All Keyed Up – Time To Tune In?

As the Fall-Winter shows begin, an unusually wide window opens into the shadowy world of the actual business of fashion. We as an industry are, in general, very secretive. Quick, which brands had the best retail season for their Spring-Summer collections? Which emerging designer picked up the most new accounts? Which labels are predictably in financial trouble? Whose arrival in the red is a surprise? Don’t have any answers? Well, that’s not a surprise because we don’t talk about it…ever.

story by Seth Freidermann
photos by Charles Beckwith

As the Fall-Winter shows begin, an unusually wide window opens into the shadowy world of the actual business of fashion. We as an industry are, in general, very secretive. Quick, which brands had the best retail season for their Spring-Summer collections? Which emerging designer picked up the most new accounts? Which labels are predictably in financial trouble? Whose arrival in the red is a surprise? Don’t have any answers? Well, that’s not a surprise because we don’t talk about it…ever.

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With the notable exceptions of Irmen Armad’s outstanding Business Of Fashion site and the venerable Women’s Wear Daily, no one discuss the actual sales of designer clothing and accessories. Usually in the modern age even privately held businesses of any size have their sales increases or decreases chatted about ad nauseam, but not so in fashion. We here in the rag trade like it murky and opaque. The problem is, I believe, that prevailing attitude is a sign of an immature industry and is damaging to brands.

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The fashion industry has an unhealthy tendency to whistle past the graveyard. We like our house the way it is, even if part of it is on fire. This industry must get honest with itself about one thing in particular that most of us know is not working. The area I am speaking on is fashion shows and the growing desire of designers not to do them. This New York Fashion Week reveals a disturbing trend of a fair number of brands that showed at Lincoln Center in recent seasons not returning. While it is true that there are an equal number of new brands in the tents for the first time, most of them will not likely return for next season, opting instead for “off site” venues or no public show at all. Brands are more and more simply having press and buyer appointments in a showroom, either their own, a multi-line, or temporary showrooms set-up in places like hotel suites. This is not intended as an attack on IMG, who have done wondrous things for fashion and New York City, this is an attempt to rip away all artifice and expose the following simple truth: increased spending on fashion shows does not increase sales of your brand. These brands that are turning away from shows are for the most part good businesses simply honoring the math in their face. The return on investment on a large public fashion show does not make you more money, so why do them? But the public spectacle of the shows and the fashion weeks is exceptionally good for our industry as a whole, and there’s the rub. Fashion Week good for fashion but shows no longer worth it for individual brands.

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Here is what I propose as a solution. Sell the broadcast rights of the shows of New York Fashion Week and Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week to a major television network. This is our Olympics, and it can and should be covered like one. The amount of advertising revenue that a network could generate would be enormous, and the increased exposure for brands would quickly return their appetites for shows to the point of salivating. The major shows would be the prime time slots and the emerging designers would fill the roles of rising talent shows in the manner of an American Idol without the distasteful enforced competition. The eight or nine days of New York Fashion Week could be filled with premieres of fashion videos and interviews with our industry’s stars and characters. There would, in fact, be zero difficulty in filling up air time, what with over two hundred fashion related events crammed into eight days. While IMG and Milk can negotiate on behalf of the brands that show in their respective venues, the brands that opt for “off site” shows can conduct their own bidding process. It could add up to nice chunk of change for brands and venues even for some of the smaller spaces and labels who have great talent and can produce visually stunning shows that quickly get a reputation as “must see”. Honestly, who wouldn’t want to watch The Blonds show or the visual feast of Marchesa? I will say that this would absolutely kill the traditional stand and model presentation, but I’m not so sure that would be all that horrible, I suspect the models wouldn’t mind seeing it die. I always welcome feedback on these monthly pieces of mine but I’d love a robust discussion on this one in particular. Let’s hear it, are we ready for “The CFDA Open” in Prime Time?

All Keyed Up – The End of Fashion Retail As We Know It

Attention, attention, world of fashion commerce, you have 30 minutes to make up your mind about your future. That is all. It’s no secret that a vast number of cultural and economic systems are at worst collapsing or at best mutating. Retail fashion is, of course, just as seemingly chaotic and unsettled as everything else right now, as hundreds of companies, entrepreneurs, and financiers try to “best guess” their way to riches and influence. In the absence of long term data and faced with still developing technological platforms and mechanisms, history shows that most of the billions of dollars that are being doled out will be lost on companies that last a decade or less. In the face of such a sobering rapidly on-rushing future reality, how can the industry tell what to do and which horses to back?

story by Seth Friedermann
photo by Boris Marberg

Attention, attention, world of fashion commerce, you have 30 minutes to make up your mind about your future. That is all. It’s no secret that a vast number of cultural and economic systems are at worst collapsing or at best mutating. Retail fashion is, of course, just as seemingly chaotic and unsettled as everything else right now, as hundreds of companies, entrepreneurs, and financiers try to “best guess” their way to riches and influence. In the absence of long term data and faced with still developing technological platforms and mechanisms, history shows that most of the billions of dollars that are being doled out will be lost on companies that last a decade or less. In the face of such a sobering rapidly on-rushing future reality, how can the industry tell what to do and which horses to back?

Continue reading “All Keyed Up – The End of Fashion Retail As We Know It”

All Keyed Up – Some Words For The Garment Buyers

Despite all of the knocks against new talent, boutiques and department stores ignore fresh faces at their peril. It’s important for retailers to remember that everybody who is a superstar now was an emerging designer once. To break a new star designer adds tremendous cache to your store and will increase your destination foot traffic by giving you the status of “a place to go for those who know.” Of equal importance is the fact that after the designer breaks out you will never see wholesale prices that low again if you don’t establish an early relationship of some kind.

