For those of you following along at home, you may recall that Gather is the creation of one, miss Katie Kay, whose former occupations include being a co-designer at Skingraft, business partner to Amanda Palmer, and Lucent Dossier performer. She first opened Gather in Downtown LA back in July of 2010, and this summer the LA Weekly fashion issue had this to say about it:

Nearly everything in the store is an expression of what Kay calls the “slow fashion” movement, which favors one-of-a-kind pieces over mass production in China. Slow fashion is about creating a lifestyle as a designer rather than building a “career” it’s about being indifferent to “trends” because, most likely, you’re making them. “This may be fashion, but I’m very open to being genuine about things,” Kay says.

I first met Katie when we were both living in San Francisco over a decade ago and our lives have been intertwined in some strange and wonderful ways since. I came on board with Gather just as it opened its new location, at the intersection of Hollywood and Sunset, a couple of weeks ago. More than just a store, Gather is an articulation of a new kind of relationship we have with the things we buy. Our lives have become ever more like art galleries, both physical and virtual. And we are the curators. The pieces we select tell the story of who we are and where we’ve been. These things, the things we buy, are no longer consumed… they’re gathered.

Images courtesy of Los Angeles, I’m Yours, which had some very nice things to say about the opening.

Visit: Gather

*Totally Fucking Crazy

Right now all across America there is a feather shortage. In April, The Billings Gazette reported:

Jewelry-makers and hairstylists have been snatching up the premium chicken feathers used in standby trout-fly patterns, creating a sudden run on a market that’s ill-prepared for significant fluctuations of demand.

“Supplies are just decimated,” said Jim Cox, co-owner of the Kingfisher fly shop in Missoula, [Montana]. “We just can’t get the premium feathers. Even the (sales) reps for the suppliers can’t get them for themselves.”

What began a couple of years ago as a scattered interest in feather jewelry has erupted into a full-on fad for hair extensions made out of long, slender feathers — the exact same feathers used in the vast majority of traditional dry-fly patterns.

The feathers most valued both by fly-tiers and, lately, fashion mavens come from specific types of roosters that are selectively bred to produce long, slender feathers. Such chickens typically take almost a full year to raise before slaughter. What’s more, they’re rare: Only a few dozen commercial breeders exist in America, and most are small operations.

The situation’s getting so dire, American Public Radio’s Marketplace reports, the American Fly Fishing Trade Association is lobbying lawmakers about conservation. Tom Whiting, owner of Whiting Farms in western Colorado, one of the world’s largest producers of fly tying feathers, a third of whose sales now go to fashion, says, “We have orders far in excess of what we have in our system.” With the demand, the prices are skyrocketing. Last week the Oregonian reported a rooster neck of feathers that would have normally cost $29.95, is now selling for $360. A 300% – 700% jump in rooster saddle feather price is now typical.

In fashion parlance, feathers are in. Steven Tyler has been wearing the avian accessories as he judges American Idol contestants. Pop singer, Kesha, rocks feathers, too, even sticking one in Conan Obrien’s hair during a recent appearance on his show. Between Los Angeles’s mercantile meccas of Melrose Ave. and the Beverly Center you can get feather hair extensions, earrings, necklaces; feathers on boots, shoes, tops, skirts, hats, bras, anything. In the summer of 2011, feathers have become a staple of every sartorial and tonsorial aspect imaginable.

The other day I was asked my opinion as to where this current ubiquity of feathers has come from. But as it turns out, I happen to have something better than an opinion: I have an explanation.

Our story begins almost 12 years ago, in a little town in Oregon, by the name of Ashland, where a group of kids came together to start a circus performance troupe called, El Circo. The group would gain recognition within the Burning Man culture for the extravagant parties they threw at the festival, featuring lavish fire performances, a large, geodesic dome venue, and a top-notch sound system that attracted world-renowned music acts to perform there. In a 2005 San Francisco Bay Guardian article on the effect that the various groups within the Burning Man community have had on San Francisco nightlife — an impact which now extends to the entire west coast’s, and arguably global, dance culture — the writer paid particular attention to the influence of El Circo:

El Circo has fused a musical style and a fashion sense that are major departures from the old rave scene. [They are credited] with creating the postapocalyptic fashions that many now associate with Burning Man. Most of the original El Circo fashions, which convey both tribalism and a sense of whimsy, were designed by member Tiffa Novoa.”

