Apple Did Twenty or Thirty Big Things That Shook the Fashion World. Now Its Fashion Campaign Is Over.

Apple's grand record was built on friendly electronics and an aesthetic of extreme simplicity. The Apple Watch — a blurry product that has run through so many playbooks — looks like the odd one out.

Galeries Lafayette, at 40 Boulevard Haussmann in Paris, draws about 25 million visitors a year. Its giant Byzantine gilded dome sits next to the Paris Opera, and the store gathers luxury watches from all over the world. Selfridges on London's Oxford Street is 108 years old; in the base of its monument-like building it runs a sales floor called the Wonder Room, where Cartier, Bulgari, TAG Heuer, Montblanc and Longines are said to work an unusual kind of magic.

In mid-2015, Apple set up counters in both stores to sell the Apple Watch, the smartwatch it hoped to introduce to the fashion world — including the 18-karat solid-gold model priced at $10,000.

In January 2017, both counters closed, one after the other, for poor sales. Nobody knows whether the gold watches ever sold out. Not long before that, Apple had signed a deal to open shops inside Macy's, an odd move at a moment when traditional department stores were heading into dusk. Soon after the deal was settled, word came out that Macy's was doing badly and might be sold off in a package.

After a little more than two years, Apple's fashion campaign is over.

The only Apple Watch boutique left in the world is now inside Isetan Shinjuku in Tokyo. Count back to September 2016, when the second-generation Apple Watch launched and the solid-gold model was dropped, and this already short history shrinks by another four months.

"A year ago, wearing an Apple Watch with a Hermès band was still fashionable. Now you'd be laughed at," Bai Yingze, an expert on watch culture, told QDaily.

Apple's biggest push to sell the watch probably came last May, at the Met Gala — the dinner at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art known as the Oscars of fashion. Apple became a sponsor of the gala, to everyone's surprise, and with the hundred-billion-dollar giant's hand on the wheel, that year's dress theme was set as "Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology."

Apple mounted a large exhibition at the gala: on one side, couture made with traditional crafts like pleating and embroidery; on the other, 100 garments made by technical means — 3D printing, heat-molding, laser cutting — which added a touch of luxurious feeling to the Apple brand. Unfortunately, though the guests went to great lengths to dress to the "tech" theme, not one of them wore an Apple Watch as an accessory.

Next to the aloof, above-it-all pose Apple strikes in the tech world, it is far more humble in fashion. Jonathan Ive, Apple's chief design officer, said in his opening remarks at the Met Gala: "Both the hand and the machine can make something exquisite and refined — and both can fail to." He also compared the Apple Watch, obliquely, to the sewing machine, arguing that a technology first seen as complicated usually ends up becoming tradition.

He is right about that, of course: Apple's grand record was built on friendly electronics and an aesthetic of extreme simplicity. The Apple Watch fits Jonathan Ive's understanding of design, but it has never managed a simple answer to the one question that matters most:

"What is it actually for?"

As the first product Tim Cook handled from start to finish as CEO, the Apple Watch carried heavy hopes. Look even a little closely at how people use it, though, and the contradictions pile up. It claims to free you from checking your phone, yet you still need the phone for its main functions. It is meant to enrich your life, yet its cramped interface makes many apps look ridiculous. It is a phone in the shape of a watch: the hardware never escapes the thinking of a watch, and the software never changes the thinking of iOS.

The only thing that really matters is being able to swap bands at will — and that playbook has been run before, from Swatch back when it made plastic watches to last year's breakout hit, Daniel Wellington.

On this product, Apple's usual assertiveness is nowhere to be found. Bob Messerschmidt, a former Apple designer who worked on the heart-rate sensor, told Fast Company that he had planned to put the sensor on the underside of the band, where the pulse is stronger. Jon Ive rejected the idea, saying it did not fit fashion trends; besides, the Apple Watch needed interchangeable bands, which made a sensor inside the band impractical.

Ever since Apple fixed the center of its future products on the watch, the company's thinking may have crossed into the traditional fashion world — remember that when it sold desktops and phones, it never played by the same rules as other consumer-electronics makers.

That unfamiliar feeling of "wait, Apple is doing this too?" began on September 9, 2014.

Fashion editors, never before invited to an Apple launch event, turned up for the first time. Many of them, before they had sorted out shipment numbers or technical specs, ran enthusiastic stories under headlines along the lines of "Apple Watch Invades Fashion," making it a hot topic at New York Fashion Week that same season.

That month Jon Ive went to Europe and appeared with Anna Wintour at Colette, the famous Paris concept store. The breakfast drew the editors-in-chief of Vogue and Elle, the fashion director of The New York Times, and big-name designers including Azzedine Alaïa and Karl Lagerfeld.

In October 2014, an interview with Jon Ive and an Apple Watch ad ran in Vogue.

In November 2014, the supermodel Liu Wen wore the 18-karat gold Apple Watch on the cover of Vogue China.

In February 2015, the Apple Watch also turned up on the cover of SELF, a magazine Wintour oversees.

In May 2015, shortly after Apple's spring launch event, Apple ran a 12-page ad spread in Vogue — a single placement costing more than $2 million.

According to the media-tracking firm iSpot.tv, in the month after its spring 2015 launch event Apple spent about $38 million on television advertising for the Apple Watch alone — close to the $42 million it spent on the iPhone 6 over five months.

Apple's marketing budget has usually run a little below Samsung's. But 2015 was the heaviest-spending year in Apple's history: a record $1.8 billion, most of it on the iPhone 6 and the Apple Watch.

Dean Johnson, vice president of the creative marketing agency Brandwidth and a former Apple consultant, said at the time: "Years ago I talked with Apple about the iPad and the threats it faced. Apple said then that consumers would watch ads for other tablets but would still buy the iPad, because it really was that good."