All Keyed Up is a monthly column by managing editor Seth Friedermann

There is no degree or certificate in fashion buying, it’s an occupation that professionals succeed in via a mix of training, instinct, and fiscal discipline. A department store buyer will often study under a more experienced buyer for many seasons before being promoted or accepting a head buyer position elsewhere. Whereas opposingly, a boutique owner is instantly thrust into the role repeatedly before their store is even open. It’s an exceptionally difficult job in a good economy, so you can imagine how hard it is today. When a buyer enters the seasonal market, the severe constraints within which they operate quickly shackle their freedom to choose. A fashion buyer has to be 99% correct at least twice a year. Add in the holiday, resort, and pre-fall, and the opportunity to be wrong increases. To choose incorrect pieces is to end up with dead stock, which can be the kiss of death in the fairly narrow margin world of retail fashion. Add in the fact that an established buyer enters each season with an inflexible budget and labels that they already know will sell to their client, and that leaves precious little money left over to spend on emerging designers. Now factor in the current mess that is the world economy and the chance of a new designer’s work being purchased by a buyer has shrunk to a pauper’s slice of the pie, irregardless of talent, skill, and inspiration. Continue reading “All Keyed Up – Some Words For The Garment Buyers”

All Keyed Up – Symptoms, Conditions, and Cures

The system of values that governs both the action and conversation in global fashion is horribly askew. If you’re a reader of my writing, have met me, or even vaguely know what I care about, then you will know that I’m not happy about the way the “fashion industry” treats the designers who are in fact the actual fashion industry. The ability to make bank and be seen around celebrities is placed so far above imagination and craftsmanship that the traits are actually absent from thinking and conversation both inside and outside the industry. The ignorant obsession of the fashion industry with everything other than the actual creation of brilliant clothing and accessories is a symptom of a much larger problem.

written by Seth Friedermann
photo by Aeric Meredith-Goujon

The system of values that governs both the action and conversation in global fashion is horribly askew. If you’re a reader of my writing, have met me, or even vaguely know what I care about, then you will know that I’m not happy about the way the “fashion industry” treats the designers who are in fact the actual fashion industry. The ability to make bank and be seen around celebrities is placed so far above imagination and craftsmanship that the traits are actually absent from thinking and conversation both inside and outside the industry. The ignorant obsession of the fashion industry with everything other than the actual creation of brilliant clothing and accessories is a symptom of a much larger problem. Continue reading “All Keyed Up – Symptoms, Conditions, and Cures”

All Keyed Up – Can you be both retailer and objective journalist?

There are still a few major mysteries left in the future of the fashion industry that are the keys to understanding a progressive path forward. Two of the biggest “known unknowns,” to quote someone I intensely dislike, are… what is going to happen as digital magazines who review and feature specific designers also begin to sell clothes because of contracts with retailers or because they themselves become a direct retailer? The other question is, how does this strange new “salescape” impact the designers?

Sally LaPointe Spring 2012, photo by Ned and Aya Rosen

written by Seth Friedermann
edited by Charles Beckwith

Where are we going, and what will it look like when we get there?

There are still a few major mysteries left in the future of the fashion industry that are the keys to understanding a progressive path forward. Two of the biggest “known unknowns,” to quote someone I intensely dislike, are… what is going to happen as digital magazines who review and feature specific designers also begin to sell clothes because of contracts with retailers or because they themselves  become a direct retailer? The other question is, how does this strange new “salescape” impact the designers?

Continue reading “All Keyed Up – Can you be both retailer and objective journalist?”

All Keyed Up – Does Fashion Week Still Work?

In 1943 Eleanor Lambert organized something called “Press Week” which was held in New York City two times per year to give the fashion press access to the newest designs from the likes of Vera Maxwell, Claire McCardell, Norman Norell and many others. This was primarily due to the fact that U.S designers no matter how brilliant were barely covered by the fashion press of the day. This press week was renamed “Seventh on Sixth” in 1993 when the shows begun to be held in Bryant Park. Now as we close out our first full year in the new tents at Lincoln Center I’ve begun to wonder if Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in 2011 still does what Mrs. Lambert wanted it to do when she founded it almost 60 years ago.

story by Seth Friedermann
photo by Aeric Meredith-Goujon

In 1943 Eleanor Lambert organized something called “Press Week” which was held in New York City two times per year to give the fashion press access to the newest designs from the likes of Vera Maxwell, Claire McCardell, Norman Norell and many others. This was primarily due to the fact that U.S designers no matter how brilliant were barely covered by the fashion press of the day. This press week was renamed “Seventh on Sixth” in 1993 when the shows begun to be held in Bryant Park. Now as we close out our first full year in the new tents at Lincoln Center I’ve begun to wonder if Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in 2011 still does what Mrs. Lambert wanted it to do when she founded it almost 60 years ago. Continue reading “All Keyed Up – Does Fashion Week Still Work?”

All Keyed Up – August 2011

A few well-known fashion industry people who are also show-biz types once told a designer friend of mine that there was no place in the real world for her designs, and that they knew this because they were the experts on fashion, not her. Not only are they most certainly not, “experts on fashion,” the fact that they think such a position exists shows that they don’t even view fashion in the proper context. This incident importantly points out what is wrong with the way these “experts,” and the industry as a whole, see designers and designs.

from the desk of Seth Friedermann, Managing Editor
photos by Charles Beckwith

A few well-known fashion industry people who are also show-biz types once told a designer friend of mine that there was no place in the real world for her designs, and that they knew this because they were the experts on fashion, not her. Not only are they most certainly not, “experts on fashion,” the fact that they think such a position exists shows that they don’t even view fashion in the proper context. This incident importantly points out what is wrong with the way these “experts,” and the industry as a whole, see designers and designs. Continue reading “All Keyed Up – August 2011”