The Case of the Missing Hand Cream
How Selfies Smoothed the Way for an In-Store Fashion Revolution
As far as products and brands are concerned, the world is no longer local. Two or three decades ago, tourists could come back from visiting a country 3,000 miles away assured that the souvenirs they’d brought home with them in their suitcases—the Sumatra-Indonesian Barbie Doll, the wooden salad tongs from Botswana with animal carvings, a sweater from French Gap with a neck zipper—were not only one-of-a-kind, but could be someday directly linked back to memory and experience. Today, there are few objects that tourists can store in their suitcases that aren’t already available somewhere, from someone, online, detaching the treasures we find while traveling from the context of experience.
Still, just as there’s a wide array of Western brands and companies that Russian and Asian consumers would be surprised to discover exist, some stores and brands remain unknown to a majority of Westerners. I’ve already mentioned Picard, France’s frozen-food chain, but it’s also safe to assume most US and European natives have never heard of Mr. Bigg’s, a Nigerian fast-food chain with over 170 locations across that country serving local delicacies including moin moin and ofada rice. What about NTT DOCOMO—not AT&T, or Verizon—which controls approximately one-half of Japan’s wireless market? Won Hundred is an up-and-coming Danish menswear company, and a Chinese eyewear chain with the breathtaking name of Helen Keller sells frames and sunglasses at 80 Chinese locations.
It’s also fair to say that few people outside of Europe are familiar with Tally Weijl, a leading Swiss-French fashion label headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, whose logo is the silhouette of an extremely pink rabbit.
Tally, as its tween and teenaged female clientele calls it, has approximately 1,000 stores in 30 countries including Ireland, Italy, Holland, Poland, Germany, Greece and Russia. Similar to H&M or Forever 21, Tally’s low prices are similar to Target’s price points. So why did Tally Weijl need to bring in a branding consultant? The chain had a problem—namely unused, unsold merchandise. For years Tally had succeeded again and again in hitting the fashion nerve—the perfect length, the trendiest style, the hottest color—but the company’s warehouses still overflowed with millions of dollars’ worth of unsold inventory. Nor did the teenaged girls I interviewed in my preliminary Subtext Research seem to enjoy visiting Tally’s physical stores. The spaces were dense, cramped and disordered, they told me, and overloud techno music pounded from overhead speakers, as if the fashion and jackhammer industries had merged beneath one roof. It was sensory overload, and not in an exhilarating way.
Why were twenty-first-century adolescent girls so fickle about fashion? Was it a worldwide problem, one caused by customers of all ages reluctant to pay full price for clothes they knew they could buy online instead at a discount? If the Internet had transformed the role of the bricks-and-mortar retailer and the definition of “social”—which it clearly has—were there any new ways of successfully combining the offline and online worlds?
An issue troubling not only Tally Weijl but all fashion retailers is Fashion Week, which predates the Internet by half a century. Fashion Week debuted in Paris in the late 1940s and, as it still does today, showcases to buyers, customers, industry experts and the media the latest fashions and designs for every season. Fashion Week still takes place twice a year in New York, London, Milan and Paris, and additional unofficial Fashion Weeks occur in Brazil, Germany, Australia and pretty much anywhere else in the world girls and women love fashion and new clothes.
Obviously, segmenting fashion by season generates opportunities for consumer purchasing, which is why over the past few decades, the four fashion seasons have expanded to include subseasons like “pre-fall,” “resort,” “swimwear” and “ready-to-wear.” For adolescent girls who want nothing more complex than to blend in with their peers while subtly standing out from them, too, the “seasons” concept serves to remind them of the ephemeralness of their enthusiasms, as well as how easy it is to fall behind the curve.
Outsourcing manufacturing overseas has been a boon for Western retailers and designers, with roughly 98 percent of the clothes worn in the West manufactured in China, with the rest coming out of Vietnam, Thailand, Honduras and elsewhere.1 Less welcome is a multiseason fashion year that obliges designers to keep abreast of trends, as well as to predict the vagaries of upcoming seasons as much as 18 months in advance. (Drug abuse, breakdowns and suicide are common in an industry dedicated to coming up with new, innovative ways of—there’s no other way to put it—making a shirt.)
For most retailers, the process goes like this: After receiving specifications on cuts, colors and lengths, factory workers in mainland China manufacture the clothes, which are then loaded onto a container ship for their long transatlantic voyage. Once the clothes arrive at their destination, workers transport them onto trucks, which ferry them to distribution outlets and area stores. In the worst-case scenario, a fashion or style will pivot in an unexpected direction—blue has overtaken black, and the color green, for no good reason, repels buyers—when a container ship is in transit. In response, some retailers will go so far as to ask ships to return to port and destroy their shipments. (Rumor has it Zara, the Spanish-based retailer, and others have begun producing clothing aboard ships equipped with large production lines, allowing for dramatic turnarounds in taste at the last minute.)
