"Scye is an exceptional clothing line, but Hidaka and Miyahara’s strategy of pursuing quality and craft over trend and flash is not unique amongst young Japanese brands. Miyahara explains, “I believe the Japanese people have a basic artisanal disposition. There is a word in Japanese — kodawari — meaning being obsessed with the details, and it guides almost everything here.”

While some of this so-called quality obsession may be a response to discerning consumers, Miyahara sees craftsmanship in Japan prospering from the creators’ own self-demands:

Some part of kodawari is the designers’ own self-satisfaction of creating really nice things, even if consumers don’t notice the details. When we started the brand, we thought about how to do things from the perspective of those who actually make the clothing, and we wanted to produce clothes that people would still wear after a long time — both in terms of quality and style."

"For decades, Japan simply imported the wares of foreign cultures, but recession has led to invention. The country has begun creating the finest American denim, French cuisine and Italian espresso in the world. Now is the time to visit."

"During the robust economy of the '80s, Japan's exports ruled, and the country would import the best that money could buy from the rest of the globe, including Italian chefs and French sommeliers. Which made Japan an haute bourgeoisie heaven where luxury manufacturers from the West expected skyrocketing sales forever.

But now 20-plus years of recession have killed that dream. Louis Vuitton sales are plummeting, and magnums of Dom Pérignon are no longer being uncorked at a furious pace. That doesn't mean the Japanese have turned away from the world. They've just started approaching it on their own terms, venturing abroad and returning home with increasingly more international tastes and much higher standards…"

[See also Stateside: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/adam-davidson-craft-business.html ]

"As I walked through the markets of Hong Kong, staring at jade jewellery & Angry Birds paraphonalia, it occured to me that I could order everything on eBay or Amazon. The foreign land’s treasures have been globalised to a point of total consumer disinterest. The only thing that was left to consume was food & architecture…

Could it be that When you are drowning in a digital culture that says that social is everything then you might forget what makes you special? When Amazon and every ad banner online knows what you like, what happens if you forget what you like. Anti-consumption…

When you can be anywhere, you have to celebrate where you are right then and there. That’s luxury.

True affirmation of identity and uniqueness has become tricky when you are constantly forced into relationships with “friends”, Groupon deals and “other people also bought this” prompts. Perhaps travel and food, as sensorial experiences that one cannot share, will become even more prized than they are now."

"Consumption = word used to describe acts of acquisition...of things, in exchange for money. Unconsumption is a word used to describe everything that happens after an act of acquisition...an invisible badge...accomplishment of properly recycling your old cellphone, rather than the guilt of letting it sit in a drawer...thrill of finding a new use for something you were about to throw away...pleasure of using a service like Freecycle to find a new home for the functioning VCR you just replaced, rather than throwing it in garbage...enjoying things you own to the fullest – not just at moment of acquisition...pleasure of using a pair of sneakers until they are truly worn out – as opposed to nagging feeling of defeat when they simply go out of style...feeling good about simple act of turning off lights when you leave room...not about rejection or demonization of things...not a bunch of rules...an idea, set of behaviors, way of thinking about consumption itself from a new perspective...free."

"Many in the industry now speak of the need to go from a world that had embraced a concept of "fast fashion" -- where dresses or handbags are designed and produced quickly to meet the latest fad and then thrown away the next season -- to one that embraces "slow fashion," where goods are made by hand and meant to endure for decades. This nascent "slow fashion" movement has taken its cues from the now-popular "slow food" movement, which -- besides emphasizing slow cooking methods -- has also made efforts to support small, local farmers and to promote the use of local, seasonal produce."

"Some French intellectuals want to go much further, calling for the death of the entire luxury industry as a sort of national ritual of purification. "Since the ancient Greeks, luxury goods have always been stamped with the seal of immorality," said Gilles Lipovetsky, a sociologist who has written several books about consumerism. "They represent waste, the superficial, the inequality of wealth. They have no need to exist." ... President Nicolas Sarkozy, formerly known as "President Bling-Bling" ... and the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair hosted a conference of political leaders and Nobel Prize-winning economists to find ways to instill moral values into the global economy. The old financial order had been "perverted" by "amoral" and uncontrolled capitalism, Sarkozy said, deploring the fact that, "the signs of wealth count more than wealth itself." He praised the "return of the state" as a regulator of capitalist excess."

Nichetributs, Luxyoury, Feedback 3.0, Econcierge, Mapmania (see quote), and Happy Endings. "As the Googles, Nokias (who expect half of their handsets to be GPS enabled by 2010-2012), MapQuests, Navteqs, Openstreetmap.orgs, Apples and TomToms of this world continue to build the necessary infrastructure, devices and apps, any consumer-focused brand would be stupid not to be partnering or experimenting with map-based services. Why? Geography is about everything that is (literally) close to consumers, and it's a universally familiar method of organizing, finding and tracking relevant information on objects, events and people. And now that superior geographical information is accessible on-the-go, from in-car navigation to iPhones, the sky is the limit."

"The idea of luxury typically infers ownership, but perhaps renting is really the practice that embraces the idea of sustainable luxury. To consume more ecologically, we need a large-scale renting revolution. Renting quality should be the next disruptive innovation that shakes up the market of buying cheap. "

"In the future luxury goods will be methods that bring us back the power of our own attention: the power to choose ourselves what we want to notice or not. And there lies the true luxury of the future, to be able to resist shopping and still be happy.”

"talk I gave at IxDA's Interaction 08 conference, titled Strategic Boredom. Some of what I had to say I'd published in an earlier blog post"

"Boredom is a provocation. But what kind of provocation is it?"

"very least you would expect of a system, wrote John Frazer, is that if you kick it, it should kick back. In Generator, Frazer found germ ofidea that would shift his concepts of computer-aided design toward one where the computer took an active, not a pas

"In order to drive their brands as prestige labels with high margins, they must 1) conceal how they’re cutting corners and costs in manufacture, and 2) conceal their sales performance. If they fail, then the whole rotten house of luxury collapses."

"Once upon a time, luxury was only available to the rarefied/aristocratic world of old money/royalty...wasn't simply a product...was a lifestyle. Today, luxury is different...industry run by corporations that focus on brand-awareness, advertising...profit

"An aversion to whitehats and fast food might be a reason to leave the country, but it's no reason to bash it."

"When it comes to mobile and pervasive computing, I don't worry about privacy as much as I worry about contributing to the commodification of everyday experience. I don't worry about surveillance as much as I worry that chance encounters and serendipity m