Here are some of the El Circo costumes from their 2005 shows:

That same year, just two years out of college, I stumbled into the role of production manager for a newly-formed, L.A.-based vaudeville cirque troupe called, Lucent Dossier. Through that initial involvement with Lucent I would meet many other circus groups, including El Circo, who were by then based in San Francisco along with The Yard Dogs Road Show and Vau De Vire Society. There was also March Fourth Marching Band in Portland, Clan Destino in Santa Barbara, and Cirque Berzerk, and Mutaytor in L.A. As these acts grew, the I-5 Freeway became a central artery of culture, pumping a distinct combination of art, music, fashion, and performance up and down the west coast. A social scene evolved around these circus troupes the same way the punk subculture sprang up around the bands that defined it. For lack of another term, I’ve referred to this subculture over the years simply as “circus.”

In Freaks and Fire: The Underground Reinvention of the Circus, J. Dee Hill delves into the history and sociology underpinning the alternative culture circus resurgence:

Traditional forms of the tribe, like the village, have almost completely disappeared. Fewer and fewer people live in small communities where their daily interactions bring them in contact with the people they are deeply connected to, either spiritually or economically. Workers in modern corporations are replaceable and no longer bound to each other by the experience of a shared interdependence. The modern individual is preoccupied simultaneously by isolating, immediate concerns of personal survival and the larger, often intangible concerns of war, terror and economic change as transmitted by a now-seamless global media network. The intermediate space of community is not easily reached.

Not by accident, many of the newer, emergent forms of culture include a specifically tribal aspect. A return to tattooing, sacrification, fire performance and drumming, as well as a renewed interest in ritual, has occurred side-by-side with the formation of intentional (if temporary) communities such as the Rainbow Family gatherings and Burning Man festival.

It was at these kinds of festivals, in clubs and at underground raves, that alternative circus acts began appearing in the early 90′s. The performers were young, crazy “freaks” without any formal training who used circus costumes, skills or themes as performative means for expressing their own exaggerated personalities. Many went on to gain formal training or to study the history of the genre, but essentially their relationship to conventional circuses resembled that of outsider art to mainstream art circles. They didn’t really relate to the modern-day circus. They took their cues from something much, much older: the caravan-pulling gypsies.

The phenomenon of alternative circus performance can be seen as the theatrical dimension to one generation’s wholesale rediscovery of the concept of tribe.

And the inexorable feather trend is inextricably linked with this trajectory.

Novoa co-founded El Circo along with Marisa Youlden, a jewelry designer whose pieces accompanied Novoa’s costumes from the beginning. Youlden first used feathers in her pieces in 2000 and recalls this was when Novoa began creating elaborate feather headdresses for the performers. “At first, this was all costuming,” The 2005 Bay Guardian article quoted Matty Dowlen, El Circo’s operations manager, and performer, “but now it’s who I am.” The aesthetic Novoa first envisioned for the El Circo performers evolved into the prêt-à-porter of the circus subculture and became its signature style. Feathers, which had come to define El Circo costumes, became an integral component of the subculture’s street fashion:

Yup, that last one is me. You can’t see the feather in this shot, but trust me, it was there. In the early to mid-aughts (when the photos above were taken) the feather was as de rigueur a cultural signifier within the circus scene as the safety pin was for punks in the late 1970s and early 80s. In fact, back before it was so commonplace as to lose meaning (or induce a national feather shortage), condescending terms for those sporting the look sprang up within the subculture: “Feather mafia,” was one I heard thrown around; “Trustafarian peacock” even made it into UrbanDictionary.com. And then, something else began to happen.

In 2005, Mötley Crüe picked circus as the concept for their comeback tour:

The next year, Panic! At the Disco won an MTV Video Music Award for their circus-themed, “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” video:

A theme they then extended into their “Nothing Rhymes With Circus” tour:

And in 2008, the reigning queen of pop herself at the time, Britney Spears, came out with an album titled, Circus, and ensuing tour of the same theme:

Throughout pop culture, traces of circus’s influence would keep surfacing. The same year as Britney’s Circus album, this was the ad for that season’s America’s Next Top Model:

Or take this ad for the launch of Microsoft’s short-lived Kin mobile device from last year:

The proliferation of circus within pop culture has been directly tied to its growth in underground culture, and being in an underground circus troupe during the height of this infiltration offered backstage access to the proceedings. For example: The circus featured in the Kin ad is March Fourth Marching Band. The circus performers in the Panic! At the Disco music video and tour were members of the troupe I managed. The performers who went on tour with Mötley Crüe would become Lucent Dossier members, as well. Last year, Miley Cyrus’s “Can’t be Tamed” music video featured a winged Cyrus alongside a troupe of be-feathered backup dancers inside a giant birdcage:

Which bears a distinct resemblance to the birdcage (not to mention the aesthetic) Lucent Dossier used prominently in aerial performances during their 2008 residency at the Edison nightclub in Downtown LA.

Especially in Los Angeles, where the Downtown underground and the Hollywood pop culture industry coexist within such proximity of one another, their crossover was inevitable.

Which brings us back to fashion. In 2002, designers Cassidy Haley and Evan Sugerman, who’d met at Burning Man the year before, founded a fashion label called, Ernte. Two years later, Novoa joined Ernte Fashion Systems, parlaying the aesthetic vision she’d first developed for the circus stage into high fashion. Tragically, in October, 2007, at 32-years-old, Novoa suffered a fatal drug reaction while working in Bali, Indonesia. By then, Ernte had become a globally-renowned haute couture label, retailing in high-end boutiques like Maxfield in Los Angeles, Collete in Paris, and Loveless in Tokyo. Below are some shots of Novoa’s work:

In 2005, Haley went on to form a new label, Skingraft Designs, with Jonny Cota, and later Katie Kay, who was a partner from 2007 – 2010. All three had circus pedigree. Cota and Haley had performed with El Circo, and Kay was one of the original members in Lucent Dossier, for which Haley and Cota would occasionally moonlight. Some of Skingraft’s early work is pictured below.

Since opening their flagship store in Downtown L.A., in 2009, Skingraft’s “post-apocalyptic couture” has graced the celebrity skins of Adam Lambert and The Black Eyed Peas. Rhianna wore a custom Skingraft headdress in her “Rockstar 101″ music video:

And both Britney Spears’ and Beyoncé’s most recent videos are dripping in Skingraft designs. As Skingraft has evolved into an established name within the vocabulary of Los Angeles fashion, countless other apparel designers with circus origins have sprung up in the wings, as it were.

Over the years since Tiffa first put feathers on the bodies of circus performers, inspiring others to follow suit, hundreds of thousands, if not millions have been exposed to the style at Burning Man, and the E3 gaming convention where El Circo would perform; at Coachella, and the Grammy’s afterparty, where Lucent Dossier performed; at countless night clubs stretching from the depths of Downtown L.A. up the length of the Pacific coast. Hollywood stylists partying on Saturday night woke up on Monday with new inspiration. And circus costumers became famed fashion designers. In the end, this cross-pollination laid the foundation for the exact kind of tipping point Malcolm Gladwell describes in his seminal, 2000 book exploring the social mechanics that lead trends to “tip” into mass, cultural phenomena. The Tipping Point begins with the words:

For Hush Puppies — the classic American brushed-suede shoes with the lightweight crepe sole — the Tipping Point came somewhere between late 1994 and early 1995. The brand had been all but dead until that point. Sales were down to 30,000 pairs a year, mostly to backwoods outlets and small-town family stores. Wolverine, the company that makes Hush Puppies, was thinking of phasing out the shoes that made them famous. But then something strange happened. 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 in the clubs and bars of downtown Manhattan. “We were being told,” Baxter recalls, “that there were resale 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 buying them up.” Baxter and Lewis were baffled at first. It made no sense to them that shoes that were so obviously out of fashion could make a comeback. “We were told that Isaac Mizrahi was wearing the shoes himself,” Lewis says. “I think it’s fair to say that at the time we had no idea who Isaac Mizrahi was.”

By the fall of 1995, things began to happen in a rush. First the designer John Bartlett called. He wanted to use Hush Puppies in his spring collection. Then another Manhattan deisgner, Anna Sui called, wanting shoes for her show as well. In Los Angeles, the designer Joel Fitzgerald put a twenty-five-foot inflatable basset hound — the symbol of the Hush Puppies brand — on the roof of his Hollywood store and gutted an adjoining art gallery to turn it into a Hush Puppies boutique. While he was still painting and putting up shelves, the actor Pee-wee Herman walked in and asked for a couple pairs. “It was total word of mouth,” Fitzgerald remembers.