Some, though, have found ways to lower the risk of chucking millions of dollars’ worth of clothing items every year. The Italian-owned Benetton label, for example, manufactures its entire clothing line in white. Once the clothes are delivered to distribution centers, Benneton’s analysts assess what color or length is in vogue, at which point workers dye and cut the company’s shirts, jackets, pants and infant apparel to replicate the style and color preferences popular at the time. But Benetton is the exception, not the rule, in an industry that wields less control than it would like.
Like the cosmetics industry, fashion centers around desire, around aspiration, around the concept of transformation. “Enclothed cognition” is a psychological phenomenon that refers to the influences our clothing has on our cognitive and decision-making processes, and the ways we unconsciously adapt our behavior to the people and symbols around us. Do our voices get higher when we’re talking to a baby? Do they slow down when we address an elderly person? Do they deepen in the presence of our parents, or get higher around our pets? Does our behavior change in the presence of a police officer, a firefighter or a physician? Most of the time, the answer is yes. (Studies reveal that if we put on a white coat that we’ve been told belongs to a physician, we pay closer attention to our surroundings, but if we’re told the same white coat belongs to a painter, our attention shows no improvement at all.2)
Enclothed cognition is a variant of a field of scientific study known as embodied cognition, that believes that “humans think not only with their brains but with their bodies,3” and that in turn, our bodies themselves can suggest various abstract concepts in our brains that affect our behavior.”4 For example, if you or I carry around a clipboard, in general we feel more important, organized and mindful of what we have to do that day. For unconscious reasons, we associate washing our hands with moral cleanliness, and we also rate people holding a cup of hot coffee as warmer and more approachable than we do people who are holding a glass of iced tea. Also, when asked to focus on an upcoming event, we tend to tilt forward in our seats, as if physically “meeting” our own futures, but we tilt discreetly backward in our seats if someone asks us to reflect on events that have already taken place.5
Enclothed and embodied cognition are both nascent fields of psychological study, yet neither will surprise anyone who has ever bought a new article of clothing and believed it would redress issues ranging from poor self-esteem to social phobia. In fact, from the moment we open our eyes in the morning, most of us unconsciously seek out external totems of transformation. Our smartphone. Our first cup of coffee. Showering, shampooing our hair, shaving our legs or faces and changing into our work clothes are all rituals of becoming. At the end of the day, when we wash off our greasepaint and change out of our costumes, we confront who we were all along. On my visits to the United Kingdom, Germany and Scandinavia, I’m always struck by the sheer number of billboards advertising suntan creams and oils intended to darken natives’ complexions. But Indonesia, India, Thailand and Brazil offer almost the same number of billboards marketing creams that promise to whiten complexions. Everyone aspires to be something just a bit different than they actually are.
As I prepared for my Subtexting on behalf of Tally Weijl, I came up against two roadblocks. First, I was an older male asking questions of adolescent females; and second, there was a language barrier. Almost none of the teenaged girls I interviewed in Switzerland, France, Austria, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Poland and the Ukraine spoke English. But in the end, it didn’t matter, as most of the girls eventually allowed me inside their bedrooms, and bedrooms always convey more information in total silence than most people do using words.
Whenever I enter the bedroom of any teenager, male or female, I carry a checklist with me. Clothing always comes first. Is it displayed openly, or hidden in the closet? What brands are openly displayed, if any? Are there posters or artwork hanging on the wall? How and where is the bed positioned? How central is the bed? Is there a bedspread, quilt or duvet? How many pillows? Where on the bed do you find wear and tear or evidence of heavy use? How close is the bed to the nearest electrical wall socket? How many hours a day do the owners spend in their bedrooms? In addition to these bedroom details, how many selfies do they shoot on average during a 24-hour period? How much time do they spend on their laptops, versus their tablets, versus their phones? What role do music and videos play in their lives, and from where do they access them mostly?
Lastly, I study the parallels between a girl’s “home”—her bedroom—and her Facebook “home” page. I like to say that social media is the new bedroom wall. Just as they do inside their own sleeping areas, Facebook users upload artwork and photographs onto their “walls,” “like” certain books, magazines and films, and create photo collages and albums. An open Rolodex of their friends is always available for perusal and, of course, users are regularly urged to update their “statuses,” a word Facebook means literally.
Social media home pages and offline homes have another critical thing in common: only a small fraction of what we post on social media bears much resemblance to what’s really going on in our lives—and our real homes are often edited constructs of who we believe ourselves to be. To add even more complexity to this question, I knew that even though creating a Facebook page has become a rite of passage for a 13-year-old, a teenager’s more authentic self is more likely to show up on places most parents don’t dare trespass, like Instagram, or across free text-messaging apps like WeChat, Kik and WhatsApp.
