Wednesday, September 08, 2004

Waiting for fabulous things

Today is the first day of New York Fashion Week, when the world's fashion industry descends on Bryant Park for a sleepless round of shows, parties and gossip. The magazine industry loves it, of course, with the September issue of Vogue setting a record for the largest monthly consumer magazine ever. (It has 648 ad pages, and 832 pages altogether.)

This week, however, the New Yorker has decided not to do a fashion issue – maybe ad buyers have worked out that fashionistas don't read. But two years ago it did, with a 8,900-word profile of Puff Daddy by Michael Specter. Hard-hitting journalism this was not:

Sean John, the clothing company he started three years ago, has emerged as one of the best-selling--and most highly regarded--men's lines in America. Combs's runway show in New York last fall met with praise from even the most skeptical fashion professionals. "It was better than anything in Europe," Kim Hastreiter, the editor of Paper, the downtown fashion magazine, told me. "It was perfectly presented, perfectly original American fashion."
One day while I was in Paris, I ran into Richard Buckley, who is the editor of Vogue Hommes International. "I just got an e-mail from this writer who asked me who I thought mattered in men's clothes these days," Buckley told me. "I said the only man who is doing anything important is Puff Daddy. Right now, he is all we got."

The idea behind Sean John was great. As any visitor to the USA knows, men here are not well dressed. Most of the time they're in jeans and t-shirts, or maybe short-sleeved polo shirts; menswear is chosen for comfort and value, and is often bought at Wal-Mart. When men do dress up, in a suit and shirt and tie, the suit is likely to be a nasty $199 thing, and the tie polyester. With Sean John, the idea, as his designer said in the Specter article, was to target "a man who aspires to wear Gucci one day and Prada one day and to be able to afford the custom Zegna suits" – and give him quality clothes at a price within the bounds of possibility.

The entire fashion industry seemed to be on board: Sean John suits, when they got sent down the catwalk, had a kind of Dolce & Gabbana edge to them, a stylishness which has long been absent from US menswear. Frankly, I wanted one. But the two New York Sean John shops which were meant to materialise in 2003 never happened, and, as far as I could work out, there wasn't a single retail outlet on planet earth where these things were actually available for sale. (Trust me: I looked quite hard.)

Finally, this week, a Sean John store finally opened in New York – right on Bryant Park, actually – just in time for Fashion Week. I popped in there yesterday, and, surprise surprise – no suits. "They're coming in October," a salesman told me. But I'm not holding my breath. A similar state of affairs obtains with the long-rumoured Ozwald Boateng store in New York: we've been hearing about it for years, but we still don't seem to be any closer to actually seeing it.

We don't, despite appearances, actually live in a world of instant gratification. In fact, we live in a world of advance hype, where movies are advertised more before they come out than afterwards, where magazines are more interested in the future than in the present, where many items, especially in the world of technology, have an aura of obsolescence even on the day they're released.

Techology-related products and services are often, in fact, the worst offenders: whether it be wireless number portability or G5 Xserves, we're often waiting forever for things to come along.

It's now been well over two years, for instance, since Samsung announced its SGH-i500, a GSM flip-phone running the Palm operating system. This was something I was immediately attracted to – I'd love to be able to combine my phone and Palm Pilot in one device, and be able to run my favourite Palm application, Vindigo, on it. But no dice: it's since transmogrified into the i505, the i530 and the i550, but not one of them has yet actually come to market. I'm probably going to just give in and get a Treo 650 instead, even though I really don't want all the email functionality, full qwerty keyboard, and the rest. Although I do have to note that the Treo 600, too, took forever to come out in a GSM version: for some reason, GSM Palm phones always seem to be horribly delayed.

It's reached the point, now, where companies are actually telling people not to get excited about forthcoming innovations. After Newsweek reported that Tivo was going to team up with Netflix to offer, essentially, movies on demand, both companies went into rapid-rebuttal mode:

Netflix spokeswoman Lynn Brinton said there was no formal relationship between her company and TiVo, nor was there a timeline to form one. TiVo spokeswoman Kathryn Kelly told Bloomberg News that the company would not offer a movie download service for at least a year.

