Nice to get a shout-out from Murray Bevan in his op–ed at Fashionz, as he ponders the New Zealand fashion and beauty PR industry. He asked, referring to an article I wrote about him:
In a profession that should really be invisible, why was it that he wanted to profile me: a 20-something-year-old guy who was representing some of the least known fashion labels in New Zealand?
Pretty easy. Murray was bloody good at his job, and it’s our role, I feel, to provide coverage based on merit.
And those least known labels he represented became pretty well known.
While Queen Olivia III’s The Cat Operator’s Manual is the book of the season (as proclaimed by us), there is another that has been hitting the best seller lists, from another New Zealander. Former Facebook exec Sarah Wynn-Williams’s Careless People is on our reading list, too, and so far it’s off to a heck of a start: a shark attack that almost kills Wynn-Williams when she was 13.
Kiwis will be familiar with her sister Ruth, who used to appear on the TV news.
Meta has done an exceptional job of promoting Careless People, and it was on the strength of their injunction-seeking fear that we purchased our copy. As usual, in desperation they attack the messenger and not the substance of the message, i.e. what the world already knows. From what I can tell so far, everything I’ve been going on about concerning Facebook was right on the money, and Wynn-Williams confirms this, having had a front-row seat to a lot of the inner workings.
Meta may have muzzled Wynn-Williams for now but they have driven up demand for her book, and consequently her earnings, dramatically. Jeff Bezos has done rather well out of it, too, but Amazon, hopefully, will be the subject of another exposé before long.
The current Autocade Year of Cars, a sister publication to Lucire, already noted—despite the November 2024 publication date—how the US car industry was no longer in sync with the rest of the world. It also devoted a substantial amount of pages to the Chinese car industry, in particular its luxury brands.
Cars have interested me from a trend point of view as much as design, and here in Lucire I drew a parallel between large pillars on cars and recessions at the turn of the decade. It’s not just that the pillars are large, the designs had also become gaudy. Which equates to running out of innovative ideas and trying to find ornamental ways of covering for them. It’s almost a desperation.
I was proven right. As the 1970s unfolded, the US car industry was the one that was losing its sheen, and cars exhibited those over-ornamented traits that made them look distasteful. What Detroit turned out was out of sync with the rest of the world, and the US car industry spent the remainder of the 1970s trying to get itself back on track, including fuel-saving, modernist, compact models with front-wheel drive. In other words, what most people realized they really wanted when petrol prices started shooting up, and since Japan, Inc. had compacts, Nissan, Toyota et al. got rich.
Thanks to the might of the world’s largest car makers, GM and Ford, the US got there by the end of the decade with far more rational vehicles.
But as Lee Iacocca pointed out in his autobiography, Ford’s big cars were still selling. And since big cars made big profits, it was in the US Big Three’s (as it then was) interests to sell more of them.
There are obvious parallels with SUVs and trucks that the US companies make and peddle, but if recessionary winds bite, the US consumer will begin to question the necessity of big vehicles again. Many of them already do, wishing there were decent Chinese EVs they could buy.
This time, GM and Ford aren’t the world’s biggest car makers. They are reduced in size and capability.
As a result, they are looking less relevant on the global scene.
That was all before the US president began talking about tariffs and having his people systematically weaken the country.
The car industry has always been a harbinger of wider happenings.
Joan Westenberg, in her latest newsletter, notes that Japan, South Korea and China have held a summit, putting aside past differences and looking at a future world order without the US’s influence.
East Asians have a keen sense of history and they have witnessed how régimes fall. It didn’t take long for the Soviet Union to collapse, in living memory for the ministers gathered at the summit.
This does impact on fashion, too, as naturally the centre of coverage also shifts eastward.
We will, of course, still have plenty of US news and interviews with US designers, but if they aren’t in a country that encourages business growth (or one where people are finding it so difficult to make ends meet that don’t even start up), then there will be fewer stories coming from there.
As Westenberg believes new alliances are being formed around the world, so are new press networks for the many labels that are emerging because of the encouragement of their governments. We have seen a rise in fashion, beauty, lifestyle and travel stories from China and the Gulf.
English might still hang on as an international lingua franca so we are in a fortunate position there—but Lucire has already proved that it can work in Romanian, Arabic and French, in case being Anglophone suddenly loses its appeal.
Long before it was apparent to most of the world, my father talked of the Chinese century.
Whether you agree with their political system or not, that is fast coming into focus.
Jack Yan is founder and publisher of Lucire.
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