At last, I have a Gucci app on my phone. It accessorizes handsomely with what I’m wearing. Beautifully designed, of course, and free to download, and some would say, you can’t argue with that. Except that there’s nothing special about being
free anymore on the app store, is there? We all know that brands have some ulterior motive in offering free stuff for the phone. Without wanting to sound like a spoilt New Yorker, I’ve got an opportunity cost in checking it out, so What, beyond a cool icon, is Gucci actually going to
give me?
Well, for starters there’s the platform extension: pics of the latest collections and videos of their ads, rendered in a sleek mobile interface, and lovely eye candy it is too (so long as you don’t find soft porn movies of women coming on to handbags slightly ridiculous). Then there’s the Gucci store locator, useful for shopaholics that haven’t figured out Google maps. News and Events, a little redundant if you’re one of the 450,000 friends of the G on Facebook, but still, nice to access on the move. And an exclusive shout at a sneaker, which is technically a sell dressed up as a give, but nothing to be sniffed at from one of the world’s top names in style.
And then there’s the music. This takes up a large part of the offering, and includes a ‘Gucci Beats’ mixing tool produced by Marc Ronson, a ‘music channel’, and playlists from Ronson and Creative Director Frida Giannini. Now, call me old fashioned but one thing I don’t look to a luxury fashion brand for is music. There’s a plethora of music apps out there already, but Gucci has ill-advisedly done what hotels did after the success of the Hotel Costes CDs, when every boutique operation had to have its own compilation and a bored DJ mixing lite Latin house in the lobby (until the fad passed and the DJ got canned in favor of the owner’s boyfriend’s iPod on shuffle). Namely, they jumped on the bandwagon, and the results speak for themselves.
The beat mixer doesn’t work. Nice try, but not even a hint of a cigar. The playlists are a one-way trapdoor to iTunes. There’s an amusing picture of a loft apartment DJ console, with twin Technics either side of a 42” plasma. Great interior design, so long as you’ve got Mr Tickle in da house to throw down the vinyl with his amazingly long arms. As for the content…If you’ve been to a runway show or a Fashion Week after party, you’ll know that designers generally have questionable tastes in music. They may draw inspiration from clubland and hang out with rock stars, but their talent is primarily in the visual realm. Music culture helps to determine fashion, not the other way round. Arty types should keep a respectful distance, or incur the nemesis that will surely be meted out to Frida Giannini for listing vintage tunes by Blondie, Bryan Ferry and David Bowie as the top 3 of her ‘current favorites’. Really, love? Very interesting. Now hand us back those headphones and piss off back to Milan.
If there is one fashion brand that is allowed to tell me what to listen to, it’s Diesel, and they’ve earned that right from a decade of sponsoring the U Music program, giving some exceptional indie talent much needed exposure, and generally being hip, useful, understated and down with the program. Conversely, Gucci has handed all it’s airtime to the DJ darling of the middle-aged velvet rope set, who hardly needs the break. The Ronse must be a smooth operator and a good producer, but he looks like a douche waving that signature sneaker over his playlist, and the fact that they didn’t give so much as a wink to some up-and-coming kid from DC or Paris or wherever, sucks balls.
Apart from the touchy question of music taste, the take-home must be that if you’re trying to reinforce your brand values, Luxury is a hard one to pull off on a phone. Applications are fundamentally about utility, and the chances are that Gucci will be compromised by this attempt and come off smelling of extravagance and decadence instead. The first rule of app development should be: “Do one thing, Do it well.” And then, maybe, build from there. Rather than pretending to be a playa and slapping its logo on a pair of slipmats, Gucci would have been better off keeping it simple and functional, and sticking to the elegant design principles that brand house like theirs are built on.