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.