Success Quote by Jay Chiat

Technology as "fashion" is a provocation from a man who made his living turning desire into mass behavior. Jay Chiat isn’t praising gadgets; he’s diagnosing a marketing moment when tech stopped being a tool and became a social costume. Calling it the fashion of the '90s frames adoption as status signaling: you buy in not only to do more, but to look current, to avoid the quiet humiliation of seeming obsolete.

The line works because it splits the audience into two motives that are both slightly unflattering. One is fear: the anxiety of being left behind in a decade defined by rapid digitization, corporate reorgs, and the early internet’s promise that everything was about to change. The other is need: the genuinely practical use case. Chiat’s sleight of hand is that he treats these impulses as equally valid drivers of attention, which is exactly the adman’s worldview. Motivation doesn’t have to be noble; it just has to move product and shift culture.

Context matters: Chiat co-founded Chiat/Day, the agency behind Apple’s iconic branding. In the '90s, Apple and the broader tech industry were selling more than machines; they were selling membership in the future. His phrasing captures the decade’s new etiquette: to be tech-literate was to be employable, conversant, relevant. Technology wasn’t merely arriving in people’s homes; it was reorganizing their self-image. Fashion is cyclical, but the subtext is darker: once tech becomes fashion, opting out isn’t a choice - it’s a liability.