Tesla Owners Beware of Vandalism (email)

 There is some debate in the business literature about what effect taking a public position on controversial social and political issues has on consumer-facing businesses.  Here's a suggestion that there may be reaction not just affecting sales of Teslas and the company's stock price, but to privately owned Teslas. (I used to live in Brookline, MA, and am still on some town email lists there, and this came in a mass email.)

"To all my Brookline neighbors who own Teslas,

"There is a person, or group of people, who have been going around Brookline defacing Teslas.  The sticker in the attached picture was stuck to my car this afternoon.  It’s large and I can’t get it off (if anyone knows how to do this without damaging the car, please let me know.)  The Brookline Police told me that they have received many reports of this.  If you have a Tesla, please turn on Sentry Mode (now!) so if something like this happens to you, there will be video evidence.  I had previously set my car to disable this feature when at home, as it prevents the car from sleeping, and uses a lot of energy. I will now have it enabled 24/7.  If your car has been vandalized, please report it to the police so there is a record of the crime." 

 

  I'm reminded of reports at one time that animal rights activists/terrorists sometimes attacked people wearing fur coats by spraying the coats with paint. (See e.g. the retrospective story Cutting cruelty out of fashion.)

 

Fur for fashion banned in Israel

 Here's the story from Ynet:

Israel becomes first country to ban sale of fur in fashion trade.  

"Israel announced a ban Wednesday on the sale of fur in the fashion trade, winning applause from the International Anti-Fur Coalition as the "first entire nation" to impose such a ban

"Environmental Protection Ministry said commerce in animal fur, imports and exports, will be banned except for the needs of research, study or certain religious traditions.

"Fur is used for hats called "shtreimels" worn by some ultra-Orthodox Jews.

"On this historic day, Israel has set an ethical precedent and hopefully other nations shall join them and ban the sale of barbaric and cruel blood fashion fur," the Anti-Fur coalition wrote on its Facebook page.

...

"The ministerial decree is to take effect in six months."

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And from the Jerusalem Post:

Israel bans sale of fur to fashion industry, first country to do so  by Aaron Reich

"“The fur industry causes the deaths of hundreds of millions of animals worldwide, and inflicts indescribable cruelty and suffering,” Environmental Protection Minister Gila Gamliel said in a statement after signing the amendment, which goes into effect in six months. “Using the skin and fur of wildlife for the fashion industry is immoral and is certainly unnecessary. Animal fur coats cannot cover the brutal murder industry that makes them. Signing these regulations will make the Israeli fashion market more environmentally friendly and far kinder to animals.”

Brioni Legendary Minds: interviews and suits, and economists as clothing models

Brioni, the men's suit maker, has a series of video interviews called Legendary Minds, of unusually well dressed men. The videos are a bit unusual too, as the camera lingers on the suit at least as much as the speaker. You can watch me below:




The interview is also here:
https://www.brioni.com/us/legendary-minds-alvin-roth_section.

 Here are some of the accompanying stills:

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And here is the full set of Brioni Legendary Minds interviews to date:
https://www.brioni.com/us/legendary-minds_section

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As you might imagine, econ profs do fashion shoots all the time. Here are the stills from a slightly different one, involving clothing crafted by and for Stanford students, organized by Nina Buchmann, and featuring Muriel Niederle and myself, and Doug Bernheim.

Why own your own (fashionable) clothes?

There's a rental market for fashionable women's clothes, Rent the Runway

The NY Times ran a feature story on it:
The Transformational Bliss of Borrowing Your Office Clothes
Rent the Runway’s Unlimited service saves working women something more valuable than money: their time.

"Though Rent the Runway was originally conceived as a solution for women who didn’t want to invest in party-wear they might use only once, Unlimited has become a strategic solution for professional women...

Swap clothes on swapdom.com

Swapdom is a site for trading clothes.

It came to my attention through this blog post:  Swapping clothes instead of kidneys

Is it possible to be too young or too thin?

Could using too young or too thin fashion models become repugnant?
The NY Times is on the case: Checking Models’ IDs at the Door

"IN the five years since fashion designers got serious about protecting the health and well-being of young models, there has been a measurable improvement in the prevailing ideal of beauty as seen on the runways. Many of the top models working today, like Lara Stone, Joan Smalls and Arizona Muse, reflect a changing aesthetic toward healthier figures and at least some representation of diversity in race and age.

