Racked: All Posts by Tracy E. RobeyThe National Shopping, Stores, and Retail Scene Bloghttps://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/52809/32x32.0..png2018-04-12T09:00:18-04:00https://www.racked.com/authors/tracy-e-robey/rss2018-04-12T09:00:18-04:002018-04-12T09:00:18-04:00Acne Treatment Used to Include Poisoning Yourself a Lot
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<p>A history of the scientific blistering of maggot pimples, pustules, and papules by the most efficacious substances such as mercury.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="LL5h0r">As a historian with acne, few things irritate me more than <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2108353/The-adult-acne-epidemic-Forget-teenagers--modern-lifestyles-mean-middle-aged-women-increasingly-suffer-misery-bad-skin.html">people trying to claim</a> that acne cases exploded in the modern era. The history of acne has been covered in both the <a href="https://www.manrepeller.com/2016/11/history-of-acne.html">popular</a> and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1159/000364860">scholarly</a> press; at this point, there’s no excuse for this misinformation. The resilient belief that our superior past lifestyles prevented acne from forming comes out of the same magical historical thinking that inspires dangerous nonsense like <a href="https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/1/4/16846048/raw-water-trend-silicon-valley">raw water</a> and skipping vaccines. People do realize that it’s possible to read about the past in books rather than experience dysentery firsthand, right?!</p>
<p id="7FgpyN">At a time when things like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death">Black Death</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox">smallpox</a> had yet to be cornered into CDC labs, doctors and patients were very interested in treating acne — even when they realized it didn’t pose a threat to one’s health. The ancient Roman physician Celsus (c. 25 BC–c. 50 AD) side-eyed the treatment of acne, writing in the sixth book of <a href="http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Celsus/6*.html"><em>De Medicina</em></a>, “To treat pimples and spots and freckles is almost a waste of time, yet women cannot be torn away from caring from their looks.” </p>
<p id="iGgSoW">By the 18th century, a modern perspective on acne had emerged. Daniel Turner, a surgeon and the author of the <a href="https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=3Es0aclKctgC&rdid=book-3Es0aclKctgC&rdot=1">first book wholly devoted to dermatology</a>, defended his interest in treating acne. “I shall make no Apology for spending Time, or taking the same Pains to remove the Blemishes incident to the Face by some, as I have done to retrieve a former good Complexion lost by other Kinds of Illness,” he wrote in <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=3Es0aclKctgC&dq=daniel%20turner%20de%20morbis%20cutanes&pg=PA237#v=onepage&q=Method%20of%20Administration&f=false">1731</a>. “I cannot think the Talk below the Dignity of a Physician.” In his <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=RYYEAAAAQAAJ&lpg=PR1&ots=NPUuyjMQ2n&dq=Lectures%20on%20the%20theory%20and%20practice%20of%20medicine%2C%20by%20J.C.%20Cooke%20and%20T.G.%20Thompson&pg=PR1#v=onepage&q=Lectures%20on%20the%20theory%20and%20practice%20of%20medicine,%20by%20J.C.%20Cooke%20and%20T.G.%20Thompson&f=false">“Lectures on the theory and practice of medicine”</a> from 1839, Dr. John Elliotson describes acne as “exceedingly common, and not at all contagious, nor dangerous.” Yet Elliotson clearly thought acne was worthy of study since he discussed its treatment at length.</p>
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<figcaption>Muscular figure in allegorical pose by Juan Valverde de Amusco, 1559</figcaption>
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<p id="6jPefe">A few things were happening in the 18th and 19th centuries that paved the way for specialization in dermatology and the medical treatment of acne. Chief among them was the professionalization of the practice of medicine. <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1294998/?page=1">Turner</a> is a good example: When he registered as a medical practitioner, it was under the Barber-Surgeons’ Company of London in 1691 — as in, his guild included both the people who cut into flesh and those who cut hair and fixed up teeth. </p>
<p id="mdKuBf">Over time, the practice of medicine became increasingly specialized and male. Even midwifery, assistance with the birthing of babies, transferred from women to <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Making-Man-Midwifery-Childbirth-England-1660-1770/dp/0674543238">male midwives</a> in the 18th century (this shift is how women came to give birth while lying on their backs in bed instead of sitting on birthing stools, by the way — it was more comfortable for the male doctors). It’s entirely possible that healing women, who mostly transmitted their expertise orally, handled the treatment of acne before male doctors decided to give it a go.</p>
<p id="WtJ9mY">Undergirding the professionalization of medicine was the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_revolution">scientific revolution</a>, which started in roughly the mid-16th century and ran through the 18th-century Enlightenment. Scientists, often people we today would consider wealthy amateurs, studied things like math, astronomy, physics, and even <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemy#Medieval_Europe">alchemy</a>. For medicine, the scientific revolution meant picking up the medical and anatomical work of the ancients and adding to it by examining real human bodies, living and dead. Human autopsy was controversial and even banned in some places by religious authorities, but access to corpses allowed scientists like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_humani_corporis_fabrica">Andreas Vesalius</a> to create new anatomical drawings that helped the practice of medicine become modern.</p>
<p id="tzaMKS">In the days before Instagram and YouTube, physicians were already using their knowledge of skin to serve up pimple-popping content. Elliotson discussed how young men and women could be plagued by elevated spots with black tops for four or five years, but the spots could be extracted. “By squeezing them, you force out what is called a <em>maggot</em>, but it is only the contents of the sebaceous follicles,” he <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=RYYEAAAAQAAJ&dq=lectures%20on%20the%20theory%20and%20practice%20of%20medicine%20john%20elliotson&pg=PA278#v=onepage&q=acne&f=false">writes</a>, “and by continued squeezing, you may force out stuff as long as the follicles will supply it.” In the case of older patients with rosacea, Elliotson <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=RYYEAAAAQAAJ&dq=lectures%20on%20the%20theory%20and%20practice%20of%20medicine%20john%20elliotson&pg=PA279#v=onepage&q=acne&f=false">described</a> the condition as maggots that lie in a bed of roses. Dermatological disorders were often named as though human skin were harboring or taking on the properties of animals and insects.</p>
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<p id="NAZzi7">The ancient approach to acne treatment seems like a direct ancestor of the DIY skinternet. Ancient Egyptians and Greeks used honey in their <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2081863/">treatment</a> of acne. Celsus <a href="http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Celsus/6*.html">recommended</a> “galbanum and soda pounded in vinegar to the consistency of honey” for removing spots. What we would call “natural” skin care remedies for acne persisted into the modern era and were used alongside formulations that sound like they’d require a chemistry set. Thomas Bateman wrote in his 1836 edition of <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=0x4SAAAAYAAJ&dq=acne%20treatment&pg=PR1#v=onepage&q&f=false"><em>A Practical Synopsis of Cutaneous Diseases</em></a> that a patient believed that bruised parsley caused severe inflammation that healed her acne; he also highlighted some of the ancient-recommended topicals, such as vinegar, honey, emulsion of bitter almonds, turpentine(!!!), and myrrh. </p>
<p id="4i5deW"><a href="https://archive.org/details/toiletoffloraorc00buch"><em>The toilet of Flora</em></a>, first published in 1772, includes a number of recipes for waters intended to cure pimples that use everything from veal and newly laid eggs to apples, celery, and fennel. The mixtures sound more like a Sunday roast than effective skin care. One <em>Flora</em> recipe recommends putting a hot crust of bread on mouth pimples that have formed “in consequence of having drank out of a glass after an uncleanly person.” It all sounds a bit ridiculous, but <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-x6hCI9X0g">kitty litter face masks</a> happened on our watch, so it’s hard to be too judgey.</p>
<p id="frJz0c">The scientific revolution helped doctors identify substances that could quickly change and often shed skin; the problem was that many of the substances that busted open zits could take a few years off one’s life. Bateman <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=0x4SAAAAYAAJ&dq=acne%20treatment&pg=PA338#v=onepage&q=parsley&f=false">wrote</a> that one Dr. Underwood recommended a solution of carbonate of potass, presumably the modern potassium carbonate, a strongly alkaline liquid that sounds like a great way to needlessly piss off one’s skin for a week. </p>
<p id="gR5a6q">Bateman’s <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=0x4SAAAAYAAJ&dq=acne%20treatment&pg=PA336#v=onepage&q=acne&f=false"><em>A Practical Synopsis of Cutaneous Diseases</em></a> goes straight off the rails and suggests various compounds containing mercury for stubbornly acneic skin before dropping a rec for a solution that includes <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_cyanide">hydrogen cyanide</a>, a “colorless, extremely poisonous and flammable liquid that boils slightly above room temperature.” <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=RYYEAAAAQAAJ&dq=lectures%20on%20the%20theory%20and%20practice%20of%20medicine%20john%20elliotson&pg=PA279#v=onepage&q=acne&f=false">Elliotson</a> recommends a nitrate of quicksilver, another mercury preparation. Mercury was a popular topical medicine at the time, but the element is so toxic that the workers who made felt hats using it inspired the phrase “mad as a hatter” due to the mercury poisoning they experienced.</p>
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<p id="4bBwoU">If you think flaky, raw “<a href="https://fiftyshadesofsnail.com/2015/11/14/save-my-tretface-a-dry-skin-sample-routine-and-best-practices/">tretface</a>” from Retin-A is bad, imagine “mercface” from the application of mercury compounds to pimples. Yet it was the turn toward science-y skin care, driven by the scientific revolution and newly professionalized physicians, that established dermatology as a field worthy of study and set research on a course that would eventually end with (and someday surpass, please gawd) prescription retinoids such as Differin and Retin-A as well as isotretinoin (a.k.a. Accutane).</p>
<p id="sXsxhb">One of the sadder <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/article-abstract/1740678?redirect=true">examples</a> of attempted acne treatment that I found in the course of my research comes from an anecdote mentioned in Robert Caro’s <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Path-Power-Years-Lyndon-Johnson/dp/0679729453">biography</a> of Lyndon B. Johnson. While studying for his undergraduate degree in Texas, the future president convinced a young man — who was already frequently bullied for a possible intellectual disability — to put fresh cow manure on his face in order to treat his serious acne and then wrap a towel with eye holes around the manure to keep it in place. Upon seeing the young man attempt the treatment the next day, LBJ convinced him to add more so it would “work.” </p>
<p id="KAW00u">The incident should remind us that modern dermatology took acne seriously and attempted to offer the latest scientific treatment methods — though sometimes caustic and even potentially deadly — while the general population served up laughter, suggestions to drink more water, toothpaste spot treatment remedies, and bullshit.</p>
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https://www.racked.com/2018/4/12/17071814/acne-treatment-historyTracy E. Robey2018-02-20T11:32:02-05:002018-02-20T11:32:02-05:00The Best Natural Deodorant Is Acid
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<img alt="Three skincare products: Pixi Glow Tonic, Biologique Recherche Lotion P50, Paula’s Choice Resist Weekly Resurfacing Treatment" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/paUwqJEVPaRtx219yjoI7dH8FAs=/100x0:1700x1200/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/58755419/acids.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Pixi <a href="https://www.target.com/p/pixi-174-skintreats-glow-tonic-3-4-fl-oz/-/A-17408487">Glow Tonic</a>, Biologique Recherche <a href="https://www.racked.com/2016/12/14/13941390/what-is-biologique-recherche-p50">Lotion P50</a>, Paula’s Choice <a href="https://www.paulaschoice.com/resist-weekly-resurfacing-treatment-with-10pct-aha/765.html">Resist Weekly Resurfacing Treatment</a></figcaption>
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<p>The solution for tackling BO might already be in your skincare stash.</p> <p id="dBP0sk">These days, everyone seems to be <a href="https://www.racked.com/2017/12/5/16733686/natural-deodorant-test-dove">on the hunt</a> for a natural deodorant that doesn’t suck. The problem is that so many natural deodorants — even the ones from supposedly great brands like <a href="https://schmidtsnaturals.com/">Schmidt’s</a> and <a href="https://click.linksynergy.com/deeplink?id=nOD%2FrLJHOac&mid=2417&u1=racked&murl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sephora.com%2Flavanila" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Lavanila</a> — don’t manage to control body odor all day. They can also be thick and greasy, weirdly scented, <a href="https://crunchybetty.com/new-news-and-ph-balancing-your-old-homemade-deodorant-problems/">make one’s skin feel wildly irritated</a>, and even result in additional skin pigmentation from ingredients like baking soda. A lot of people hoping to switch to a natural deodorant are so frustrated by their options that they either spend a ton in search of The One or give up and go back to a traditional deodorant/antiperspirant.</p>
<p id="pXErcd">But the best natural deodorant may very well be in your skincare stash right now: an acid meant for your face. The discovery that acid makes a fantastic deodorant came about when some gnarly ingrown hairs made me apply facial acids to my pits in the hopes that I could unclog pores and exfoliate away hyperpigmentation from past underwire-enabled cysts. Only after using acid for a few weeks did I notice that I no longer had any body odor emanating from that area.</p>
<p id="kc5hki">I should be more clear about what I mean — I no longer had body odor even 24 hours after my last acid application, despite cartoon flies otherwise circling my head due to a general funk.</p>
<p id="BYazuL">Before realizing that acid was the cause of my perpetual freshness, I got kind of full of myself and I thought that maybe I just no longer smelled, as if you reach a certain age and level of wisdom and your body decides to grant you the power of always smelling neutral. Yeah, that turned out to be absolutely not true.</p>
<p id="CqiFfY">For me, acid makes a better deodorant than stick deodorant itself, whether it’s a natural one or traditional. It doesn’t smear on clothes and bras, it doesn’t result in a hot deodorant fragrance wafting around every time I flap my arms, and it doesn’t clog my pores.</p>
<p id="IOHDAd">The only thing it can’t do, in my experience, is stop sweat. Acids don’t work as an antiperspirant because they don’t contain aluminum salts, which reduce the amount of sweat released by glands. If you’d like to control sweat, acid is not the solution you’re looking for. If you’d like a natural deodorant that’s awesome, acid might be the answer.</p>
