China's not just getting rich, it's getting cool

In 2007, the agency I worked for was pitching for Wrangler, the traditional wild-west jeans brand. I argued that culture and therefore fashion was about to get more serious after fifteen years of foolishness and that Wrangler were well positioned to take advantage of this.

I’d just been to Dublin, where the effects of the crash had already hit. For the five years prior, Dublish had been very foolish indeed – a bit like the flashier parts of London but even easier credit and more expensive drinks.

After the crash, I’m sure a lot of people missed the party atmosphere. Young people though, perhaps having not gained or lost all that much, seemed pretty sanguine. They told us that they were going to the beach at the weekends now and were spending more time outdoors. It was as if that’s what they wanted to do all along… It felt like the whole city had switched its narrative from party to serious and soulful overnight.

At that point, the effects of the crash hadn’t really hit Britain. I remember well because T and I were still able to sell a house at boom prices at the end of 2007.

Nonetheless it felt like culture was shifting. After at least fifteen, more like twenty-five, years of London getting richer the middle classes realised that if culture kept getting faster, things could end up in a distinctly non-middle class place.

And so in 2007 these two drivers – the impending crash and the desire for a a slightly slowerculture – came together and, in my view, lead to culture trying to be a bit more serious and soulful. People looked to evoke expertise and hard-won knowledge and, rather than “taste”, they preferred to emphasise “character”: dependability, honesty, self-reliance. In the end, this led to a movement that I just discovered has a name “heritage fashion”*. Not only do I like it, I also think it proved that I was right about Wrangler.

Anyway… Although I thought it was obvious, my colleagues didn’t agree and they ended up pitching something else, which, thankfully, the brand was sensible enough to ignore.

So I thought this was a big missed opportunity. These cultural shifts don’t come along all that often and you’re often not aware of them until they’re well established (or they’re over). So when you catch one at the beginning, you need to act on it**.

So, since 2007, I’ve been wondering what the next shift might be. I knew it wasn’t going to be a reverse of the 2007 one: slow anti-banker culture is here for at least the next five years. So I was looking for an evolution, something that builds on slow and heritage but updates it.

And then this morning something occurred to me. Something so obvious I feel like I must have read it or heard it in lots of places already. I’m going to try it out here…

Over the next few years, people are going to think a lot about the rebalancing of the global economy.

If 2007-2011 was about how you felt about bankers and excess, these years are going to be about how you feel about Brazilians, Russians, Indians and Chinese.

Some people, particularly the young and those that live in capital cities are going to feel pretty positive. Partly because of self-interest – they see opportunities – but also because they’ve made friends in these countries at university or at work***. They’d be more likely to move from a Western capital to Beijing than move to the provinces in their own country. And, if they were asked to make a choice, they’d accept one American or Brit slipping out of the middle class if six Chinese join it.

The majority though (and perhaps the landed wealthy) will be fearful. They’ll see the rest of the world getting richer as their living standards decline. And will, rightly, look back to the past as a time when they were better off.

As a result, society will split, not simply into haves and have-nots but into those that think things are getting better and those who know it is getting worse.

No doubt this will have all sorts of unpleasant consequences for national politics. To go back to the original thesis of the article though, some of the most interesting consequences will be for popular culture, fashion, and brands. Here are a few loose predictions:

Heritage fashion, which is really a metropolitan phenomenon, will evolve to become global, borrowing from the heritage of the BRICs. This will not be like 00’s gap year kids bringing back fisherman’s pants from Thailand, it will be the signs and products you only pick up if you live in a country for a while (or you have friends that did). On reflection, this is maybe not so different to what happened to the hippies at the end of the sixties: the search for authenticity takes you east.

Nostalgia culture will continue to grow in developed markets. The young and the hip will get bored for it though and it will become stolid and defiantly middle market.

Rich western consumers will get a lot more interested in brands and culture from countries in the south and the east. As major western companies push into these countries, they may have to lets brands, innovations, and references flow back the other way. Not, this time, to attract diaspora communities, rather, to stay relevant to their core consumers.

A brand could be introduced, or brought back, to the west – Lifebouy soap, the brand that saved millions of lives through handwashing and the darling of CSR thinkers like John Grant seems like a good bet.

It could be a product tweak. Nokia got a lot of attention for launching a twin-sim mobile in India (following Jan Chipchase’s work I think). That would not only be a useful innovation for young people in the UK, it would also show that they’re up to date with the rest of the world.

Even the government could get in on the act by encouraging cultural and school exchanges with the BRICs rather than France or Germany. The best badge for a student and what better sign that Britain is really open for business.

Either way, the trend is clear: as developed businesses move one way, ideas and less developed brands move back.

Worldliness and connectedness are celebrated. The east and south become more visible. Consumers in the west will hopefully come to understand the consequences of their lifestyles. And Western businesses stop assuming that the rest of the world wants western products and brands.

It sounds brilliant. Unfortunately, at the same time, large parts of the west, the parts that are losing out are going to running in exactly the opposite direction.

Nationalism and internationalism are both going to be very powerful at the same time. It’s going to be tough for brands and for politicians to appeal to both streams at once.

P.S. Reading it back, I think I’ve cribbed it from half remembered ideas of glocalisation after reading Robertson and Bauman at LSE which I’ve coloured with last week’s economist. So not original but maybe right. Let’s see.

* There’s clearly a lot to say about gender here. In fact, if you look at the last four years, I’d say that menswear has told the story or fashion far more clearly than womenswear.

** Read “Cultural Strategy” by Douglas’s Holt and Cameron to understand how brands like Nike and Ben and Jerry’s have taken account of these shifts.

***The internationalism of the educated elite – i.e. the number of friends they have in other countries – is one of the great stories of the last ten years. Could I get data on this?