"And yet, season after season, we still see models who appear to be dangerously thin or...models who are as young as 14, even though designers and modeling agencies have pledged not to cast girls younger than 16 in the shows. If you believe them.

"Assessing the impact of a campaign to curb reckless behavior in their industry, Diane Von Furstenberg, the president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, said this week that some progress had been made but that much work remained to be done. This season, the council urged its members to insist on seeing identification from models to prove that they are 16 by the time of their shows. (Ms. Von Furstenberg herself was embarrassed a year ago, when, after promoting the age requirement, it was discovered that one of the models in her own show was still 15.)

“If we haven’t done anything else,” Ms. Von Furstenberg said, measuring her words, “we certainly have created awareness.”

The true meaning of "fashion forward." Coordinating dates in NY, London, Paris, and Milan

The fashion forward among you will probably be as relieved as I am to know that New York Fashion Week Finally Has An Official Start Date: September 6th

The back story comes to me via Assaf Romm and Dvorah Marciano. They write as follows.

"So Fashion Week is a concept invented in NYC around 1943 (back then it was called "Press Week") when there was not enough French fashion coming from across the ocean due to the German occupation. Around 1993 it took its current form in which there are a lot of fashion people and media coming to one place to plan their Fall/Spring buys and so on. Furthermore, the Fashion Week was copied by many other cities. Specifically, the main events are the Fashion Weeks in NYC, London, Paris and Milan. These events take place consecutively twice a year (around February for the Fall collection, and around September for the Spring collection of next year): 

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/fashion/2006/02/how_the_runway_took_off.html

"It should be mentioned that these Fashion Weeks compete on fashion buyers, media coverage and even models. For example:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/20/london-fashion-week-losing-models-milan-_n_971347.html

"Apparently, scheduling the Fashion Weeks between the big four cities is an ongoing saga, with dates moving earlier and earlier (...I don't have specific data yet). That's why they signed a three-year agreement in 2008 to determine schedules. Obviously, recently there were some issues with Milan moving its dates to coincide with the NYC and London weeks in September 2012. And it seems like Paris also joined in to the fight:

http://fashionablyjust.com/2011/12/fashion-week-wars-volume-xxxxiiiiii/

"Finally, it looks like today a final agreement has been reached: [see top of post]. 

"To conclude, this looks like a great unraveling story, because you obviously cannot move Fashion Weeks too early (well, according to Dvorah, you just cannot introduce new fashion too early, or otherwise it wouldn't be fashionable by the time it reaches the consumers....). Also, it seems like fashion highly depends on information. That is, fashion is a form of art, and it is determined by current events ..."

And here's the International Fashion Week Dates Agreement of 2008

Beautiful work and the beauty premium

It pays to be beautiful, but it's risky to try to make it big on beauty alone.
That's the message from recent books and other work showing that good looking people earn more--there's a "beauty premium," but that a career in modeling is high risk.

Slate reviews Pricing Beauty, by BU's Ashley Mears, a book about an industry with a good looking work force, models and modeling agencies.

"Through interviews, Mears investigated the financial state of the (unnamed) small modeling firm she worked for in Manhattan. She found that 20 percent of the models on the agency's books were in debt to the agency. Foreign models, in particular, seem to exist in a kind of indentured servitude, she writes, often owing as much as $10,000 to their agencies for visas, flights, and test shoots, all before they even go on their first casting call. And once a model does nab a job, the pay is often meager. Mears herself walked runways, sat for photo shoots for an online clothing catalog, modeled for designers in showrooms, and went on countless unpaid casting calls. During her first year of research she worked mornings, evenings, and weekends around her graduate classes and earned about $11,000.
...
"The alternative to high-fashion poverty is to be a "money girl," working for catalogs and in showroom fittings, jobs that pay well and reliably. The best-paid model at Mears' agency, for instance, was a 52-year-old showroom model with "the precise size 8 body needed to fit clothing for a major American retailer. She makes $500/hour and works every day." But the commercial end of modeling is widely derided within the industry as low-rent, as mere work without glamour. Once a model has done too many commercial jobs, she is thought to have cheapened herself, and it's exceedingly difficult for her to return to high fashion."
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Over the last few years in economics, there have been a lot of studies about pricing beauty in the general work force, where there seems to be a premium for looking good.
See Dan Hamermesh's Beauty Research Papers, and his book Beauty Pays--Why Attractive People are More Successful