First, though, an adolescent girl’s identity, aspirations and desires can be found in her bedroom, a place where almost nothing is left to chance.
The bedrooms of adolescents have changed dramatically in only ten years. The centerpiece of any child’s room used to be a desk, a chair and a desktop or laptop computer. Today, it’s the bed itself. In the past few years, beds have literally expanded, as the result of teenaged boys and girls using them as command posts. Sure, some kids still use desks when doing their homework, but for most teenagers and even college students, the bed is where they read, study, doze, slump, text, post, FaceTime, Skype, listen to music and watch videos, usually simultaneously.
As a result, the concept of light has also changed. All around the world, when we wake up, the first thing most of us reach for is our phone, which has become as much a transitional object as the blankets we carried around with us when we were young. A 2014 survey carried out by YouGov and the Huffington Post revealed that almost two-thirds of smartphone users between the ages of 18 and 29 actually sleep “with their phones or tablets in their beds,”6 implying that our first and final exposure to light during a 24-hour period is the artificial blue light of pixels. The radiance from our phones is almost more potent, and pertinent, than either sunlight or moonlight. A decade ago, there were anywhere from two to five lamps in the average teenaged girl’s bedroom. Today, as patches of screen-light illuminate our bedrooms instead, lamps have become nearly as redundant as desks.
Along with light, the concept of “display” has also gone through any number of changes. Chairs still exist, but mostly serve as structures on which to drape or hang clothing. Ten years ago, girls’ bedroom walls were papered with any number of posters and artwork. Today, two posters at most hang on the average girl’s wall. In many cases, girls may have long outgrown their interest in the subject of the poster, but when asked why they haven’t taken it down, they invariably give the same answer: they don’t have “time,” or they’re “too busy.” The real reason, it became clear to me later, is that they’re holding on to what remains of their childhoods, an idea I’ll be revisiting later on.
Boys’ bedrooms have undergone a similar number of changes in the past decade, and whenever rooms have transformed, it’s safe to say their owners have, too. Generally speaking, adolescent males are becoming more like adolescent females, and the reverse is also true. If today’s girls are nerdier, today’s boys are needier. Once upon a time, boys would sprawl, the edge of a shoe or a sneaker grazing the chair or couch, but today, boys have taken to curling one ankle around the other. In general they’ve become more fashion-focused, with trendy shoes and sneakers taking on increasing importance in their lives. Hence the omnipresence of the floor-length mirror, which today as many boys as girls are likely to have.
But what could girls’ bedrooms—in Switzerland, Italy, France, Austria, Germany and Poland—tell me about reversing the fortunes of a Swiss-based fashion retailer? Frankly I was puzzled where to start, and a few weeks later, having conducted Subtext Research across eastern and western Europe, I wasn’t all that much smarter. Apart from the overall changes in décor I’ve just noted, and the prominence of the bed, at that point nothing I saw or heard struck me as terribly unusual, which is why I turned things around and asked each girl I interviewed if she wouldn’t mind keeping a videotaped and text-based diary, and also whether they were willing to take a dozen photographs that best described who they were (or rather, how they saw themselves).
As far as the videotaped diary was concerned, the rules were simple: The girl was asked to fill out what she did that day, and what she planned to do the next. If she visited a website, she had to write down its name, and the same went for the music she listened to and the videos she watched. At first, the recounting felt cliché and staged—most girls seemed to be reenacting what they saw on shows like Sex and the City and Pretty Little Liars—but as time went on the videos grew looser and more relaxed: I am now going to the fridge. Tonight I am going out to meet my boyfriend. I’m now going onto YouTube to listen to Sia’s new song.
Based on their photographs alone, I realized that almost all the pictures the girls had shot revealed imbalances. Ironically, these were often “counterbalanced” on the girls’ Facebook pages. The Facebook photo of one girl struggling with her weight showed her profile only, and a gaggle of slender, good-looking friends. The Facebook page of another girl whose parents were divorcing, and who’d confided in me how alone she felt, showed a girl who was literally never by herself. Offline was the real world, it seemed, while dreams lived online. There was another thing, too: Based on their online videos and separate interviews, the lives of adolescent girls revolved around fashion and dressing up. My research revealed that girls spent around 80 percent of their waking hours mulling what they wore that day, what they were thinking about wearing the next day and clothing in general—a somewhat shocking statistic. They were also online anywhere from two to three hours a day visiting their favorite fashion retailers, websites and Tumblr blogs. Swiss girls were preoccupied by British and German fashion websites, as well as Tumblr, Instagram and Snapchat, while eastern European girls tracked Scandinavian websites. Most girls knew the fashion world intimately well, including the names of the top models, and kept an official or unofficial wish list of outfits they wanted to buy but couldn’t afford.
