Some months later, I saw a beyond-epic 9-minute long video, called “The Apple Tree,” featuring VFX shots, action clips, and dance sequences from like 700 different movies in a mind-scrambling montage scored to The Glitch Mob‘s music. New York Magazine, which got a hold of the video in September, called it “intense,” and, indeed, if by the end of The Apple Tree you don’t experience the overwhelming need to get in your car and drive somewhere immediately with the volume up, the windows down, and the needle in the red the whole way, you’re probably dead. The first time I watched it I literally had to hit pause like every 30 seconds just to catch my breath. But more than simply an adrenalized ad for special effects, The Apple Tree video is really a piece of art, using montage not so much to tell a story but rather to relate sound to motion, each cut creating its own blast of synesthesia. Among the clips used in the video were a handful from the forthcoming Tron: Legacy sequel due out in December, which picks up where the classic 1982 movie left off.
And that’s when I got an idea… I brought this idea to The Glitch Mob, who got Khameleon808, the auteur behind the Apple Tree on board; we picked a track, Animus Vox, off their new album, Drink The Sea, and now, a few months later, I’m suuuuuper excited to announce this new piece of total fucking awesome!
A Tron mashup crafted by an unemployed movie fan made a big impression on Tron: Legacy producer Sean Bailey, who singled out the clip during a recent Los Angeles press conference.
While discussing Tron: Legacy’s viral-marketing campaign, Bailey saluted the trailer made by 31-year-old Josh Prescott. The DIY filmmaker took Daft Punk’s electronica as a stylistic point of departure for his own sequence of beauty shots culled from promotional trailers and music videos for the 3-D sci-fi sequel.
Prescott’s “Rerezzed” clip, which glides along on music by Los Angeles-based trio The Glitch Mob, caught the eye of Bailey and other Tron: Legacy filmmakers.
March 2, 2011 – The cat is out of the bag: Pitchfork reports Walt Disney Records will release a remix album of the Tron:Legacy soundtrack, Tron: Legacy R3CONFIGUR3D on April 5th. The first track on there is The Glitch Mob’s remix of “Derezzed.” In case you’re wondering what that’s gonna be like, I’ve heard it, and it sounds like what this looks like:
Above, is a poster for an animated Nickelodeon movie called Rango, starring Johnny Depp, coming out in 2011.
Here is a poster for a movie Johnny Depp made a decade ago:
The same cactuses in the background, the big bug-eye aviator shades and the big lizard bug-eyes, the horizontal, grimacy mouth, the psychedelically twisty neck, with the massively disproportionate head bobbling on top. But it’s the Hawaiian shirt that seals the deal. You just do not ACCIDENTALLY put Johnny Depp, as a lizard, in the Mojave desert with the same cactus in the background as on the Fear and Loathing poster…. in a HAWAIIAN shirt.
Here is what lizards look like in that other Johnny Depp movie in the Mojave desert.
But now there’s this:
.
Is it just me or does this shot from the trailer look….. like Bat Country?
A year ago I wrote a piece called “Your Lifestyle Is An Alternate Reality Game.” An ARG, for short, is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants’ ideas or actions. Lifestyle, I suggested, with its proscribed media content, its insider signifiers, its ever-evolving subcultural narrative, is the alternate reality game all of us in the modern world are already playing. Having grown up in the rave scene and then produced nightlife events and music festivals for a decade this similarity was instantly apparent. Since writing that post, I’ve actually seen pioneering ARG creators, Jordan Weisman and Sean Stewart, each, individually liken ARGs to a quintessential alternative culture / music festival experience: Woodstock. (Called it!)
This year, however, the new buzzword gaining popularity for this type of multi-platform narrative is “transmedia.” (On the schedule for the New York DIY Days conference a couple of months ago, the word “transmedia” appeared literally a dozen times in the descriptions for no less than 5 different sessions during the course of the 1-day event). And as the terminology becomes more encompassing — no longer strictly a gaming-specific thing — last year’s thesis needs an upgrade as well: In the digital age, transmedia isn’t just how we create lifestyle narratives, it’s how we experience the narrative of our lives. .
