before jil & donna, there was zoran

The French idea that you have to "suffer to be beautiful" is anathema to Zoran - a throwback to the era of corsets, before women exercised to maintain the body and knew what to eat.

''We don't operate on the cocktail circuit. We don't need that constant schmooze factor.''

-Zoran, designer for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (who bought his entire first collection), Queen Noor,

Candice Bergen, Lauren Bacall, Isabella Rossellini, Lauren Hutton

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/04/20/style/reviews-fashion-zoran-the-master-of-deluxe-minimalism-still-provokes.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

what Zoran's anonymous-looking, logo-free clothes do: they silence the discussion about fashion.

installing a shower in his loft to remind private customers he didn't approve of makeup with his clothes.

''I never feel I look as good in other designers' clothes as I do his."

Gloria Vanderbilt says: ''I was wearing, unfaithfully, an Armani suit, and Zoran had with him this beautiful chiffon stole, amber colored. He took it and draped it all over me so that the other outfit was completely covered.''

Zoran refuses to allow his clothes to be marked down, stores have an incentive to sell them at full price.

Zoran's supremely simple concept for his office, which was to allow the space to remain undefined -- "like Home Depot for girls" -- not unlike his clothes, which present hundreds of combinations.

Zoran does not have franchises; he doesn't do sunglasses or scent. He doesn't much like makeup or jewelry.

"You don't have his private phone number, do you? I'm desperate for more pieces. There is never enough."

Zoran makes clothing for women—there are plenty of them—who are discreet and utterly confident and who do not need to wear their money on their sleeves. If you have to ask why a simple quilted silk jacket, no lining, no fastening, costs two grand, you're probably not a Zoranista.

He insists that modern clothes must be wearable throughout the business day, travel well and work for a woman who "can wear anything she wants. She is intelligent and she is deciding."

The gender disparities in the United States’ STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) workforce are disturbing. According to a report released last month by the Department of Commerce, although females fill almost half of the jobs in the American economy, less than 25% of jobs in STEM fields are held by women. Even worse, female representation in computer science and math — the largest of the 4 STEM components — has declinedover the years, from 30% in 2000 to 27% in 2009. These disparities are not only stifling America’s technological creativity — numerous studies have shown that diversity in the workplace promotes innovation — they’re a menace to the very future of the country.

“This is a national crisis,” Nancy Ramsey, a futurist and co-author of The Futures of Women: Scenarios for the 21st Century, tells me. She sounds appalled. She has every right to be. In 2005, Ramsey, along with a fellow researcher, released a report for the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology that looked into gender imbalances in information technology. Six years later, she says, not much has changed, and the lack of women in computer science is not only limiting the country’s creative and entrepreneurial output, it’s undermining the strength of our economy, and, by extension, our national security.

“The country is not responding,” says Ramsey, who wishes the situation was taken as seriously as the space race of the 1950s and 60s. (Her husband is Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart.) “Tom Friedman jumps up and down daily about the state of the economy; Fareed Zakaria had a special on jobs on CNN but I don’t think either one of them have talked about the need for more people to be in technology, especially women and girls.” (According to the U.S.Bureau of Labor Statistics, the employment of computer scientists is expected to grow a whopping 24% between 2008-2018, which the Bureau says is “much faster” than average for most occupations. Rebecca Blank, Acting Secretary at the Commerce Department, tells me that because of this increased need, the participation of more women will keep the industry – and, by extension, the country – globally competitive in the long run.) Says Ramsey’s co-author, Pamela McCorduck, “What has really changed is competition from abroad. You care about your country, you do everything you can.”

These realities have significant implications for the economy on a more micro-level: Women in traditionally well-paying STEM jobs, particularly computer science, enjoy more wage parity with men than in other occupations. The disparities also have long-reaching cultural and social ramifications. Christianne Corbett, a senior researcher for the American Academy of University Women (AAUW) and co-author of the 2010 report Why So Few?, is blunt: “The growth of technology is driven by the people who are designing it. Without women at the design table, the interests of half the population will be basically be ignored.” Adds Lucy Sanders, the CEO of the University of Colorado’s National Center for Women & Information Technology: “We don’t know what women would invent because by and large right now, they are not.”

“Coming from a feminist viewpoint, the people who are developing technology are the ones with the power,” says Jennifer Skaggs, a University of Kentucky education researcher and author of the June 2011 paper Making the Blind to See: Balancing STEM Identity With Gender Identity.