<p id="TU4eVT">I’d recommend testing watery <a href="https://goto.walmart.com/c/482924/565706/9383?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.walmart.com%2Fip%2FStridex-Maximum-Strength-Acne-Treatment-Pads-Alcohol-Free-2-Salicylic-Acid-Face-Wipes-90-wipes%2F10791016&sharedid=racked.com" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">2% BHAs</a> or <a href="http://www.gardenofwisdom.com/catalog/item/7495831/6203270.htm">7-10% AHAs</a>: strong enough for serious daily use, but not peel strength. I’ve experimented with how often to swipe, and it seems like once per day from a cotton round or pre-moistened pad in the morning is the sweet spot for me; it’s enough power to kill odor, but not enough exfoliation to leave my skin irritated and tender. Unshaved pits? Experiment with the pad options, but consider adding an acid spray such as Paula’s Choice <a href="https://paulachoiceusca.l3km.net/c/482924/311423/4801?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.paulaschoice.com%2Fclear-acne-body-spray%2F624.html&sharedid=racked.com" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Clear Acne Body Spray</a> to help spread the low-pH love around.</p>
<p id="ZzJkJh">I was curious about why acid meant for my face worked so well to control BO, so I contacted Gloria & Victoria, skincare chemists who run the <a href="https://www.instagram.com/chemist.confessions/">Chemist Confessions</a> Instagram account. “BO is directly linked to bacteria breaking down the lipids and proteins in your sweat,” they told me. “The most likely mechanism is that the acids lowered the pH to a point where the environment is no longer favorable to the BO bacteria.”</p>
<p id="5sN4xZ">The duo say that there shouldn’t be any risks associated with using AHA or BHA on your pits, but be sure to watch for irritation and don’t overdo it. Gloria & Victoria linked the effect of acid on underarms to a new area of research: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_flora">skin microflora and microbiome</a>, or the unique way our body works with bacteria and the bacteria blend that’s particular to each of us. Since we’re all working with different sweat and oil glands, skin types, and bacteria, my deodorant routine might not work for everyone.</p>
<p id="ddHtRU">I shared my acid deodorant experiment on the skinternet, and skincare fans around the world actually joined in the testing to see if acid is truly a universal solution to the natural deodorant problem. Two Twitter users, who shall go unnamed for the sake of their mentions, reported successfully using cult skincare classics Pixi <a href="https://goto.target.com/c/482924/81938/2092?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.target.com%2Fp%2Fpixi-174-skintreats-glow-tonic-3-4-fl-oz%2F-%2FA-17408487&sharedid=racked.com" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Glow Tonic</a> and even Biologique Recherche’s luxe <a href="https://www.racked.com/2016/12/14/13941390/what-is-biologique-recherche-p50">Lotion P50</a> to kill odor and ingrown hairs after the products didn’t work on their faces.</p>
<p id="LbbvV8"><a href="https://twitter.com/ineznatasha">MSN</a> said that BHA worked better than AHA and recommended Cosrx <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Cosrx-Step-Original-Clear-Pads/dp/B00XXOKKS2">One Step Original Clear Pads</a> for the job. <a href="https://twitter.com/_Selianth">Selianth</a> recommended Stridex <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Stridex-Natural-Control-Pads-Count/dp/B003D7L7PY">Natural Control Pads</a> with 1% BHA, finding that they once even warded off BO for a whole two days. <a href="https://twitter.com/SkincerelyGlow">Clare Oparo</a>, who blogs at <a href="https://www.skincerelyclare.com/">Skincerely Clare</a>, reported “Loved it!” <a href="https://twitter.com/JocelynAS">redbcuzofScully</a> said tests have been “So far so good!”</p>
<p id="OUKNEK">That’s not to say that every acid is going to work for everyone. <a href="https://twitter.com/ivory_ijack">Ivory</a> shared that “it worked for me on days I wasn’t exercising. But it had to be a liquid AHA. No serums (too sticky).” <a href="https://twitter.com/MiMiLuvsMakeup">Mimi</a> tested several acids and application techniques before concluding that the technique didn’t work for her. <a href="https://twitter.com/Charlottessaem">Charlotte</a> found that Nip + Fab <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Nip-Fab-Glycolic-Night-Extreme/dp/B010SAF0YC">Glycolic Fix Night Pads Extreme</a> took too long to dry down to be useful. And <a href="https://twitter.com/OverlySarcasmic">Your Perma-Bitchfaced Nemesis</a> recommended a hack for those who want to get the skincare benefits of acid while still blocking sweat: Use an acid under a regular antiperspirant deodorant.</p>
<p id="kVtiOT">I started my pit experiment with some Garden of Wisdom <a href="http://www.gardenofwisdom.com/catalog/item/7495831/6203270.htm">8% Lactic Acid Exfo Pads</a> left over from a lactic acid orgy I had last year. The pads were great, if quite strong on my face, so I wondered if they could maybe <em>somehow</em> convince my underarms to stop freaking out after the Great Backpack Strap Chafing Incident of 2017. The good dose of daily-strength lactic acid at a very low pH delivered a significant (but not unpleasant) tingle on the raw areas, but quickly exfoliated my skin, untangled the ingrown hair situation, and left me fresh AF.</p>
<p id="ezdqIu">I happened to have a spare bottle of Paula’s Choice <a href="https://paulachoiceusca.l3km.net/c/482924/311423/4801?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.paulaschoice.com%2Fresist-weekly-resurfacing-treatment-with-10pct-aha%2F765.html&sharedid=racked.com" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Resist Weekly Resurfacing Treatment With 10% AHA</a> on my vanity a few months later and swiped it on one day when I really wanted to see how much my pit skin could take before screaming. Not only did the glycolic acid formula sting very little and control stench for more than 24 hours, it actually cleared up some stubborn ingrown hairs and — I’m not kidding — started to chip away at the years of hyperpigmentation issues that have piled up in the region. It’s like a spa for your pits.</p>
<p id="T8vKce">Not everyone has enough facial acid stockpiled to survive a total meltdown of society, but that’s where my long-term plan comes in: the super famous, affordable, and actually awesome <a href="https://www.racked.com/2018/2/6/16945484/stridex-acne-treatment-reddit">Stridex Maximum Strength Pads</a>, which are available at US drugstores. The pads contain 2% salicylic acid and no alcohol, so they’re a good pore-unclogging affordable pad option.</p>
<p id="bqvl1O">As with all skincare, <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/SkincareAddiction/comments/14sd25/i_just_learned_how_to_do_a_test_patch_properly/">patch test</a>, try it for a few days at home, and report back on your pit experiments in the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/RackedLounge/">Racked Lounge Facebook group</a>.</p>
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https://www.racked.com/2018/2/20/17021612/natural-deodorant-acidTracy E. Robey2018-02-07T09:32:00-05:002018-02-07T09:32:00-05:00K-Pop Stars Get Designer Clothes From Fans
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<figcaption>BTS are seen at Gimpo International Airport on November 5, 2015 in Seoul, South Korea. | Photo: ilgan Sports/Multi-Bits via Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>Fans are helping K-pop artists with world-class sales look like superstars — even when their actual paychecks don’t allow it.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="UmxJdV">When Korean boy band <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_Cqw69_m_yzbMVGvQA8QWrL_HdVXJQX7">BTS</a> attended US music awards shows in 2017, fashion and beauty publications took note. <a href="https://www.vogue.com/article/bts-amas-2017-red-carpet-saint-laurent"><em>Vogue</em></a> proclaimed “BTS Shut Down the AMAs Red Carpet in Saint Laurent” while <a href="https://www.bustle.com/p/btss-2017-american-music-awards-outfits-make-90s-boy-band-fashion-look-sad-5508858">Bustle</a> wrote “BTS’s 2017 American Music Awards Outfits Make ’90s Boy Band Fashion Look Sad.” As newly ordained stars in the global pop scene, there was considerable interest in what the band would wear. On the red carpet at the BBMAs and AMAs, the seven members of BTS looked totally comfortable in their Saint Laurent suits. The band may have been unfamiliar to many US viewers, but they’re no strangers to superstar style. And it’s fans that help BTS and other K-pop stars (called “idols”) stay in designer everything, down to their pajamas on casual live broadcasts. </p>
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<p style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px; margin-bottom:0; margin-top:8px; overflow:hidden; padding:8px 0 7px; text-align:center; text-overflow:ellipsis; white-space:nowrap;"><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Be0FLGyHEIP/" style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px; text-decoration:none;" target="_blank">A post shared by iKON_Wardrobe (아이콘 의상) (@ikon_wardrobe)</a> on <time style=" font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px;" datetime="2018-02-05T11:43:47+00:00">Feb 5, 2018 at 3:43am PST</time></p>
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<p id="fdMlux">K-pop idol fashion is documented on <a href="https://www.racked.com/2016/8/24/12402684/kate-middleton-style-bloggers">social-media style accounts</a> by admins that can instantly recognize clothing and create collages that pair paparazzi-style photos taken at the airport, video screenshots, or social-media images with official clothing and accessory marketing that shows the designer, price, and sometimes even the provenance of clothes and accessories. <a href="https://www.soshified.com/">Soshified</a>, the largest international fan community dedicated to idol group Girls’ Generation (the community has been in existence for a decade), has a whole <a href="http://style.soshified.com/">Style section</a> of its website devoted to clothes and accessories worn by the girl group’s members, complete with shopping links. While providing fashion info about a girl group’s style to a largely female audience (at least outside of Korea) makes sense, K-pop fans are just as interested in knowing what their favorite boy bands are wearing. Style accounts for megagroups <a href="https://twitter.com/getonswag?lang=en">BTS</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/_EXOstyle_">EXO</a> have over 100,000 followers on Twitter, but seemingly every active band, even those with smaller followings, has its style intensively tracked by at least one Twitter or Instagram account.</p>
<p id="Rb3jyI">The centrality of designer fashion to K-pop has grown over the years, raising the bar for every time an artist leaves the house for work-related events and <a href="https://www.racked.com/2016/6/30/12039926/celebrity-airport-style">travel</a>. Girls’ Generation’s stylist Seo Soo-kyung told <a href="http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20171018000840"><em>The Korea Herald</em></a>, “Before [landmark K-pop group] Big Bang, K-pop artists’ costumes were literally costumes. Stylists’ job was to kind of copy the lines of famous designers and recreate them into stage outfits.” Big Bang’s more natural style featured “outfits freshly out from a designer’s collection,” according to Seo, meaning that fans could buy the same clothes their favorite idols wore. </p>
<p id="9Kv1ub">Haru98, from Twitter’s <a href="https://twitter.com/iKON_Wardrobe">iKON_Wardrobe</a>, which tracks the style of YG Entertainment’s seven-member boy group iKON, told Racked that the band’s clothing for music videos, photoshoots, and travel is usually either purchased by YG stylists or borrowed from designers — mainly Korean brands such as <a href="http://www.haleineshop.com/onlinestore1.html">Haleine</a>, <a href="http://acmedelavie.com/">Acmé de la Vie</a>, and <a href="http://www.pragmatic.co.kr/product/list.html?cate_no=85">Pragmatic</a>. K-pop fan Jess, who has been following boy bands, including GOT7, B.A.P., and VIXX, for several years, told Racked, “airport fashion on male stars can be well over $50,000 for one outfit.” </p>
<p id="bqgLJl">K-pop idols are wearing outfits that cost as much as some of their peers’ annual salaries to catch a flight. <a href="http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20150112000858"><em>The Korea Herald</em></a> reported that Korea’s National Tax Service released figures showing that K-pop idols made an average of $42,000 in 2013. </p>
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<p style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px; margin-bottom:0; margin-top:8px; overflow:hidden; padding:8px 0 7px; text-align:center; text-overflow:ellipsis; white-space:nowrap;"><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BeiMEUNHtly/" style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px; text-decoration:none;" target="_blank">A post shared by EXOstyle (엑소스타일) (@_exostyle_)</a> on <time style=" font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px;" datetime="2018-01-29T12:57:42+00:00">Jan 29, 2018 at 4:57am PST</time></p>
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<p id="ZY0OZx">For every group collecting bigger paychecks, there are smaller acts scraping by without even turning a profit. Popular girl group AOA <a href="https://www.koreaboo.com/news/aoa-finally-out-of-debt-to-fnc-entertainment-paid-for-first-time-in-3-years-since-debut/">worked for three years</a> to pay off debts to FNC Entertainment before finally collecting their first paycheck in 2016; perhaps most shockingly, three years to pay off debts related to music production, promotion, training, housing, and food is considered fast in the industry. Hip-hop group Block B <a href="http://netizenbuzz.blogspot.ca/2013/01/block-b-files-injunction-against-their.html">filed an injunction</a> against the first company that employed them in 2013: They said they were not paid in the course of several years of labor and that band members’ parents supplied stage costumes and cash to support promotions. </p>
<p id="7asl4h">Even the biggest K-pop boy bands collect salaries far smaller than one would expect from their sales figures. In 2015, EXO sold over 1 million albums, but user <a href="https://onehallyu.com/topic/329263-how-to-estimate-your-idols-profit-from-album-and-digital-sales/">MyRoad2Pro on OneHallyu</a>’s forums broke down the millions of dollars their albums earned to show that band members may have only received $73,604.40 each from their new music (with endorsements being far more lucrative for the band), while top girl group Apink likely had $2,926 net debt per member before endorsements got the band into the black. Not every artist turns a profit — EXO and Apink were two of the most successful groups in 2015, and the salaries for K-pop stars mostly go down from there.</p>
<p id="w2PEYx">How do K-pop stars, who make far less than you’d expect, manage to stay dressed in designer clothes? Alex, from BTS fashion Twitter account <a href="https://twitter.com/GetOnSwag">Beyond The Style</a>, told Racked, “I [think] it’s, like, 30/30/30 percent,” with clothing coming equally from purchases by the band’s stylists, loans from designers, and gifts from fans.</p>
<p id="VDLU6e"><a href="https://twitter.com/iKON_Wardrobe">IKON_Wardrobe</a>’s Haru98 says that idols, in addition to buying their own outfits, receive gifts of clothing from fans, friends, or family. On the occasion of a band member’s birthday, fans — usually working together under the direction of a star’s fan sites — will give artists presents, including expensive clothing. The idols typically wear these gifts for more casual public appearances, such as going to the airport or appearing on the radio (where they are usually photographed and filmed for a live video feed by the station). </p>
<p id="CEukTl">Fan sites double as personal photographers-slash-paparazzi (although they’re usually on very good terms with the artists they cover) and fan clubs. Their admins take photos and videos of the band members they follow, edit the images, and sell things like photo books and DVDs of their original work to help buy gifts for the idols they follow. In addition to selling fan goods, fan sites also collect <a href="https://twitter.com/YOURMOMENT0309/status/957238659111178240">donations</a> in order to provide artists with luxury clothes and accessories, donate to charity in the name of the artist, provide food at radio and TV broadcast appearances by the band, and secure celebratory advertising for their fave on everything from the <a href="http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2014/05/28/2014052801624.html">sides of buses in Seoul</a> to <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/tamarherman/2017/12/21/k-pop-fans-spend-big-on-times-square-ads-promoting-their-favorite-stars/#1e7c96dd7105">billboards in Times Square</a>.</p>