In 1985, a student at Bennington College named Bret Easton Ellis published what would become a best-selling debut novel called Less Than Zero. It’s a story told in first person by a narrator named Clay, home for Christmas break from a fictional New England liberal arts college, as he wafts through L.A.’s endlessly dissolute desert of affluence, parties, rampant drug use, meaningless sex, and progressively increasing depravity. The book was so insidious and disturbing that by 1987, just two years after its publication, it was turned into an inevitably much less insidious and disturbing movie starring Andrew McCarthy as Clay, Jami Gertz as his ex-girlfriend, Blair, and, notably, Robert Downey Jr. as Clay’s heroin-addicted best friend from high school, Julian, who’d turned to prostitution to pay off his drug debt. Now, 25 years and 5 novels (including The Rules of Attraction and American Psycho) later, Ellis’s newest book, Imperial Bedrooms, out June 15, catches up with Less Than Zero’s original cast of poster-children for morally vacant, excess-addled, existentially corrupted youth in present day, as they inhabit middle age. Once again, Clay is the narrator, once again, he’s just returned to Los Angeles after a semester-length absence, and the first thing Clay says — as classically laconic as his “People are afraid to merge on the freeways in Los Angeles” line that opened Less Than Zero two and a half decades earlier — is: “They had made a movie about us.”
The movie was based on a book written by someone we knew. The book was a simple thing about four weeks in the city we grew up in and for the most part was an accurate portrayal. It was labeled fiction but only a few details had been altered and our names weren’t changed and there was nothing in it that hadn’t happened….
[The author] wasn’t close to any of us… He was simply someone who floated through our lives and didn’t seem to care how flatly he perceived everyone or that he’d shared our secret failures with the world, showcasing the youthful indifference, the gleaming nihilism, glamorizing the horror of it all….
I remember my trepidation about the movie began on a warm October night three weeks prior to its theatrical release, in a screening room on the 20th Century Fox lot. I was sitting between Trent Burroughs and Julian, who wasn’t clean yet and kept biting his nails, squirming in the plush black chair with anticipation…. The movie was very different from the book in that there was nothing from the book in the movie. Despite everything — all the pain I felt, the betrayal — I couldn’t help but recognize a truth while sitting in that screening room. In the book everything about me had happened. The book was something I simply couldn’t disavow. The book was blunt and had an honesty about it, whereas the movie was just a beautiful lie. (It was also a bummer: very colorful and busy but also grim and expensive, and it didn’t recoup its cost when released that November.) In the movie I was played by an actor who actually looked more like me than the character the author portrayed in the book: I wasn’t blond, I wasn’t tan, and neither was the actor. I also suddenly became the movie’s moral compass, spouting AA jargon, castigating everyone’s drug use and trying to save Julian. (“I’ll sell my car,” I warn the actor playing Julian’s dealer. “Whatever it takes.”) This was slightly less true of the adaptation of Blair’s character, played by a girl who actually seemed like she belonged in our group — jittery, sexually available, easily wounded. Julian became the sentimentalized version of himself, acted by a talented, sad-faced clown, who has an affair with Blair and then realizes he has to let her go because I was his best bud. “Be good to her,” Julian tells Clay. “She really deserves it.” The sheer hypocrisy of this scene must have made the author blanch. Smiling secretly to myself with perverse satisfaction when the actor delivered that line, I then glanced at Blair in the darkness of the screening room.