“She continues to make my life possible, and her presence fills me with love and a deep security,” the book says. “That’s what a marriage is for. Now I know.”

- roger ebert

if I designed clothes that I would wanna wear every day, I would be very bored as a designer.

we’re not limited by the things that we personally want.”

- rodarte

she also appears to have come from a bygone age when getting dressed was considered a demanding form of self-expression, rather than an opportunity to wallow in spandex-enabled comfort.

Her appearance is so interesting it suggests that her appearance is the least interesting thing about her.

Valerie Steele, the director and chief curator of the F.I.T. museum, puts Guinness in the lineage of Grace Kelly, Tina Chow, and Nan Kempner—women whose wearing of clothes amounts to a form of creativity in itself.

she is bored by money—a great luxury. In her, as in few others, wealth has been transmogrified into a flowing, wild, slightly absurd freedom. “Sometimes I feel like I’m speaking Chinese when I go out to dinner, and everyone’s from hedge funds, and I want to talk about a certain color,” says Guinness

I think life is about having the mixture of the curiosity of an older person and the imagination of a child.

“I think the world’s just gone completely mad, with everyone wearing the same things, even celebrities,”

she’s given herself over to the world of imagination

“When there were little gangs at school around the head of the lacrosse team or whatever, wanting to be cool, I found that really depressing,” she says. “I’m most comfortable being by myself.”

she’s one of the only women of that sort who manage to combine cartoonish attire with sex appeal.

“I had gone to a couple dinner parties and realized, This is not the way that I build a new life,” she says. “I wanted to be around a different kind of person. I wanted to be around artists.”

Guinness is also making her own clothes, though she doesn’t know “if I want to get on that treadmill,” she says. “I’ve got such a backlog of projects I want to do, and it is an undertaking.”

- new yorker & nymag articles about daphne

‘I never have more than one bag at a time. I think one is already quite enough,’

‘Also, I hate changing bags, so I never have the thing of having ten bags.

- jane birkin

There has to be a new language for women in the twenty first century

Now everyone's trying, but I don't think anyone's really got it.

No one is defining the woman for the twenty first century.

Chanel told us, at the birth of her look in the twentieth century:

It was all about her wearing the clothes of her lovers.

- bill cunningham

fashion week: fantasy or reality

"16 and pregnant? There could be a show called '25 and pregnant', and I'd be like, 'Oh no! They're so young! They had their whole lives ahead of them!'"-Aziz

learnings from Nike Just Do It book

Phil Knight philosophies

ends his rare exhortations of the Nike troops with two words:

"Let's win."

"If you want to have a lot of friends-- lose."

"Here we work like crazy to convey that performance, not the image, is everything."

Fight any feeling of entitlement. Be humble. We are not preordained to be #1.

There are only three things that can kill this company: arrogance, entitlement, and bureaucracy.

Knight always said that the grasp of any company-- even one that had managed to capture so much of the pathos, and even the moral force, of athletics and then brilliantly reify that passion as pairs of shoes-- was bound to be fragile. All he could think to do was control what could be controlled and never stop thinking of the next "big idea"

"being number one means that you simply can't fight all the time. So let's start waiting for the big fights."

"We're not just the largest shoe company in the world. We're an apparel company, a sports and fitness company, a marketing company... We're a company that Wall Street's never known how to analyze."

"We've seen sports change-- a lot-- but our attitude at Nike remains the same. We understand the athlete-- those who battle the odds and the system. Those who crave the bell lap, the last inning, or the final seconds of the season."

profound

"You can't create an emotional tie to a bad product."

Advertising was phony, Athletes were the real ticket. Real athletes in authentic shoes.

true economic success is won by those who place something in the world that wasn't there before

we wanted nike to be the world's best sports and fitness company. once you say that, you have focus.

"Twenty years from now, one of those workers you say is so abused will be your landlord."

missteps- "You have to really think about them when they happen - spend a lot of time alone."

"I believe that some things people do are there forever. Some things never really fade."

first truly global company in this industry

The fundamental questions: "Are the shoes light? Are they comfortable? Can they go the distance?" - Bowerman

" I know that the average Nike employee will not be on the cover of Sports Illustrated, but I als know that without the average Nike employee I would not be on the cover of Sports Illustrated."

athletes as heroes and icons

Does he excite anyone? move people?

the final game of the NCAA tournament is better than any runway in PAris. Kids [boys] will climb right up next to the screen to see what the other players are wearing.

glory of rebellious youthfulness

anti elite

a dream was the very best and most profitable thing a young man could be - agassi

Why does Nike use so many athletes to support company initiatives.