<aside id="o6hPv7"><div data-anthem-component="actionbox" data-anthem-component-data="{"title":"Like what you're reading?","description":"Get Racked's twice-weekly newsletter.","label":"SIGN UP","url":"https://confirmsubscription.com/h/d/59F5932428C4E6CD"}"></div></aside><p id="TfKj5G">The unique K-pop gifting relationship between fans and idols is perhaps most clear when it comes to luxury watches. While part of the appeal of <a href="https://www.racked.com/2018/1/3/16841062/cartier-sunglasses-detroit">Cartier White Buffs for Detroit rap artists</a> is that the stars can demonstrate the depth of their bank accounts by buying them, many of the high-end timepieces in the K-pop world are known to be fan gifts. We know this because fan sites post <a href="https://twitter.com/_nuna_V/status/944875507937452032">proof</a> photos showing neatly arranged rows of gifts in the wake of events such as artist birthdays, in part to reassure fans that the money they collected, whether from purchased photo and video goods or outright donations, was spent appropriately. In many cases, more expensive gifts, such as watches, are photographed separately and highlighted in posts when the artist uses the garment or accessory. A series of tweets by fan site <a href="https://twitter.com/_nuna_V">NUNA V</a> recently compared <a href="https://twitter.com/_nuna_V/status/958315773969104896">a coat, watch, tie, and bag</a> gifted to BTS member Kim Taehyung (stage name: V) with screen captures of him using the items during an episode of <em>Run BTS!</em>, the band’s web variety show.</p>
<p id="fcoWq2">Providing one’s favorite star with a high-end watch holds special interest for fans. A <a href="https://twitter.com/dayumexo/status/771564394933198848">Twitter account</a> periodically revives its joking demand that EXO’s company, SM Entertainment, buy member Do Kyungsoo (stage name: D.O.) a Rolex. D.O. stopped accepting gifts from fans <a href="https://www.allkpop.com/article/2016/09/exos-do-decides-to-stop-accepting-gifts-from-his-fan-union">in 2016</a>, and SM Entertainment hasn’t been exceptionally generous when it comes to profit-sharing, so he’d likely need to buy that Rolex himself, but bandmates <a href="https://www.allkpop.com/article/2015/01/baekhyuns-fan-polar-light-presents-him-with-expensive-christmas-gifts-including-a-rolex-watch">Baekhyun</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/exokai_kr/status/954320422731857922">Kai</a> have each received a Rolex timepiece from their fan sites. BTS member Jungkook was still in high school when he <a href="https://pann-choa.blogspot.com/2016/10/instiz-high-schooler-who-wears-rolex.html">received a Rolex</a> from his erstwhile fan site Direct Kill. On an article about the gift, a Korean commenter (English translation via <a href="https://pann-choa.blogspot.com/2016/10/instiz-high-schooler-who-wears-rolex.html">Pann-Choa</a>), wrote: “As expected from my man.” It’s not the fact that a star has the cash to buy a luxury accessory that’s important to fans, it’s that he somehow owns it — even if it’s a gift.</p>
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<cite>Photo: Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>VIXX arrive for the 24th Seoul Music Awards at the Olympic Park.</figcaption>
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<p id="Q9YF0Y">That’s not to say that all K-pop fans are chipping in for Rolexes. Don’t try to connect K-pop’s gifting to vague (verging on Orientalist) notions of collective culture. Commenters in Korea are often dismissive of lavish presents and sometimes aghast at the idea of providing a star luxury goods. Posts on Korean forums such as <a href="http://m.pann.nate.com/talk/339856133?currMenu=best&stndDt=20171219">Pann</a> (translated at <a href="https://pann-choa.blogspot.com/2017/12/enter-talk-dont-you-think-that.html">Pann-Choa</a>) and on English-language K-pop forums such as <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/bangtan/comments/50hnd8/celebration_culture/">Reddit</a> show similar levels of bafflement at the lengths to which fans will go to provide clothing, accessories, and even food during events for band members. A massive investigation of fan gifting in 2013 led to <a href="http://netizenbuzz.blogspot.com/2013/01/evolution-of-fan-gift-culture-rice.html">articles</a> on <em>jo gong</em> culture. The term “jo gong” was used historically to refer to the tribute a vassal state gave its feudal overlord; such a parallel raised the ire of online commenters, who wondered why fans would treat themselves like vassals of a celebrity, even <a href="http://netizenbuzz.blogspot.com/2013/08/fans-found-taking-out-private-loans-and.html">taking on side jobs</a> and risky loans to contribute to gifts for celebs. </p>
<p id="9THUZS">The same attitudes that result in stars receiving designer underwear from their fan sites also cause tremendous scrutiny of any behavior that appears to indicate which gifts they want to receive. For instance, EXO’s Sehun and Chanyeol were <a href="http://netizenbuzz.blogspot.com/2015/05/pann-sehun-and-chanyeol-like-pictures.html">criticized</a> for liking fancy watch posts on Instagram. (K-pop fans spoke to Racked on the condition that they could use nicknames, social-media handles, or their first names; most K-pop fans in and out of Korea don’t use any part of their real name online. In light of the fact that top stars can get hate for pressing “like” on Instagram posts showing fairly standard material goods, it’s no wonder that fans are wary of surrendering their privacy.) </p>
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<p style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px; margin-bottom:0; margin-top:8px; overflow:hidden; padding:8px 0 7px; text-align:center; text-overflow:ellipsis; white-space:nowrap;"><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BezRQxmjnWS/" style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px; text-decoration:none;" target="_blank">A post shared by Kpop_Closets (@kpop_closets)</a> on <time style=" font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px;" datetime="2018-02-05T04:10:10+00:00">Feb 4, 2018 at 8:10pm PST</time></p>
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<p id="ie7nqt">Stars such as <a href="https://www.soompi.com/2011/08/08/big-bangs-gdragons-handwritten-letter-to-fans/">G-Dragon</a> from Big Bang, SHINee’s <a href="http://netizenbuzz.blogspot.com/2013/07/taemin-declines-fan-gifts-for-his.html">Taemin</a>, and <a href="http://www.kpopherald.com/view.php?ud=201607261431450795410_2">JYP Entertainment</a> as a whole don’t accept gifts from fans. Some bands and artists followed suit; most recently, BTS <a href="http://cafe.daum.net/BANGTAN/jbaj/421">announced</a> that they will no longer accept fan gifts as of March 2018. Just this week, EXO’s Xiumin <a href="https://www.allkpop.com/article/2018/02/exos-xiumin-writes-to-fans-about-his-decision-to-stop-accepting-gifts">posted</a> that fans had filled his house with so many gifts that he found it difficult to walk around, and asked that they understand his decision to decline all future presents. That’s not to say that fans will stop spending on birthdays and anniversaries of the artists’ debut performances: That money will likely now be directed fully into the aforementioned advertising and charity projects, such as when fans <a href="https://www.allkpop.com/article/2016/04/fans-donate-blood-for-twice-chaeyoungs-17th-birthday">donated blood</a> to celebrate TWICE member Chaeyoung’s birthday, <a href="http://www.rapportian.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=102849">donated money</a> to help low-income children with hearing impairment for Hoya from Infinite’s birthday, and <a href="http://netizenbuzz.blogspot.com/2016/01/kais-fans-donate-23-million-won-to.html">supported</a> the Korea Childhood Leukemia Foundation for Kai’s birthday.</p>
<p id="4oe6rV">At this point, K-pop fans are so coordinated that some groups could probably pick up seats for their favorite bands in the US midterm elections. Fans are tweeting, voting, and calling to help their favorite K-pop artists gain traction outside of Korea — having a globally recognized designer look has been part of how K-pop smashed through the language barrier to reach an international audience. Even when bands can’t speak every language, their clothes say enough to get their music a listen around the world. </p>
<p id="ZuR0gp">As IATFB, founder of the satirical K-pop news and commentary site <a href="http://www.asianjunkie.com/2015/05/13/sehun-chanyeol-make-their-fans-buy-them-expensive-gifts-people-mad/">Asian Junkie</a>, reflected in a post on EXO’s gifted Rolexes, “Nobody is forcing fans” to give lavish gifts, “but the idols know damn well that crazy teens will do whatever it takes because they’re delusional.” But, IATFB explains, “That’s essentially the whole pop business model to begin with, so if the fans are dumb/dedicated enough to gift them cars and shit, so be it.” </p>
<p id="XgNGvp">K-pop fan Jess, who is not a teen and who has participated in several birthday projects aimed at sending idols messages and images rather than luxury gifts, is unbothered by the K-pop gifting culture. Aware of the salaries K-pop groups probably earn, she says, “All of those gifts mean idols don’t have to buy stuff on their own and can use their money for other things.”</p>
https://www.racked.com/2018/2/7/16978538/kpop-stars-designer-clothes-fansTracy E. Robey2017-12-28T09:32:01-05:002017-12-28T09:32:01-05:00Depression-Era Movies and Their Bizarre Fashion Show Montages
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<figcaption>Joan Bennett and Warner Baxter in a scene from <em>Vogues of 1938</em>. | Hulton Archive/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>How Hollywood cast itself as the center of style by stopping the action for Paris-style fashion shows.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="Mlb6as">Forty-four minutes into <a href="https://youtu.be/ZEuBt9gMcR4"><em>The Women</em></a><em> </em>(1939), the star-studded cast — filmed in black and white — takes their seats to watch a live fashion show. The six-minute segment is the only part of the movie shown in Technicolor. We never learn which shade is Jungle Red nail polish, a significant plot point that helps break up a marriage, but we do see some well-dressed mini monkeys that interact with models in full color. The camera quickly zooms to show sports playsuits, bathing costumes, picnic attire, and eveningwear designed by Adrian. MGM gathered megastars Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, and Rosalind Russell in an anticipated adaptation of a hit Broadway play, and paused the ride to show some clothes in pricey Technicolor. What was the studio thinking?</p>
<p id="28e5OE">Then there’s the fact that <em>The Women </em>takes place during the Great Depression, an economic collapse so profound that ancestors who lived through it carried habits for the rest of their lives that could only be explained by pointing to it (“Grandma cleans, sorts, and stores bread bags and their ties because she lived through the Great Depression, don’t judge.”). At a time when the national consciousness was filled with Forgotten Men brought low by the economy, why show opulent clothes on models and small monkeys? </p>
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<p id="x8g0Te">People watching the <em>The Women</em> in 1939 were just as baffled by director George Cukor’s choice to stop the catty action to show some clothes on models. <em>New York Times </em>movie critic Frank S. Nugent called the fashion show sequence “the only mark against George Cukor's otherwise shrewd and sentient direction” in <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=EE05E7DF1731E474BC4A51DFBF668382629EDE">his review</a>, asking “[w]hy not a diving exhibition or a number by the Rockettes?”</p>
<p id="qHUc6R">A hint as to the reason for the fashion show sequences comes from the <em>Times </em>review. Nugent calls the segment “lovely,” noting, “at least that's what most of the women around us seemed to think.” Popular magazines about films and Hollywood stars featured whole segments devoted to fashion each month, with clothes modeled by stars of all magnitudes — including Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford in the <a href="https://archive.org/details/photopla15chic">September 1939 issue of <em>Photoplay</em></a><em> </em>to promote the release of <em>The Women.</em> It’s probably no shock to readers of Racked in 2017 that sometimes people like to keep up with fashion and beauty news while the world burns.</p>
<p id="wHDYEg">The mid-film fashion shows in movies such as <em>The Women</em>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuUsGpL2bY0"><em>Fashions of 1934</em></a> (1934), <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0029737/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl"><em>Vogues Of 1938</em></a> (1937), <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0030413/"><em>Mannequin</em></a> (1937), and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0028310/"><em>Stolen Holiday</em></a><em> </em>(1937) weren’t just general escapist fun: They were part of a vast marketing machine that stretched into middle America and capitalized on major changes in how clothes were made. Later films such as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqkhBzsbehg"><em>How to Marry a Millionaire</em></a><em> </em>(1953), <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ygy3-uWbfg"><em>Funny Face</em></a> (1957), and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2G4NWk9CJw"><em>A New Kind of Love</em></a> (1963) featured fashion shows, but the fumbling way the sequences were inserted into early talking pictures and their contrast with the national economic devastation make mid-film fashion shows of the 1930s particularly interesting.</p>
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<cite>Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Bette Davis in <em>Fashions Of 1934</em>.</figcaption>
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<p id="y4XLrV">Film scholar Sarah E. Berry, Ph.D., author of <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=mTwmMRwXll8C"><em>Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood</em></a>, explained via email to Racked that “the new affordability of fashionable clothes in the ’30s” — due to “larger-scale clothing production and marketing” — led to “a fascination with this theme in movies.” Berry found that “there are only a dozen or so popular films from ’30s with full fashion show scenes,” but others took place in department stores and “featured female fashion designers, illustrators, models, and salesgirls” who modeled informally in the office or a showroom during the film. Between full-scale fashion shows and fashion-oriented settings for the drama, there were plenty of chances to show off clothes.</p>
<p id="SQoMqe">In movies such as <em>Fashions of 1934</em>, there’s a recurring theme that fashion is an elite, sometimes ridiculous thing that comes from Paris and then is sold to American women at shockingly high prices. As the characters in <em>Fashions </em>rip off Parisian designs and then open their own fashion house to rival the grand couturier Baroque, moviegoers were getting more access to stylish clothing due to real-life changes in clothing manufacturing. This was part of “an overall shift in US ready-to-wear design from Paris to Hollywood trend-setting,” according to Berry. </p>
<p id="mDSL7W">Movies of the period reflected the shift. Early in <em>Fashions</em>, William Powell’s Sherwood Nash character asks a room full of dusty department store owners “Why spend those thousands and thousands of dollars when you can have the identical models,” meaning knock-offs created by scheming Americans, “delivered to you, direct from Paris, for a mere fraction of their present cost?” Films like <em>Fashions </em>talked endlessly about — and sometimes even satirized — stylish clothes emanating from Paris, while at the same time movie studios and stars were actually stealing the City of Lights’ style crown.</p>
<aside id="ZoBuIm"><div data-anthem-component="actionbox" data-anthem-component-data="{"title":"Like what you're reading?","description":"Get Racked's twice-weekly newsletter for more shopping recommendations.","label":"SIGN UP","url":"https://confirmsubscription.com/h/d/59F5932428C4E6CD"}"></div></aside><p id="D8WUNP">Part of the way filmgoers got access to fashionable clothes was via studio-authorized copies of garments seen onscreen. “Film-fashion tie-ins were huge in the ’30s,” according to Berry, with brand names like “Cinema Fashions,” “Studio Styles,” and “Hollywood Fashions” even “advertised as part of a film's overall promotion strategy.” Changes in how clothes were manufactured allowed studios to become players in the American ready-to-wear industry. According to <em>Screen Style</em>, fashion tie-ins began when department stores supplied popular stage productions with garments around the turn of the century, but the partnership soon flowed in the reverse direction: “[B]eginning in the '20s, women could sew movie knock-offs through tie-in sewing patterns, but by the '30s they could also buy costume knock-offs, and these were often featured in department stores and magazines.”</p>
