Buying In - (Page 4) 4 rob walker buyers—the people who decide what boutiques and department stores all over the world will make available to consumers. Most every brand that you could think of is here (from Polo to True Religion Jeans, from Jhane Barnes to Timberland), along with many brands you probably could not think of. The geography of Magic is the geography of consumer demographics: Sections are labeled Young Men’s, Magic Kids, Active Lifestyle, Casual Lifestyle, Women’s Sportswear, Dresses and Outerwear, and Streetwear. The mode of Magic is mercenary tribalism: buyers and sellers roaming the floor in their signifying outfits (there’s a couture guy, here’s a hip-hop girl, there goes a Japanese hipster kid), cutting their deals, while the trend prospectors and fashion editors study the action, looking for the smallest flicker of a pattern change in the garment zeitgeist. The language of Magic is an endless babel of logos and brands. Part of the reason for my first trip to Magic, in early 2005, was to connect with Bobby Kim, otherwise known as Bobby Hundreds. I had met him in Los Angeles some months earlier, and he seemed likely to be a great help to me as I worked to understand what was changing in the consumer marketplace. He was twenty-five years old, a Korean American who grew up in multicultural Los Angeles and was into hip-hop, punk, and skateboarding. He was the kind of person the youth-obsessed marketing industry chases relentlessly, and he knew it. But he scorned mainstream efforts to speak to his generation. I’d been struck, for example, by an essay on his Web zine blasting the “commercialized” version of skateboarding culture that he saw in the X Games or on MTV as a “big-industry ruse.” So that’s Bobby Hundreds: He is hard to impress. I’m mak-
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