This same preoccupation with fashion could be seen with their smartphones themselves, beginning with their covers, which were plastered with stickers and decals, and extending to the apps: color-matching apps, apps that matched lipstick hues to clothing, apps that gave the locations of the hottest clubs in town and apps offering techniques to improve a girl’s appearance or make her look slimmer than she was. Not a single girl I met was at peace with how she looked. She either considered herself too plump or too slender, an issue, I might add, that can and should be blamed squarely on the contemporary clothing store. For ease-of-manufacturing reasons, retailers don’t produce a wide range of clothes for a range of body shapes, and rather than blaming manufacturers, girls convince themselves that the fault lies with them.
Then there were the selfies. A selfie can sometimes tell me more about a person than anything inside a meticulously staged bedroom. When a girl shows another girl a photo on a smartphone, the first few things she seeks out are, in order of importance: Am I in this picture? How do I look? Who is standing beside me? Does the person standing beside me in this photo lend me a halo effect of popularity, or is standing beside this person a social liability? Selfies, it seemed, were even more important than the event or moment they were supposed to memorialize.
Finally, I put aside an entire week to go shopping with large groups of girls. If there was an H&M near their house or apartment, they would go down there for 45 minutes to an hour, walk around, chat with store employees and ogle the mannequins. They weren’t there to buy anything; they were there to immerse themselves in a fashion fantasy, and maybe touch the hem of their own aspiration—it was as if by shopping at a global chain, they had come that much closer to escaping their own local identities. Still, as the girls trooped through store after store, with me trailing behind them, taking notes, I couldn’t help but notice that along with observing the clothes, they were also busy evaluating the other girls in the store. Subconsciously, it seemed, girls perceived a clothing store less on what it has for sale, and more on the other women who are shopping there. (The same is often true for prospective female students when they visit college and university campuses.) If the other girls aren’t cool or aspirational enough, a girl will take her business elsewhere.
Inside Tally Weijl and other retailers, I observed another intriguing behavior. Girls rarely, if ever, shopped by themselves. Instead, a small crowd of three, four or five girls would appear in the dressing room area. Two of them would stand sentry as a pair of other girls disappeared inside the dressing room to try on a piece of clothing. When one or both girls came out, they were met with a flurry of approving or disapproving comments and opinions. But was this really all that unusual? (The answer turned out to be yes, but at the time this observation didn’t feel like anything at all.)
I walked away from my first round of Subtext Research with the distinct impression of how difficult and confusing it must be to be a 14- or 15-year old girl, shy and bold at the same time, dependent on your parents and family, but with your physical development overtaking your chronological age—a confusion that showed up in the teddy bears that kept appearing in bedrooms from Poland to Austria.
Worn and adorable as they were, these teddy bears weren’t what they seemed. Many of the girls I interviewed told me they had a boyfriend, and when I asked them about their teddy bears, it was clear in most cases that the teddy bear was a stand-in for the boys in their lives. “Describe your teddy bear,” I would say, or “What was the first time you felt really close to your teddy bear?” or “Can you describe a moment when your teddy disappointed you?” These questions weren’t as strange as they sound. When girls discussed the boys in their lives, they seldom described them accurately, as I would later find out when meeting the boys; what I heard instead was how girls wanted their boyfriends to be, and what their idealized image-making said about the girls themselves.
Teenaged girls inhabited an uncertain area made up of two separate universes: a Toys“R”Us world of the past, and a sexualized future ecosystem symbolized by stores like Victoria’s Secret. Most girls who went into Victoria’s Secret told me they felt out of place, and even uncomfortable. At the same time, still living at home, they no longer felt like children. In contrast to boys, their own physical and psychological development placed them in a gray area with no real name of its own. One snapshot I took summed up this duality perfectly and poignantly: a teddy bear sitting on a blanket embossed with a Playboy bunny in a bedroom belonging to a 15-year-old girl.
As well as being preoccupied with how they looked, girls were also hyperconscious of how their friends, and the world itself, perceived them. Being a teenaged girl meant that you were petrified of standing alone, or being left out, forgotten or rejected. Today, everyone knows what a girl does when she is feeling insecure about herself: she posts a new photo of herself on Facebook and awaits a flurry of compliments about her appearance. Once she’s regained a dose of self-confidence, she is ready to become, once again, the star of her own life.
In my work across Brazil on behalf of a beer manufacturer (which I covered in chapter 5), I couldn’t help noticing that the bedrooms of every Brazilian girl featured a display, or collection, of some kind, usually of colorful beer bottles. (Beer drinking is extremely common among Brazilian adolescents.) These collections communicated a message about who a girl wanted to be, or alternately, about the people, or socioeconomic class, with whom she wanted most to be associated. In some cases, the girl in question didn’t even like the beer brand she had on display—such as Heineken—but that didn’t matter. Heineken cost more than the average beer brand, and Brazilian girls would save up for weeks to afford a night out at a popular club. It was as if by surrounding herself with Heineken bottles during the week, she could somehow move closer to the sort of person she imagined herself being, as well as to the friends she hoped someday to attract.
