Cool before it was cool
Fashion used to have room for the odd ones, the small brands and the shops that knew their town. I want that back.
What got me into fashion in the first place was the way the whole thing was put together. A young designer could start a label by selling wholesale to a handful of independent shops. Those shops built their own little networks in their own towns and neighbourhoods, got to know their customers properly and kept tweaking what they stocked until it fitted them like a glove. And everyone in that chain, from the designer to the shop to the lad behind the counter, made enough margin and carried low enough costs to make great product and give people a proper experience at every level.
It started with the hunt. You'd get hold of the latest copy of The Face or i-D, American GQ with its 200 pages of adverts and, heaven forbid, a Men's Non-no or Popeye that had somehow made it over from Japan, and you'd learn about brands and designers before anyone had the chance to take them over and roll them out. Then a trip up to London, round Covent Garden, the King's Road and Carnaby Street, finding things you'd never seen because only a couple of shops in the country had them. And if you were really lucky, Paris, Florence or Amsterdam, where you'd stumble on brands nobody back home had heard of, buy into them and come home with a bit of influence. The real test was walking into the pub on a Saturday night without the whole bar shouting wanker at what you had on.
All of that worked because the margins were there. Low costs meant you could afford to make a statement, do something you believed in and stand apart, instead of sweating over this quarter's numbers.
Over the last ten or fifteen years that's been flattened. Mass market and fast fashion took over, and the cost of running a brand or a shop is now completely out of proportion to what it takes to build something that lasts. Decisions get made by algorithms and market research, and the algorithms press everything down until we're all beige and vanilla, following trends instead of starting them. Now AI has hoovered the lot up and served it back as the best it can do, which, unless you know what you're doing, is flatter still.
That used to take months or years, long enough for a small nut to grow into a giant tree. Now it's days or weeks.
The hunt has gone too. The magazines, the bus trips, the hitchhiking to places that were genuinely rare, that was how cultures and subcultures got thrown together and fermented into something cool before it was cool. Then the hype machine and the agencies would turn up, package it, repackage it and sell it back to us once it was already past its sell-by date. That used to take months or years, long enough for a small nut to grow into a giant tree. Now it's days or weeks.
That's what got me started on Rooms, which now sit inside VIA. Rooms are the anti-social network. Nobody's counting followers, and nobody wins for shouting loudest. We all know 100 good customers are worth more than 100,000 followers. A Room connects the people who actually make a difference to your business, whether that's a customer or someone whose voice is respected and who'll speak up for you without expecting a fee, because they're part of something new and want other people to know about it.
A Room is where like-minded people get together and use what I call the three C's: collaborate, co-create and, eventually, commercialise. The best ideas usually start in a garage, a bedroom, down the park or in the back room of a pub, which I banged on about back in July,1 a few guys and girls kicking things around until something ferments. Sometimes it becomes a cultural phenomenon. Sometimes it's a really bad band. Sometimes it's the start of a clothing label, or a business doing something nobody's thought of before. The point is there was space and a network, and a chance to come together, and if it turned into business, brilliant. Plenty did, and some still are. It's just so much harder now.
So that's the hope for VIA and the network we're building, with Rooms and Taste Cards inside it and Real Real Genuine running on it: that real creatives, independent brands, independent shops and independent voices can get together, make things and do business without being in hock to big tech, or anyone else who wants a fee for the privilege. If you've got the right product, the right attitude and a network working for you, a lot of the rest can happen on its own.
