1. #iranelection
2. #musicmonday
3. Michael Jackson
4. Google Wave
5. New Moon
6. Follow Friday
7. Halloween
8. Paranormal Activity
9. Harry Potter
So how do the top 10 and Susan Boyle inform the CCO? What is the measuring stick that takes the stock of the corporate interest and the conversation that is social media? CCO seems to me to be, in part, a minder of the conversation as well. Brand is being challenged by the conversation and that challenge presses at the brand’s relevance.
December 20th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
The death at age 32 of actress Brittany Murphy may be yet another tragic result of Hollywood’s obsession with thinness. Here is a young woman whose popularity (and paychecks) was inversely related to her weight. Remember what she looked like in Clueless? Over the years she literally wasted away in front of us, and in the end Hollywood discarded her anyway. So very, very sad.
December 21st, 2009 at 2:59 am
Like old money and cherished heirlooms, I feel the Saks model serves to reassure a certain type of consumer that beauty can be purchased when it is a)anonymous slash accessible and b)high slash extreme either in rarity (ie: haute couture) or in price. Skinny models in a more healthy tolerent environment help to reinforce this extremity, and thus perceived (class) differentiation. Could it be Saks customers are aging or otherwise being marginalized? Or is this simply an management slash art direction issue? (can’t get the slash function to work on this puter)
December 21st, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Rates of bulimia and anorexia are actually decreasing.
There’s more to the scourge of wafer thin models than the obvious.
Consider: for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Obesity is at an all time high. It only makes sense that as the population is increasingly overweight, that models would be thinner.
Fashion is an extreme, high fashion more so. These lines are not intended to generate revenue (they’ve never made money); these are PR pieces, designed to provoke reaction (sometimes outrage) and media interest. It’s their RTW lines that generate profit.
December 22nd, 2009 at 6:23 pm
[...] anthropologist grant mccracken muses in a recent blog post: [...]