"The athlete remains our reason for being." Nike's customers are all athletes too.

"It saves a lot of time. You can't explain much in sixty seconds, but when you show Michael Jordan, you don't have to."

"Anything that is good for sports is good for Nike."

Nike had most profitably demonstrated that once the new heroes were created, the things they wore and talked about would become desired by millions.

T.S. Eliot said:

"decadent athleticism" of American culture

Nike executives can occassionally be spied on campus wearing two entirely different shoes.

"It's crazy because when you boil it all down, what we do is just about sneakers."

"customers need to be taught to understand and appreciate the shoes

athlete becomes "a dream"

the dominant culture at Nike comes from the playing field

perfect results count, not perfect process

upper tier of celebrity, household name

coach - give clinics, offer feedback

knight- more coach than owner

To excite the public, the structure has to change if it's product categories or even progressive ideas about society that excite people now -- instead of heroes.

for the kinds of people we are, there are no textbooks

projecting dominance at ispo booth

we harmed athletes! we've violated a commitment at the core of our purpose.

history

Bowerman spent all of his free time pondering ways to help his athletes excel. He spent long days pulling apart clunky track shoes and trying to build his own shoes in hope of making them lighter and more comfortable. One shoemaker tried to convince him that making shoes took years of study and apprenticeship, but a maker of spiked logging boots in Eugene taught him in a day how to cut out and sew up a shoe.

"A shoe must be three things. It must be light, comfortable, and it's got to go the distance."

"People are kind of bent one way or the other. Go into the lunchroom and see the guys eating alone. They're the ones who are going to start their own business."

"It's a good business idea." - Knight

"You're just screwing around." - Knight's dad

"All they knew was how shoes were supposed to feel and that the good ones would help you win the race."

In 1967 Bowerman coauthored Jogging: A Physical Fitness Program for All Ages. The book became a best seller.

Bowerman would cobble shoes in a small closet at home. In 1972, Bowerman was staring at the waffle iron when the idea hit him so hard that he forgot to spray the inside of the family waffle iron with the greasy release compound he used to make his molds. He stuffed the waffle iron full of modeling clay, but then he couldn't get the clay out without a plierd. Then he drove to the store and came home with six new waffle irons, disappeared into his basement, and went to work.

The result was a black, waffle-shaped sole that made the new bright blue, yellow-Swooshed Nikes brought to market in 1977 feel like bedroom slippers.

"I'm still here because I don't have a choice. All my eggs are in this basket. I can't just pick up and leave. I'll never quit worrying about Nike, and we'll never stop needing to win.

Once you let peope in your office, they'll come in and out all day long. I need to think." - Knight

Knight manages the Nike empire by nuance-- a raised eyebrow here, the jingle of keys in his pocket there, a yawn.

Bowerman taught me: Always let your performance talk for you.

15 months required to produce a new shoe

Nike sells a million dollars of shoes every three hours or so in the United States. - 1993

Howard Slusher came upon the classic sociological study of the role of play in a culture, Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens. Slusher wrote a book called Man, Sport, and Existence: A Critical Analysis

Slusher saw Phil Knight as a "hero" and as a man "who was very much alone"

He was the lone runner. He loved athletes, and he loved the games.

Gordon Thompson

"I thought Nike's image was essentially glamor; now I understand that it's really about romance."

flash in the pan glamor business

director of Nike Design

grand conceptions

props inside a spectacle

unimpeachable visual statement that Nike was The #1 Sports and Fitness Company in the World

"I want you to stay away from the numbers. You just keep on drawing, Gordon."

Michael Doherty, Nike's creative director for film and video since 1982

"It's not like you're ever short on emotional material because you've got sports. I can build a whole show around a shoe."

fourteen hundred films

state of the art production facility

dramatic musical scores

ethereal imagery

slow-motion sports highlights

Promotional office in LA to give free shoes to entertainers and entertainment executives

jockey to get hold of early versions of movie and tv scripts in order to get Nikes onto the screen

Ekins are technical experts, connected to retailers, offer clinics and explain technical details

committed to personal fitness and competitive sports

enthusiasm

vocabulary of achievable freedom

Jim Riswold

managed to remain an undergraduate at the university of Washington for some seven years.

three BAs

With Wieden & Kennedy's help the customers would finally understand that Nike meant something more than shoes.

