Designer Soyon An Links With Baby Phat
This chick is all over. Pop, country, hip hop, if it's in the limelight, Sohon An is behind the scenes making people look good.Reading articles about licensing just drives home why this is not the industry for me. It's so convoluted. Like fine art or pretty much any creative endeavor today, the whole market has been pluralized. Everyones got a hand in 20 different cookie jars. In this world of corporation and liabilities, I can see why designers would want to have sort of multiple business identities, so that if one takes a hit, the others can still keep the money rolling in.
I can't decided if this has saved the fashion industry or destroyed it but clearly it has fractured it if nothing else. With the horizontal and vertical conglomerates, it's such a messy tangled web, most consumers are clueless. Where does one even begin to try to figure it out?
My experience in this byzantine business structure is more in the health food industry. In order to know who is who and what they are all doing you really have to be actively seeking out information all the time. For example, long time patrons of a company, say like Burt's Bees, family run business, gets bought by Clorox. The average American (granted probably doesn't care, but almost definitely) doesn't know that, they sure don't repackage it to say "now corporate!" People keep mindlessly buying the product that they think is "all-natural" "small business" etc, but really they are putting money into pockets of very not-healthy-for-the-planet people...
But between horizontal and vertical collaborations, licensing, multiple labels/price points/markets, my head is spinning. I know a lot more about designers and the history of fashion than I did 2 years ago, but I feel like I've barely chipped a snowflake off the tip of the iceberg. I can't help but wonder what a course like this will be like in 30 years. How will they keep it all straight? All the simultaneous things that are happening?
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