How Millennials are changing fashion

So welcome to our Millennial fashion issue. But immediately things get complicated. What is a Millennial?

What's in a name?

You might assume a clue is in the name, except that the Pew Research Center – the American "fact tank" that somehow gets to dictate where each demographic starts and ends – recently shrunk the catchment to end at 1996, not 2000. This is in order for all within it to be old enough to comprehend the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, while also finding their way through the 2008 recession.

Snapshot of the first Millennial I talk to for this story, because he lives across the street from me in London: Nathan Jones is a tailor. Did the GFC affect him? "Er, yes, in that I got on the graduate program of a bank basically to find there was no bank."

Ah yes, I'd forgotten that. Well, can he give me one tip to understand his generation? "I think we just want to be happy. Ours is a logical reaction to an illogical situation."

If you seek analysis by a team of experts, let me recommend you read The State of Fashion 2019 by The Business of Fashion and McKinsey & Co. I certainly have. And every other report I could get my hands on – the Millennialisation of fashion being studied more than pretty much anything else by those working in the industry.

But more of this is not what you are going to find in these stories. Instead, we'll begin from my own excellent vantage point from which to observe the Millennial in a favoured habitat.

Hipster spotting

To report our fashion specials for The Australian Financial Review Magazine, I usually dig deep and travel wide. This time last year, I was at minus 35 degrees, surrounded by goats and sleeping in a yurt to report on cashmere from the Gobi Desert.

Yet now, I can start my study by looking out my window. For the street where I live in London functions as the heuristic, the micro example of much larger societal change.

Visualise, please, a curved cul-de-sac of candy-coloured houses that have arched windows just like Play School. Our street was purpose-built in 1851 as a social experiment to see if the deserving poor might behave better if they lived in pretty houses. We like to say that we do. Yet now this street exerts an irresistible pull to another social group: those who frame their world through Instagram's square, into which these small-scale, rainbow-hued homes fit so perfectly.

You don't need to tell me that Millennial traits include seeing oneself as a content creator. There are bloggers, vloggers and influencers moue-ing into their iPhone X's right outside my door.

The one I'm watching now is wearing Gucci – or it could be Camden Market fake, it's hard to tell at this distance. What??? She has just picked up a pot of daffodils from one neighbour's window sill, walked to the next house with it and taken a selfie, presumably because the colour combination works better with her look.

Does that count as the Millennial C-word, curating? Or is that styling? Or just damn cheek? But before you tell me not all Millennials are alike, you think I don't know that? When I fall into the same age-related demographic as Donald Trump?

I call up my former Financial Review colleague Joanna Lowry, a strategist at the world's leading brand and retail consultancy, FITCH, in order to get some wider light on her age group.

"That's 'Access not ownership' for you!" she laughs, when I tell her about Gucci Girl. "The other thing to consider is how she found your street. Because a key thing we value is insider knowledge."

A pause, and then: "How about we meet for tea at Rose Bakery at Dover Street Market?" How perfect, given it's not a bakery, it's not in a market and it's not even on Dover Street.

"The No. 1 'ask' among our clients is 'How do we make our brand relevant to Millennials?' " she's saying, when we're face-to-face sipping tea. "We look first at macro trends, like sustainability, which has ramped up from a 'tick box' to something that is massively impacting fashion. Or the eradication of hetero-normality, because now you have lines like Boy de Chanel [Chanel's first make-up for men], which is also a lure that makes it OK for all Chanel make-up to be sold gender-blended."

Gosh.

She goes on: "Inspiration has replaced aspiration. Flaunting your wealth is so old-fashioned. Then we might talk about co-creation, because it is no longer about the designer in their ivory tower. Designers collaborating not only with their peers but also with their customers is so important …"

A snort of derision escapes me. "So when brilliant designers like Alber Elbaz [ex Lanvin] are out of work, your generation thinks you can actually design the clothes?"