perhaps the running boom had been only the advance wave of a much larger health and fitness revolution to which Nike had attached itself in a fundamental way

"Revolution"commercials- diminished the distance between the greatest athletes and the people who play for exercise and fun

celebration

guilt shared by Americans who had let health and fitness issues slide or had managed to so complicate their lives that exercise never became part of their routines

we need to convey- just do it

if you have a body you can be an athlete

outfit every athlete in the world

managed to evoke countless previously impeded visions of personal possibility

"This has become much more than an ad slogan. It's an idea. It's like a frame of mind."

promoting your ad- anyone who missed the top of the fourth inning would be sorry

to each sporting dream a product; to each product a discernable state of mind

fantasies of the best version of themselves inextricably connected to shoes

subversive sneaker commercial

sneaker salesman telling us that sneaker salesmen can't save us

shift- real role models are people you can talk to at breakfast, but people can't really come up and touch me. just because I can dunk a basketball, doesn't mean I should raise your kids

too much fantasy, too much hype

Women's ads

athletics as an experience of personal growth

fifty thousand calls

calls from therapists asking for reprits

one out of every three schoolgirls now played on an organized sports team

serious versus fun

"A serious runner was the very definition of a social outcast during the early nineteen-sixties. In those days it was true geekdom."

the idea of exercise and game playing ceased to be something the average American did for fun.

Nike started the fitness revolution.

"Physical self-improvement and health became the basis of the new secular religion.

One thing that all consumers share is a fear of death."

high tech shoes

There's no shoe school out there to create talent that can understand what we need to do.

write the book, don't follow it

"I do see our shoes as unique and uniquely American contributions to contemporary design. Adidas pioneered the development of athletic footwear, but to this day they regard these shoes as equipment. They still don't understand how to go beyond that and design in romance and imagery and all of those subliminal characteristics that make an object important to people in less utilitarian ways." - Tinker Hatfield

gifted cobbler Adi Dassler

the one shoe you can depend on

"If you're talking performance shoes, you need only one or two pairs. If you're talking fashion, you're talking endless pairs of shoes."

Fashion -- the very noun is all but officially proscribed inside Nike. Fashion, a phenomnon devoid of larger values and implying whim instead of abiding passion, was the antithesis of authenticity.

without anything of substance to market

--- materials with integrity (steve jobs book)

This shoe is like a living breathing thing instead of an inanimate consumer product.

advanced designer polymers-- variously rock-hard, malleable, breathable or "high memory" substances designers borrowed from chemists, NASA scientists, sail-makers, women's girdles, or cooked up themselves

In the last half of the 1970s, Nike's sales grew from $10 million to $270 million. One out of every three Americans owned a pair of running shoes and half of all running shoes sold were Nikes.

Nike became known for the first overtly high-tech shoes

Nike did have factories in Exeter, New Hampshire and Saco, Maine, but a lot of shoes still came from the Orient. No high-tech athletic shoes were made in the United States, Nike argued, because traditional American manufacturers, as in the auto industry, never invested to keep their plants at the cutting edge. Never a high-tech athletic shoe infrastructure in the US

continue to invest and study the new technologies

the entire industries productive processes were still based on how fast women could glue together by hand up to twenty five pieces of a single shoe

edge of Nike opposite all the glamor

never argued that working in a shoe factory was a pleasant way to spend a day

glue and paint fumes

unprotected workers near hot molds

image of hourglass with an overfed fellow in a bathingsuit floating happily in the top of the glass and an impoverished woman on her knees trying to catch drops in her upturned mouth

$29.50 Nike pays per shoe to plant

15% workers

60% materials / components

5% indirect labor & handling costs

10% factores amortized costs (making expensive molds), administration, overhead

10% profit

cost of molds, packing, freight, warehousing, hefty duty charges

we'd rather put money into our factories than into the hands of celebrities. - new balance

computer stitched attachments along the sole of the air loom

aqua sock amphibious footwear

Five years after Nike began to order Chinese shoes, not one factory could make a white shoe because they were so dirty with little water, electricity, and phones.

change from subsistence economy to consumer-based economy

underground movement successfully masquerading as a business

for all of the twenty years they worked together, Knight never invited him over for dinner or even had very much to say.

barking at designers about the "damned shoes being too heavy"