As the movie glided across the giant screen, restlessness began to reverberate in the hushed auditorium. The audience — the book’s actual cast — quickly realized what had happened. The reason the movie dropped everything that made the novel real was because there was no way the parents who ran the studio would ever expose their children in the same black light the book did. The movie was begging for our sympathy whereas the book didn’t give a shit. And attitudes about drugs and sex had shifted quickly from 1985 to 1987 (and a regime change at the studio didn’t help) so the source material — surprisingly conservative despite its surface immorality — had to be reshaped. The best way to look at the movie was as modern eighties noir — the cinematography was breathtaking — and I sighed as it kept streaming forward…. But the thing I remember most about that screening in October twenty years ago was the moment Julian grasped my hand that had gone numb on the armrest separating our seats. He did this because in the book Julian Wells lived but in the movie’s new scenario he had to die. He had to be punished for all of his sins. That’s what the movie demanded. (Later, as a screenwriter, I learned it’s what all movies demanded.) When this scene occurred, in the last ten minutes, Julian looked at me in the darkness, stunned. “I died,” he whispered. “They killed me off.” I waited a beat before sighing, “But you’re still here.” Julian turned back to the screen and soon the movie ended, the credits rolling over the palm trees as I (improbably) take Blair back to my college while Roy Orbison wails a song about how life fades away.
The real Julian Wells didn’t die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the sound track. The real Julian Wells was murdered over twenty years later….
I’d seen what had happened to him in another — and very different — movie.
Transmedia, as USC media studies professor Henry Jenkins describes in his book, Convergence Culture, is storytelling that spans across multiple forms of media, with each element expanding the viewer’s understanding of the story world and creating a new “entry point” through which to become immersed in it. Beyond Ellis’s sheer meta-mindfuckery (and the full, unabridged intro is even moreso), by incorporating the existence of the Less Than Zero movie into Imperial Bedrooms — even detailing the various characters’ reactions to its sanitized inconsistencies with the original novel — he’s effectively turned the film into something other than just the compromised adaptation it’s been for the past 23 years. It’s now a legitimate, if suitably ironic, “entry point” into the Less Than Zero world.
A couple of weeks ago, Jenkins wrote a post called “He-Man and the Masters of Transmedia,” about another fictional world spawned from the 80’s which may have had a lasting affect on my generation:
In many ways, Masters of the Universe was already a transmedia story, at least as much as the technology of the day would allow. He-Man not only appeared in the Filmation-produced cartoons but his story was extended into the mini comic books which came with each action figure, on the collector cards and sticker books and coloring books and kids books.
Once they were removed from their packages, these toys could be mixed and matched to create new kinds of stories….Kids would move from re-performing favorite stories or ritualizing conventional elements from the series to breaking with conventions and creating their own narratives.
I never understood the parents who feared such toys would stifle my son’s imagination because what I observed was very much the opposite – a child learning to appropriate and remix the materials of his culture.
When I speak to the 20 and 30 somethings who are leading the charge for transmedia storytelling, many of them have stories of childhood spent immersed in Dungeons and Dragons or Star Wars, playing with action figures or other franchise related toys, and my own suspicion has always been that such experiences shaped how they thought about stories.
From the beginning, they understood stories less in terms of plots than in terms of clusters of characters and in terms of world building. From the beginning they thought of stories as extending from the screen across platforms and into the physical realm.”
It’s why the website for Imperial Bedrooms has a playlist of songs “from the book” featuring tracks by Randy Newton, Bat for Lashes, Duran Duran, The Fray, Bruce Springsteen, and others — music has always been a key element in Ellis’s fiction: Less Than Zero got its title from an Elvis Costello track, as does its sequel, and there are constant references to songs throughout his novels, cueing a soundtrack in your mind as you’re reading the story. (In fact, all of Ellis’s books now have playlists.) It’s why the Los Angeles Magazine website has an interactive Google map of the locations featured in Imperial Bedrooms and it’s accompanied by Clay’s guide, in his own words, to these various haunts. It’s why Clay has ended up on Facebook and his profile photo — still bearing a decided resemblance to Andrew McCarthy — is also included with his city guide. Here, for instance, is Clay’s take on Hollywood Forever Cemetery:
The most beautiful cemetery in Los Angeles. It’s behind the Paramount lot and it can be disorienting to walk off Gower Avenue into this lush, paradisiacal place. I remember going to movies there during the summer; Psycho, The Muppet Movie, Carrie. I was there last for a funeral where the only person I talked to was Blair.
Meanwhile, in a different genre section of the bookstore, there’s yet another author blurring the lines between fiction, reality, media formats, you know, the ushe: Richard Castle.