There was no analogy to those beer cans in the bedrooms I visited in eastern and western Europe. Sure, an Austrian girl might have on display a set of matching pillows, a Polish girl a tray of perfumes, but nothing close to what I had seen in Brazil. Still, knowing that fashion is always linked to aspiration and transformation, I knew I needed to discover where girls kept their “secret display,” in the hopes it could help Tally Weijl better understand its consumers. I finally found what I was looking for in an expected place: on girls’ feet. Whenever I opened the door to a closet packed with clothing and shoes, I knew I’d discovered the equivalent of a “beer shelf.” What’s more, girls told me that every single pair of shoes had a purpose, a concrete reason for being. Any girl who owns and wears shoes knows that footwear is a reflection of her mood and attitude, and that shoes, like music, can both reflect and dictate the way someone feels. Based on the Subtexting I carried out, the average teenaged Swiss girl owned 19 pairs of shoes, compared to 15 for a French girl and 13 for a German girl.
That’s when I decided to conduct a little experiment. For the next week and a half, every time I flew into a capital city—Berlin, Bern, Paris, Rome, London—I left my hotel and took a long walk. I had no intention of sightseeing. I had a single mission: to track the gazes of every woman on the sidewalk as they passed another woman on the sidewalk. I realized that almost always, the first thing a woman’s eyes landed on were the other woman’s shoes.
Back on the job, I began photographing the inside of closets, taking photo after photo of the shoes inside. A week later, I returned to the same girls’ bedrooms, where I decided to take additional photos of the insides of their closets. Which was when I noticed a strange thing had taken place in only seven days’ time. Contrasting the photos I’d taken a week before against the new set, I found that the appearance and even the sequence of the shoes had changed. Only rarely was a pair of shoes in its old spot. This confused me, considering that almost every girl had told me that despite the number of shoes she wore, she seldom put on more than one or two pairs a week. Still, when I brought up this contradiction, most girls shrugged. Maybe they’d tried on the shoes, maybe they hadn’t. They couldn’t remember.
When you gaze at one thing for a long time, you become blind, and as far as teenaged shoe wear was concerned, I felt as though I’d lost my ability to see things clearly. If I can’t understand something, or if something makes no sense, I need to walk away from it for a few days and shock my senses back to normal. In this case, I needed to look elsewhere within the same family ecosystem, but at another end of the spectrum: the bathroom.
Some girls had their own bathrooms; others shared bathrooms with siblings; still others shared family bathrooms. Not surprisingly, most were stocked with standard products like toothbrushes, toothpaste tubes, deodorants, perfumes and lip glosses. What was missing? Anything? No. Nothing was missing. Or was there? It took a few days for the answer to hit me: there were few if any face or hand creams, and when there were, the lotions I saw were water-based. Ten years earlier, the face and hand creams you’d find in most girls’ bathrooms were oil-based. Oil-based creams not only last longer, they also cause less damage to skin in cold weather. Yet in only a decade, they had vanished from girls’ bathrooms. Why?
Hand creams. Skin creams. Selfies. Hidden shoe collections. It was almost the definition of small data. Alone, none of these things had anything significant to say, but together, they indicated a possible hypothesis. That hypothesis—if I could even call it that at that stage—was, possibly, connected to technology. The moment I realized that oil-based hand and face creams had disappeared from girls’ cosmetic collections, my first thought was that face and hand moisturizers make users’ fingers fatally sticky. They leave gluey-looking marks on keyboards and space bars. Not only that, but shining skin also creates a reflective glare, which most people would agree is antithetical to the spirit of a good selfie. Most girls are canny enough to know that oil-based creams, text messaging and selfie taking don’t mix.
By now I had a theory in mind but I first needed to collect more evidence. Over the next few days, in every home I visited, I asked the same question: would the girls—or their parents—be willing to show me their monthly cell phone statements? Not just the short form, either, or the amount they owed to landline and cell phone providers, but the extended version, the one that enumerated all their mobile phone calls and text messages? Some girls and their parents hesitated; others looked at me strangely; still others asked if this was really necessary. Yet when I explained my theory, most of the mothers were just as intrigued as I was.