INVENTION

Advanced Product Engineering Group

Nike Sports Performance Laboratory

Nike Sports Research Lab

define human movement in terms of biomechanics and physiology

biomechanical and physiological research specialists

sports medicine research

"our job is to translate activities into a set of performance-enhancing and injury-reducing needs."

very serious polymer science

" we do stuff with materials that they're only thinking about putting in the space shuttle."

idea of James Bond being outfitted at Nike

Research machines include:

measuring equipmet

shoe mills

blocks of steel to make test molds

steel pressure mat- within seconds causes nearby computer to light up a color coded map of a subject's foot

lasting machines & glue making procedures

large open space with computers on trolleys, automatic treadmills built into the floor, exercise bikes, closed-circuit camera systems pointing at the treadmills and bikes, full-sized human skeleton, assorted weight plates, piled boxes of shoes made by other companies

machine to rub the outsole/ bottom for hours on end across surfaces that simulate tennis courts, basketball courts

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzkaEUEFsoQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UNKP-aTWCg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1OIM_jLEPM

lab work indicated that the forefoot anf feel have separate tasks and tendencies

air suspension system

gas cushioning - customers would become more excited about the air technology if they built a little window in the side of the heel through which to actually see the gas

structural support - quick lateral movements

Universal teenagers

stuff lag not information lag

embellish daily life with props and niceties

Knight saw sport as a common medium of a global desire for things

consumer is already out there, just waiting

Europeans own less shoes

How to make profitable business with owning less? recycling/ cradle to cradle?

accountering a product so it becomes an essential part of culture

Kenichi Ohmae's book Borderless World- There is no value in making things anymore. The value is added by careful research, innovation, and marketing

madonna- serious student of modern marketing techniques

shoe as different as this won't take off unless their are ads

in the 70s, fashion meant sharkskin suits, funky wide brim hats. But then Michael Jordan cam along, and all of a sudden fashion meant shoes

apparel is much more easily copied than high-tech shoes

only 10% of nikes retail for over $100

middle price points, lucrative center of the market $60-80 account for a huge majority of total sales

Nike collector:

"never gone out in the rain in a pair of Nikes. Other shoes are for that."

Nike Store Relationships

stores= public stages

store owner's favorite brand

delivery, product profitability, promotion support, returns, packaging

24 hour hotline to talk about a shoe or get a question answered

we have to change everything about our shoes several times in a single year

social history of the modern athletic shoe

why shoes? --like why rock music? question decades earlier

"they ought to be buying themselves books"

asked what the shoes meant to them

their lives are shit

I make my money from poor people. A lot of them live on welfare. Sometimes a kid is dirty and poorly dressed

Gordon Thompson display

state of the art museum -- museum & theater -- retail entertainment

hands on sports environments

hung products from ceiling (like Speedo mannequins in mall at Short Hills)

trying to find some status in the world

just cool

feel special

trying to figure out how to grow is what make business exciting

play by the rules,but be ferocious.

my transition via Jil

More Vintage Jil Images

the long journey to the suits with "an engineer's precision"

from a feminine appearance, catering to the male gaze

"1968, the year of the student riots, was also the year that Jil Sander founded her own company. She single-handedly painted the outside of her boutique black, schlepped around mannequins for the store windows, worked in the office, and designed clothing for professional women"

to a more gender neutral appearance

''If you look as a professional, 98 percent of what we see now is cut-and-paste,'' she says. ''It's all old-fashioned, the work. It's coming from vintage, and so it's almost as if fashion today has become a stupid story.''

The pursuit of lightness has always been one of her main concerns, she explains, as our car moves away from the curb and into traffic. She is referring to her determination, as a designer, to take basic items of clothing and refine their silhouettes, eliminating surface distractions and cutting away at everything she judges to be extraneous to the function and purpose of the garment, until finally what remains is a deceptively simple and, not infrequently, beautiful thing.

I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs in their 20s who are knowledgeable about the valuations various Y Combinator startups have attained, know the names of all the angel investors in the Valley, have in-depth knowledge of the Facebook diaspora and their doings, have opinions on various Zynga acquisitions, and know exactly how to get Andrew Mason on the line…it boggles the mind. These are good things to have in your tool kit. But

I want to hear about things out there that they love. About loving the thing they’re building.

There’s less of that.

Leaders are not what many people think–people with huge crowds following them. Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see whether anyone is following them. “Leadership qualities” are not the qualities that enable people to attract followers, but those that enable them to do without them. The include, at the very least, courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, determination, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head even when things are going badly. This is the opposite of the “charisma” that we hear so much about.