OK, so, technically he’s a TV character played by Nathan Fillion on the ABC show, Castle, which follows the best-selling mystery writer and his unlikely partner, a tough, sexy, NYPD detective named Kate Beckett, as they solve Manhattan murders. The show’s first season story-arc saw the release of Heat Wave, Castle’s new novel about (you know this) a tough, sexy, NYPD homicide detective named Nikki Heat, which also happens to be an actual Hyperion book.
Richard Castle is the author of numerous bestsellers, including the critically acclaimed Derrick Storm series. His first novel, In a Hail of Bullets, published while he was still in college, received the Nom DePlume Society’s prestigious Tom Straw Award for Mystery Literature. Castle currently lives in Manhattan with his daughter and mother, both of whom infuse his life with humor and inspiration.
But Castle isn’t just on TV and bookshelves. Like any 21st century writer who knows what’s up, he’s also on Twitter —
Imperial Bedrooms wasn’t designed to deliberately be a “transmedia narrative” — it’s just a novel, after all — but that doesn’t matter. It’s inevitable. Our lives are inundated with the use of digital platforms and social applications. We move from medium to medium effortlessly, and we expect the content and narratives we consume to travel the same way. Any world or characters we find compelling already exist beyond their original medium. It’s 2010. All media is transmedia. Deal with it. Rock ‘n roll.
Castle has obviously been designed as a deliberate transmedia narrative, but Imperial Bedrooms wasn’t — it’s just a novel. Either way, it’s inevitable. The human brain has a natural affinity for narrative construction, and it’s incredibly channel agnostic. Once upon a time, the Ancient Greeks heard thunder and believed it to be the sound of Zeus’s thunderbolt. Today, our media formats are just more sophisticated. Our lives are inundated by digital technology, content platforms, network applications — it’s not narratives that travel trans-media: we do. And we bring the stories along for the ride. It’s 2010. All media is transmedia. Deal with it. Rock ‘n’ roll.
Your computer doesn’t care what the 19th century production mechanism for producing your entertainment was. Record, book, it doesn’t care. It’s all 1’s and 0’s to your computer. Video, music, pictures, text, and let’s not stop there, let’s include other things that you can now incorporate as part of your entertainment, like web-pages or searches or email or phone calls directly to your audience. Here’s a simple mnemonic: any way that human-kind has invented to lie to one another should be part of your storytelling toolkit.
But fictional narratives aren’t what this toolkit is strictly limited to. As tech blogger Robert Scoble writes in his recent post, “The ‘like, er, lie’ economy“:
The other day I found myself over at Yelp.com clicking “like” on a bunch of Half Moon Bay restaurants. After a while I noticed that I was only clicking “like” on restaurants that were cool, hip, high end, or had extraordinary experiences.
That’s cool. I’m sure you’re doing the same thing.
But then I started noticing that I wasn’t behaving with integrity. What I was presenting to you wasn’t reality.
See, I like McDonalds and Subway. But I wasn’t clicking like on those. Why not?
Because we want to present ourselves to other people the way we would like to have other people perceive us as.
I’d rather be seen as someone who eats salad at Pasta Moon than someone who eats a Big Mac at McDonalds.
This is the problem with likes and other explicit sharing systems. We lie and we lie our asses off.
We are all storytellers now, all the authors of our own life stories (no big surprise, we’re taking some “creative liberties”). The array of media tools through which to “present ourselves” is already ubiquitous, and constantly expanding. Social networks, personal blogs, microblogs, digital cameras, location-based social applications — for some reason Time Magazine singled out Foursquare as one of the 50 Worst Inventions for being “just another tool tapping into a generation of narcissism,” as if, inexplicably, it’s particularly worse than the cesspools of self-focus that are Facebook or Myspace. With every status update and photo upload and location check-in and “like” we click, we are producing an endless stream of new “entry points” into our personal narratives. And, in turn, like Ellis’s, aptly named, Clay, we are all shaped by the resultant media representations of our selves. In the digital age, transmedia isn’t simply the default for how we experience entertainment, it is how we experience the story of our lives.
