Adam Maguire

The JW Anderson items tend to sell for hundreds of euro apiece, some going into the thousands, but you can buy some of their Uniqlo items for around €30.

And presumably the internet and social media contributing to the hype?

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely playing a part in the way these things take shape now.

The Swatch AP collab was teased online at the start of the month, next to no details about what was being sold.

And then they did that knowing that, you know, the fans and the fashion world would build a hype for them far better than any marketing campaign that they would put out, would manage to do.

And then they unreleased the images of the products days before they actually went on sale.

And of course,

Social media means that, you know, there's no extra currency to being the first to own... There is an extra currency to being the first to own an exclusive covered item, not to mention how digital technology has made it easier for people to resell items at a profit.

And all that being said, though...

consumer frenzies are nothing new.

They certainly predate the internet.

You could argue, you could go all the way back to the 1600s to the first record of a consumer frenzy, which was tulip mania in the Netherlands in the 1630s.

And this is a warning to the royal pop scalpers.

This is also seen by many to be the first example of an investment bubble and a stock market crash because the tulip was first brought to Europe from Asia in the late 1500s.

For a while, they were kind of just something that botanists were interested in.

Then it was discovered they tolerated the Dutch climate well.

They began to grow in more and more places around the country.

And because they were quite unlike flowers where people are used to seeing in Europe, they had much more vivid colours, they suddenly became a highly sought after item and a luxury item among rich Dutch people.

And that saw that the price the flowers and bulbs were selling at skyrocket from around 1634 onwards.

OK, so even without social media, they managed to get themselves into a frenzy.