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<cite>George Hurrell/John Kobal Foundation/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Joan Crawford in <em>Letty Lynton</em>. Her white organdie dress was designed by Adrian and was widely copied. </figcaption>
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<p id="1bSTK2">The power of the film industry to sell fashion was soon clear when women snatched up copies of Joan Crawford’s dress from <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0023132/"><em>Letty Lynton</em></a> (1932). According to an exhibit called “<a href="https://www.lib.uci.edu/sites/all/docs/exhibits/checklist_fashion.pdf">Puttin’ on the Glitz: Hollywood’s Influence on Fashion</a>” at the University of California, Irvine’s Langson Library in 2010-11, Macy’s sold 15,000 copies of the <em>Letty Lynton</em> dress within a few months of release while Butterick also sold dress patterns for making the gown. Copies of the dress even <a href="https://universityofglasgowlibrary.wordpress.com/2016/04/18/hollywood-comes-to-aberdeen-the-influence-of-hollywood-glamour-in-the-john-falconer-catalogues/">reached Scotland</a>, where it was sold in an Aberdeen department store for what amounts to 200 pounds in today’s currency (roughly $266). </p>
<p id="HmG8G3">The Sears catalog featured “Autographed Fashion” and accessories worn on screen by stars such as Loretta Young, Ginger Rogers, and Ann Sothern. A silk crepe Loretta Young gown in 1935 cost $4.98 ($89.67 today), while an organdy gown cost only $2.95 ($53.11 today). Hollywood certainly didn’t destroy Paris as the fashion capital of the world, but it became a center of fashion for women who couldn’t drop the cost of a whole car on a evening gown — the majority of women, especially during the Great Depression.</p>
<p id="bh8dDR">At the same time that fashion shows were being jammed into movies — more or less creakily — Hollywood and its stars were partnering with the new mass clothing retailers. Together, they promoted clothing on a scale and level of sophistication that’s more in line with today’s Instagram fashion influencers than the seemingly unreachable catwalks of Paris that the movies emulated.</p>
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https://www.racked.com/2017/12/28/16790280/mid-movie-fashion-show-great-depressionTracy E. Robey2017-12-21T09:32:01-05:002017-12-21T09:32:01-05:00There Was Never a Time When Western Society Wasn’t Weird About Cleavage
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<figcaption>Brother Philippe's Geese by Nicolas Lancret. | Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art</figcaption>
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<p class="c-entry-disclaimer"><i>Racked is no longer publishing. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years. The archives will remain available here; for new stories, head over to Vox.com, where our staff is covering consumer culture for <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods">The Goods by Vox</a>. You can also see what we’re up to by <a href="https://vox.com/goods-newsletter">signing up here</a>.</i></p>
<p>Classical paintings and Hulu’s Harlots have been lying to you.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="pIATUZ">If you watch TV shows like Hulu’s <em>Harlots</em> or have browsed even a few early modern European and early American paintings, you might get the impression that we missed out on an era of NBD boobs. Sure, the thinking goes, if a time machine took you back to 1750s Europe, you might need to get laced into a corset each day, but at least you could let the tops of your boobs experience the wonders of early Industrial Revolution pollution minus today’s catcalling assholes and people judging your gracious display of cleavage. Sorry to ruin the <em>Outlander</em> daydream, but that’s just not true.</p>
<p id="lccjXl">Part of the problem for women in the English-speaking world was that 18th-century low-neckline styles that featured boobs squishing out the top of a corset and bodice were associated with France. The French were the originators of the low and open chest look for ladies who did not engage in sex work. France and England were rivals in the early modern period due to disputes over royal inheritances, religion, competition for colonies, and holdover grievances. The open neckline style came to England as a sexual, Catholic, and foreign fashion that caused it to get hate in northern, largely Protestant Europe. The same dress that might be considered perfectly fashionable and fine on a lady at the French court might raise eyebrows in London.</p>
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<cite>Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art</cite>
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<em>Self-Portrait with Two Pupils</em> by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (French, 1749–1803, Paris)</figcaption>
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<p id="Sj3UjW">Yet as a <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436840">self-portrait by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard</a> (France, 1785) shows, not even all women in France wore the open-neck style without modifications. Labille-Guiard paints herself with the fashionable exposed <em>poitrine</em>, while her two pupils wear dresses of similar cut, but accessorized with gauzy kerchiefs that provide some coverage. Women throughout Europe and their New World colonies used a variety of accessories, such as ribbons, bows, kerchiefs, tuckers, lace, jackets, and shrugs, that were worn over or tucked into the bodice to provide coverage, warmth, and protection from the sun. Accessories could also help counteract physics and keep boobs lodged in one’s dress while leaning over in the course of working; plenty of bawdy paintings and <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/403267">engravings</a> show women popping out of their dresses (to some extent, it’s a porny trope, but one grounded in some sort of reality). </p>
<p id="Bb8F4v">That said, women didn’t always want to wear covers. <em>The Guardian </em>complained in 1713 that ladies weren’t wearing the tucker as much anymore, leaving their necks and bosom tops uncovered. Author Joseph Addison complained that dresses had exposed women so much that “the Neck of a fine Woman at present take in almost half the Body.” Later, publications advised against women “unmasking their beauties.” Susan J. Vincent writes in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Fashion-Dressing-Renaissance-Today/dp/1845207645/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1512451775&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Anatomy+of+Fashion+vincent"><em>The Anatomy of Fashion</em></a> that correspondents in the 18th century wrote that “otherwise polite, genteel women looked like common prostitutes.” For many women, the neckline depended on the time of day: Even in France, the low and open neck was reserved for evening gowns while daytime dress remained more covered.</p>
<p id="7vahBQ">Little girls wore the same styles as their mothers, but that had little to do with any sort of lack of sexual ideas about breasts and everything to do with the fact that children tended to be dressed as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centuries_of_Childhood">tiny adults</a> in miniature adult clothing. Whether for adults or for children, fashions shown in paintings did not necessarily reflect the reality of everyday wear — you’ve probably never stepped out in a meat dress, but someone in our lifetime has.</p>
<aside id="edxkYB"><div data-anthem-component="actionbox" data-anthem-component-data="{"title":"Like what you're reading?","description":"Get Racked's twice-weekly newsletter for more shopping recommendations.","label":"SIGN UP","url":"https://confirmsubscription.com/h/d/59F5932428C4E6CD"}"></div></aside><p id="CXk1un">The French Revolution, famous for lopping off heads, had some far-out ideas regarding boobs. In 1793, artist Jacques-Louis David constructed a “Fountain of Regeneration” in Paris on the site where the Bastille prison once stood. The fountain looked like Isis, the Egyptian goddess of fertility. Eighty-six male deputies from the National Convention drank water “joyfully” from the statue’s spouting breasts — <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/2166840">the idea was</a> that the water stood in for milk that would symbolically renew the nation following royal rule and the earlier part of the French Revolution. </p>
<p id="y4kwT4">When people try to tell you that boobs were seen as normal, natural, and not sexualized in the past, please show them to the statue of Isis shooting water out of her tits to renew her 86 large adult revolutionary sons. </p>
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<cite>Photo: Charles Monnet [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons</cite>
<figcaption>Fontaine de la Régénération by Charles Monnet.</figcaption>
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<p id="lmFhVa">There was never a time in early modern Europe when an actual breast wasn’t judged against some platonic tit ideal. Smaller breasts have been considered sexually attractive more frequently and for longer periods of time in the West. Larger breasts were considered to be closer to those of animals and were associated with the lower classes or racial groups considered unattractive. <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/2166840">Early biologists</a>, who would develop ideas that became modern scientific racism, even studied differences in breast shape and size between different ethnic groups, elevating some groups over others due to the degree to which the observed breasts adhered to the European standard of beauty. Keep in mind, after all, that the word “mammal” comes from the word for “breast” — Swedish biologist Linnaeus and friends were so hung up on tits that they named a whole chunk of the animal kingdom for boobs rather than other shared characteristics such as our three inner ear bones.</p>
<p id="BeEPxj">Despite the relatively open-neck cut popular in the 18th century, complete exposure of breasts in portraiture was acceptable for only two groups of women: the scandalous, such as mistresses and prostitutes, and the pure: breastfeeding mothers or queens, seen as mothers of the nation. Other women, such as mothers who weren’t nursing at the moment, single women and girls, and women past childbearing age — the majority of women — were expected to be at least covered from the nipples down. The Enlightenment of the 18th century brought new ideas about Isis feeding legislators, and also the natural role for the female breast. Biologists such as Linnaeus and philosophers of nature such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau popularized the idea of the woman as a nurturer, simultaneously making breastfeeding one’s own children natural and fashionable. Before then, mothers of all classes except the lowest tended to send their children to be breastfed by poorer women. </p>
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<cite>Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art</cite>
<figcaption>Madame Grand by Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (French, Paris 1755–1842 Paris)</figcaption>
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<p id="0CxqgU">While TV shows about the mid-18th century tend to serve up cleavage galore, the height of boob and shoulder exposure came in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The fashion of the time referenced both neoclassical ideals and the new biological ideal by emphasizing natural, flowing gowns while moving the waist very high, immediately under the breasts. Thanks to the use of light fabrics, breasts became easily available to both nursing babies and lecherous observers. Movies such as <em>Pride and Prejudice</em> and <em>Emma</em> may seem to feature fairly modest fashion to us, but the exposed shoulders and boob-on-a-shelf eveningwear looks were considered kinda scandalous — yet fashionable — at the time. No less than Jane Austen herself <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Fashion-Dressing-Renaissance-Today/dp/1845207645">described</a> a woman she saw as a “short girl with a broad nose & wide mouth, fashionable dress, & exposed bosom.” </p>
<p id="HQ1PAL">Marilyn Yalom, author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/History-Breast-Marilyn-Yalom/dp/0345388941"><em>A History of the Breast</em></a>, argues that in the early 19th century, male thinkers decided that a nursing mother’s breasts were both erotic and meant for nourishing the future male citizens of the nation. In the Renaissance, if you whipped out a boob to feed your own child, you would be criticized for subjecting your bosom to animal-like practices when you should be using a wet nurse. By the early 19th century, the same action would be applauded for exemplifying the natural role of the mother — as long as nursing was done in private, since any complete exposure of the breast for any reason was now considered sexually provocative. At the same time, higher necklines emerged in the 19th century (although they moved up and down quite a bit). While one might look at the fashions of the Victorian era, for example, and think that women were fairly covered, people at the time stayed scandalized because the corsetry and bustles of the era gave women body shapes that were considered extremely sexy — even if they skipped showing skin in some periods.</p>
<p id="UCjqgC">As Western civilization turned toward modernity, real women’s real breasts were shoved into the domestic sphere of the home. People in the West have been judgy and gross when it comes to breasts for at least the last 500 years. Women always got shit for their tits. The only women able to show their breasts in public without derision or lecherous looks were symbolic figures like Isis, nourishing thirsty male legislators and serving the interests of the state.</p>
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https://www.racked.com/2017/12/21/16738658/cleavage-historyTracy E. Robey2017-11-29T09:32:02-05:002017-11-29T09:32:02-05:00How Tights Took the Devil From Terrifying Demon to Mustachioed Prankster
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<figcaption>Scene from 'Faust' by Charles Gounod (1818-1893). | Photo: Stefano Bianchetti/Corbis via Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p class="c-entry-disclaimer"><i>Racked is no longer publishing. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years. The archives will remain available here; for new stories, head over to Vox.com, where our staff is covering consumer culture for <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods">The Goods by Vox</a>. You can also see what we’re up to by <a href="https://vox.com/goods-newsletter">signing up here</a>.</i></p>
<p>The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was putting on an absurd outfit.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="HnalX6">How did the devil go from the ugly and terrifying Enemy of Man and God in the Renaissance to a Renaissance tights-wearing <a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VpmRwoNMtCc/Tnfuh0A1TEI/AAAAAAAAAI4/hUf3i3_tJyI/s1600/1906_Underwood_Deviled_Ham.JPG">chopped ham spokesperson</a> in the 20th century? It all comes down to the telling and retelling of a fable about a real German scholar accused of trying to snatch knowledge that wasn’t his to take.</p>
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<cite>Photo: Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>“The Devil Presenting St Augustin with the Book of Vices,” c1455-1498, by Michael Pacher. Here the devil is nude, with a face for a butt.</figcaption>
