Tsubi - Hot Air or Substance?
Saturday, January 21st, 2006
A number of learned fashionistas amongst us have highlighted the not too unreasonable similarities between Tsubi and Bape. Many are questioning whether there’s a new “fashion” phenomenon at play. The premise maintains that traditional fashion created around tailoring and design has been replaced by psuedo-fashion built upon a foundation of hype-and-tease. The days of go honest design and tailoring demonstrated by the likes of Giorgio Armani, Chanel, YSL, Dior and McQueen amongst others, have been replaced with a new type of pseudo-fashion which has very little to do with innovative design and tailoring and more to do with generating a “fashion myth” which is perpetuated by limited availability and a nonchalant approach to grass-roots customer service focusing more on celebrities to help perpetuate the seemingly unattainable myth.
Tsubi have recently taken the hype-and-tease phenomenon to a new level with the introduction of their new “Tsubi Book” which is apparently a pictorial memoir of their five year history. Why anyone would want to purchase a pictorial menoir of a clothing brand with less than five years’ history is perhaps beyond most observers who haven’t been swept away in the hype-and-tease. Nevertheless, the fact remains, the Tsubi Book is set to become another collector’s item, providing they manage to limit supply and pump up the hype-and-tease. The book will be sold in Sydney Tsubi boutiques in Paddington and Bondi and after Sydney it will launched in London, New York, Paris and Los Angelas.
The tsubi book is exclusive to tsubi and FAT stores for RRP $90.
Have you also noticed that brands like Tsubi and Bape fail to provide a useable website for their customers. All part of the hype-and-tease phenomenon methinks!!
A Bathing Ape (BAPE) is it just Hype or is it truly a cultural phenomenon? Is the founder of A Bathing Ape, Nigo, an artistic genious or a shrewd businessman with a propensity for marketing and tapping into the vast expendable income of the world’s youth? Perhaps a question still in the balance! Regardless, no one can deny the impact of Nigo and the Bape Brand in the 21st century.