In case you happen to have missed it, Tropicana changed the design on their cartons last month, and in the process discovered that “Some Buyers Are Passionate About Packaging,” as Stuart Elliott writes in the New York Times:
PepsiCo is bowing to public demand and scrapping the changes made to a flagship product, Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice. Redesigned packaging that was introduced in early January is being discontinued, executives plan to announce on Monday, and the previous version will be brought back in the next month.
Also returning will be the longtime Tropicana brand symbol, an orange from which a straw protrudes. The symbol, meant to evoke fresh taste, had been supplanted on the new packages by a glass of orange juice.
The about-face comes after consumers complained about the makeover in letters, e-mail messages and telephone calls and clamored for a return of the original look.
Some of those commenting described the new packaging as “ugly” or “stupid,” and resembling “a generic bargain brand” or a “store brand.”
“Do any of these package-design people actually shop for orange juice?” the writer of one e-mail message asked rhetorically. “Because I do, and the new cartons stink.”
Others described the redesign as making it more difficult to distinguish among the varieties of Tropicana or differentiate Tropicana from other orange juices.
Such attention is becoming increasingly common as interactive technologies enable consumers to rapidly convey opinions to marketers.
It was not the volume of the outcries that led to the corporate change of heart, Mr. Campbell, [president at Tropicana North America in Chicago] said, because “it was a fraction of a percent of the people who buy the product.”
Rather, the criticism is being heeded because it came, Mr. Campbell said in a telephone interview on Friday, from some of “our most loyal consumers.”
“We underestimated the deep emotional bond” they had with the original packaging, he added. “Those consumers are very important to us, so we responded…. What we didn’t get was the passion this very loyal small group of consumers have. That wasn’t something that came out in the research.”
What has essentially happened here is that the ultimate fallout from the responses of a “very loyal small group of consumers” has exponentially magnified the exposure for what was originally just your run-of-the-mill packaging redesign:
The campaign, which carries the theme “Squeeze it’s a natural,” was created by Arnell in New York, part of the Omnicom Group. Arnell also created the new version of the Tropicana packaging.
“Tropicana is doing exactly what they should be doing,” Peter Arnell, chairman and chief creative officer at Arnell, said in a separate telephone interview on Friday.
“I’m incredibly surprised by the reaction,” he added, referring to the complaints about his agency’s design work, but “I’m glad Tropicana is getting this kind of attention.”
That’s the thing. Because of this vocal minority of avid Tropicana fans the attention of a far wider audience has been captured. Tropicana has now made a bigger splash by announcing they will be changing the packaging design back, than they did by changing it in the first place. Suddenly the avid Tropicana-fan minority has company.
Suddenly a lot more of us are now talking about orange juice. Thinking about orange juice! And thinking about it in a way that we never did before. After all, for the vast majority of us, just how different is one OJ brand from another? It’s not exactly a lifestyle product category, is it? (The whole organic argument aside for the moment, as it isn’t really specific to orange juice in particular so much as to grocery purchases in general). Do most of us really think about purchasing Tropicana vs. Florida’s Natural vs. Minute Maid because one brand is more relevant to our identity than the others? Unlikely.
So after enjoying its moment of unique distinction, Tropicana is now planning to scrap the new packaging and bring back the old familiar design so that the small loyal group who asked for it can be appeased, and all the rest of us can go back to not caring about orange juice.
But what if you could do something different?
What if discovering that your brand has more deeply passionate consumers than you’d imagined, and being open to to their input and responding to their concerns is just one part of the new marketing equation? What if the other part is understanding when you have an opportunity to get people really engaged. And not just engaged in giving you feedback, but engaged in helping to develop the brand’s identity itself. What if a non-lifestyle product category suddenly had the opportunity to stake out a piece of the cultural landscape? After all, Tropicana spent $35 million on the “Squeeze” campaign Arnell developed, which it now has to partially undo. What other direction could future advertising money be invested towards?