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<p id="3zbAi5">The medieval and Renaissance devil has some of the gnarliest toes in Western art. In an <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/693797">engraving from the 15th century</a>, Lucifer sits in the middle of hell devouring sinners with three mouths on his face and one on his stomach, his toes taking the form of talons. The image was inspired by Dante’s <em>Inferno</em>, which <a href="http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/circle9.html#treachery">depicts</a> Lucifer frozen at the center of a lake in the middle of hell. His head with three faces is covered with tears from his six eyes as he chews on three of the worst sinners ever, blood mixing with saliva and running down his faces. While crunching on the bodies, he flaps his giant bat-like wings to keep this part of hell frozen. Dante himself was baptized under <a href="https://www.florenceinferno.com/baptistry-ceiling-mosaic/">Florentine mosaics</a> depicting a three-headed Lucifer that seems to be using the bodies of sinners as footstools. Medieval devils sported <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/467263?sortBy=Relevance&amp;ft=devil&amp;offset=40&amp;rpp=20&amp;pos=43">horns</a> and <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/471907?sortBy=Relevance&amp;ft=devil&amp;offset=0&amp;rpp=20&amp;pos=2">talons</a>, while later examples sprouted <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/334522?sortBy=Relevance&amp;ft=devil&amp;offset=0&amp;rpp=20&amp;pos=15">webbed feet and hands</a>, features of multiple animals at once, and even <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/669850">elongated breasts</a>. In short, the premodern devil was a monster.</p>
<p id="khjYkg">The key to the transformation is the Renaissance story of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Georg_Faust">Faust</a>. Scholars now think that there was a real German man (or two similar men later conflated into one) named <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Georg_Faust">Johann Georg Faust</a>, active in the early 16th century, who practiced astrology and alchemy. In the Renaissance, alchemy was the forerunner to modern chemistry, and a lot of alchemy was aimed at changing base metals into precious ones like gold. Faust acquired a popular reputation as a magician. To his contemporaries, he could have only acquired this knowledge — stolen from God — with the help of the devil.</p>
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<cite>Photo: Culture Club/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>A Liebig Company collectible cards series depicting the devil, Marguerite, and Faust in <em>Faust</em>.</figcaption>
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<p id="gbV1Nc">From the late 16th century on, the story of Faust first became a literary bestseller, boosted by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Wolfgang_von_Goethe">Goethe</a>’s romantic play <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethe%27s_Faust"><em>Faust</em></a> in the 19th century. It then dominated pop culture through <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Gounod">Charles Gounod</a>’s 1859 opera <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faust_(opera)"><em>Faust</em></a><em>.</em> Exposure to opera at the time was not reserved for the upper classes: Opera was broadly accessible through shorter performances of the highlights sung in the native language of the audience. With colorful and memorable sets and costumes, the form had reach beyond the stage.</p>
<aside id="tpyCJx"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"racked_national"}'></div></aside><p id="vwd9mJ">The star of Gounod’s <em>Faust</em> is not the titular character, but Mephistopheles, the personification of the devil. Faust sells his soul to Mephistopheles, and in exchange, the charming devil becomes his servant. Thanks to Mephistopheles, Faust becomes young again and seems to win the love of beautiful and modest Marguerite. </p>
<p id="EkzEbF">As the story of Faust morphed from a Renaissance fable to a 19th-century romantic opera, the appearance of Mephistopheles transformed, but the costume remained true to the Renaissance setting of the story. In the Renaissance literary versions of the story, written by Protestants during the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wars_of_religion">European Wars of Religion</a>, Mephistopheles is a representative of the devil on earth — he’s described as taking the form of a Catholic monk. </p>
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<cite>Photo: Buyenlarge/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>A man reads a girl’s diary accompanied by the devil on a poster that advertises the movie <em>My Friend the Devil</em>, 1922.</figcaption>
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<p id="sTwm8w">In the Goethe play, Mephistopheles accompanies Faust in the Romantic guise of a traveling scholar, equally ready for a philosophical debate or drunken debauchery. Once brought to the stage, the charming yet infernal nature of Mephistopheles could not be left to the imagination of the audience, and so the signature look of the 19th-century devil was born.</p>
<p id="P50o4r">Whether in publicity photos of opera singers or in the advertisements for deviled ham, coffee, and Tabasco sauce, the devil was a goateed and mustachioed man dressed in an all-red Renaissance costume, complete with red tights, a cape, and a red cap decorated with two horn-like red feathers. The connection between the operatic Mephistopheles and the Victorian image of the devil was so clear that the likeness of <em>Faust</em> opera star Édouard de Reszke was used to advertise the devilishly spicy <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Victorian_Tabasco_Box.jpg">Tabasco sauce</a>. <a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VpmRwoNMtCc/Tnfuh0A1TEI/AAAAAAAAAI4/hUf3i3_tJyI/s1600/1906_Underwood_Deviled_Ham.JPG">Underwood’s deviled</a> (chopped and spiced) canned ham also used the operatic Prince of Darkness as their spokesperson in the early 1900s. The ads show a grinning man dressed in tights, cap, and cape, brandishing a can or a deviled ham sandwich as well a mini pitchfork.</p>
<p id="Wma5St">Like the 1930s monster movie that collapsed Dr. Frankenstein and his monster into one bolt-necked creature, Gounod’s opera made Mephistopheles the face of Faust. <a href="https://i.pinimg.com/736x/23/52/62/2352622aa94d40900442fe4847de1cef--framed-sheet-music-faust.jpg">W.E. Blanke’s Faust-brand pepper and coffee</a> depicted not the Renaissance scholar, but rather his red-tighted frenemy.</p>
<p id="1ERnRM">In the wake of the Renaissance, scientific revolution, and enlightenment, people started to think that the idea of the devil was at best superstitious and at worst ridiculous. To modern people, the idea of a man that personified evil roaming around the earth in Renaissance tights was increasingly out of step with how they understood evil. By the 1950s, Mephistopheles, still wearing his tights and horn-like Renaissance hat, morphed into the campy <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/12/the-devious-ad-campaign-that-convinced-america-coffee-was-bad-for-kids/282676/">Mr. Coffee Nerves</a>, destroying the sleep of those who didn’t drink caffeine-free Postum. Early on, the devil fell sway to the sexy costume trend, resulting in sexy devil costumes on the covers of racy midcentury magazines and on actresses such as <a href="https://40.media.tumblr.com/ca53b1759275bf4c317baf2e728f9901/tumblr_nindvqz6iH1qa70eyo1_500.png">Anita Ekberg</a>. Reduced to humor on one side and titillation on the other, old Mephistopheles became ridiculous and deeply unscary.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"> <figure class="e-image">
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<cite>Photo: Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>A lithographic Victorian-era cigar box label entitled “Mephisto,” featuring the devil.</figcaption>
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<p id="VsP0hT">What the people of the postwar world feared was not a personified demon, but the fiery hell of modern war characterized by genocide and the alchemy that split atoms in increasingly powerful new bombs. The perceived source of evil moved from an outside force like Mephistopheles, which actively tempted people, to a force that was potentially present within every human. The devil no longer needs a monstrous appearance, an all-red costume, or even a bodily form. Like the killer in a horror flick, it’s coming from inside.</p>
<p id="OYYS52">When modern American composer John Adams was commissioned to write a new <em>Faust</em>-themed opera, he turned to the creation of the atomic bomb by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer">J. Robert Oppenheimer</a>. In the key scene of the opera, Oppenheimer sings about his sadness over the loss of his soul despite his longing for God. He is wearing a 1940s-style American suit and hat. There is no Mephistopheles anywhere on stage with him. His only companion is his creation: the bomb. Modern evil no longer needs either a separate person or a special costume; instead, it’s found within an otherwise absolutely normal human being reaching for what he shouldn’t have. </p>
<p id="nLFNcT">In the 1995 film <a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Usual_Suspects"><em>The Usual Suspects</em></a>, starring Kevin Spacey and directed by Bryan Singer, the character Roger "Verbal" Kint memorably tells investigators, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.” While Elizabeth Hurley in <em>Bedazzled </em>and Al Pacino in <em>The Devil's Advocate</em> played sleekly attired Mephistophelian tempters around the same time, it was Keyser Söze — hidden within, right in plain sight, and wearing utterly forgettable clothes — that captured pop culture’s imagination and embodied the new face of evil.</p>
https://www.racked.com/2017/11/29/16615182/devil-costumeTracy E. Robey2017-11-22T09:32:02-05:002017-11-22T09:32:02-05:00You Might Think You Hate Crowded Stores, but Science Says Otherwise
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<figcaption>Despite what this guy’s face implies, shoppers actually prefer crowded stores. | Photo: Zoran Milich/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>Researchers since the 1970s have been exposing our evolution-determined love of shopping in herds. </p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="ltf1Qf">When I was growing up, my family revealed a shocking secret about my father: In his youth, he used to shop for presents on Christmas Eve. I absorbed the lesson that crowded stores are the domain of the young and reckless. These days, he claims that the last-minute shopping was due to procrastination, but for extremely social and competitive people like my dad, packed stores can be part of the holiday fun. A whole body of academic research is revealing that crowding in retail stores sometimes actually makes us enjoy shopping more.</p>
<p id="Z1I9CP">Research on crowding began in the 1970s, when scholars such as <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/5056743">Daniel Stokols</a> argued that there’s a difference between density and crowding. While density is the objective tightness of a space due to the floorplan and number of people in it, crowding is the experience of not having as much space as you want. Crowding is subjective, and the feeling of crowding varies from person to person. </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="don2L4"><q>The findings suggest that the people who are in the mall this season <em>want </em>to be there and actually like the experience of holiday crowds on some level.</q></aside></div>
<p id="y2F8uD">The feeling of crowding can even vary in the same person depending on the situation. Researchers tie vastly different reactions to crowd density to whether someone is shopping for utilitarian or hedonic reasons. An example of utilitarian holiday shopping would be grabbing sugar cookie ingredients at the supermarket on the way home from work. Hedonic shopping might be browsing newly launched <a href="https://www.racked.com/2015/12/15/10124636/luxury-candles-diptyque-cire-trudon-nest">luxury candles</a> and beauty advent calendars at a department store. The same human crowding that could feel oppressive at the supermarket might feel festive and fun around the holiday beauty display.</p>
<p id="TzQ1vE">Researchers <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11747-011-0284-z">Julie Baker and Kirk L. Wakefield</a> break mall patrons into task shoppers and social shoppers. Task shoppers have “a higher need for control” and “tend to perceive density as crowding,” while social shoppers “tend to have a higher need for intimacy, perceive density positively, and feel excited.” Baker and Wakefield found that roughly one third of mall patrons are very social shoppers (30.3 percent), another third are very task-oriented shoppers (34.3 percent), and the remaining chunk are somewhere in between. Since “frequent mall shoppers tend to be socially oriented, while infrequent patrons are prone to be task oriented,” the findings suggest that the people who are in the mall this season <em>want </em>to be there and actually like the experience of holiday crowds on some level. This might be even more true now, since in the five years since the study was published, online shopping has only grown, which gives task-oriented shoppers a way to clear their list without leaving home.</p>
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<cite>Photo: TREVOR COLLENS/AFP/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Shoppers at the Herald Square Macy’s on Black Friday, 2014. </figcaption>
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<p id="h3FhxQ">Subsequent research showed that we don’t tend to like feeling crowded by tight store layouts, but we do <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296304000360?via%3Dihub">like shopping with a crowd</a> — just as long as there aren’t too many people. Researchers studying via surveys, in labs, and in stores have shown that there’s an <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0267257X.2012.729075">inverted</a> <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2004.01.005">U-shaped</a> response to crowding: too few people or too many and we don’t like it, but a bustling store seems to set our inner animal at ease. Our preference for crowding is explained by environmental psychology theory, which <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296304000360?via%3Dihub">suggests</a>, “[w]e don’t like large spaces and we seek out arousal in certain circumstances and settings.” Somewhere on the top curve of an inverted U is a crowding sweet spot that makes us feel safe, interested, and ready to buy.</p>
<p id="neq7aA">Expectations regarding the number of other shoppers you’ll find in a store play a significant role in how you’ll respond to the crowd actually there. If you expect a store to be empty and find it packed, you’re far more likely to be put off by it than if you go in expecting a crowd, according to researchers <a href="http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.452.1203&rep=rep1&type=pdf">Karen A. Machleit, Sevgin A. Eroglu, and Susan Powell Mantel</a>. Interestingly, the longer you’re in a store, the less you’ll feel stressed by crowding from the layout and other shoppers. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2004.01.005">Eroglu, Machleit, and Terri Feldman Barr</a> discovered that shoppers who spent more than 60 minutes in a store didn’t report as much negativity about crowds; the researchers think it could be explained by adaptation theory, which says that we notice a stimulus less over time. When Mom took you to an overcrowded store after Thanksgiving, she wasn't lying when she said you'd get used to it. </p>
<aside id="yqFlBk"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"racked_national"}'></div></aside><p id="W7pFpR">Researchers looking at major shopping dates such as Black Friday report that crowds actually drive sales and make shopping fun for some people. <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254085638_The_Influence_of_Others_The_Impact_of_Perceived_Human_Crowding_on_Perceived_Competition_Emotions_and_Hedonic_Shopping_Values">Sang-Eun Byun and Manveer Kaur Mann</a> found that shoppers in crowded stores experience more negative emotions and fewer positive ones, but stores come out on top due to crowds creating a sense of competition. They explain, “when perceived human crowding is associated with perceived competition, it does elicit positive emotions such as joy, excitement, and thrill.” In fact, we care so much about other customers that perceived similarity to them makes us <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2015.01.004">like a mall more</a>, and what they buy helps us to determine <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2010.09.006">how much we like</a> a retailer.</p>
<p id="fqvGEP">Even music can shape how much we experience crowding, and conversely, crowds impact how much we like piped-in music. <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1362/026725708X326002">Researchers</a> that played music near a long undergraduate registration line found that music made people feel better when the crowd was smaller, but music became a liability once the crowd got bigger. In another study, both utilitarian and hedonic shoppers preferred a mix of <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mar.20074/abstract">slow music</a> with a high density of shoppers and fast music in a less busy store, presumably to make the space feel less empty. The last thing you want to hear while reaching over someone for the last box of icing sugar is “Carol of the Bells.”</p>