In 1995, the company sold 430,000 pairs of the classic Hush Puppies, and the next year it sold four times that, and the year after that, still more, until Hush Puppies were once again a staple of the wardrobe of the young American male. In 1996, Hush Puppies won the prize for best accessory at the Council of Fashion Designers awards dinner at Lincoln Center, and the president of the firm stood up on the stage with Calvin Klein and Donna Karan and accepted an award for an achievement that — as he would be the first to admit — his company had almost nothing to do with. Hush Puppies had suddenly exploded, and it all started with a handful of kids in the East Village and Soho.

How did this happen? Those first few kids, whoever they were, weren’t deliberately trying to promote Hush Puppies. They were wearing them precisely because no one else would wear them. Then the fad spread to two fashion designers who used to shoes to peddle something else — haute couture. The shoes were an incidental touch. No one was trying to make Hush Puppies a trend. Yet, somehow, that’s exactly what happened. The shoes passed a certain point in popularity and they tipped. How does a thirty-dollar pair of shoes go from a handful of downtown Manhattan hipsters to every mall in America in the space of two years?

Right now, the roosters know, but they’re not telling.

__________________________________

Special thanks for helping fill in the details and history for this post go to: Arin Ingraham, Siouxzen Kang, Marisa Youlden, and Cassidy Haley.

True Blood’s Anna Paquin wearing SkinGraft blackbird jacket in the current Venice Magazine.

If, in the course of watching True Blood, you’ve found yourself thinking “damn, those vampires look hot,” — and, seriously, who hasn’t? — here’s (well, one reason) why. The stylist for the “postmodern” vampire series has been consistently dressing its characters in the sartorial creations of “post-apocalyptic couture” design house (and long-time homies): SkinGraft.

There’s more shots out there, but you get the gist. You can’t really be a vampire if you’re not rockin the rockstar-wear, and SkinGraft is it: Adam Lambert is a well-known SkinGraft devotee, as are the Black Eyed Peas, and Rhianna even wore a custom SkinGraft headdress in the video for her song, literally titled, “Rockstar 101.”

I’ve written about True Blood’s seriously brilliant “transmedia” marketing campaigns before (1, 2), created by Campfire Agency, which have sought to bring the fictional world of the show off the screen and into reality, and I’ll even admit I’ve done a double take seeing a guy wearing one of those subtly faded “Bon Temps Football” t-shirts out on the street. Now, I’m hearing there’s rumblings of a plan underway to sell not just show merchandise but some of the real-life designer clothes the characters wear — including SkinGraft’s, of course — through the show’s website. Pretty awesome!

If you can’t wait that long — and you really shouldn’t, even if you’ve got forever — you can find SkinGraft HERE.

And P.S., if you’re in LA, keep an eye out for the upcoming opening of Gather, a new boutique by Katie Kay, partner and former co-designer at SkinGraft, located at 630 S. Main St. in downtown.

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]]> http://social-creature.com/skin-blood/feed 0 http://social-creature.com/what-to-do-after-an-overnight-success http://social-creature.com/what-to-do-after-an-overnight-success#comments Thu, 20 Aug 2009 17:36:07 +0000 jenks http://social-creature.com/?p=1707

If, sometime circa 2004, you were out and about at certain underground parties in the Los Angeles Circus scene, and saw someone wearing a particularly striking pair of pants (male or female), created from asymmetrical strips of leather sewn in a twisted, impeccably tailored way, like the trappings of some Mad Max forest nymph biker gang escapee, and were compelled by this post-apocalyptic hipness to inquire of the wearer as to where these pants had come from, the answer you would inevitably receive is that they were made by someone named Cassidy. This would happen so often, in fact, that by the time I finally met Cassidy, out one night at a club on the shady side of La Brea, I actually recognized him by his trousers.

At the time, Cassidy was part of the Ernte design team, but soon thereafter co-founded SkinGraft Designs with partner Jonny Cota, and later Katie Kay. Even as the SkinGraft operation was growing with each year, headlining LA fashion week, opening the doors to a flagship store in Downtown LA this spring (no small feat for an indie fashion label in a recession!), and getting their sartorial grafts onto an ever-expanding assortment of celebrity skins, what Cassidy kept yearning to do was sing.

