Do We Need a 100 Year Old Jacket or Products That Last Forever?

There is an iconic luxury watch ad campaign that proudly declares, "you never actually own a Patek Philippe, you merely look after it for the next generation." A watch has regularly had this sort of generational appeal. It's a luxury product designed to be handed down to your children. LIVSN Designs, an outdoor fashion retailer, recently announced a jacket designed to last 100 years along with free repairs for life, so presumably you could hand their jacket down to your kids too.

The thing these long lived fashion products assume is that they will always be in style. Yet globally fewer people are wearing watches. And jacket styles change regularly too. In The Future Normal we wrote about a biodegradable sneaker brand known as the "Degenerate" that can be entirely recycled when its lifespan ends. Is a completely biodegradable product "better" than one which can last for generations? It's a hard question to answer and depends on who you ask as well.

Maybe we need both.