The Future of Fashion Branding for Gen Z? Be as Wacky and Weird as You CanFor the young people, absurdity sells.
You can't miss them. They're big, absurd, and very red.
The newest viral creation from Brooklyn-based art collective MSCHF is the $350 Big Red Boot. Reminiscent of Astro Boy's, these boots intentionally cartoonify their wearer. Against the gray, concrete backdrop of most cities, the wearer appears abstracted from reality.
The Big Red Boot is not the first metaphysically rebellious output by MSCHF. In 2021, the art collective collaborated with Lil Nas X on its litigious 'Satan Shoes' - a rework of Nike's Air Max 97s with an inverted pentagram and a drop of human blood in the soles.
It doesn't stop there. MSCHF's $450 Help, I Broke My Foot (a fake plastic cast modeled after a real medical foot brace) was peddled using the tagline "health is OUT. Injury is IN. Now you can look broken while still being whole." Think that sounds ridiculous? Well, according to MSCHF, "malingering has never felt so luxe."
Albeit provocative, these creations are not intended to be satirical. It seems we've arrived at a point in fashion evolution where absurdity is no longer... absurd. And this is even evident in the creative decisions of more traditionally classic fashion houses, like Loewe.
Jumping on the surrealism bandwagon, the Spanish brand is putting out grass sneakers (the original, runway versions were literally seeded and grown for 20 days), cubic tops, and pixelated trousers that look like they're something out of Minecraft - if your screen's resolution was extra terrible.
For Gen Z, absurdity sells because it taps into 3 psychological needs. Here's how, according to science!
Need #1: Novelty
It's no secret: we're all online. And when it comes to Gen Z, that's an understatement.
Those born between 1997-2012 spend a whopping 10.6 hours per day engaging with online content of some kind. According to Hootsuite, 95% of 13-17 year-olds use YouTube, collectively spend 5% of their monthly 'awake time' on TikTok, and 83% of Gen Zs surveyed say they use social media to shop.
But despite these big numbers, the average user spends as little as 3 seconds looking at a given social media post. This essentially means that, to remain competitive in the ephemeral Gen Z attention market, brands need to inject as much as they can within those initial 3 seconds. Things need to hit, and ASAP. The solution? Go wacky.
Psychologically speaking, this satisfies our need for novelty. We're motivated to explore new environments, sensations, and objects, and we're attentionally biased towards stimuli that offer this. Evolutionarily speaking, keeping tabs on the latest happenings helps us futureproof our survival. It's adaptive, and we can't help doing it.
And that's lucrative.