I discovered very quickly after we met that in addition to his fashion career, Cassidy is also a songwriter and performer. At one point, there were even a couple of production meetings held at my house for a show he was thinking of putting together around his music, and involving various performance-oriented friends. That show never came to pass, but after years of false starts, Cassidy finally revived his music focus from back-burner exile and 10 days ago self-released his debut album, Little Boys and Dinosaurs. What happened next is straight out of the viral phenomenon playbook.

On Sunday afternoon, August 15th, Adam Lambert, longtime SkinGraft friend (he’s currently wearing a custom SkinGraft jacket on the American Idol tour, and sported numerous other SG pieces during the show’s run) tweeted to his followers: “My friend Cassidy just shot this great video… http://bit.ly/18FvaM.” Within days, the video shot up to over 36,000 views, and Little Boys and Dinosaurs, sans label, marketing push, or pr strategy, rose to #3 on the iTunes electronic chart, between LMFAO’s “Party Rock” and Imogen Heap’s “Ellipse.”  It didn’t hurt that the video was glam-rock pretty and sexually controversial, featuring some simulated sexual behavior, and a pair of undies slung Sports Illustrated-low. Within hours of Lambert’s tweet, a bonafide minor scandal had erupted over his linking the video, which was, by some contingent, considered inappropriate for his underage following. If you’re thinking this sort of outrage over music video explicitness seems strangely anachronistic in the post-Lil’ Kim / Britney Spears / Lady Gaga era, it should probably be mentioned that the dirty dancing in question here is exclusively male. In any case, the controversy only helped to generate further attention for the music, and by Thursday, Lyndsey Parker, was writing for Yahoo! Music’s The New Now blog:

At this point, Adam Lambert is pretty much like Oprah, in terms of his all-encompassing influence over his devoted fanbase. Just like any Oprah Book Club selection is certain to become a New York Times best-seller, in the pop music world there is perhaps no more ringing endorsement these days than a black-fingernailed thumbs up from the tastemaking Glamerican Idol.

So far the public response to Cassidy’s music, at least among diehard and very vocal Adam Lambert fans, has been hugely enthusiastic. Will record labels take notice? That remains to be seen, but if so, then Cassidy Haley may be the first artist to get signed out of American Idol without ever having appeared on the show.

If you’re a social media strategist, and your friend just so happens to become an overnight internet phenomenon, you’ve basically got no choice but to find the whole thing incredibly fascinating. On Tuesday, as Little Boys and Dinosaurs was climbing the chart, I got a call from Cassidy, and the question on his mind was, “What do I do now? What next?”

Which is a great question for any marketer in the digital age to think about as well.  All too often I think marketers have blinders on, criminally overusing the word “viral” (still!) in the frenzy for buzz and fans and word of mouth and all that. But what if you could get all of it overnight? What if all the promotional initiatives and exposure efforts paid off just like they were supposed to? Is that the extent of your strategy? Or would you be prepared for What Next?

My advice to Cassidy was to take his questions straight to his new-found fans; involve them directly in helping to shape and define the answers together, and keep the momentum going. And he did. The outpouring of ideas that came back to him from this nascent, yet incredibly dedicated, army included everything from ad hoc twitterstorms that got the attention of various media folks, to online community resources created by fans to connect to one another, and to Cassidy’s music. The troops even came up with a seriously cute name for themselves, Comets, (as in Haley’s).

Overnight, Cassidy was handed the sort of opportunity that many marketers and brands are tirelessly chasing after, and yet the most powerful move he made was the one AFTER that happened. He opened up to his fans and offered them the opportunity to be  directly involved with him in the creation of what comes next.

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Some choice shots from this weekend’s epic runway show. Images courtesy of Apparel News:

Skin.Graft Designers: Cassidy Haley, Katie Kay, & Jonny Cota:

(photo by: half a second)

And yes, I must admit I am quite proud of myself for having introduced Katie and Jonny to one another back in 2005. So tremendously proud of what my friends have created together!