Broadband is one of the areas where people get very excited about what might happen in the future. Om Malik greatly understates the reality when he says that "venture capitalists have put a value of $867 per customer" on Vonage – he gets that figure by dividing Vonage's $208 million in total VC funding by its 240,000 customers. In fact, although we have no idea what kind of valuation the VCs bought in at with their latest $105 million investment, I can guarantee you that it's a lot more than $208 million.

On the broader question, however, Om is right: Vonage is overpriced – and so are Netflix and Tivo, if investors are buying them on the basis of movie delivery over broadband pipes. Vonage and Netflix and Tivo are all small startups with bright ideas who do what they do better than anybody else. But put them up against AT&T, Wal-Mart and Time Warner, respectively, and they look like complete underdogs, their first-mover advantage notwithstanding. The barriers to entry in all of their businesses are far too low to justify high valuations on these companies – the best they can hope for is that they get bought out as a strategic investment by a giant like Microsoft.

Broadband has enabled lots of great technologies, of which VoIP is only one. I'm far from convinced, however, that anybody's going to make any money off it. The bandwidth itself has already been commoditised, as have wireless router technology and digital video recorders. Once the movie industry comes up with some kind of DRM system for downloadable films, multiple sources will offer that, too, and Apple won't be out in front like it is with music. (How long Apple will keep its pole position is also unknown, now that Microsoft has entered the fray.) While I love my broadband technologies, and wouldn't dream of giving up my Vonage phone (a recent 113-minute phone call to Argentina cost me just $5.65), I equally wouldn't dream of investing in any of these companies. The time between now and profitability is likely to make the wait for a nice affordable suit seem positively Lilliputian.

Posted by Felix at 15:24 EST

Comments

Vindigo is available on multiple GSM phones as a java application, if you can't swallow the hardware upgrade.

Why, we even have this handy form to help you find it: http://www.vindigostudios.com/products/howtoget.jsp

And Vindigo loves you back.

Posted by: morland at 16:13 EST, September 08, 2004

Diddy I am proud of your accomplishments, however I am angry and ashamed as a Black person about your behavior. You hosted the recent Video Award Show and you could not have been more pompous and arrogrant you also promised not to use foul language but you were bleeped several times. What a shamed . I frankly thought that there were too many rappers and as usual there was violence. When will this end. You rappers have a responsability to the young men in the Black communtiy. Since far too many of these young men
are fatherless you guys become their example. The vulgar lyrics the vile and out-of-order behavior and the glorification of violence all receips of distruction. I hope that you rappers could get togehter and make a sincere attemp to reach some of these kids. You will not reach all but I can assure that you will get to some of them. I remember when Nelson Mandela was set free some of his fist words to the nation, his people and the world was to thow your guns into the sea. Shame on you rappers. You all should lean some humility. Because you all never had money does'nt mean that you should be so austentatious. And yes last but not least I wish that rappers(when they win an award) would stop making a mockery of God they are always thanking God but packing a gun what fools.

Posted by: linda rogers at 15:21 EST, August 30, 2005

Diddy I am proud of your accomplishments, however I am angry and ashamed as a Black person about your behavior. You hosted the recent Video Award Show and you could not have been more pompous and arrogrant you also promised not to use foul language but you were bleeped several times. What a shamed . I frankly thought that there were too many rappers and as usual there was violence. When will this end. You rappers have a responsability to the young men in the Black communtiy. Since far too many of these young men
are fatherless you guys become their example. The vulgar lyrics the vile and out-of-order behavior and the glorification of violence all receips of distruction. I hope that you rappers could get togehter and make a sincere attemp to reach some of these kids. You will not reach all but I can assure that you will get to some of them. I remember when Nelson Mandela was set free some of his fist words to the nation, his people and the world was to thow your guns into the sea. Shame on you rappers. You all should lean some humility. Because you all never had money does'nt mean that you should be so austentatious. And yes last but not least I wish that rappers(when they win an award) would stop making a mockery of God they are always thanking God but packing a gun what fools.

Posted by: linda rogers at 15:26 EST, August 30, 2005

Waiting for fabulous things

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