My Unlikely Passion for Fashion
How I learned to love fashion — while boycotting buying clothes.
If you know me — well, actually, even if you see me for the first time — it’s quite clear that I am far from fashionable. In the language of Zalando’s customer portraits*, I’m clearly “Paul the Pragmatist”. I don’t care about trends, I wear clothes as a functional necessity and I wish they simply lasted forever. Partly out of environmental concerns and partly because for me shopping is a chore, I wear things for as long as they last — or longer.
Early in my Zalando career I remember a colleague talking about watching the fashionability trajectory of new engineers or UX design geeks, who would — inspired by their employee discount — gradually, but noticeably dress better over the course of their first 6 months in the company.
When I joined Zalando I did the opposite.
No new clothes.
At the time, one of our values statements was “Wear sneakers, not ties”. I hated the wording because (a) it was prescriptive (what if someone likes ties), (b) referencing “ties” was sexist, and (c) the logic is just wrong since sneakers and ties are not mutually exclusive and can be worn nicely together. It probably wasn’t my complaints that killed it, but I’m happy to say that this value statement was retired in 2016 and Zalando employees (continue to) wear whatever they like.
But although I hated the wording, I lived the sentiment. As a manager I wanted to demonstrate the fact that it’s your behaviour not your outfit that counts at work. So I dropped my previous uniform of brown jeans with a white dress shirt and started wearing T-shirts.
Then I went a step further. I also stopped buying clothes.
Why? I took the maxim of Henry David Thoreau** seriously: “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes”. Thoreau thought that new clothes are good only for politicians, and that politicians are good for nothing.
For two years.
I decided I would go a year without buying new clothes for myself and then write a blog article about it. I never got around to writing that article, so I went another year. After the two-year landmark, my bike gloves were becoming worn out and all six pairs of my brown Levi’s 501s had holes in the crotch. Not such a fashionable look, even if you’re dressing down. So I went back to buying clothes occasionally.
Then I noticed the benefits. Of not buying clothes. If you’re to be a voice of empathy.
We use personas to remind each other that “You are not the customer”, but when I started buying clothes again I noticed that I was using myself as an example when we were talking about these things at work. And this is of course quatsch (nonsense) — as a user-centred design manager, I need to be giving examples from what we saw in the user lab or in customers’ homes. And what I saw was indeed inspiring.
So along this journey over the course of a year or two where I wasn’t engaged in buying fashion but rather in empowering others to do so, through empathising with our customers I actually developed my own actual passion for fashion.
For good.
One thing I do have in common with a lot of our customers is a concern for shopping sustainably. Fashion, in particular, is problematic for the planet.
One could boycott working in the fashion industry and go and plant trees. That would be great, too, but I’d rather be in the midst of the mess and see if I can do my little part to clean it up — to make the world a tiny bit better. As one of our founders said in an interview in the German press, fashion is a hard problem and that’s why we’re excited about working on it. Fashion eCommerce is difficult in many dimensions. The supply chain, the logistics, the size and fit issues, the seasonality, and so on and so forth.
There’s a lot of work to do. I like hard work.
For Glück.
Fashion is emotional.
“Scream for joy” shouted the Zalando advertising campaign that made us famous — and infamous. In 2012 we saturated the airwaves with “Schrei vor Glück oder schick’s zurück” (scream for joy or send it back), which customers loved in Germany, but hated in Holland. Regardless of what you think of the campaign, it illustrates nicely how Zalando highlighted customer joy from the very beginning. Fashion is highly personal — intimate even. At the same time fashion is also very functional. As a designer I love this interplay between function and emotion, between ease of use and joy of use.
So without changing how I dress — and even while going back to my boring white-collar uniform — I discovered what I love about fashion. I enjoy living out my newfound passion for fashion every day at work. And I enjoy the exchange with colleagues on the other end of the spectrum — those whose eyes light up when they try on their new finds in the office!
Whether influencers or drag queens or punk rockers or suit-wearers or bland dressers like myself — at Zalando Design we can all work together to make fashion eCommerce more fun for everyone.
*“Portraits” is our name for “personas”, a product design tool popularized by interaction design legend, tech industry curmudgeon and self-proclaimed “design ancestor” Alan Cooper.
**Henry David Thoreau wrote a book called Walden in 1854, which in the States is a seminal work for environmentalism, nonviolent civil disobedience, mindfulness, and more.
Want to hear more? I first spoke openly about my unlikely passion for fashion at Service Experience Camp in November 2018. The recording of that talk is on YouTube.