Stargate Outfits:

Watching Hulu’s recommended shows scroll by, it suddenly dawned on me that the outfits that the cast of Startgate: Atlantis are wearing in the promo shot look incredibly familiar:

Particularly the leather jacket, second from left…

Reminded me a lot of a design my friends at Skin.Graft made a few years back, called the Darrah jacket:

Checking out other Stargate outfits…

…the jackets look a lot like designs from the newer Skin.Graft collection:

Oh, and then, of course, there’s the dreddy dude…

Who’s, like, a look-book unto himself of the de rigeur, reconstructed, burningman aesthetic…

I’ve been seeing the girls’ version of the style creep up in various ways before. Nice to see the guys’ fashion getting adopted too.

Moving on…

Russian Hats:

I first noticed this last Summer, in a spread in Vogue’s 2008 Supplement, “Fashion Rocks,” featuring Dhani Harrison and Sasha Pivovarova:

It’s not every day you come across an Alexander McQueen-ed version of the particular kind of hat that is one of the hallmarks of your childhood, so it definitely stood out. But Summer is not exactly fox-fur hat season, so I had to wait till winter hit to see this trend in full swing. At Lucent L’amour, a couple of weekends ago, I must have seen a dozen people sporting Russian hats. Since it was an outdoor music festival in the middle of February, it was definitely a practical accessory. Cavalli has been making Russian “folk”-inspired Jackets for years. These below are from Fall 2005:

By last Summer, it seems fashion designers from Dolce & Gabbana, to Anna Sui, to Temperley London had all taken their inspiration from traditional Russian costumes, and military Cossack outfits. In response to my joking that “Russian hats are the new Fedoras,” Katie Kay, one of the partners at Skin.Graft, who was just at the fashion trade-show, MAGIC, this past week, tweeted:

I’m wondering if this might be the beginning of a larger trend of Western adoption of traditional Russian styles. Perhaps it’s been long enough now since the collapse of the Soviet Union that the younger generations have been able to rediscover an authentic cultural heritage that was pretty much erased from the social radar during the USSR era. Now, as individual expression and fashionability supplant the last remnants of communist conformity, Russian folk styles may offer a hidden trove of aesthetic inspiration.

Will Russian Orthodox iconography, or traditional Finift Jewelry will be next?

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]]> http://social-creature.com/stargate-costumes-and-russian-hats/feed 1 http://social-creature.com/im-a-pc-and-a-human-being http://social-creature.com/im-a-pc-and-a-human-being#comments Tue, 23 Sep 2008 15:32:35 +0000 jenks http://social-creature.com/?p=464 Have you ever been in a meeting where everyone in the room is using a Mac except one person? Ever notice what happens when suddenly everyone starts to get on that person’s case about the fact that he’s the only one not on a Mac?

I have, and it kinda looked a little bit like this…

That’s a still from the latest ads developed by Crispin Porter & Bogusky in Microsoft’s new campaign to–essentially–regain control of their identity, and it’s a pretty accurate depiction of how I’ve seen that PC-in-a-room-full-of-Macs situation play out. (Clearly, it must not be an isolated incident). In the ad, when the diver flips the white board over, the other side reads, “And I’m Kinda Scared.”

Now, I’m a Mac now, but the computer I had before this one was a PC. I’m just as comfortable using either, and I’ve got Microsoft programs running on this computer right now. I could even get a Mac that comes with the option of running Windows, anyway, if I want, so even though I’m a Mac user, I clearly don’t see my identification with the brand in terms like this–

But many clearly do. And perhaps nothing has helped to articulate the contemporary Mac superiority complex quite like those Mac Vs. PC ads. In the iconic spots created by TBWA/Media Arts Lab, which began in 2006 and new iterations are still being developed now, a casually-dressed, attractive, 20-something guy introduces himself as “Hello, I’m a Mac…” while an older, slightly overweight guy, wearing glasses and a cheap lookin’ suit-and-tie combo introduces himself as “… And I’m a PC.” The two then act out little vignettes against a stark white background in which the capabilities and attributes of “Mac” and “PC” are compared. Often the spots end up presenting various legitimate PC shortcomings in an entertaining, glib way, but just as often the focus is on the two machine-characters’ personalities, and the feature comparison ends up being almost beside the point. Mac is always self-assured and easy-going. PC is resentful and awkward. The great success of these ads,

The subtext of these ads, which has also become the subtext of the Mac user community, is that this isn’t just a tool for enabling a certain kind of lifestyle, it’s a badge of it. A Mac isn’t just about helping you BE creative, it MEANS you are creative. A PC, on the other hand, means you are a stiff, unimaginative, frustrated tool, overly concerned with work, and incapable of doing anything interesting. At least not as good as a Mac can. Oh, and furthermore, if you’re  a PC user, then you may as well know that this is what other people are thinking about you, too.

