A Design For Life
A Design For Life
The search for new clothes in Stockholm, and the search for economic complexity in Melbourne
I am currently in Sweden for several months. I am based in a town in Skåne called Kristianstad, but last week I was up in Stockholm. Aside from meeting with some colleagues, it was also an opportunity to buy some new clothes. Although retail is obviously now global, unless you know the sizing of specific brands, purchasing new items online can be fraught. Call me old fashioned, but I still like to try clothes on before purchasing them.
In Stockholm the volume of clothing options available is astonishing – especially the famed Scandinavian minimalism; clothes that are timeless, understated, but stylish. Labels like A Day’s March and stores like Grandpa are aimed at the cool, but not ironic, customer (the progressively absurd Our Legacy is for that). And there are two similar sounding stores Arket - which is a little more upmarket Swedish Uniqlo, and Asket, which does the same thing only better (but with less of a range). If you have a bit more money to throw around the whole second floor of the department store Nordiska Kompaniet is dedicated to the pricier range of men’s fashion. Although it also includes the Danish label NN07, where I like to get my shirts (and is more in my price range).
Visiting these stores got me thinking about why Melbourne doesn’t have a similar array of quality clothing stores. As a city twice the size of Stockholm, theoretically there should be a scale economy – with access to more customers, companies should have the ability to sell more diverse and better quality products. Not only should similar clothing options exist in Melbourne, but the city itself should be creating such products due to a greater pool of minds.
Yet this is clearly not the case. Finding good clothes in Melbourne is incredibly difficult. I spent quite a bit of money in Stockholm because I know I won’t be buying clothes when I return home. Of course, there are some stores in Melbourne, like Incu and Somedays, that cater to a guy like me, but they stock a very limited range – unable to confidently import a broad range of items, or items in bulk. None of the Scandinavian labels that have opened stores in London and Berlin would consider opening stores in Melbourne.
So clearly there are other factors than just the scale economics of bigger cities. Markets respond not only to people in numbers, they respond to the culture of the people. As I see it there are two components to this. The first is the weather. Countries like Sweden that have to think more about their clothing options obviously will spend more time concerned with design. For much of Australia there is no point owning more than a handful of shorts and t-shirts – to think about clothes is to waste precious time that could be spent having barbecues or throwing a frisbee on the beach. This doesn’t excuse Melbourne though, a city that has four clear seasons (often all in the same day), and an urbane culture distinct from the rest of the country.
So while the culture derived from weather is one thing, the culture derived from demeanour is another. Australians favour practicality over polish. People who pay serious attention to what they wear would in general be considered wankers, and I suspect this may be the assessment of me from this article as well (there’s a point coming). Good design is therefore considered a conceit, and having little cultural value it cannot produce any significant market incentives.
This national sentiment extends far beyond just clothing, it drives our urban design and public infrastructure as well. Not only do we seem to believe that good urban design is an unnecessary pretension, we seem oblivious to the soft power advantages that come from well designed buildings and urban settings. Despite many of us being highly attracted to well designed cities and beautiful buildings when we visit other countries.
Yet Melbourne never used to be like this. The city’s original parks and gardens are glorious displays of public design, with both Fitzroy Gardens and the Domain Parklands being two of the most exceptional public green spaces in the world. The enormous plot of land dedicated to the Domain – in such a prime location – is a strong indication of the value that was given to aesthetics in the city’s early planning.
Melbourne was also one of the great cities of Victorian architecture – and in many ways still is – but as the recent documentary The Lost City of Melbourne has illustrated, a shift in the 1950s saw a wrecking ball taken to many of the city’s elegant 19th-Century buildings. Although today there is a greater recognition of many of its urban masterpieces, there is still no genuine effort to create new buildings of aesthetic value.
This shift in thinking has also occurred with other public goods. The exquisite Tait trains that ran on Melbourne’s rail network between 1910 and 1984 were a demonstration that the city saw the importance of attractive design in its public infrastructure. Trains were not just vehicles from getting from A to B, they were experiences in themselves that required care and attention. Their replacement initially by the gritty Hitachi trains, and subsequently by a series of rectangle boxes on wheels with garish interiors has been an extraordinary abandonment of public design and the dominance of brute and careless functionality in the city’s public infrastructure.
Yet attention to aesthetics is not simply a value in itself, it is a mindset that flows on to what societies produce, and more broadly what societies wish to become. Despite being the world’s thirteenth largest economy, Australia currently suffers the ignominy of ranking 74th in economic complexity – the measure of the knowledge in a society as expressed in the products it makes. We sit below many countries that do not share our wealth, structural assets, and excellent education system. Sweden, by contrast, ranks 7th, despite having 15 million less minds to draw upon.
Australia is trapped within its own unique resource curse. The resource curse is a phenomenon where countries that have an abundance of natural resources tend to have limited economic growth, unstable political systems, widespread corruption, and poor development outcomes. Australia has none of these things, yet its abundance of resources has instead created complacency and creative stagnation. Australia has become so wealthy from simply digging things up and shipping them overseas that it has felt no need to do anything else.
This complacency has acted in concert with the country’s general demeanour of privileging practicality over polish to limit our ability to produce complex ideas and products. It may be a stretch to conclude that if Australians dressed better we’d be making semiconductors rather than just exporting raw materials. But the economic capabilities that Australia requires – especially in advanced manufacturing of renewables technology, as coal and gas decline – will not be magically gifted to us. They will come from the aggregate of what individuals value and the actions and ideas they pursue that are guided by these values.
Unfortunately, there’s very little that can be done about the weather, and national demeanours can also be difficult to change. Although Australia has done remarkably well in shifting from an insular, homogeneous, society to a highly diverse one in a short period of time. But this complexity in Australia’s civil society has yet to translate into complexity in our economic output. Which indicates that there are larger cultural boundaries that prevent Australia from achieving its potential.
In Sweden design is considered essential to innovation, not simply an added extra. Design is infused into everything the Swedes do, and nothing is considered too insignificant to not be designed well. An article for the International Council of Design about what makes Swedish design so good explained that “there can be as much quality behind the design for an identity for an art museum as there is for a crisp bread package.” It is difficult to imagine Australians currently having the same commitment.
Yet, at least there is the opportunity for the state to set such an example, and seek to create a civic pride through infrastructure and building design codes that can inspire the public to embrace design more broadly. Of course, this would rely on the state actually being able to recognise its current deficiencies. The colour schemes of Melbourne’s new high capacity trains are a stark indication that it doesn’t – even if the move to incorporate Indigenous art into the designs is a positive one.
Having the largest tram network in the world, Melbourne has an enormous internal and external soft power asset that it under-utilises. Melbourne trams should be highly Instagrammable – as unpleasant as that neologism is – but instead the network is bound to unfortunate shades of green – what I will call “complacency green” – that neither reflects Melbourne’s urban culture nor projects a sophisticated image outwardly. As the only city in Australia able to attract young, cool, and creative people from around the world, Melbourne should be thinking seriously about how it enhances this capability.
Of course, all of this is quite rich coming from someone whose only real ability is to pass comment on global affairs. The real work of shifting Australia’s economic output will be done by those with minds far more adept than mine. But maybe returning to Melbourne with some new Swedish outfits might catch a few eyes and inspire some questions about why good clothes in Melbourne are so hard to find. These right eyes might set about solving this problem, and in turn change Australia’s approach to design enough to make the country’s lack of economic complexity, a little less complex to address.