Fashion. Business. Reader is back 🚀
Anna Wintour's biography, Conde Nast no longer a magazine company and the future of fashion where content and commerce converge
Hi there! 👋
It has been a while since my last newsletter here, but it's not like I've stopped writing... to some degree. To be honest, I was so wrapped up in PR work, so each time it came to going through the news headlines, it was getting overwhelming and a bit scary (considering the past few months).
So rather than keeping up with the latest news, I started to dive more into the history of fashion. This ended up in an impressive book library, numerous visits to various museums and exhibitions, fashion-related and not (will share more on this in future editions) and just constantly feeding the mind through art, music, theatre and travel.
We’ve heard of ‘revenge travel’ and ‘revenge shopping’, but is ‘revenge museum/art gallery visit’ a thing? 😄 Btw I’m still bumped to have missed Chanel exhibition in Paris back in 2021, but good news is it will be coming to London in September 2023.
“Developing a creative eye or developing taste, I think that’s something that you have within you from a very early age but it is also something that you can develop through exposure to culture, to the arts, through reading, visiting museums, looking at what’s going on in the world around you.
Creative exposure, cultural exposure, I think [it] is so important to spend as much time on that as you possibly can” - Anna Wintour, a quote from “Anna: The Biography” by Amy Odell
Just the other day I finished reading the recently released biography of “the most powerful woman in fashion” and the longtime Vogue editor in chief among her many job titles, written by the fashion journalist and fellow Substack writer Amy Odell.
👗 Fun-fact: among the first gigs of the future fashion media icon Ms. Wintour were working retail at Biba Boutique and the Harrods and covering lingerie market for her first fashion assistant role at Harper’s Bazaar.
At times, fashion industry can feel as a superficial & frivolous, but it is actually a serious business. From mass-market fashion giants to luxury powerhouses, not to mention multi-level infrastructure of the fashion industry, including textile production, retailers, fashion media and other operations in between, it’s the industry that employs an estimated 70 mlm people globally and generates tremendous economic value. To have a female leader represent this industry is quite remarkable.
Bringing a pop culture moment into the mix, one couldn’t sum up the influence of fashion and media better than the caricature version of Anna portrayed by Meryl Streep with her infamous “blue sweater speech”:
A lot has changed since Anna’s early days at Conde Nast, which according to its current CEO is “no longer a magazine company”. The fashion media industry went through a big transformation from print to digital in the past two decades, with content and commerce continuously merging into shoppable anything from an online article to a social media post to a livestream.
The recent acquisition of Highsnobiety by German e-tailer Zalando and Ebay’s launch of dedicated live shopping platform are among recent examples of more blurring the lines between content and commerce to come. To add, as stated in BoF and McKinsey & Co’s “The State of Fashion 2022”, worldwide social commerce sales is expected to reach over $600 billion in the next 5 years.
Related reading: What Happens When Big Companies Buy Cool Ones
To keep it short and sweet, I’m ending this edition with a few interesting reads on TikTok and China, where live commerce trend has essentially originated from, and a US-based start-up turning a scene from “Clueless” into reality:
How to Keep Up With TikTok’s Lightning-Fast Trend Cycle (Business of Fashion)
Here’s what China’s e-commerce giants are telling us about the economy (CNBC)
How Shein became China’s ‘TikTok for e-commerce’ (TechNode)
This AI-Powered ‘Shop the Look’ Platform Is Driving a 4-times Increase in Product Discovery (WWD)
Summer is finally here! ☀️ With another heat wave expected in the next few days in Milan, I’ll be catching up on a giant pile of old fashion books recently scored at a charming bookshop in a comfort of my home with the AC on 🫠
📚Speaking of books, don’t miss Taschen annual summer book sale happening this weekend with something for everyone. Their book titles would make a lovely gift or addition to your home library. Here are some of my personal favorites out from my book collection (non-affiliate links):
Wishing you a great weekend ahead! 😃
Assiya