Garlands, trees, Mariah Carey… Yes, Christmas is back. And with it, the (ugly) sweaters, for better or for worse for our retinas. Latest episode to date: the hype around Lidl Christmas sweaters, which tear up before they even hit the shelves. To understand a little better this trend as tenacious as the variants of the coronavirus, 20 minutes asked Vincent Grégoire, prospective director at NellyRodi, a business strategy consulting agency.
Lidl, Monoprix, H & M… Many brands have started selling Christmas sweaters. Why ?
It is a phenomenon that began about ten years ago with thirty-something Anglo-Saxons who wanted to have a good laugh. We all more or less have to spend Christmas with our blood relatives. And that can be drunk. Especially for millennials, who just as much want to spend the holidays with their loving family.
So they started having alternative parties a fortnight before Christmas, where you could do something fun before going to bother with parents and grandparents. It was a pretext to dress up, an ironic way to celebrate Christmas by making fun of overconsumption while celebrating moments of conviviality and sharing.
Generation X, the boomers, everyone is playing the game today. All the more so with the rise of populism, the climate fight, the variants of Covid-19, we want things feel good right now.
Up to the point of establishing itself in the big brands …
It has become a moment of communication in the stores: we make selfies with an ugly sweater, it makes talk, gives a cool image. This moment has become institutionalized, and therefore all brands are doing it.
There is something at La Tuche of totally assumed. For brands, this makes it possible to connect with a younger clientele, to have a modern image, proximity and fantasy. The brand is desecrated, made less austere.
And that creates traffic in the store, because you have to find THE ugly sweater if grandmother is no longer there to knit it. Lack of pot, it is often made in Pakistan or China with the wrong products.
Today you can find Lidl Christmas sweaters at 13 euros, and Gucci sweaters at over 1,000 euros …
The ugly Christmas sweater is salvaged by the elites. Initially, it was a popular middle class phenomenon, a street culture. It was very millennial, very social networks, and now, the recovery is done by luxury brands, who want to give themselves a 10th degree image.
By marketing the ugly Christmas sweater, Lidl is giving itself an image trendy, and Gucci a cooler image. It is the top which joins the bottom and the bottom which joins the top.
Is this a trend that works more in big cities?
There are no longer large and small towns, because the trends are relayed in rural or peri-urban areas. It is a general phenomenon and it is interesting to see how it spreads. If, being on a social network at age 14, you see Justin Bieber or some K-pop icon taking pictures with elk ears and an ugly Christmas sweater, you want to do like them. It can go very quickly and everywhere. These products are very instagrammable, snapable …
As with the mullet cut, the uglier, the better the Christmas sweater?
It’s interesting that people go so far as to look for ugly sweaters to customize. I saw some with badly hung garlands. But that’s okay, because even if it’s poorly done, the sweater is unique. And the end goal is to show it off on Instagram.