Why was I asking? Because a single question lay unanswered, and I knew that monthly cell phone statements could help me zero in on the answer. What, exactly, was going on in girls’ bedrooms between 6 a.m. and 6:30 a.m. every morning? Most girls told me they got up early in the morning, and “got ready for school.” Based on my bedroom visits, I know they weren’t spending time in the shower. How did I know this? From past work I’d done with a European shampoo manufacturer, I know that the bigger the hole in the spout of a shampoo bottle, the more bottles the manufacturer can sell. The reasons why are obvious. When you squeeze a bottle with a large spout, more shampoo than necessary comes out. The bottles thus empty out faster, obliging us to buy replacement bottles. There is, I knew, a direct correlation between the length of a shower and the size of the hole in a shampoo bottle. The bigger the hole, the longer the shower. The smaller the hole, the shorter the shower. I’d tucked this phenomenon away as a curiosity, nothing more, but realized now it might explain more than I’d thought.
With the help of my assistant, I spent the next 48 hours poring through phone bills, and when I was done, I knew my hypothesis was right. Phone bills are “big data” seemingly without value, but with the addition of small data, we soon came up with a strong theory. By studying families’ cell phone data plans, it was clear that girls were waking up earlier and earlier, despite going to bed later and later. (It’s little wonder that sleep deprivation among teenagers is such an issue around the globe.) Most household digital phone use began regularly at around six in the morning, which was the precise time most girls told me they rolled out of bed. Still, it wasn’t what you might think. The girls I interviewed weren’t prompt do-gooders eager to ensure they made it to school in time, or turned in an error-free term paper. No, they were waking up early and, in the stillness of their homes or apartments, using that time to text their friends one selfie after another.
Speaking approximately, the average girl took 17 selfies every morning. Why? The obvious answer is that thanks to technology, they could. A less smart-alecky answer is that humans are fundamentally insecure people, that at least in early adolescence we want to be like everyone else, and that the fear of expulsion from our tribe is stronger than practically anything else. That said, fashion will always dictate its needs and changes, and for teenaged girls, there seemed to be three points, or angles, of desire. The first began in the privacy of their bedrooms, where they surfed products and fashions online. The second involved planning and strategizing about what they would wear that day and the next. The third angle was now out in the open, and the girls—and the size of the holes in the shampoo bottles—confirmed it when I asked them about it, too.
It appeared that every morning, after waking up, the first thing they did was snap photographs of the clothes and shoes they were considering wearing, and text them to all their friends, who would respond positively or negatively. They spent every morning like this, coordinating their fashion choices, using their peers as stand-ins for Anna Wintour, critics who could weigh in not only about what looked best, but who could also ensure two girls wouldn’t show up at school wearing the same shirt, shoes or pair of pants.
Like any members of a tribe, these girls were dressing and color-coordinating their identities in the world. As I found out earlier, their goal wasn’t to stand out so much that they might become phosphorescent; their goal was to stand out only slightly. Their parents, naturally, had no idea about any of this, nor should they have. This low-key fashion parade took place behind closed doors, in the stillness of the early morning.
Again, none of us are immune to the pressures of fashion and status, and if nothing else, Facebook and other social media sites have made what is implicit about human beings—what, before the Internet, we used to imagine or theorize about, without any supporting data—explicit. Even the most confident people on earth are insecure when no one’s looking. Traveling as much as I do, I spend a lot of time in airport lounges, where I sit surrounded by expensively dressed businessmen tapping away on their laptops or talking on their phones. Over the years I’ve noticed that many of them turn their boarding cards upside down, or else park them in their lapel pockets, so that you can’t make them out. Eventually, I figured it out. These men’s gold Visa or American Express cards gave them access to the business and first-class lounge, but in truth they were traveling in economy class. Also? Pore through any businessman’s wallet and you will find that any number of club memberships and credit cards expired long ago. Yet these cards are often prominently displayed. No matter our age or gender, we are always sending out conscious and unconscious signals to the world—and the girls I interviewed were no exception.
What did morning selfies have to do with the world of adolescent fashion, you might be wondering? How could I take an observation, or a series of discordant observations, and wrap them into a case, or argument, or strategy for helping Tally Weijl?
It bears repeating that the Web has destroyed the concept of “local,” not just as it connects to souvenirs, but in how we feel we stack up to others. Before the Internet, we contrasted ourselves to people in our high schools and hometowns, and to friends attending nearby schools. These days, we compare ourselves to many millions more people our age across the globe. Teenaged girls are especially susceptible to falling into this trap, where nothing they wear, or do, is ever good enough unless their friends validate it first.
The extreme coordination required to align clothing daily has made girls’ response time shorter. In the old days, girls might have coordinated outfits in the weeks and days before a prom or other significant school event took place. In an Information Era, this level of coordination can easily take place every morning, and it has a direct and consequential effect on retailers like Tally Weijl. After all, comparing and contrasting clothes and shoes forces young girls to add even more items to their existing collections. The need for even more shoes, more shirts, more pants, more lingerie, more sweaters, more coats and more scarves increases accordingly. With multiple fashion “seasons,” the adolescent girls of today are forced to refresh and replenish their wardrobes almost constantly.
