We are heavily socialised to make a kind of rough approximation between cause and effect. The second of the principles of epidemics - that little changes can somehow have big effects - is also a fairly radical notion. Simply by writing the word, I can plant a feeling in your mind. And finally, if you yawned as you read this, did the thought cross your mind - however unconsciously and fleetingly - that you might be tired? I suspect that for some of you it did, which means that yawns can also be emotionally contagious. If you play an audiotape of a yawn to blind people, they'll yawn, too. If you're reading this in a public place, and you've just yawned, chances are that a good proportion of everyone who saw you yawn is now yawning, too.
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Even as I'm writing this, I've yawned twice. Just because you read the word "yawning" in the previous two sentences - and the two additional "yawns" in this sentence - a good number of you will probably yawn within the next few minutes. Have you ever thought about yawning, for instance? Yawning is a surprisingly powerful act. But, if there can be epidemics of crime or epidemics of fashion, there must be all kinds of things just as contagious as viruses. We have a very specific, biological notion of what contagiousness means. Their chief characteristics - one, contagiousness two, the fact that little causes can have big effects and three, that change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment - are the same three principles that define how measles moves through a school or flu attacks every winter.Ī world that follows the rules of epidemics is a very different place from the world we think we live in now. Ideas, products, messages and behaviours spread just like viruses do. The best way to understand the Hush Puppy boom, or the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life, is to think of them as epidemics. How does a $30 pair of shoes go from a handful of downtown Manhattan hipsters and designers to every mall in America in the space of two years? The shoes passed a certain point in popularity and they tipped. Yet, somehow, that's exactly what happened. No one was trying to make Hush Puppies a trend. Then the fad spread to two designers, who used the shoes to peddle something else - high fashion. They were wearing them precisely because no one else would wear them. How did that happen? Those first few kids, whoever they were, weren't deliberately trying to promote Hush Puppies. In 1996, Hush Puppies won the prize for best accessory at the Council of Fashion Designers awards dinner, and the president of the firm stood up on the stage with Calvin Klein and Donna Karan and accepted an award for an achievement that - as he would be the first to admit - his company had almost nothing to do with. In 1995, the company sold 430,000 pairs, and the next year it sold four times that, and the year after that still more, until Hush Puppies were once again a staple of the wardrobe of the young American male. In Los Angeles, the designer Joel Fitzgerald put a 25ft inflatable basset hound - the symbol of the Hush Puppies brand - on the roof of his Hollywood store and gutted an adjoining art gallery to turn it into a Hush Puppies boutique. Then another Manhattan designer, Anna Sui, called, wanting shoes for her show. He wanted to use Hush Puppies in his spring collection. First, the designer John Bartlett called. It made no sense to them that shoes that were so obviously out of fashion could make a comeback.īy the autumn of 1995, things began to happen in a rush. People were going to the little stores that still carried them." Baxter and Lewis were baffled at first. "We were being told," Baxter recalls, "that there were re-sale shops in the Village, in Soho, where the shoes were being sold. At a fashion shoot, two Hush Puppies executives - Owen Baxter and Geoffrey Lewis - ran into a stylist from New York, who told them that the classic Hush Puppies had suddenly become hip in the clubs and bars of downtown Manhattan. Wolverine, the company that makes Hush Puppies, was thinking of phasing out the shoes that made them famous. Sales of the classic American brushed-suede shoes with the lightweight cr*pe sole were down to 30,000 pairs a year, mostly to backwoods outlets and small-town family stores.
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The brand had been all but dead until that point.