Hasta La Ideas

News: trend forecaster Li Edelkoort has published her Anti_Fashion manifesto, outlining why she believes the fashion industry “is going to implode”.

The 10-point printed manifesto, published by Edelkoort’s Paris-based agency Trend Union and subtitled “Ten reasons why the fashion system is obsolete”, follows her declaration in an interview with Dezeen this weekend that we are witnessing “the end of fashion as we know it.”

“These ten points argue that the industry has reached a vanishing point of fashion,” she writes in the manifesto. “This means that the economy of clothes will take over from the turnover of fashion.”

The manifesto is divided into 10 chapters dedicated to topics including education, manufacturing, designers, retailing and marketing.

Under Education, Edelkoort argues that students are being trained “to become catwalk designers, highly individual stars and divas, to be discovered by luxury brands.”

“As a result the fashion world is still working in a 20th-century mode, celebrating the individual, elevating the it-people, developing the exception… in a society hungry for consensus and altruism,” she writes. “This places fashion out of society and de facto makes it old-fashioned.”

In the Materialisation chapter, Edelkoort argues that cost-cutting in both the education system and within fashion houses is threatening the textile industry.

“The first to be sacrificed are knitting and weaving ateliers,” she says. “As a result the students are no longer instructed in textile creation and basic knowledge about cloth.”

This means that European fibre, yarn and textile industries are threatened with extinction. “Without them the knowledge of spinning, weaving, finishing and printing will be lost,” she warns.

Under Manufacturing, Edelkoort writes that the drive for ever-leaner supply chains has led to a “rapid and sordid restructuring process, which has seen production leave the western world to profit from and exploit low-wage countries.”

Rather than boycotting brands that employ cheap labour, customers have instead become seduced by cheap, disposable clothes.

“Now that several garments are offered cheaper than a sandwich we all know and feel that something is profoundly and devastatingly wrong,” she writes.

“But worst of all is the symbolism of it all,” Edelkoort continues. “Prices profess that these clothes are to be thrown away, discarded as a condom and forgotten before being loved and savoured, teaching young consumers that fashion has no value. The culture of fashion is thus destroyed.”

In the chapter called Designers, Edelkoort says that the great names of the past were able to change society by introducing new silhouettes, new postures and new forms of movement.

Today’s designers, however, endlessly recycle trends from the past. “Luxury designers are requested by the brand’s marketing to focus on product and need to give most of their creative energy to bags and shoes and are rather resigned concerning the creation of clothes,” she writes.

Edelkoort uses particularly fierce language when discussing marketing, arguing that: “It is without doubt the perversion of marketing that ultimately has helped kill the fashion industries.”

“Initially invented to be a science, blending forecasting talent with market results to anchor strategies for the future, it has gradually become a network of fearful guardians of brands, slaves to financial institutions, hostages of shareholder interests, a group that long ago lost the autonomy to direct change.”

Advertising gets short shrift too. Magazine ads “are so repetitive and seem so much alike that it is rather difficult to read the various brand values” while publications collude with brands to tie editorial coverage with advertising.

“The same clothes, more or less, are used in the editorials that are heavily art directed by the economy of advertisements; a new brand has little to no chance to be featured.”

In the Press & Blogging chapter, Edelkoort says that standards of journalism are slipping as knowledgeable fashion editors are replaced by younger writers with no specialist knowledge or critical perspective.

She writes: “The genial humor and knowledge of some of the best fashion journalists of international newspapers is rapidly replaced by uninteresting generalizations by a younger generation, articles that are opinion pages instead of critical assessment from a professional point of view.”

Retailing has failed to move with the times, she states. “As a consequence we are struggling with outdated formats that do not correspond anymore to todays fluid consumers, able to browse high and low, city and country, airport and hotel, on line and in real time.”

Finally a new breed of consumer has emerged, Edelkoort says, arguing that fashion does not cater to them.

“The consumers of today and tomorrow are going to choose for themselves, creating and designing their own wardrobes,” she writes. “They will share clothes amongst each other since ownership doesn’t mean a thing anymore. They will rent clothes, lend clothes, transform clothes and find clothes on the streets.”

Mainstream consumers are taking style into their own hands, while Silicon Valley has produced the first generation of super-rich consumers who don’t care about fashion.

“Fashion has lost these consumers over the last twenty years and will not be able to get back to them,” she concludes, ending with a prediction that clothes, not fashion, will be the major talking point in the coming years.