<p id="x7IxdT"></p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="3HcWl2"><q>“When perceived human crowding is associated with perceived competition, it does elicit positive emotions such as joy, excitement, and thrill.”</q></aside></div>
<p id="yJbZzT">The feeling of crowding can also depend on our culture: how much space we’re used to having and attitudes about one’s relationship to others. The connection between culture and the feeling of crowding was theorized <a href="http://acrwebsite.org/volumes/5820/volumes/v03/NA-03">back in the ’70s</a> and has been confirmed in a comparative study that looks at feelings about crowd density in both <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2006.10.017">Mexico and Canada</a>. Yet much of what researchers found seems to be cross-cultural. Competitive and busy <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1300/J046v20n01_02">night markets</a> along with <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02642060902720121">hypermarkets</a> (a supermarket and a department store smashed into one mega shop) in Taiwan give shoppers positive feelings. Shoppers at a <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2012.729075">hypermarket</a> in India had a response to density of bodies that followed the same inverted U-shaped trend seen elsewhere. </p>
<p id="hegVm9">The cross-cultural excitement at crowding even extends into the past. When discussing the experience of shopping in the shortage economies of former Socialist nations, present-day Eastern Europeans speak of the experience with a certain pride at having beaten their fellow consumers and the state in the hunt for goods. Our inner animal avoids large, empty places and sees crowds as exciting — so too do the most social and competitive among us replicate the thrill of the hunt in crowded malls and stores.</p>
<p id="v79P07"></p>
https://www.racked.com/2017/11/22/16649384/crowded-stores-black-friday-scienceTracy E. Robey2017-11-17T09:32:01-05:002017-11-17T09:32:01-05:00How Free Shipping Fulfills the Centuries-Old Promise of Capitalism
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<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/5M_edh3X0bgggjdgRBBmM0XNS50=/634x0:5273x3479/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/57491201/GettyImages_869382144.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>A modern cargo ship. | Photo: Horacio Villalobos - Corbis/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>Like you, George Washington hated paying S&H.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="Au6sWi">By the end of the year, more than half of US households will <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/08/amazon-prime-will-be-in-more-than-half-of-us-households-by-years-end.html">have</a> Amazon Prime memberships, but the thirst for safe, fast, affordable shipping is nothing new. Shipping has always been a necessary, expensive thing that doesn’t really add tangible value to a purchase, making it difficult to embrace. In fact, dissatisfaction with shipping is baked right into the development of capitalism and has inspired a whole field of academic research that grew up alongside e-commerce.</p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="LdQODv">During the Italian Renaissance, Genoese merchants protected their cargos by creating <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=151871">shipping insurance</a> contracts that would cover losses from ships that sank or pirates making off with their stuff. Piracy was practiced pretty much anywhere there was water and good things to be captured in early modern Europe, including the Mediterranean. Shipwrecks near trading centers such as Amsterdam were so numerous that even now, downed ships sometimes appear from under the sand after a storm, like ghosts looking to tell their secrets. </p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="tlykkB">Even Florence’s powerful Medici family experienced headaches due to shipping. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Medici#Grand_Dukes_of_Tuscany">Grand Ducal Medici</a> — a later, junior branch of the family that followed godfathers of the Renaissance Cosimo and Lorenzo — filled <a href="http://bia.medici.org/DocSources/Home.do">their letters</a> with woes at the logistics, cost, and safety of shipping everything from gold fabric to marble columns and paintings.</p>
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<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Dffx69NzZSFXtXCfMtO8kprV0ew=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9621893/GettyImages_639159978.jpg">
<cite>Photo: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Glad Tidings, a 19th-century cargo ship.</figcaption>
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<p id="fYdvXA">Shipping troubles continued in the New World as planters sought to move their goods to market where they could be exchanged for cash and European luxuries. No less a personage than George Washington <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=wTOXSRg8jD4C&pg=PA82&lpg=PA82&dq=had+to+pay+higher+freight+than+the+planters&source=bl&ots=jdwU2LEf-C&sig=fJCOhCTMoXHcNA7sp_e1iL66aTM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjKgv7W9JTXAhUBzSYKHWHYB50Q6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q=had%20to%20pay%20higher%20freight%20than%20the%20planters&f=false">exploded in letters</a> over the cost of moving crops harvested at Mount Vernon to England for sale. The future US president was furious that he paid more for each of his regular shipments than occasional customers, complained about his stock being ruined by captains who didn’t protect it from the elements, and then threatened to return items that didn’t match his requests. The 19th-century <a href="https://www.amazon.com/United-States-Mail-Order-Industry/dp/1556234864">development of mail-order</a> businesses resulted in sewing machines, Tiffany jewelry, and prefabricated houses moving across the country, but shipping headaches remained because rural customers often needed to pay additional charges for delivery from the nearest post office to their homes. In the early days of shopping from home, “free delivery” merely meant that the charge for getting the item from the post office to one’s house was included in the shipping fee.</p>
<p id="r5b4ap">By the time e-commerce took off, free shipping was still not yet the norm. A blast-from-the-past 2002 CNN Money <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2002/06/24/technology/techinvestor/hellweg/index.htm">article</a>’s subtitle reads “Amazon and Buy.com offer free shipping. Can either company survive the promotion?” As the article notes, free shipping was often offered as a promotion in the late 1990s, particularly to attract new customers, but e-tailers pulled back after the dot-com bubble burst. In 2002, Amazon experimented with free shipping for carts $49 and up, while Buy.com granted free shipping on everything, a move experts found very risky at the time. In 2017, Amazon is making a play to <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/25/16538834/amazon-key-in-home-delivery-unlock-door-prime-cloud-cam-smart-lock">unlock your house</a> to deliver packages, while Buy.com was long ago swallowed whole by Japanese e-commerce company <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rakuten.com">Rakuten</a> after falling woefully behind. Their respective trajectories are more complicated than a free shipping war, but getting shipping right often means the difference between smooth sailing and going down with a rich cargo.</p>
<aside id="jA1pAn"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"racked_national"}'></div></aside><p id="3FZSwx">The early days of e-commerce shipping research involved trying to figure out how much and which shipping and handling fees influenced purchase decisions. A 2006 <a href="https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.1050.0150">article</a> found that free shipping “greatly increase[d]” the number of times people would order, but the size of the orders would be smaller — not the ideal situation for the retailer offering free shipping. The authors concluded, “while shipping promotions can increase demand, the increased merchandise revenues are unlikely to offset the corresponding lost shipping revenues.” So how do so many online retailers offer free shipping — while remaining successful?</p>
<p id="6HSdVi">Retailers have gotten more sophisticated in how they offer free shipping. Rather than just keeping prices the same and then popping up with free shipping promotions periodically, there are <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0125939">whole</a> <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925527313003678?via%3Dihub">models</a> <a href="https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ddns/2014/578280/">showing</a> how to adjust the prices we see on product pages in order to offer free shipping without sacrificing profits. </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="hpRgr2"><q>So how do so many online retailers offer free shipping — while remaining successful?</q></aside></div>
<p id="GHrMwP">At the same time, customers have grown savvier in how they understand online pricing. When e-commerce shipping research started, researchers looked at <a href="http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/v42/acr_v42_17441.pdf">partitioned</a> <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11846-016-0208-x">pricing</a> — separating the base product price from mandatory shipping and handling fees — and found that products with lower base prices were more attractive, even if they ended up costing more once shipping and handling charges were tacked on. But we did a lot of regrettable things in the early days of the internet, and researchers found that by the mid-2000s, experienced customers could do the sort of mental <a href="http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/08876041211257918">shopping</a> <a href="http://jitm.ubalt.edu/XXIV-4/article1.pdf">calculations</a> on the fly that leveled the playing field for products with higher base prices and lower or more transparent shipping fees. </p>
<p id="RQWMwb">Whether we prefer less expensive combined prices or lower shipping costs seems to vary depending on the situation. For example, people who shop for <a href="http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/v42/acr_v42_17441.pdf">hedonistic reasons</a> buy more when sellers use partitioned pricing that separates out the shipping cost. Some people are just <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109499680570061X?via%3Dihub">shipping-charge skeptics</a> and believe that shipping is always a rip-off that shops use to pad their profit margins.</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="7HumJ8"><q>The sway of the free-shipping god seems to grow all the time, and it results in more indulgent shopping.</q></aside></div>
<p id="4x87NU">As customers have become more sophisticated in some ways, the sway of the free-shipping god seems to grow all the time, and it results in more indulgent shopping. Researchers are finding that customers return more products after free shipping promotions — and not just due to having no return costs. Edlira Shehu, Dominik Papies, and Scott Neslin <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2864019">studied</a> the aftereffects of free shipping promotions and found that a higher rate of returns was due to customers buying “more product categories than usual” and “spending more per category than usual.” Shoppers bought and returned so much random stuff that it actually resulted in a 56 percent decrease in the profits earned during the eight free shipping promotions they studied. </p>
<p id="uETJUS">Free shipping is so powerful that customers in the study actually spent much more liberally with free shipping rather than with a coupon that would have discounted their carts as much as the cost of shipping (€1.57 in extra purchases for the discount coupon versus €14.85 for free shipping). The authors theorize that it’s because we segregate sudden, unexpected gains such as a free shipping offer into mental “windfall accounts” that are more persuasive than our usual shopping mental gain and loss accounts; when we find a <a href="http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=45365">windfall promotion</a>, we’re vastly more likely to buy something we otherwise wouldn’t purchase.</p>
<p id="49POzN">Amazon has understood and then reprogrammed how people think about shipping, as a 2014 <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/markrogowsky/2014/02/02/prime-factors-should-amazon-really-mess-with-the-best-loyalty-program-in-retail/#b03af2d3cc94"><em>Forbes</em> article</a> argued. Prime is what scholars call Membership Free Shipping (MFS), where customers pay a fee ($99 per year for Prime) to get free shipping on purchases for a set period. Other examples include <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.shoprunner.com%2Fnon_member%2Fhome%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F11%2F17%2F16614720%2Ffree-shipping" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">ShopRunner</a> ($79.00 per year, covering a number of retailers) and <a href="https://click.linksynergy.com/deeplink?id=nOD%2FrLJHOac&mid=2417&u1=racked&murl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sephora.com%2Fproduct%2Fsephora-flash-subscription-P379518%3Ficid2%3Dbd_flash_us_030117_banner_image" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Sephora Flash</a> ($10 per year). </p>
<div class="c-wide-block"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/HYZaNnKp_bdrB5DXGT_i8V4R_u0=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9621953/GettyImages_625519344.jpg">
<cite>Photo: GERARD JULIEN/AFP/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>An Amazon fulfillment center on the eve of Black Friday.</figcaption>
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</div>
<p id="xKYMBI">Now that so many households have Amazon Prime memberships, free two-day shipping is members’ point of reference even at other stores, making it incredibly difficult for other retailers to compete. Zhong Wen and Lihui Lin <a href="http://aisel.aisnet.org/hicss-50/in/electronic_marketing/7/">found</a> this year that MFS programs like Amazon Prime result in more relaxed competition. As in, Amazon can charge more for Prime stuff because their members want to use their shipping membership. In fact, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2015.09.001">one study</a> argued that customers who pay a fee to join a membership program like Prime will spend more and like it more than if they enrolled in a free loyalty program. That’s due to commitment-consistency: “consumers who have made a greater commitment to a loyalty program... have more favorable attitudes toward a loyalty program,” according to authors Christy Ashley, Erin A. Gillespie, and Stephanie M. Noble. </p>
<p id="VJHR9E">Another reason is the sunk cost fallacy, which in the case of Prime means that shoppers like getting something back for their past investment and end up shopping loyally in order to maximize the value of their membership. Although retailers that offer MFS end up subsidizing rocketing shipping costs, they make the money back thanks to the membership fee they collect from customers, the volume of sales they make, and, potentially, the higher prices they can charge. Interestingly, MFS is most profitable when the shipping service offered to members is faster than standard shipping, according to a <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2820238">2015 study</a>. Price isn’t the only concern shoppers have; speed matters a whole lot, too.</p>
<p id="OuOrqn">At one point, new businesses seemed to provide the answer to shipping woes: Railroads moved those sewing machines and Tiffany rings at a speed once unthinkable. But perceived unfairly high freight charges associated with railroad monopolies created enough unrest that the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Commerce_Act_of_1887">government stepped in</a>. Time will tell if nascent retail monopolies raking in money by understanding our enduring desire for fast, cheap, secure shipping will meet the same fate.</p>
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https://www.racked.com/2017/11/17/16614720/free-shippingTracy E. Robey2017-11-06T09:32:01-05:002017-11-06T09:32:01-05:00What Happened to the Internet’s Favorite T-Shirt Company?