A nice experimental paper in the AER by Markus Mobius and Tanya Rosenblat, Why Beauty Matters, even shows that some of the beauty premium can be collected through telephone interviews in which the interviewer can't actually see how attractive the interviewee is. This suggests that some of the beauty premium may come from the increased self confidence that beauty bestows.

(Of course not only the beautiful can get the part of the premium available over the phone: this must be what people mean when they tell me I have a face for radio...:)

Flash sales--buying in a hurry

Time Is Money
...
"But commerce will always require the creation of scarcity, bottlenecks and stampedes. The most immediate way to do this is to make time seem tight — the going-going-gone approach to sales. For years, digital-world salespeople have been putting in overtime to resurrect the illusion that consumers must put up their money now or life will pass them by.


"Not long ago they figured it out: the online private-shopping club. It’s brilliant and insidious. No current retail trick so successfully conjures the bygone retail climate of hotness and nowness — with its proven capacity to create value — as luxuriously capitalized clothing vendors like Gilt Groupe, HauteLook and Rue La La. For shoppers who register, these services host “flash sales” — sudden sales of limited inventory that offer a seemingly exclusive group of consumers deep discounts on known labels in a few-frills atmosphere.
...

"Gilt Groupe, HauteLook and Rue La La are the holy trinity of flash-sale event dealers, at least when it comes to clothes. Know them by their five-star labels, their ticking clocks, their sheen of exclusivity and their limited searchability.


"EBay won’t be left out of the private-club revolution. The latest way to beat those preposterous M.S.R.P.’s — manufacturer’s suggested retail prices — is eBay Fashion Vault, a shopping club like Gilt Groupe but with some of the madcapness of eBay. "

You can be too rich or too thin: Repugnance and fashion

Well, maybe you still can't be too rich (although let's wait until all the government bailouts settle down before we rush to judgment on that). But
Now even Vogue thinks you can be too thin.
"A brave editor has exposed fashion's dark secret - that it is the designers themselves who demand ultra-skinny models"

"Alexandra Shulman, the editor of British Vogue, has written to international fashion designers complaining that their sample garments - displayed on catwalks or sent to magazines for photo shoots - have in recent years gradually shrunk. Now they are so small, the only models who can fit into them are flat-chested, hipless, and so emaciated that Vogue is fearful of readers' horror if they put them on the cover. Even the superwaif Kate Moss struggles. Post-motherhood, post-30, she has newly acquired breasts.
Shulman's letter is brave: in taking on her own industry she risks scorn, snubs and precious advertising revenue. But she is also clever to cut to the heart of the long-raging size-0 debate. Before, the glossy magazines or model agencies were blamed or the models themselves made scapegoats. In 2006 the Spanish Government decreed that any girl with a body mass index of less than 18 should be banned from fashion shows. Many balked at the notion of gazelle-like teens being publicly weighed like livestock. Designers insisted that these were just naturally slender young women and that they sized their samples accordingly.
Shulman's letter exposes the dark truth, that the pressure to use überskinny models emanates from the designers themselves. In gradually shaving millimetres off sample sizes they force a model, who already has only a few ounces of body fat, to starve herself. To choose, perhaps, between Prada and her periods. (Italian and French designers are the most didactic body fascists.) And if a glossy magazine wishes to publish the latest collections by, for example, Dior these are the girls they must use. Indeed some newspapers - with less “edgy” values and older readers - now resort to retouching catwalk shots to make the models look bigger, less scary."

Understanding repugnance to some transactions is so tricky because it so often involves many things other than pure repugnance, such as the incentives that competition in certain professions may give members of those professions, and how such competition might therefore be regulated for the public good (e.g. no life-shortening steroids for athletes). The repugnance involving ultrathin young models may be akin to the repugnance that society feels to prostitution.