Tally Weijl had given me a specific mission: to dig up the small data that would not only create and strengthen brand loyalty, but also, in an industry that demands change and reinvention every two months, could remain novel for decades. No retailer in the world catered to young women in the gray area between childhood and their future adult selves. It was uncharted territory. To attract and retain its core demographic, Tally Weijl had to appeal to the teddy bear and the sophisticated Victoria’s Secret model at the same time.
Combining the offline and online world is known across the retail industry as retail convergence. In response, some retailers today have digitally “live” shelves—similar to those electronic speed limit signs that tell you how fast you are driving as you go past them—that customers can swipe with loyalty cards that offer real-time online or in-store discounts, and Waze, the community-based traffic and navigation app, has teamed up with a number of corporations, including Target, to offer geo-location-enabled deals and discounts at nearby stores.
Fashion retailers, Tally Weijl among them, are understandably frightened of losing their hold on the young female shopper who is nonetheless almost never offline. To create our own methods of convergence, the Tally Weijl board and I had to agree on what the word social meant in an Information Age. We agreed that offline and on, the biggest advantage of shopping is its social benefits. Shopping gets us out of the house, and stores and malls provide a community, even a small city, of fellow fashion believers. Another thing online retailers cannot do is replace tactility, the human desire to touch and “feel” a shirt or pair of pants before buying it—which is perhaps why Amazon opened its first bricks and mortar bookstore in Seattle in late 2015.
The Internet is also a city that rivals the offline retail world in connectedness, sociability—and place. It gives users access to stores, and brands, and other countries that most of our hometowns would find it hard to compete with. It also offers users social equity and belonging, the approval and disapproval of a peer group whose opinions now define and dominate teenaged girls’ lives. At the same time, when we do anything online, including shop, we’re alone. My goal was to bring together the authentic sociability of shopping offline with the artificial company that online shopping offers, to create something that, as far as I knew, the world of retail had never seen before.
But when I proposed it to the Tally board, my first concept was a flop. What if we created a dream house, or loft, where a select group of girls could live, I asked the board? We could recruit them via a special in-store contest, or even via a Willy Wonka–like Golden Ticket system. The girls could live in the loft, courtesy of Tally Weijl, and we’d also provide them with perks including a 24-hour chauffeur, a catwalk, a spa and a music studio. We would stream their parties, shows and get-togethers on the Tally Weijl website, in stores, on the brand’s YouTube channel and via Periscope, the live-streaming app. In return, the house or loft would serve as a word-of-mouth broadcast center for the Tally Weijl brand.
Everyone liked the idea, to the extent that we began looking for affordable Parisian real estate. A year later, we still hadn’t found the perfect property, and in the end the chief designer pulled the plug on the idea, not willing to compromise the Tally Weijl brand by using a less aspirational locale. But two weeks later, the board approved a second concept, and so far it seems to be working extremely well.
The new Tally Weijl—Tally 2.0—was rolled out in 2013, in a pilot store in Vienna. Since then, its success has spread across numerous cities in Europe.
Knowing that adolescent girls are changeable, and not especially loyal to much of anything, I wanted to create a religious temple in the new Tally Weijl. My Subtext Research had taught me that girls today, or at least the ones I’d interviewed, needed something they could believe in, and many no longer had that in their lives. In my experience, once girls uncovered that belief, and found a place where they could come together and even worship as a tribe, they would and could remain loyal to something. My hope was that thing would be the new Tally store.
If the old Tally Weijl was cramped, noisy and abrasive, the new Tally Weijl was spacious, colorful, flamboyant and over-the-top. We hired a well-known English theater director who turned Vienna’s flagship Tally store into an event, a circus, a spectacle. On opening night, costumed actors—stilt walkers, street musicians, bearded men in dark glasses and frilly dresses—strolled in and out of the store, sipping pink bubbly water out of champagne glasses. Waitresses in green and purple wigs served trays of cotton candy and pink heart-shaped cookies and oversized lollipops. Inside and outside the store, palm and tarot card readers offered readings as white-powdered circus acrobats bent themselves into curlicue shapes.
An encyclopedia could be written about the gay influence on heterosexual culture and fashion, and the ways in which gay men serve as bellwethers for trends eventually adopted by the mainstream. Two decades ago, for example, men who wore earrings were “gay,” and hair gel and moisturizer were also emblems of the gay male world. Today, of course, any number of straight men sport an earring and use facial creams. Where, and how, does the gay male influence on heterosexual culture begin? The answer is complex, but as far as fashion is concerned, the tastes of gay men often influence young girls who, seeing how good something looks on a gay man, persuade their boyfriends to try it out. Working with Tyra Banks on developing a new merchandising line that built on her strong public awareness from America’s Next Top Model, FABlife and Victoria’s Secret, I spent a day studying her database to uncover the brand’s core demographics. The line was directed at teenaged girls, or college-age girls, but I was also surprised to learn that the target audience of many lingerie lines was gay males in their early and late twenties. The reasoning was simple and time-tested: if the line found favor with a younger homosexual population, who found it stylish, or provocative, or elegant, it was only a matter of time before a gay male recommended it to his younger heterosexual female friends. Moreover, many gay men are extremely opinionated; if they dislike a brand or store, find it corny or tacky, they will come right out and say so. Their opinion, in short, acts as a kind of quality control. If a young, observant gay male likes something, it’s probably all right, which is why the crowd flocking at Tally’s on opening night had a big percentage of young gay men in attendance, whom we hoped might serve as fashion arbiters for younger female consumers.