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<figcaption>Photo: Rene Johnston/Toronto Star via Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p class="c-entry-disclaimer"><i>Racked is no longer publishing. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years. The archives will remain available here; for new stories, head over to Vox.com, where our staff is covering consumer culture for <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods">The Goods by Vox</a>. You can also see what we’re up to by <a href="https://vox.com/goods-newsletter">signing up here</a>.</i></p>
<p>Threadless made millions by selling out huge runs of crowdsourced T-shirts; now they’re printing almost everything one by one.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="5R37xm"><a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.threadless.com%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F11%2F6%2F16551468%2Fthreadless-t-shirts-ecommerce" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Threadless</a>, the internet-born design shop known for screen-printed graphic T-shirts, was once heralded as the best example of how to actually make money on the internet (back when it seemed impossible to do). Recent news that Threadless has <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-threadless-bucketfeet-20171011-story.html">acquired shoe design start-up Bucketfeet</a> shows that the originator of the crowdsourced T-shirt trend is still taking in considerable money. But as Threadless has introduced new printing technology and more favorable terms for artists in the last five years, its momentum on social media, search volume, and reputation for coolness and quality have fallen.</p>
<p id="UKFjeJ">The company’s founding idea was that anyone could submit a design, all designs would receive scores from registered users, and, after review by Threadless staff, the winning designs would receive the honor of being printed and sold. The idea — and the community of designers and registered users supporting it — earned Threadless millions of dollars.</p>
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<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/SX3cuHyyeWLHeakf2SOPzvOUe0g=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9540785/Banner_982x350.jpg">
<cite>Photo: Threadless</cite>
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<p id="rvCucU">From 2005 to about 2011, Threadless was repeatedly crowned the model student in the newly emergent class of online crowdsourcing businesses. Jeff Howe, who <a href="https://www.wired.com/2006/06/crowds/">defined</a> the concept of crowdsourcing in 2006, <a href="http://www.crowdsourcing.com/cs/2006/06/pure_unadultera.html">called it</a> “an almost pure expression of the [crowdsourcing] model.” Threadless sold “<a href="http://www.crowdsourcing.com/cs/2006/06/pure_unadultera.html">60,000 T-shirts a month</a> that year, ha[d] a profit margin of 35 percent and [wa]s on track to gross $18 million” while employing fewer than 20 people. <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6607681">In the same year</a>, Threadless received 150 design submissions a day and had over 400,000 registered users who voted on which shirts would get made. In 2007, <a href="https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/184394#"><em>Entrepreneur</em></a> noted, “every design printed has sold out” since the site launched, and the company opened a Chicago retail store. <a href="https://www.forbes.com/2009/04/03/threadless-crowdsourcing-internet-technology-internet-threadless.html"><em>Forbes</em></a> reported that Threadless had hit 1 million users in 2009. Threadless’s 10th anniversary in 2010 resulted in a retrospective <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Threadless-T-shirts-Worlds-Inspiring-Community/dp/B00DTOYFZK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1507148166&sr=8-1&keywords=threadless+jake+nickell">book</a> and <a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/3010658/the-accidental-business-threadless-10-years-later"><em>Fast Company</em></a> noting: “the T-shirt company has capitalized on a buzz that never seems to fade.” </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="h8GDEm"><q>“The designs that they were putting out at the time always made me want to go make my own.”</q></aside></div>
<p id="s3K0SZ">At the core of the Threadless business model is a community of artists that submit to design contests, participate in the brand’s social network, and promote the company to their friends and relatives. CEO and co-founder Jake Nickell told Racked via email, “[w]hen an artist submits a design, they tell everyone they know to go vote on it, and then those people join the community and it snowballs.” Just a few designs are printed each week. Nickell told Racked that Threadless prints “one design for every 1,000 submitted,” just 0.1 percent of submissions. </p>
<p id="cIZQRK">Artist <a href="http://freebensears.com/">Ben Sears</a> submitted a design about 10 years ago. “I didn't get accepted, but the designs that they were putting out at the time always made me want to go make my own,” Sears told Racked via email. </p>
<p id="KDYRcv">Standout designs helped make Threadless huge — but that didn’t necessarily make the artists submitting them rich. Artist <a href="http://everythingburns.com/wp/">Tom Burns</a> told Racked via email, “the cash prize was... $750 cash and $250 in free tshirts from the site” when he submitted the <a href="https://tomburns.threadless.com/designs/the-communist-party">Communist Party</a> design that shows leaders including Mao and Lenin celebrating with red cups in 2006. A Threadless spokesperson confirmed to Racked that it’s the best-selling design ever on the site. By mid-2007, Threadless’s prize for winning the design contest rose to $2,500 in cash and merchandise. But according to the terms of Threadless’s contest, artists at that point (until 2014) turned over the copyright to their designs upon winning (today artists retain their copyright and earn profits beyond base cost on all printed items). Despite this, Burns wrote, “I have a soft spot for Threadless... it is kind of nice to feel like you helped something cool like that grow, since at that time, they were the first best game in town.”</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="WAPiqZ"><q>“It is kind of nice to feel like you helped something cool like that grow.”</q></aside></div>
<p id="VqGWnz">It was thanks to the loyal community that Threadless made it through the growing pains of its first decade. Nickell characterized the early days as “[p]retty much total chaos,” admitting that the company “didn't know how to print T-shirts, charge credit cards, [or] ship orders.” Crushing demand led to some “embarrassing holidays in the early years where we were not able to ship everything in time for Christmas,” wrote Nickell. In the second half of the 2000s, Threadless’s parent company started side ventures — such as <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20120313170329/http://extratasty.com:80/">cocktail recipe</a> and <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20061222122242/http://www.15megsoffame.com:80/">song-scoring</a> websites that later failed. At the same time, other shirt-printing companies popped up copying Threadless’s business model. Sites such as <a href="https://www.lafraise.com/">laFraise</a>, <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20080220182418/http://allmightys.com:80/">Allmightys</a>, and <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20080303111523/http://www.teetonic.com:80/">Teetonic</a> (all defunct) ran similar T-shirt voting competitions, no doubt siphoning off some of Threadless’s designers, voters, customers, and shine. <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.threadless.com%2Fforum%2Fpost%2F1008485%2Fremember_the_days_when_50_comments_was_normal%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F11%2F6%2F16551468%2Fthreadless-t-shirts-ecommerce" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">According to longtime users</a>, even the emergence of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram as popular social networks impacted Threadless, since its voting and submissions run alongside a once-staggeringly successful blog network/forum. </p>
<aside id="gGLqc6"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"racked_national"}'></div></aside><p id="hYAHjC">Then things changed. In January 2014, Threadless <a href="http://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/inc-well/Chicago-Based-Threadless-Closes-Store-Cuts-Jobs-240108691.html">laid off</a> more than one-quarter of its staff, cutting 23 of 84 jobs, and closed its Lakeview retail store. <a href="https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=threadless">Search</a> <a href="https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=threadless%20shirt">trends</a> for Threadless, with the exception of December spikes for holiday shopping, have pointed down since 2011. Since 2014, Threadless has actually lost Twitter followers, falling from <a href="http://www.powerretail.com.au/marketing/threadless-cmo-todd-lido/">2.2 million</a> to 2.13. The less tangible cultural significance Threadless once had has dissipated in the last five years.</p>
<p id="I0YVIw">In the wake of the shift, Threadless experimented with different ways to compensate designers. Under the royalties and rights terms introduced in 2014, the weekly design competition no longer awarded a $2,500 prize (these days the general competition prize is a $250 gift code), but artists retain all rights to their work and receive royalties on each sale. A <a href="http://threadlessrules.com/post/94471000409/learn-about-our-brand-new-feature-funding">short-lived plan to crowdfund shirt designs</a> launched in 2014, but ended up producing few winners. </p>
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<blockquote class="instagram-media" data-instgrm-captioned="" data-instgrm-version="7" style=" background:#FFF; border:0; border-radius:3px; box-shadow:0 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.5),0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.15); margin: 1px; max-width:658px; padding:0; width:99.375%; width:-webkit-calc(100% - 2px); width:calc(100% - 2px);"><div style="padding:8px;"> <div style=" background:#F8F8F8; line-height:0; margin-top:40px; padding:50.0% 0; text-align:center; width:100%;"> <div style=" background:url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAACwAAAAsCAMAAAApWqozAAAABGdBTUEAALGPC/xhBQAAAAFzUkdCAK7OHOkAAAAMUExURczMzPf399fX1+bm5mzY9AMAAADiSURBVDjLvZXbEsMgCES5/P8/t9FuRVCRmU73JWlzosgSIIZURCjo/ad+EQJJB4Hv8BFt+IDpQoCx1wjOSBFhh2XssxEIYn3ulI/6MNReE07UIWJEv8UEOWDS88LY97kqyTliJKKtuYBbruAyVh5wOHiXmpi5we58Ek028czwyuQdLKPG1Bkb4NnM+VeAnfHqn1k4+GPT6uGQcvu2h2OVuIf/gWUFyy8OWEpdyZSa3aVCqpVoVvzZZ2VTnn2wU8qzVjDDetO90GSy9mVLqtgYSy231MxrY6I2gGqjrTY0L8fxCxfCBbhWrsYYAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC); display:block; height:44px; margin:0 auto -44px; position:relative; top:-22px; width:44px;"></div>
</div> <p style=" margin:8px 0 0 0; padding:0 4px;"> <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BYrwu8Sjg7X/" style=" color:#000; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px; text-decoration:none; word-wrap:break-word;" target="_blank">Slice. Slice. Baby. "Sweet Dreams are Made of Cheese" by @arkzai
#NationalCheesePizzaDay</a></p> <p style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px; margin-bottom:0; margin-top:8px; overflow:hidden; padding:8px 0 7px; text-align:center; text-overflow:ellipsis; white-space:nowrap;">A post shared by Threadless (@threadless) on <time style=" font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px;" datetime="2017-09-06T03:02:53+00:00">Sep 5, 2017 at 8:02pm PDT</time></p>
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<p id="IyvTIu">More successful is a program to help artists sell their own designs without winning a contest. Threadless <a href="https://thenextweb.com/creativity/2015/06/03/threadless-eases-the-way-for-artists-to-create-unique-storefronts/#.tnw_hzk2MCHu">announced</a> Artist Shops in 2015 and rolled them out to Threadless’s general community in <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.threadless.com%2Fforum%2Fpost%2F1006332%2Fhello_artist_shops_bye_bye_funding%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F11%2F6%2F16551468%2Fthreadless-t-shirts-ecommerce" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">early 2016</a>. Artist Shops, still in existence, allow designers to sell items printed with any design (allowed by Threadless’s terms and conditions) directly to customers and receive royalties on each sale. More than 100,000 white-label Artist Shops have opened since 2015, and Threadless launched a program called <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.threadless.com%2Fartist-shops%2Fsignup%2Faccelerator&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F11%2F6%2F16551468%2Fthreadless-t-shirts-ecommerce" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Accelerator</a> in early November that will distribute $100,000 in promotional funding to four of them.</p>
<p id="Ftww9O">The shift to a more equitable royalties and rights model removed the gamification elements of Threadless that made the site so addictive to some designers and users. While per-shirt royalties from the start would have massively benefitted the most successful artists, such as Burns, many designers <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.threadless.com%2Fforum%2Fpost%2F993975%2Froyalties%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F11%2F6%2F16551468%2Fthreadless-t-shirts-ecommerce" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">said</a> that the windfall $2,500 prize for winning the weekly design competition was preferable to them and they lost the motivation to submit designs due to the change. Designer <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.threadless.com%2F%40sonmi&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F11%2F6%2F16551468%2Fthreadless-t-shirts-ecommerce" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">sonmi</a> wrote on the Threadless forum that the changes to how artists would be paid “makes it feel less like a community. Less special.” </p>
<p id="Se1Mte">Designers felt that initiatives such as the Artist Shops made it no longer a mark of distinction to be printed by Threadless. (One should note that with few exceptions, designs initially offered for sale via Artist Shops do not appear on the main Threadless shopping page mixed in among contest winners.) When Threadless community members tried to understand why the social side of the site was no longer as active in 2015, designer <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.threadless.com%2F%40biotwist&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F11%2F6%2F16551468%2Fthreadless-t-shirts-ecommerce" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">biotwist</a> <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.threadless.com%2Fforum%2Fpost%2F1000628%2Fwhat_happened_to_the_community_challenges%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F11%2F6%2F16551468%2Fthreadless-t-shirts-ecommerce" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">wrote</a>, “because threadless isn't a good T-shirt contest site anymore.”</p>
<p id="TOZlHw">Threadless fans report that the shirts now appear in UK T.K. Maxx stores (owned by the same <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TJX_Companies">parent company</a> as US T.J. Maxx) due to wholesale agreements <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.threadless.com%2Fforum%2Fpost%2F1010897%2Fthreadless__dont_forget_why_you_were_unique%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F11%2F6%2F16551468%2Fthreadless-t-shirts-ecommerce" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">confirmed</a> by Threadless staff in July 2017 (a company spokesperson did not confirm the agreements to Racked). The revelation prompted designer <a href="http://cargocollective.com/farnell">Farnell</a> to <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.threadless.com%2Fforum%2Fpost%2F1010897%2Fthreadless__dont_forget_why_you_were_unique%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F11%2F6%2F16551468%2Fthreadless-t-shirts-ecommerce" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">entreat</a>, “[t]here was a mystery around Threadless,” telling the company, “don't forget why you were once special, the pinnacle of unique T-shirt design, always one step ahead and never following the crowd.” The company that once <a href="https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/184394#">turned down</a> offers from Target and Urban Outfitters in order to work with smaller vendors, then negotiated limited, careful distribution deals with <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-08-12/business/ct-biz-0813-notebook-retail-20100812_1_threadless-jake-nickell-t-shirt">Nordstrom</a>, <a href="http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20110611/ISSUE01/306119977/ceo-ryan-takes-threadless-beyond-crowdsourced-t-shirts">Target</a>, <a href="http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20120707/ISSUE01/307079982/t-shirts-and-beyond-for-hipster-brand-threadless">Gap, and Bed Bath & Beyond</a> has gone mass in a vastly less cool way than users <a href="https://www.inc.com/magazine/20080601/the-customer-is-the-company.html">sneering</a> about Urban Outfitters in the 2000s could have imagined. </p>
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</div> <p style=" margin:8px 0 0 0; padding:0 4px;"> <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BajVybUjCrk/" style=" color:#000; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px; text-decoration:none; word-wrap:break-word;" target="_blank">Oh duck! "Save Ducky" by Steve Ash</a></p> <p style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px; margin-bottom:0; margin-top:8px; overflow:hidden; padding:8px 0 7px; text-align:center; text-overflow:ellipsis; white-space:nowrap;">A post shared by Threadless (@threadless) on <time style=" font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px;" datetime="2017-10-22T13:36:18+00:00">Oct 22, 2017 at 6:36am PDT</time></p>
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<p id="LnPApd">Meanwhile, Threadless has moved almost entirely to printing everything sold on demand. “On-demand digital printing has gotten to the point where the quality can match or exceed a screen print,” Nickell says, but Threadless artists and customers aren’t totally sold on it yet. Sears told Racked via email, “I prefer to have control over as much of the production as possible,” since if a designer is “willing to go through a printer, maintain the inventory, and ship everything, most of the money goes back to” them. </p>
