Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
Levi's promises individualized denim for every fancy. But one explorer discovers that mass customization is trickier than it looks.
Mar 5, 2003 | I waited for Karen inside the front entrance to the store, in between two walkie-talkie flanked greeters and the ostentatiously hip customization department. Hand-painted jean jackets hung from low vestibule ceilings and spiraled up alongside the staircase, ascending toward three floors of Levi's heaven.
The jackets had been cast in a resin-resembling immobilized state, thereby rendering them more suitable for a traction patient than for casual club hopping. Each was signed and dated by the artist and available for $500. I wandered over to the uninviting table next to the greeters and was pleased at the salonesque array of pop fashion magazines. I picked up Interview and waited for mine.
Karen Burbano, former customization and vintage merchandiser for Levi Strauss & Co., is one of the main reasons rhinestones have been everywhere, from J.Lo to JCPenney. By the end of her Levi's stay, Burbano had quietly put the jean mammoth back in the hipster realm with her nearly panoptic trend-seeking gaze. Her own intern to Puff Daddy story was quick yet deliberate, starting in the Jean Archive (which does exist and does house original 501s) and progressing into the budding vintage merchandising department. Around 1999, while on business trips overseas, she began noticing a trend toward craftsmanship and the mark of the individual in many designers' products. A rhinestone spotting in the late '90s led directly to the elite margins of the customization department and eventually caught mainstream-Levi's fire.
"I was in Japan at a popular upper-end boutique called 45 RPM, and I noticed a sewing machine in their store," says Burbano. "I knew right then that customization was going to be the way the market would go." But despite Burbano's convictions, Levi's big guys weren't too sure. "Even when I began in vintage, corporate wasn't really behind it. They didn't understand the market we were seeking. And the idea of customization was even more foreign. But eventually we convinced them that in order to get Levi's back into favor with the fashionable public, it was going to have to make some changes. So they finally agreed, and we opened up the customization department here at our flagship store in August of 1999."
Customization for a mass-market item like Levi's? There seemed to be an inherent contradiction in the idea. I wanted to know more. Would it be like ordering a fast-food meal: No. 1 equals silk-screening and a large Coke? Or would it be more creative, more oriented to the style of the individual as per the original concept behind customization? There was only one way to find out -- I had to go beyond simply interviewing the customizing mastermind. I had to get customized myself. My plan was to be subversive, to be a stowaway pirate on the flagship store's lower deck, a gang of one with my peg leg stealthily hidden beneath my vintage Levi's. But as I set sail through the extensively charted Levi's waters, little did I know it would be I who was going to get pirated.
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The term "mass customization" was born in 1987 in Stanley M. Davis' seminal book "Future Perfect." As Davis explained, before the Industrial Revolution business was confined to a localized market, where producers of goods and providers of services generally operated within limited geographical boundaries. (This hearkens back to a time when "marketplace" actually meant a place with a market, not the cafeteria section of Marshall Field's.) After the Industrial Revolution, mass producers began to standardize goods and services and that supply created its own homogeneous demand.
But in order to gain a competitive edge, some companies decided to splinter off from this homogeneity and attempted to lure specific types of customers through target marketing. In the auto industry, for example, General Motors' Alfred Sloan segmented the mass market based on socio-demographic factors, focusing instead on a range of minor markets -- Cadillac at the high end, followed by Buick, then Oldsmobile -- in effect activating the idea of the market niche. As a subset of mass production, the market niche directed a more specialized product to a more specialized group of customers. The next phase, as Davis saw it, would shed the mass-production mentality of both the supplier and the demander and would replace it with an enlightened new-growth strategy called mass customization. Fifteen years later, Metropolis magazine highlighted it as the No. 1 design idea for the 21st century.
Since the Industrial Revolution, much of what defines American culture has rolled off assembly lines and directly into our lives with little resistance. But as mainstream society consumes more and more assembly-line culture, both things and people begin to look, sound and act the same, averaging out to some C-grade consumer mentality. In the early 1940s, when American assembly lines pumped out everything from cars and toothbrushes to tanks and missiles, philosophers Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer began writing about what they dubbed the "Culture Industry" created by and through mass production. In "The Dialectic of Enlightenment," Adorno and Horkheimer argue that "under a monopoly, all mass culture is identical." In other words, the production of culture is dictated by a few, yet consumed by all. Everything is for sale, and it is our own complacency in the system, the fact that we literally "buy into it," that perpetuates this commodification. Culture has come to replace cars on the assembly line.
But if mass customization is dictated by a few and consumed, in theory, by one, does it somehow invert (or at least distort) this idea?
First of all, the term is inherently oxymoronic, and this is not something to be overlooked. When I slipped and said "mass customization" to Karen Burbano, there was a pause of uncertainty and then a very cautious reply, as if I had blown my undercover Levi's investigation and they would be exposed as purveyors of the same old shit, just with more rhinestones. Levi's claims to deal in "customization," not "mass customization," yet there are rules in place to maintain both a timely tailoring schedule and prevent a misrepresentation of the company. When I brought up the time I worked for Ben & Jerry's and had to customize an S/M cake complete with a chocolate-icing whip and cake-cone handcuffs, I was told that there are limits to what Levi's will customize. "Nothing pornographic or with questionable language," Karen replied. "And nothing that isn't Levi's."
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