"With the Apple Watch, there's hard cash going out the door on advertising."

It is not only the Apple Watch. The whole company has been changing as breakthrough innovation stalls, and the change shows up most directly in personnel. Cook hired Burberry's former CEO to polish the company's retail end into more luxurious spaces, brought in YSL's former CEO as vice president of "special projects," and put Marc Newson — the British industrial designer who founded the Swiss watch brand Ikepod — to work under Jonathan Ive. Fashion executives jumped to Apple one after another, becoming brand consultants, PR managers and marketing directors.

In 2013, Angela Ahrendts was still chief executive of the British fashion empire Burberry. She remembers the line Tim Cook used to persuade her to join Apple: "We have ten thousand technology experts here, but not one person like you." Apple's first-year package for Ahrendts came to $73.4 million — eight times what Cook made that year — including $70 million in stock.

As Apple's "senior vice president of retail and online stores," Ahrendts pushed through a series of changes to the sales channel. The plan had two halves: try the product in the store and buy it online; and, on the other side, extreme luxury.

Every Apple store that opened in the second half of 2015 used a new design: simplified displays, all third-party products repackaged in uniform white boxes. Ahrendts and Ive also filed a set of patents for the stores, covering double-height ceilings, special spotlights and more. Under her, Apple stores began to carry, alongside an expensive speaker starting at $1,990, more than a dozen banyan trees.

Ahrendts was plainly rebuilding Apple's retail along the lines of a luxury house, while the other outside hires taught Apple to market itself the way the fashion industry does. All of it moved further and further from the game Apple was good at.

Meanwhile, this run of moves advertised not only Apple but, incidentally, countless potential competitors. Except that this time, too many consumers could not point to a clear reason the Apple Watch beat every other smartwatch.

Beyond the committed followers, the market split two ways: one group still could not make up its mind, and another had finally decided it wanted a smartwatch — but would buy a much cheaper substitute to try it out.

One piece of evidence is the competition in the smartwatch market. Data from the ZDC Internet Consumption Research Center shows the number of smartwatch brands dropped sharply in the first quarter of 2016, then climbed steadily again from the second quarter. Analysts put this down to Apple's spring event in April, where it introduced several new Apple Watch bands, including nylon for the first time, which pulled consumer attention back and drew the copycat makers back in.

Another piece of evidence comes from a November 2015 report by the Mobile Life Centre, which found that the feature people used most often on the Apple Watch was the watch face — that is, checking the time. A function that a cheap electronic watch worth a few dollars can handle (never mind a smartphone) hardly lives up to the smart-device fantasy that $349 is supposed to buy.

Until the Apple Watch's app market really takes shape, the smartwatch business will stay in this state of everyone showing off a trick of their own for a long while yet. Something as simple as a bus-card tap-to-pay feature, at a price under 500 yuan, can be enough to cost Apple a customer.

Even so, it would be wrong to say the Apple Watch's fashion marketing failed. Measured against the field it invaded, it did rather well. Jacques Wang, an independent writer who covers watches, believes the Apple Watch used band marketing to enlarge the product's decorative meaning: "Parmigiani watches use Hermès straps too — but does anyone know that?"

On shipments alone, the Apple Watch's several million units a quarter hold up well against the whole Swiss watch industry — dozens of high-end watch brands put together do not reach that volume. In 2015 the Swatch Group posted annual revenue of 8.5 billion Swiss francs (about $8.4 billion), while "Other Products" in Apple's accounts — a line dominated by the Apple Watch — brought in $10 billion in sales that year.

But for a company with $215.6 billion in annual revenue, a few million units are not enough to make the Apple Watch the next engine of growth after the iPhone. And it is already sliding. IDC figures show that even with the largest share of the smartwatch market, sales of the first-generation Apple Watch fell 70% in the third quarter of 2016.

The watch industry, once panicked by the Apple Watch's alarming shipment numbers, has calmed down a great deal. At January's Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie (SIHH) in Geneva, a return to tradition was the core theme. Watchmakers still envy Apple's hold on the mass market — this year's Geneva fair added a public day, open to people outside the trade, for the first time — but they have also grasped that an electronic device can never become a luxury object worth keeping, and that it cannot crush mechanical watches the way the quartz crisis once did.

"A year ago some brands still worried about whether they had to rush a smartwatch out. Now everyone knows it was just a fad," Bai Yingze said.

Treat the Apple Watch as a fine watch and it goes obsolete too fast. Treat it as a fashion item and its pace of iteration — or of changing bands — is too slow and too monotonous. By Apple's own standards it is still a product being worked on, nowhere near mature; its latest patent application covers powering the device through the band. Its push into fashion now looks like nothing more than trial and error.

Look across Apple's two years of feeling its way through fashion and you can feel clearly that it never decided whether to play the lofty disruptor or the careful participant.

Judging by its latest moves, the limelight it once shared with the fashion press has blown away. In July 2016, Apple invited reporters to tour the Apple Fitness Lab it had built for the Apple Watch. The central images in its newest 15-second Apple Watch ad are "Stand," "Exercise" and "Move" — the three rings in the iOS Health app.

Cook can perhaps console himself that the Apple Watch had its best quarter ever last quarter, taking nearly 80% of the entire smartwatch industry's revenue. But he should also know that, given Apple's strategy of winning enormous markets with very few products, the Apple Watch's failure to start a consumer trend is a real worry.

Paul Deneve may have come off worst. The former CEO of the famous French luxury brand YSL did hard service getting the Apple Watch into the fashion world, taking part in several large marketing campaigns, including the striking window displays at Selfridges in London. But in December 2016, when Apple updated the page introducing its leadership, Paul Deneve's name was gone.

Cover image credit: Vogue