Having worked with various music festivals, I’ve consulted on and helped execute a number of “Battle of the Bands” contests. A proto-“User Generated Content” initiative, it’s always exceedingly popular. Different music acts submit tracks, or sometimes videos, competing for a chance to perform at the festival. This kind of initiative is most effective when combined with a voting aspect, so that it can extend beyond just the music acts, and actually get greater swaths of fans to participate in the process of selecting the winner to be added to the festival lineup.
In a more beverage-oriented variation on this theme, there’s last year’s “DEWmocracy” campaign, which allowed fans to vote on the new flavors for Mountain Dew (incidentally, also owned by PepsiCo), including the product packaging:
According to the PepsiCo press release, “DEWmocracy is the first-ever interactive, story-based online game that will result in a consumer-generated beverage innovation.” The campaign, which consisted of several phases, involved the launch of a website with a massive multi-player game. Once users created a profile they could go into the game’s 7 “worlds,” earning points and selecting different attributes for their ideal Mountain Dew beverage–i.e. flavor, “boost”, color, name, logo design, and so on. On top of all of this, the game/campaign had quite the storyline. As BevReview explains:
Pepsi and ad agency WhittmanHart Interactive tapped into actor/director Forest Whitaker to help craft the storyline. The entire adventure is setup up via a 3 minute short film that evokes overtones of Big Brother and overbearing governmental/corporate control. This has resulted in a loss of creativity….As is the plotline in most of these types of stories, a “chosen one” rises up to rebel against this oppression. Here’s the product twist… he seeks an elixir that will bring creativity and “restore the soul of mankind.” Now if you move beyond the irony that PepsiCo is a huge multinational conglomerate and that Mountain Dew is a top 5 selling soft drink found pretty much everywhere, you can see the somewhat unique spin this campaign possesses.
Not that I’m suggesting something this over-the-top is really appropriate for orange juice, necessarily, but the DEWmocracy site did reportedly have over 700,000 unique visitors, with 200,000 registered users participating in the first phase of the game. And that’s when they had to stir up consumer interest in engaging with the process of defining a brand direction for the Mountain Dew brand from scratch. Tropicana’s already got that one in the bag.
So what could you do if you were Tropicana?
Now that there’s already quite the buzz about Tropicana’s openness to fan-feedback in general, and about its packaging design in particular, why not create a platform for people to submit their design ideas? Yes, ok, clearly they discovered that people are deeply connected to the original design, but that is in response to just one other, radically departing, yet not particularly dynamic option. How might Tropicana lovers re-envision what that OJ carton could look like given the chance? It could just be a fun exercise in creativity, but then why not consider the possibility that the new design direction could emerge from the fans? Perhaps some new designs would remix the beloved orange-with-a-straw-poking-out image, but put a new spin on it with additional design elements or layers. Perhaps others would reinterpret the iconic image in totally new ways. Maybe others would find new ways to recreate the Tropicana logo in an unexpected style. Who knows?
What is definitely certain is that a small group of avid Tropicana fans clearly have deeply feelings about the brand and its design, and that a whole lot greater audience now cares that Tropicana cares about their input. So why stop the train there? Why not see how far it can go? In fact, why pick just one new design? How about different winning carton designs printed in “limited editions”? If it’s art, suddenly there’s a WHOLE new reason for choosing one OJ brand over another. In that case, why not deliberately set out to discover and promote emerging artists? Giving them their first break of mass exposure through orange juice cartons in grocery stores across the country. Nike’s doing it. So has Mountain Dew, for that matter. Suddenly it’s not just about a “campaign,” it’s an opportunity to create culture.
It’s like that scene in the Mad Men pilot episode where Don Draper suddenly realizes that if all the cigarette companies are facing the same limitations on what claims they can make in their advertising, then it’s “The greatest advertising opportunity since the invention of cereal.” When you’ve got a bunch of pretty much identical companies, making a pretty much identical product–in this case, OJ–you can do anything you want to create distinction. The possibilities for what you could do are pretty limitless, if you were Tropicana.
NOTE: These two items are actually unrelated, I just figured I’d kill two fashion birds with one post.
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 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?