Reuters -- To much fanfare, Apple announced Tuesday that Angela Ahrendts is resigning as chief executive officer of Burberry and joining the inner circle in Cupertino, California. “Apple-polishing” has become the headline du jour. Picturing the soignée Ahrendts surrounded by geeks in jeans and hoodies, we might be forgiven for wondering why Apple feels in need of a fashionista buff-up. After all, there is hardly a product line more shiny-bright than Apple’s — or one with less affinity to the cold exclusivity of the world’s great fashion houses.
But the extraordinary affection that iPhones inspire is different from the anxious ostentation surrounding high fashion.
However sublime couture may be, it is neither lovable nor practical. Nor does using it feel like participating in a major human advance. There is something wondrous about Apple products in the ease and pleasure they afford their users, connecting us in unprecedented ways to other people, to our surroundings and to the world of ideas.
In contrast to beautiful, yet exclusive and often unaffordable fashion products, “Apple was the first company that took high design and made it mainstream,” Phil Libin, Evernote’s chief executive officer, explained. “It taught the world taste.”
What should we make of high tech’s embrace of high fashion? Some might say that marketing is marketing — whether the product is an iPhone or Burberry’s latest open-toed plaid booties. Until now, however, the images of these products could not have been more different. It is as if a health-food company had suddenly sought guidance from the marketers of Dom Perignon. Much as we love bubbly, we might fear for the future of granola.
This is by no means the first time in the history of design that technology and fashion have been entangled. Art deco, a sleek 1920s machine aesthetic, inspired evening gowns with the look of automobiles and skyscrapers. The 1920s Bauhaus movement advocated universal access to elegant design through the forms and economies of mass production. In the 1960s André Courrèges, trained as a civil engineer, “built” geometric fashions out of plastic and metal. His miniskirts and space boots conveyed the glamour of NASA’s rocket program, like the cartoon clothing of The Jetsons and the stylized uniforms on Star Trek.
In these various movements, fashion provided an instant reinterpretation of technological developments. But now the shoe is on the other foot: Tech companies are reinterpreting fashion by inventing “wearables.”