Earlier, I brought up the question Steve Jobs asked Disney CEO Robert Iger: “If a store could talk, what would it say to the people entering it?” Tally Weijl 2.0—which was chic, trendy, colorful, and simultaneously child-like and sophisticated—had a lot to say. Instead of talking down to them, I wanted Tally to communicate directly to the girl who loved her teddy bear while also keeping her gaze trained on a future international catwalk. Our vision, one that reflected the mind-set of both the brand and its customers? Eat dessert first. Tally Weijl’s new flagship store itself was a sexy, girlish, phantasmagoric explosion of raspberries and greens, lime-green rugs and pink-red ottomans, all atop a floor of authentic wooden pallets. The deliberately retro-looking décor included reupholstered chairs from Ireland and Scotland, cozy and traditional and at the same time jazzy and diva-like; its mix of fanciful and functional assured teenaged consumers that they were still within a safe family environment, but also suspended in a world of fantasy and theater. We also created what I called the “Best Friends Area,” an area of the store that included a giant bed where girls could rest, relax and catch up on text messages. We even provided cell phone cords and chargers to ensure there was no conceivable excuse for a girl to leave Tally Weijl—at least not until she had finished shopping.
Studying thousands of selfies reminded me that today’s teenaged girls have a strong need to be the stars of their own lives. Which explained the cameras angled from the ceiling in every room in every store, creating the illusion that each and every Tally shopper was the leading lady of her own life. Everywhere on the store’s walls were framed representations of Tally Weijl’s bunny logo. There were polka-dotted bunnies, bunnies in cameo lockets, Victorian-era bunnies and bunnies that looked as though Andy Warhol had painted them.
I’d also made it a point to introduce storytelling inside the store. A pair of brightly colored shoes was positioned alongside a small bookcase, dominated by a large hardcover book entitled Safari. Why? In some core way, Tally Weijl consumers were on their own private safaris, searching for an ideal pair of shoes. The concept of a safari validated their mission, while giving them implicit permission to explore every last square inch of the store.
But I’m saving the best for last.
Over the years I’ve spent hours observing dressing rooms, noticing how girls in pairs squeezed themselves into tiny cubicles only to leave empty-handed; noticing how their boyfriends would stand outside, waiting, clearly irritated about the unending Try-On-Take-Off, “What do you think?” sessions. Tally Weijl’s new dressing room area was itself a candyland, with each dressing room painted a different shade of red, green, orange, yellow and blue. Outside, I created a “parking lot” area, where boyfriends could keep an eye on their girlfriends without coming across as impatient or intimidating. But inside was where the magic—and convergence—happened. With the support of the Tally Weijl board, I’d engineered what I called a “Clicks and Mortar” dressing room. To explain: In every dressing room, I’d positioned a large, Internet-equipped, floor-to-ceiling mirror that, at the tap of a finger, transformed itself into a giant, live computer screen. A girl who had gone inside a dressing room, alone or with a friend, to try things on could now type in her Facebook name and password, go onto Facebook, connect with her closest friends in real time, model shirts, pants and shoes before a live camera, initiate a “voting session” and—item by item—request and receive instantaneous feedback about what looked good on her and what was a near miss. In short, the new Tally dressing room was an online and offline version of the secret morning rituals I’d learned about just two months before.
In Tally, we had succeeded in creating a fashion temple—a lounge area and destination equipped not only with phone rechargers but also with the fastest Internet connection in Vienna. Since the launch of Tally Weijl 2.0, the brand has mostly overcome its fashion crises, revenue is up dramatically and the number of Tally Weijl Facebook fans has quadrupled; but more important, the role of one bricks-and-mortar store has been redefined and reinvented. Today, adolescent Austrian girls line up to enter Tally’s dressing rooms, extending a private at-home 6:19 a.m. experience among friends into the rest of the day, building the Tally brand, as well as their own starring brand, by texting selfies to Facebook friends. One girl I spoke with called the new Tally “breathtaking,” while another who earlier had given the store a “3” now awarded it a “9,” adding, “It’s now so over the top that you have to see it.” The store, in short, deserved a big hand (with or without cream).