"We're not buying into it if we're not part of it," she counters. "You need to look at who 'owns' fashion now," she says, citing Balenciaga, Gucci, Nike, Kanye West's Yeezy, and Off-White, the label of Virgil Abloh, who is also men's artistic director at Louis Vuitton. "Yet it is no longer just about buying stuff. It's about In Real Life (IRL) experiences beyond those lived through your phone … "

All that glitters

I hurry into Gucci's London flagship store in the wake of two Asian boys, talking in what I take to be Mandarin, a couple of black London lads and a 30-something white woman in posh yoga gear. What links them, to my eyes anyway, is their shoes – each wearing a variation of the classic tennis shoe Gucci calls its Ace, with a flash of dark green and red grosgrain ribbon.

I head downstairs, into what used to be "menswear". It is now, like everything at Gucci, seamlessly gender blended, although the sneakers down here are in bigger sizes.

The first shoe I pick up, which is black with an army green sole and wrapped in purple crystals, is the size of a dinghy. To me, this Flashtrek is unspeakably ugly. But it isn't me that this mega-brand is after.

"Is the distressed leather Ace more popular than the pure white?" I hear Marcus, my Millennial guide, asking before I even spot him.

Neither Gucci chief executive Marco Bizzarri nor creative director Alessandro Michele are Millennials, yet together they have proved so adept at mining where the wealth is that a rumour has gone around of a secret committee of Millennial advisers.

"Slightly inaccurate," replies Robert Triefus, Gucci's marketing and communications director, by email. "Marco has a sounding board, which is made up of a small group of Millennials from across the company, who are given a specific issue to address."

As to demographic targeting, Triefus says: "It has happened quite naturally and organically … We attribute this to certain values that Alessandro believes in ,which seem to be particularly resonating with Millennials or those with a Millennial mindset: authenticity, inclusivity, self-expression, freedom."

Take the case of Dapper Dan, 74, the famed Harlem tailor who took inspiration from heritage Gucci iconography and funked it up into his own look, which then inspired Alessandro Michele. Vintage cool does that. While one could argue Dapper Dan appropriated Gucci first, once the brand was called out for appropriating him back, it started paying him.

More with less

Marcus is now engaged in trying on funny spectacles that look like they have been pinched from his Auntie Beryl. He flicks past the rock band T-shirts and hip-hop jogging pants to the multicoloured sweaters.

Gucci is somewhat like my little London street, in that it is diverse, friendly, eye-catching, bright, nostalgic and everyone is welcome here, although for those buying in now, the prices are through the roof.

No surprise either that it has the highest Instagram engagement of any luxury brand, with more than 32 million followers. Its growth is exceptional, up 36.9 per cent from 2017 to 2018. Gucci represents 60.6 per cent (€8.3 billion) of the income of parent group Kering, for whom latest revenues are €13.7 billion ($22 billion).

Marcus doesn't ask a single question about the provenance of what he is buying. Yet in every expert report I've pored over, the drum beat is of the need to demonstrate to his demographic that brands stand for more than just making money.

With this in mind, Gucci has a microsite, Gucci Equilibrium, which celebrates both ethical business practice and wider concerns. It made a sizeable donation to the US student-led gun control "March for Our Lives". It hosts panel discussions in Milan, inviting the likes of Gen Z social influencer Glacier Girl, who is adamantly anti-consumerist.

But Gucci's true brilliance is it is making more by using less. Kering insists all its brands declare an EP&L (ethical profit and loss) including air emissions, waste, water consumption, etc, which has proved a compelling business case for the industry at large. That it is expanding yet actually using less via efficiencies in its supply chain is surely appealing mathematics to any demographic.

But can this last? Alessandro Michele is an eclectic designer. What happens when he scrapes the bottom of the dressing-up box? This past January, the luxury goods equity analyst at UBS downgraded Kering stock from buy to neutral, partly on the grounds that Gucci has reached peak glitter.

In view of strong results released in mid-February, you might say this was a poor call. But the long-term question is, when you offer everything to everyone (who can afford it), what do you do for your next act?

The Fashion issue of AFR Magazine is out on Friday, April 5 inside The Australian Financial Review. Follow AFR Mag on Twitter and Instagram.