Personally, I’ve always been completely impressed that Mac has been able to brand a conformist white box into a symbol of creative and individual expression. But the idea is that your white box gives you entry into a whole network of other creative individuals, (just like you), and it’s that community association that bestows identity. A good friend of mine, who is a fashion designer, belly-dancer, serial entrepreneur, and has more tattoos and crazy hairstyles than the majority of the creative class, is a dedicated PC, and one of the major reasons for her choice is that she finds the idea inherent in a Mac–that you need this thing in order to express that you’re “hip”–to be a huge turnoff. A Mac doesn’t just bestow hipness to its users, it kind of subsumes it from them too. Perhaps she’s wary of this kind of  accessory watering down or co-opting her own particular kind of hip. Either way, she says she feels like no one else has this line of thinking. It’s a turnoff  “Only only to me,” She says, “I think PCs are just fine, and a lot more bang for your buck,” but everyone else she knows seems to have no problem with this aspect of their Macs.

It’s to let people like her know that there’s more of their kind out there, and to establish that their computers can, in fact, represent their creative, dynamic, interesting identities, that CPB took the direction they did with the new Microsoft ads.

Here’s one. You should watch it before reading further:

I think what’s really interesting here is that the ads say NOTHING about the product, or the features, or anything technical whatsoever. The sole purpose of the ad is to explore the diversity of PC users. I’m trying to think of another example of an entity trying to redefine its own identity by working to undo the stereotype of its “fans,” and I can’t think of one. (Anyone got one?) It’s pretty intense.

In a post titled, “Huh. Those Mac Ads Aren’t As Funny Any More,” Michael Arrington wrote:

Those Microsoft commercials aren’t particularly engaging, and they don’t make me want to go out and buy a copy of Vista. But what they do is show lots of fascinating people saying that they use PCs. They highlight the fact that many people may be somewhat offended by the idea that they can’t be interesting or cool if they don’t use a Mac.

Suddenly, Apple looks a little elitist. I mean, they were elitist before, but in a way that made you want to be a part of the club. Now, they just seem a little snobby.

If that’s what Microsoft and their pushing clients to the edge advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky were aiming for, it’s brilliant.

According to the New York Times, CPB “Relishes efforts to transform perceived negatives into positives.” (See also announcing the onset of an “SUV Backlash” to help promote the US launch of the Mini Cooper–before any such backlash had yet begun at all, positioning the Mini’s uber-compactness as an alternative to the gas-guzzling hegemony.)

More from the New York Times:

Apple executives have been “using a lot of their money to de-position our brand and tell people what we stand for,” said David Webster, general manager for brand marketing at Microsoft in Redmond, Wash.

“They’ve made a caricature out of the PC,” he added, which was unacceptable because “you always want to own your own story.”

The campaign illustrates “a strong desire” among Microsoft managers “to take back that narrative,” Mr. Webster said, and “have a conversation about the real PC.”

The celebration of PC users is intended to show them “connected to this community,” added [Rob Reilly, partner and co-executive creative director at Crispin Porter], “of people who are creative, who are passionate.”

Every single person featured in this ad is somehow compelling and enigmatic. Perhaps it’s because they’re all so different. You have no idea who is coming next. They challenge not only the expectations of who a PC is, but the assumption that you’re supposed know everything about who someone is just based on the kind of computer brand they use. (Talk about “Think Different,” huh?) If the Mac community is “alternative,” the one depicted in the Microsoft ad is global. If the Mac community is elitist, this one is accepting. Beyond “creative and passionate,” this community has a real sense humanity. It’s worldly and smart and open-minded and profoundly diverse. It’s approachable and philosophical. A community that’s out to change the world, and enjoy the world; a community that’s what the world might look like if everyone in it got along. And regardless of whether you’re a Mac or a PC…what kind of progressive human being (not a human doing, or a human thinking) wouldn’t want to be a part of a community like that?

The next time I need a new computer, maybe it’ll be a Mac, and maybe it’ll be a PC, but either way, I find it comforting and heartening to know that this is the kind of community a company like Microsoft sees–and wants the rest of us to see–as its own ideal.