France & the Burberry Cycle

I work in an environment where the sales of clothing are analysed to the nth degree and sales predictions are made with an eye on the smallest fraction of a percentage point. Obviously, this is intricate work and due heed needs to be taken of the crystal ball gazers who seek to work out (or, perhaps, dictate) what people will deem to be fashionable 18 months into the future.

With all of this educated and finely-tuned prediction going on and with all of the vast quantities of thousands of different items of clothing being ordered by the company to satisfy the predicted demand for them, it’s hard to imagine managing the earthquake which happened under the Burberry company in recent years.

Burberry came into being just over 150 years ago and, once established, became synonymous with high quality, practical and stylish outdoor wear, favoured by the well-to-do, all the way “up” to the monarchy. The now famous check or tartan-style pattern started off as just a lining standard for trench coats in the 1920s but, over the following 40 years or so, it gradually fought its way onto the outside, first onto umbrellas, scarves and luggage and, eventually, onto…. well, pretty much everything. Image and popularity grew hand in hand for well over one hundred years from the company’s founding and I can easily imagine the executives of the 1970s viewing the demand curves of previous years, knowing full well who their clientele were and ordering yarns, dyes, treatments, machinery, manpower and whatnot with a certain air of certainty that their predictions for “next year” would turn out to be very close to the eventual reality. Possibly 1 or 2 percent out, one way or the other.

Then, of course, the earthquake. People of a certain mentality began, through wheeling and dealing or market trading or football management, to acquire a wealth that people of that ilk could only previously see from a distance in the wardrobes and jewellery boxes of the silver spooners and the university-educated, suburb-dwelling financiers and their wives.

These newly-affluent people knew that they could never be high class. They didn’t have anything in their armoury to achieve that status but then, as now, they had the only thing it took to allow them to look high class. Money.

Houses with mock-ancient Greek carriage lamps outside, swimming pools in the shape of a roll of carpet (in recognition of the source of one’s wealth) and pink Cadillacs are all well and good when you want to show the World how high you’ve soared but these things can’t follow you everywhere. Jewellery can. Clothing can.

So, after a short hunt for the right things to be seen wearing, the rules became clear to these ignoramuses. If a small gold ring on a finger demonstrated beauty, class, rarity, delicacy and a sense of one’s being, in some way, “select”, then it stood to reason that 16 gold rings, distributed amongst 10 fingers and thumbs must surely be 16 times as beautiful, classy, rare, delicate and select a manifestation. You and I, of course, see something far removed from “classy” when we see those fingers.

Similarly, if a distinctive, expensive, “upper-class” scarf demonstrated one’s having hauled oneself up the social scale by one or two layers, then dressing oneself from head to toe in such distinctive and expensive garb must surely mean that one is viewed as having raised oneself higher still. Again, of course, you and I see this in what might be described as inverse proportion but, to the “hard of thinking”, there’s no irony, no pathetic cry for acceptance to be heard, no inanely transparent attempts to be something more than is possible are being made.

Clearly, as far as the clothing was concerned, the Burberry range fit the bill perfectly. Expensive and distinctive, it was the perfect choice and, probably after a period of foiled analyses and abject shock, the good people of Burberry, seeing their numbers soar for the unlikeliest of reasons, appear to have opted to swallow their pride and to bask in the figures. This gave rise to little gems like the Burberry baseball cap and such like – items which the founder and the original core clientele would never have recognised and would never have been seen dead wearing. After this, the law of the jungle dictated that those oiks who had the money to "dress posh" began to be emulated by countless hordes of dross who had neither the brains nor the money to make an independent wave on the social seismometer and the inevitable result was that, just as the "I now have money but no brains" team emulated the upper classes, the "I have neither money nor brains" team began to emulate the former and, of course, this World is chock full of people with neither brains nor money. With neither class nor intellect. With neither decorum nor self-awareness. The result? Thousands upon thousands of sales for our friends at Burberry but at the price of the assassination of their hard-won image and, worse, the fact that hordes of under-achievers now wanted to be seen wearing things they couldn't afford led to another group of scum, namely forgers, bridging the price gap in the market so that not even Burberry themselves could take full advantage of this bitter-sweet turn of fortune for their range.

Whatever is happening in the Burberry empire and however they see their future, it’s clearly impossible that things will ever be the same for them again. It would take 100 years for them to shed the image created for them by the dross who hijacked their brand and, of course, they are culpable themselves too. If not, then the Burberry baseball cap would never have existed. Presumably having realised what they’d done to themselves, they discontinued the cap in 2004 but it was too little, too late. The thieves and counterfeiters had already made sure that the product, albeit not the “real” one, remained and remains well and truly available.

Having moved to France, there’s an amusing codicil to be seen. Whereas, these days, in the UK, Burberry, as a brand, is almost 100% associated with the pondlife who appropriated the brand image from its rightful owners, here in France, the cycle is still at a fairly preliminary stage. Yes, the gold-dripping oiks are bedecked in it, as in the UK but, here, decent, normal people are still to be seen sporting it in apparent unawareness of the way the Burberry cycle works.

As the months and, perhaps, years pass, the “nice” girls and boys of France will gradually shun it, like the truly “classy” people long since did and then, as much as it may continue to cause the demand forecasters of Burberry stomach ulcers, in France, just as in the UK, the only people who’d be seen dead wearing that once proud tartan are the people to whom this blog would make no sense whatsoever.