<p id="mj6Yde">Concerns about controlling quality make sense given that artists on <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.threadless.com%2Fforum%2Fpost%2F1010585%2Fanyone_else_experiencing_low_quality_prints_on_their_tees%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F11%2F6%2F16551468%2Fthreadless-t-shirts-ecommerce" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Threadless’s forum</a> complain that they’re unable to promote their work because the print quality has dropped to the point that designs flake off after a few washes. Reviewers say the sizing, feel, and weight of Threadless’s shirts is inconsistent and getting worse over time, with some customers <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.threadless.com%2Fforum%2Fpost%2F1010585%2Fanyone_else_experiencing_low_quality_prints_on_their_tees%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F11%2F6%2F16551468%2Fthreadless-t-shirts-ecommerce" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">reporting</a> that shirts bought five to 10 years ago are still holding up better than those purchased this year. Longtime customers complain of direct-to-garment (DTG) printed shirts smelling like “<a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.threadless.com%2Fforum%2Fpost%2F1002984%2Fdtg_prints_smelling_funny%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F11%2F6%2F16551468%2Fthreadless-t-shirts-ecommerce" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">bad fish</a>” or an “<a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.threadless.com%2Fforum%2Fpost%2F1006497%2Fvery_low_quality_cheap_fabric_funny_smelling_tshirts_%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F11%2F6%2F16551468%2Fthreadless-t-shirts-ecommerce" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">embalmed corpse</a>” on arrival. A Threadless spokesperson advises that any printing odors go away with washing and customers are able to get items they’re unhappy with reprinted or receive a credit for the price of the item.</p>
<p id="E30bLy">Longtime customers sometimes gather on Threadless’s own forums to check in with their old friends and talk about the changes to the company. For some, it’s natural to pull away from something they <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.threadless.com%2Fforum%2Fpost%2F998775%2Fremember_when_everyone_said_they_were_leaving%2F%3Fpage%3D1&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F11%2F6%2F16551468%2Fthreadless-t-shirts-ecommerce" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">associate</a> with their youth, a place they consider home. For others, such as the designer Farnell, there’s an attempt to rally fellow community members and the company itself back to the glory days. Burns doesn’t participate as much in the Threadless community now, but he tells Racked, “I think they are on the right track, probably the only track.” </p>
<p id="drCyAV">Although Threadless has lost the buzz it once had and faces competition and technology challenges, it has shown resilience over the course of 17 years and benefits from a back catalog rich in great art as well as a community of supporters. Threadless isn’t the madcap, brilliant ride it once was, but it has matured in ways the early days didn’t predict, morphing into something stable and lasting. Unlike so many others, Threadless is an internet business that has made it to adulthood.</p>
https://www.racked.com/2017/11/6/16551468/threadless-t-shirts-ecommerceTracy E. Robey2017-11-02T09:32:01-04:002017-11-02T09:32:01-04:00What Kim Jong-un Has to Do With Your Skincare
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<p>South Korean beauty brands have long regarded the US as a side hustle. Now they’re coming to play for keeps, and it’s sorta thanks to North Korea.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="4BgdBn">South Korea’s beauty products are caught in the crossfire of the battle for who will dominate East Asia. First up, there’s Kim Jong-un, leader of North Korea, currently owner of a stash of worryingly functional nuclear weapons. As of<a href="https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2016/01/28/North-Korea-working-to-produce-world-class-cosmetics-state-media-says/1171454009401/"> 2016</a>, he pushed for North Korean cosmetics quality to improve so it could compete with international brands, and <a href="https://kcnawatch.co/newstream/1509229874-545998494/kim-jong-un-gives-field-guidance-to-remodeled-pyongyang-cosmetics-factory/">just this week</a> he toured a remodeled cosmetics factory. While it’s unlikely on many levels that North Korea's Unhasu brand will supplant Fenty at the local Sephora (a thriving DPRK cosmetics export industry would likely get hit with trade sanctions), Kim Jong-un apparently cares about making good waterproof mascara. Everyone keeps turning to North Korea’s neighbor China to exert some muscle when Kim Jong-un pops off, but they’re in a bind:<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/08/china-military-strength-north-korea-crisis/538344/"> China probably needs Jong-un to remain in power</a>.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="CwnZO8"><q>While it’s unlikely on many levels that North Korea's Unhasu brand will supplant Fenty at the local Sephora, Kim Jong-un apparently cares about making good waterproof mascara. </q></aside></div>
<p id="xuF5gQ">Although it might seem counterintuitive to want things to stay as they are, collapse or unrest in North Korea would likely mean that many ethnic Koreans<a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41150291"> would flee</a> to China, and South Korea would control both Koreas — possibly after immeasurable damage to Seoul and its inhabitants. If South Korea took over, it would do so with the vigorous support of the US military. The US military getting more hooked into the Korean peninsula is exactly what China does not want to happen. What China <em>does </em>want to happen is the growth of its own beauty brands, including some, such as<a href="http://www.proya-group.com/en/"> Proya</a>, that feature Korean celebrity endorsers, manufacturing partnerships with experienced K-beauty companies, and mostly imported ingredients.</p>
<p id="nt4V0U">Meanwhile, after winning election in May 2017, South Korean President<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Jae-in"> Moon Jae-in</a> inherited a diplomatic problem known as THAAD that has been a nightmare for Korea’s beauty industry. The acronym stands for<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_High_Altitude_Area_Defense"> Terminal High Altitude Area Defense</a>, an anti-ballistic missile defense system built by Lockheed Martin for the US Department of Defense. THAAD is meant to protect against an attack by North Korea, but China has seen THAAD as a threat because it<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/world/asia/us-south-korea-thaad-antimissile-system-china.html?"> believes</a> the radar system could be used to monitor China well beyond the border and shoot down <em>Chinese</em> weapons (a claim the US and South Korea deny).</p>
<p id="DxSAfs">The unexpected victim in this has been K-beauty — and by extension, South Korea's soft power strategy.</p>
<aside id="fRhrDD"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"racked_national"}'></div></aside><p id="DeCp7a">In the last decade, K-beauty sales have risen dramatically worldwide. For most Korean beauty brands, the biggest international sales come from East and Southeast Asian countries such as China, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The promotion and sale of K-beauty abroad is part of a soft power strategy employed by the South Korean government and large companies<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Birth-Korean-Cool-Conquering-Through/dp/1250045118"> since 1997</a>, designed to export not just South Korean-made products, but Korean culture itself. While North Korea has focused on self-reliance to the point of isolationism, South Korea has actively promoted Hallyu — the<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Wave"> Korean Wave</a> — in the wake of the<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Asian_financial_crisis"> 1997 financial collapse in Asia</a>. Even after the crash, the success of South Korean TV shows throughout Asia paved the way for K-pop music, beauty products, and food,<a href="http://www.asianisr.org/Manage/Include/download.asp?FileName=AISR_18_1_S8_Hannah_Jun.pdf&FileReName=20170623091917791779.pdf&FileDir=Paper%5CArticles"> according</a> to<a href="http://cms.ewha.ac.kr/user/indexSub.action?codyMenuSeq=1567704&siteId=gsis&dum=dum&prfId=1577216&page=&command=view&prfSeq=3997749&search=&column="> professor Hannah Jun</a> of Ewha Womans University, Seoul.</p>
<p id="UFPb9b">Here in the US, K-beauty-focused shops and Western retailers such as Sephora have pushed South Korean beauty products as a new trend since 2012. But the US is still a comparatively small slice of the K-beauty pie, long considered by K-beauty brands a “hobby” market, according to K-beauty consultant<a href="http://www.insidetheraum.com/"> Ju Rhyu</a>.</p>
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<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/FIkwhkrauNySkwSx4Su_fSV1atk=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9538589/GettyImages_858294442.jpg">
<cite>Photo: Chris Jung/NurPhoto via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>A South Korean exhibitor explaining cosmetics to buyers during the Beauty Expo 2017 at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre in Malaysia.</figcaption>
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<p id="l1yeT1">In China during 2015, the sale of Korean beauty products doubled in a single year, reaching<a href="http://www.kita.org/global/ecoView.do?seq=15907&searchWrd=&result_url="> $1.08 billion</a>, or 40 percent of K-beauty’s international sales. In comparison, the US bought<a href="http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/news/2016/01/24/0200000000AEN20160124000600320.html"> $233 million</a> in K-beauty products in the same year. The perceived cultural differences and size of the K-beauty economy has made America a less attractive bet than China. Even K-beauty powerhouse Amorepacific has employed what could be considered a careful strategy, launching a sure-thing<a href="https://www.racked.com/2017/9/15/16306758/innisfree-k-beauty-korean-beauty"> Innisfree flagship</a> in New York City this year but not yet raising an Etude House<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3ZN4kW2-kA"> princess castle flagship</a> — all at the same time as Forever 21 appears to be poised to steal the pink thunder with its<a href="https://www.racked.com/2017/10/2/16384658/riley-rose-beauty-store-forever21"> Riley Rose</a> shops.</p>
<p id="DJs3VI">The soft power cultural diplomacy of South Korea has been tested by hard power moves by the North.</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="f9usDA"><q>Sales losses linked to the drop in Chinese tourism were as much as 70 percent versus 2016.</q></aside></div>
<p id="c5h74U">China opted to squeeze South Korea in late 2016 and earlier this year in retaliation for accepting THAAD, and that’s where things got ugly for the K-beauty industry.<a href="http://www.thebk.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=181561"> Graphic design</a> for THAAD-related stories on Korean-language cosmetic trade websites went wild as warheads, lipstick, and national flags were Photoshopped together to convey the gravity of the situation. “The ‘China effect’ on K-Beauty this year came mostly from the sharp decrease in Chinese tourism to Korea,” writes Rhyu via email. “Duty-free sales plummeted and local Korean beauty road shops in areas like Myeongdong (popular tourist shopping area) suffered as well.” Sales losses linked to the drop in Chinese tourism were as much as 70 percent versus 2016. But that doesn’t mean that K-beauty was dead to Chinese consumers.</p>
<p id="UMuLJw">Desire for Korean consumer goods, including beauty products such as sheet masks, snail mucin essences, horse oil face creams, and color cosmetics, remained high in China. “I don't think Korea's plans to deploy THAAD resulted in Chinese consumers hating Korea, or even Korean products,” writes Jun via email. “K-beauty ... has been quite resilient despite the geopolitical drama.” Rhyu notes that AHC, the leading brand in the Carver Korea stable, which was recently acquired by Unilever for nearly <a href="https://www.unilever.com/news/Press-releases/2017/unilever-to-acquire-carver-korea.html">$3 billion</a>, had a five-times increase in sales on Chinese shopping site Tmall this spring. </p>
<p id="RTUs9h">But that sales explosion hasn’t happened for Amorepacific, the grande dame of K-beauty, or most mid-level companies. Frank Wang, senior sales manager at<a href="http://sandalwoodadvisors.com/"> Sandalwood Advisors</a>, says, “Korean [beauty] companies are still showing healthy growth, but they are underperforming the sector as a whole” in China.</p>
<p id="e806xc">While<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/29/business/china-south-korea-trade.html"> coverage</a> of the THAAD/K-beauty disturbance tried to detect an overall trend, it’s apparent from talking to experts that there’s no single trajectory for the Korean brands that make your sheet masks. Jun says that most sentiments against Korean consumer companies were directed at the<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotte_(conglomerate)"> Lotte super conglomerate</a>, which supplied the land on which the THAAD system is parked. “We saw a lot of negative activity (both official and unofficial) in China targeted at Lotte,” she writes, including<a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-missiles-southkorea-china/ghost-stores-lost-billions-as-korea-incs-china-woes-grow-idUSKCN1BN33V"> Lotte Mart stores</a> in China, a number of which were closed by the government for conveniently timed “safety issues” this spring, and Lotte’s Duty Free shopping empire. Online and offline sales in China of products made by Amorepacific and most mid-tier Korean brands have lagged behind sales of K-beauty brand LG’s products, Japanese skincare from brands such as SK-II and Shiseido, and Western brands like Estée Lauder according to Wang.</p>
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<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/iuZw0fgDZOcqymw9UL4YhlJ4PuQ=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9538601/GettyImages_850391352.jpg">
<cite>Photo: Zhang Peng/LightRocket via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>A Lotte department store in Tianjin downtown, affected by tensions relating to the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) controversy.</figcaption>
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<p id="0xPXaa">The consensus is that the THAAD row wasn’t an outright disaster for K-beauty, but it hampered its runaway success in China, potentially creating space for homegrown Chinese beauty brands. While she says that the K-beauty industry wasn’t an intended direct target of China’s THAAD retaliation, Jun thinks “this vacuum may be a convenient time” for China “to test out the market” for its own cultural products inspired by the success of Hallyu, including beauty. It wouldn’t be surprising if we started seeing serious coverage of C-beauty in the coming years as China rebrands “Made in China” as a symbol of modern Asian cool. If that seems far-fetched, keep in mind that parts of Seoul’s Gangnam were farmland until the 1980s.</p>
<p id="toaggf">For Korean brands, tentative signs of a THAAD thaw boosted stock prices in October. “China agreed to extend a<a href="http://www.kita.org/global/ecoView.do?seq=19675&searchWrd=&pageIndex=1"> currency swap</a> with South Korea that point[ed] to easing tensions,” Rhyu writes, which set off staggering surges in some K-beauty stock prices mid-month.<a href="http://m.hkcosm.com/"> Hankook Cosmetics Manufacturing</a>, an OEM and ODM manufacturer, saw a one-day<a href="http://www.thebk.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=183681"> 29.83 percent boost</a> in its stock price, and Amorepacific saw more modest yet significant<a href="https://globalcosmeticsnews.com/asia-australasia/5198/amorepacific-shares-soar-as-china-and-south-korea-extend-currency-deal"> gains</a> in recent weeks.</p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="F4F4QQ"><q>“They are all trying to mitigate risk and have finally realized” that being too dependent on China “is a bad thing.”</q></aside></div>
<p id="5GwA3G">Finally, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/south-korea-and-china-move-to-normalize-relations-after-thaad-conflict/2017/10/31/60f2bad8-bde0-11e7-af84-d3e2ee4b2af1_story.html?utm_term=.6dee9a476cf9">news broke</a> this week that China and South Korea have decided to talk through the THAAD dispute and probably get back to normal. It looks like South Korea will keep the missile defense system while China will back off its K-boycott, a huge diplomatic win for President Moon that sent <a href="http://www.cmn.co.kr/sub/news/news_view.asp?news_idx=24683&flag=h">K-beauty stocks surging</a> and then <a href="http://www.thebk.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=183767">falling back</a> from post-news highs. Even before the THAAD breakthrough, a tentative K-beauty recovery was underway, and Chinese tourists <a href="http://www.thebk.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=183768">are starting to return</a> to Seoul’s main shopping district. But Korean firms are shifting their strategy in the wake of the THAAD dispute. Korean cosmetics trade website <a href="http://www.thebk.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=183762"><em>Beauty Economy</em></a> called for the diversification of exports despite the news. “I have clients who feel a strong sense of urgency to get into US retail distribution NOW because they know that many, many other Korean brands will be flooding the US market soon,” says Rhyu. “They are all trying to mitigate risk and have finally realized” that being too dependent on China “is a bad thing.” </p>
<p id="tmFgo5">Despite the easing of tensions, Rhyu says, “Not all brands are recovering in China as we see in the sales data, so I think they will continue to focus on the US and other markets.” The fight to be the brand that<a href="https://www.racked.com/2017/8/3/16064782/k-beauty-korean-beauty-best-brands"> wins K-beauty in the US</a> is about to get a whole lot more competitive. And if you think the K-beauty trend is already big here, it’s only just begun.</p>
<p id="rQRbhc">One thing is certain in the competitive global beauty market: You probably won’t be buying North Korean Unhasu waterproof mascara anytime soon. Then again, if North Korea’s nuclear and hacking programs are any indication of the surprises in store for those who downplay or mock the country, your local drugstore might need to free up some space for mascara. Even if Unhasu never overtakes Maybelline, Kim Jong-un probably has a surprising lot to do with how you’ll buy beauty in the future.</p>
https://www.racked.com/2017/11/2/16549002/north-korea-global-beauty-marketTracy E. Robey