“Clothes will become the answer to our industries’ prayers. Clothes will dominate trends for the future. Therefore let’s celebrate clothes.”

The only exception to the bleak picture is men’s fashion, Edelkoort argues, saying that men are increasingly interested “in fashion and accessories as well as cosmetics and fragrances.”

She predicts that couture will make a comeback, occupying the void left by fashion: “After all it is in the atelier of couture that we will find the laboratory of this labor of love. Suddenly the profession of couturier will become coveted and the exclusive way of crafting couture will be inspiring all others.”

Edelkoort presented her Anti_Fashion manifesto at Design Indaba in Cape Town this weekend. Speaking to Dezeen after the talk, she said fashion has become “a ridiculous and pathetic parody of what it has been.”

Edelkoort, who was born in the Netherlands in 1950 and is based in Paris, advises fashion companies and consumer brands around the world. Time magazine named her one of the 25 most influential people in fashion in 2003 and she was director of Design Academy Eindhoven from 1998 to 2008.

The post Li Edelkoort publishes manifesto
explaining why “fashion is obsolete” appeared first on Dezeen.

This is the latest installment of In the Details, our weekly deep-dive into the making of a new product or project. Last week, we deconstructed a cloudlike pendant light.

Startup culture may be good for innovation, but it’s often bad for the body—a plight that the folks at Tangram know all too well. “Running a busy startup means our schedules are less than predictable, and we’re always crunched for time,” says Joen Choe, the president of Tangram America. To try to squeeze in some cardio during their long workdays, Choe and his colleagues got in the habit of taking breaks on the office patio to jump rope.

But they quickly noticed a shortcoming in this otherwise efficient and practical exercise. “After any decent number of jumps, it’s very difficult to keep track of how many jumps you’ve taken,” Choe says. Given its expertise in product and UX design, the Seoul-and New Jersey-based Tangram saw an opportunity to create a smarter jump rope that can display fitness data in midair, right before its user’s eyes.

The resulting Smart Rope, which launched on Kickstarter last week, uses 23 high-quality LEDs embedded in a proprietary, patent-pending flexible printed circuit board (FPCB) to show the number of jumps or calories burned on the rope itself. A dot matrix–style display creates the effect known as “persistence of vision”—a phenomenon where light, moving quickly, appears as a streak to the human eye. You may have seen it in your last sci-fi movie, or in this really great explanation from “Mr. Wizard.”

But, wait, don’t counting jump ropes already exist, albeit in analog form? “Anyone who’s used a counting jump rope knows that they’re quite poorly designed, and it’s pretty much impossible to read the tiny counter on the handle while you’re jumping—especially when you’re in the hundreds or thousands and you’re focused on powering through a workout,” Choe says. With the Smart Rope, four digits are illuminated with clear visibility, continuously displaying relevant data in front or the jumper. 

For the actual shape and feel of the device, the team at Tangram was inspired by classic jump ropes from their childhood, with their thick wooden handles. “There are all types of handles today, but this classic design has lasted because it’s both intuitive and functional,” Choe says. “We wanted to create something that was sleek and simple but still felt substantial in the hand. And, of course, we wanted to ensure an effortless, natural motion while jumping rope.” To meet that last requirement, Tangram positioned the rope at a 45-degree angle to the chrome handle, using a turning unit and ball bearing to allow for natural, smooth revolutions with a flick of the wrist.

The Smart Gym app

Inside the handle is a customized Arduino board and RAM memory, which stores basic count information detected from magnetic sensors (more on those in a moment). The FPCB is specially designed to be light and flexible enough for an ideal jump rope, but durable and impact-resistant enough to withstand shock and the occasional misstep. The handles also house a Bluetooth 4.0 transmitter, which communicates with a paired smartphone and the Smart Gym mobile application.

As for those magnetic sensors: The Tangram team developed this proprietary component in lieu of using a gyroscopic sensor like the ones found in smartphones or other wearable monitors. “The poorly-kept secret about most wearables is that they really don’t have much functionality beyond what’s already in your smartphone,” Choe says. “We see most wearables on the market as passive monitoring devices—they can tell you that you made a lot of generic movements on a given day, but whether that’s trekking back and forth from the fridge or doing burpees is beyond most of them.” The Smart Rope’s magnetic sensors, by contrast, register the actual revolutions of the rope to precisely count each complete jump. This means that the device can offer a basic jump count even without a paired smartphone, and that it will potentially be able to store several jumping sessions between smartphone pairings (although the details of that functionality are still being worked out). 

