Tiffany & Co.

This week's post is about a very well known diamonds' store: Tiffany & Co. (or just Tiffany's).

We are going to approach this theme because we just started to study a book called Breakfast at Tiffany's from the author Truman Capote.

At first we didn't know what was "Tiffany's", we even thought that it was a coffee shop! But then our teacher explained us that this was a jewelry brand and told us to explore it. Besides approaching mainly an historic view (textually), we'll show you through videos and images the influence that this company has on society and its symbolic meaning - luxury. 

Tiffany's was founded in the "Big Apple, the city that never sleeps", which is New York in 1837 by Charles Lewis Tiffany and a school friend, Teddy Young. Initially the store only commercialized stationery items. In 1841 they extended the market to Bohemian Glass and porcelain, also starting to produce their own jewelry, this expansion resulted in the change of the name to Tiffany, Young and Ellis. In 1853, Charles Tiffany took over total control of the brand and gave it a new structure by changing its name to Tiffany & Co. and starting to sell another type of products like jewelry, it was in this decade (50s) and in the next one (60s) that this brand reached the international market, with stores in London and Paris, for example. Also in the 50s, they relocate the main store to Fifth Avenue, in New York as well.

Charles Lewis Tiffany (left) in his store, about 1887

Tiffany & Co., Union Square, storage area with porcelain (about 1887)

Tiffany and Co.'s flagship store at Fifth Avenue

At the time this, most of the people thought that this kind of business wouldn't last long due to the high poverty levels, but, against all odds, their industry survived and with a lot of success, and they even turn on the lights in a dark moment by making the most of the American Civil War (1861-1865) providing swords, flags, etc., to the Union Army, and gaining profit with it.

Meanwhile, the original owner - Charles Tiffany, died and his son Louis Comfort Tiffany became the first official Design Director, in 1902, continuing for a long time his father's legacy with high quality and high price products. However, in 1978, Tiffany & Co. was sold to Avon Products Inc. and started to drop the products and services standards.

Obviously, Avon's bet went wrong because people didn't want to have this kind of products trivialized so they were "forced" to sell the brand. The investor was a group led by William Chaney, that restored wealth times to the company.

In the 90's, America faced an economic crisis that brought to the company the need to widen their public spectrum, so Tiffany started an advertising campaign focused on the mass sell to attract more people, without losing quality and maintaining the elevated status of the brand.

So what we thought it would be a coffe shop, turned out to be a really huge international company of high-cost products... 

We guess that with this knowledge we are finally ready to go to New York, maybe in the next senior trip!

Bibliography

http://www.tiffany.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiffany_%26_Co.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Lewis_Tiffany
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Comfort_Tiffany

Text written by the authors of the blog:

Cristiana & Margarida

Teens' revolution

Following the viewing of the 1955 film "Rebel Without a Cause," contextualized by the topic studied this week "The 50s", we chose, in this post, to focus on some ideas about the differences and similarities between the contemporary youth of this film and the youth of today.

As a starting point for this analysis we highlight the fact that in the 50s, the adolescence started relatively later and finish earlier than in these days. “Why does that happen?” that’s the question that rises.

In general, the demand level of children has been increasing significantly, thus visible a huge difference  at this level, mainly in terms of the variety of activities connected to the education that the teens are subjected. In this context, today's children should be worried about their future a lot earlier than the children of the other decades (like the 50s). Alongside this, the room for “face-to-face” fun with street games and plays is decreasing while the electronic games and the television is gaining space in children’s life in a warning way, because they start to interact with virtual characters instead of real people and that disturbs the social growth of today's youth. The television puts, prematurely, kids in contact with “adult stuff” like sexuality, violence or even drugs, and with this fact we can easily see that one of the aspects that influenced the attitude change of the young people is the appearance of television that occurred in the 50s. 

With the culmination of these various experiences, children are exposed in a radical way, to the almost absence of limits, such fact is accentuated by the lack of a proper education that parents can’t, or just don’t know, how to provide, making the assimilation of this symbolic message impossible, because kids won’t be able to distinguish what they see on TV and what happens in real life. 

The youth of the 50s changed the way that adolescence was percepted, subverting the relations with the body and sexuality. So, it was the 50s children that announced loud and clear that it was “forbidden to forbid”. It was in this historic context that occurred the first teen revolution, that proclaimed their rights to political intervention and confronted the big amount of hypocrisy and conservatism that existed in the previous generations.

Teens imagined that another type of world would be possible and to this end they needed to take over absolute control, not just the political control but the moral, ethic and aesthetic control too. To reach that goal it was necessary to break the bound of dependence that they had with their parents, so they became adults a little earlier than expected, in a conflicting but joyful journey because the 50s teens were very optimistic. They started to leave their parents house earlier in the search of their own independence and values, with the adventure and the pursuit of the unknown as main objectives. They flooded the job market because they were too many looking for a job that would give them enough money to live with quality alone or sharing the apartment with friends. 

All of these changes that occurred in teens' life and thoughts modified completely the concept of teenagehood and turned the process of adolescence a lot shorter.

Such fact influenced today’s youth in a different way because, though we start our adolescence very early, we finish it a lot later.

So, today we see a helpless generation because it still exists a big stack of information to filter due to the lack of parental support just like the 50s generation. But, if the 50s generation were fighting together for a better world, nowadays it’s not like that, because it’s everyone for oneself.

This has led to an egocentric society, away from public causes and solidarity, a society focused only on the individual good.

Bibliography

http://vadevintage.wordpress.com/2012/03/01/bad-boys-dos-anos-50/

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheFifties

http://analoganalogy.blogspot.pt/2007/12/teens-in-50s-are-thing-of-past.html

http://www.oppapers.com/essays/Role-American-Teen-50S-Now/81760

http://www.loti.com/fifties_history/Teenage_Life_in_the_1950s.htm

Text written by the authors of the blog:

Cristiana & Margarida