Digital Hive: Making sense of the fashion world

What we're reading for inspiration

Gerald Zaltman: How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market
We heart Jerry. His groundbreaking methods reveal the true drivers of customer behavior. You'll never be satisfied with a focus group again. (*****)
Ben McConnell: Citizen Marketers: When People Are the Message
Could we heart this book (and its authors) more? NO. Essential reading for anyone in marketing in 2007.
Martha Barletta: Marketing to Women: How to Understand, Reach, and Increase Your Share of the World's Largest Market Segment
Fantastic description of the biological drivers of the differences between how men and women think and behave.
Radu Stern: Against Fashion: Clothing as Art, 1850-1930
Fascinating description of how fashion expressed underlying social values and tensions. Wonderful visual history of fashion in the western world 1850-1930.
Eric Ericson: Design for Impact: Fifty Years of Airline Safety Cards
A fascinating visual history of how graphic designers have tried to equip airline passengers for disaster
Charles Yang: The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World
Fascinating description of how humans learn language skills.
Sina Najafi: Cabinet 22: Insecurity (Art and Culture)
Cabinet magazine (it's a quarterly) is a provocative roundup of interesting cultural phenomena
Ron Galella: Disco Years
A larger than life homage to the personalities and habits of Studio 54's most infamous patrons. A fascinating document of American culture's excess and quest for self expression.
Adam Morgan: The Pirate Inside: Building a Challenger Brand Culture Within Yourself and Your Organization
What can we say, we heart Adam Morgan. A primer on how to blow up the old push marketing approach to brand and substitute a customer-driven "listening" approach.
Bruce Sterling: Shaping Things
A manifesto for the future of design, impeccably crafted by Bruce Sterling and ehnahced by the delicately emphatic graphic intelligence of Lorraine Wild.

March 08, 2008

Making sense of the fashion world

Are you as confused as I am about what fashion is all about? Leave it to the WSJ to plot it all on a 2x2 matrix. Check out the WSJ.com's interactive graphic (reg. req'd.) evaluating fashion week's recent looks (still shot above).

A simple way to tease an interesting story out of a category that's sometimes a challenge to make sense from.

A build for next tiime: integrate more of a POV - make one of the axes "must buy" vs. "must avoid" so readers can just print this thing out and take to store and know what to try on. Now that's marketing as a service!

I figured a fashion-oriented posting from Milan would make sense. For you fashionistas out there here are some "latest spring looks" from Milan's shop windows (click to enlarge).