Snapshots from the development process

Testing FPCBs

Sketches of the turning unit inside the handle

A rendering of the handle assembly

Choe predicts that the market will continue to move in the direction of the Smart Rope, with more wearables that fulfill a specific, niche function—and he says that Tangram plans to roll out a series of additional smart-fitness products that will integrate with its Smart Gym platform.

For now, however, it’s focused on the Smart Rope. If Tangram reaches its Kickstarter goal, those funds will be used to cover production costs. “While we certainly have best-in-class manufacturers working on our projects, we’re not a factory or large-scale manufacturer, so we wanted a way to develop the best product possible without the constraints of wasteful inventory,” Choe says. “Kickstarter allows us to get real-time feedback from backers and continuously optimize the product, which is what we’re all about.”

Although Tangram’s Smart Rope has only just launched on Kickstarter, it is making its debut at the tail-end of very similar campaign: Sophia, “the smart skipping rope,” is another connected jump rope that uses a mobile application to track calories and sync exercises over Bluetooth. In addition to connectivity and mobile syncing, Sophia offers a way to gamify your workouts—sharing statistics via social from the mobile application. The product falls short as real-time display, however—it only shows the jump count via a small screen in the handle of the device. “Considering one of the major benefits of jumping rope is cardio, interrupting your jumping like this doesn’t make much sense,” Choe argues. He says that his team’s Smart Rope also provides a wider range of data: the duration of your session, the number of jumps executed, the calories burned and recommended interval-training data—based on CDC guidelines for jumping rope. A bonus for the CrossFit community: the Smart Rope also registers “double unders” by tracking the velocity of jumps (based on RPM). 

With the smart jump-rope space already beginning to look pretty saturated, it’s only a matter of time before the next piece of fitness equipment gets disrupted. Hula hoops, anyone?

In Core77’s 2015 Tech-tacular—launching today!—we’ll be reviewing some of the latest software offerings for industrial designers, as well as considering the wider implications of wearables, autonomous automobiles, so-called Smart Cities and other big-picture design-tech developments.

But we also wanted to know what kinds of digital tools contemporary designers are actually using on a day-to-day basis. So we got in touch with ten designers from different industries, and asked them each a batch of questions about their computer setups, most-used software, favorite apps, biggest tech gripes and related issues. 

We intentionally cast a wide net, interviewing designers who work on a variety of different kinds of products—from consumer electronics to experimental architecture, home furnishings to some very large pickup trucks. We hope that the resulting interviews provide a window into how designers are incorporating new digital tools into their workflows—very often, in tandem with tried-and-true analog tools—and that readers come away from the series with some ideas for novel software solutions or tech workarounds to integrate into their own practices.

The first of our interviews—with Thomas Murray, a senior industrial designer at Bresslergroup—is now live, and we’ll be posting a new one each weekday morning for the next two weeks. So check back, and be sure to weigh in with your own tech-related wishes and gripes in the comments.

Photo: the desk of Paul Hoppe, art director at New York’s Local Projects. Check back tomorrow for our interview with Hoppe.

This article is part of the Core77 Tech-tacular, an editorial series exploring the myriad ways that technologies are shaping the future of design.

Forbes has published its annual Billionaires issue and once again, you didn’t make the cut. A few people who did:

• Bill Gates, who grabbed the number one slot with a net worth of $79 billion
• Michael Bloomberg, the highest media exec on the list at #14
• A record 197 women, including Elizabeth Holmes and Anne Cox Chambers
• Newcomer Michael Jordan
• Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, two of Snapchat’s founders

For the complete list, click through.

Yahoo’s latest singular-focused site — Yahoo TV — is live. As has been Yahoo’s strategy with its other similar sites, the publisher is referring to Yahoo TV as a “digital magazine.” We will not be doing that. Because it’s stupid.

Yahoo TV is edited by Entertainment Weekly alum Kristen Baldwin, with fellow former EW staffers Ken Tucker as TV critic and Mandi Bierly as deputy editor.

Here’s Baldwin’s take on what readers can expect from the new site:

Whether you’re looking to plan your weekly watch list or to decide the most binge-worthy shows to stream, our Yahoo TV writers will guide you to must-watch content through expert analysis, exclusive interviews, behind-the-scenes sneak peeks and more. Like you, our writers and editors are obsessed with TV, and we’re excited to start an ongoing conversation that helps you discover the best of what’s next on TV and catch up on today’s most talked about shows.