FLEX COMMERCE 2020–2025

Taste, time, aesthetic innovation, niches, membership, and anything worth waiting for

In 2003, Slavoj Žižek, a famous postmodernist philosopher and Marxist cultural theorist, wrote copy for Abercrombie & Fitch’s Back to School Catalog. Shout out to The Sociology of Business reader and its Paid WhatsApp Group member Joe Fattorini for sharing this on our group chat recently. In the catalog, alarming nudity is overlain with sharp cultural commentary. More than 20 years later, the catalog images don’t hold, but the text does. Having a philosopher write for your catalog is the ultimate flex commerce, because what are people really buying?

I had a pleasure of being a guest on Eugene Rabkin’s legendary podcast Style Zeitgeist, and enjoyed our conversation immensely. You can listen to it on Apple podcasts or Spotify.

Equally exciting was for Hitmakers: How Brands Influence Culture to be featured in the window of legendary Casa Magazines in the West Village. We did it for the giggles, but I heard that some copies sold. Ali is a legend.

I took Abercrombie’s (Žižek’s? consumers?) flex — this catalog is a semiotic vortex — as the opportunity to look at the evolution of the new luxury — taste, knowledge, time, membership, access, niches — that I observed in my first book, The Business of Aspiration, published in 2020. I was lucky to make a trip to Japan just before the pandemic, and my experience there was fresh on my mind. The resulting output mixed the shift in our aspirations with what brands should do about

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