Why a seditious Banksy? Seductive, pretty, familiar and dangerous? Perhaps a good old-fashioned twisted iconic image that is quasi-reflective of fashion sitting in the very front row.
Lights, cameras, iPhones, iPads and where once the front row was editors at Vogue flanked by media to the left and right with photographers kneeling (yeah right) in front and the occasional buyer sprawled, spit out by the cables and limping away. Row Two was the money row: Presidents of large stores and their buyers spilled over into Row Three with its star boutiques and friends of the house. The rest? Who cared. Standing by the back wall was every bit as cool as the very front row; it meant the house security and fire marshals accepted you, knew that you needed to be first to exit (never never never before the show's end, no matter what) to race somewhere very important: lunch or the next show.
Wee children were barely tolerated, special cases only; none were wearing lipstick or tiaras or had their own press agent. Directors were very, very welcome however.
American and Brit designers were dispatched from St Martin's to important fashion houses to work alongside the uncredited very well known designers doing a Missoni, Biagiotti or Krizia collection. Well-born daughters were sent to intern under Lagerfeld and the children of fashion houses sent to Brown's in London. Someday with a few years rare and delicious experience on their CV's, the designers would leave, some to form their own house or work with an Italian factory who would fund their first few collections or even to work for more money at other houses.
Photographers at the shows turned over their film - real film, yes - to their agencies and sold some under the table in the back of the building at midnight under a dull streetlight to manufacturers who would assemble a team to gather together to ambush the designer collection into a shop by a good six weeks. European designers waited anxiously for textile deliveries that were always late, for their factory workers to return from weeks off in the summer and kicked shipping boxes out the door as quickly as possibly to play beat the cancellation date. Blustering stores fought with schedules and complained that Vogue et al were doing editorials of the fashion before it was in their shop.
Buyers were stuck with the loyalty (and damn minimum orders negotiated) even in the face of of one of those "omg, you've done it again" collections where everything was wrong and what to do. Can you really buy enough plain white blouses and black pants to pass the minimum and make something of the mess in shop?
Shops called in to Mastercard, Visa and American Express for approval, a plodding painful where-do-you-look process; there was always the possibility of no and maybe I wasn't the only one holding my breath and hoping "let me pay for this, let me take it, hurry up, oh please."
Pierre Berge, yes of L'Amour Fou fame as well as for being the rock strong business partner of YSL forever, taught the rest of the designers (truth) to care about the brand, not to just sell a shop for the money but to do a no-punches-pulled tour of America to make sure all the fancy claims about movie star customers and a fashion mix straight from designer heaven was true and that clothes should not end up in a discount mall shop next to tattered label clothes, i.e. Loehmans or Century21. It worked and the tug of war, apt words, became about square footage at major department stores such as Bloomingdales, Bergdorf's, Saks. Ok, they did it, they grew money and licenses and movie-stardom in unheard of leaps, their every move investigated by their country's tax people because nobody could get mega-you-wouldn't-believe-it rich from dresses and jackets. There were forever rumors and exposes about money laundering and the Mafia at Versace and other Italian houses. Who knew what was up. These houses sold more clothes raking in more profits than seemed feasible. Where were all these shoppers ponying up thousands for dresses coming from? There were bread lines in Moscow and there was only New York, Los Angeles and Chicago really.
Money was at the heart of it, the entree and reason and everything. To buy, to sell, to profit: merchants for dollars and the need to make sense of it. Here in Los Angeles, size four to eight could sell out while tens and twelves (were there fourteens?) languished even unto the sale racks. Sixe 7, 7 1/2 and 8 were the shoe sizes that would sell out but reluctantly you'd add fives, sixes, nines and tens. If the minimum was too high as it was at many vain designer houses, you could take a chance that the most extravagant sumptuous evening clothes wouldn't be shipped, too difficult for the textile house to produce small quantities and you're breathe easily, minimums made and yet avoided.
Was. Was ok, was very good. A period called Then. Things that had no part of Then:
- Faxes, cells, computers
- Look books and videos/cd's/dvd's, youtube
- Bloggeratti
- Designer websites
- Flash sales sites
- Online shopping ala netaporter.com (ok, there was no online)
- Democracy in fashion and, umm, social media
- Thank you ... yes, I know: a few buyers waited (ad nauseum) for thanks for your order pal
- Special emissaries (huh?) for Chanel etc
- Hotel suites for swag, just plain giving things away would have made anyone in fashion faint
- Red carpet free haute couture and payments, omg, for wearing "our" dress
- Hundreds of billions of dollars to buy out your boutique to take it big time
- Live fashion reporting (there was Elsa Klensch once a week and that was it)
- Friendly returns (ok, we all took returns but you'd never know it from our clenched teeth)I
Is. Is is very good and causes pain, social conscience and the doors have been thrown open. Things that weren't, are. In exchange, fashion is no longer produced in America where once it was a major industry. French fine clothes (hello Chloe) could bear a made in Romania label and clearly are not sent in a taxi to a particular seamstress. Fast fashion has a cadre of designers waiting like wallflowers to collaborate that practice saying silly things like "masstige" and "why not." Red carpets are unrolled (rolled out?) for press parties for reality stars and media to celebrate the production of low clothes that are so throwaway to be called fast fashion. Is Snooki really paid to NOT wear certain things? Hmmm.
Fashion shows are live streamed, sometimes with designer q&a's simultaneously, in a cloud to whatever you sign into, designer and lesser websites let you order from them (yes, I hate this wildly and am most peeved with the people at Burberry who assure - huh - that this is better for their stores because the buyers will know what customers really want, omg save me from this kindness, not bearable), a plethora of associations with magazines (huh again) to flash sale sites with Amazon and Groupon spawning daily deals until you cancel the emails because you do not want to pay 80% off for surgery and a shoe in the same day.
The front row will continue to have Anna Wintour, Grace Coddington, Carla Sozzana, and the lot of Vogue editors but squeezing closer to the middle will be
Bryanboy who sweats glitter,
Tavi Gevinson who is age fifteen and presumably has homework but also rolled out a brilliant online magazine aptly called
Rookie, and other bloggers who can lay claim to readership that matters and has enthusiasm and immediacy as credentials as well as the ability to take their own photos and videos, write their own material, deal with the press and readers and mature into a credible source for personal fashion and its stories.
Fashion exists on a heavy dose of interns, usually glamorous brilliant young highly educated and knowledgable, energy in a bleary economy with heightened global political anger, and they are barely paid if that. Bryanboy wrote about this phenomenon and its true meaning in his post "
Coffee Runners Are The Future Of Fashion Reporting," filled with insights and compassion to an industry that he loves, imperfect as it is.
Bloggers, the bloggeratti, threw open the doors of the sequestered, established world of fashion with its criteria of audience, enthusiasm and personality, keeping some form of equilibrium as shops and major stores shut their doors silently. The internet exploded, certainly one of the reasons that a recent IHT Luxury Conference revealed has become ingrained: the bother of shopping in a real store and dealing with the frustration of limited inventories whilst at the computer the entire world's stock is available with two clicks, along with the act of dealing with real people, not as easy as the forgiving websites have become.
Within the bloggeratti are rich rewards for the few: Marc Jacobs naming a handbag after Bryanboy to the photographic campaigns of
Garance Dore to the reputed seven-figures
Scott Schuman made for his book The Sartorialist which he just happened to launch at Bergdorf Goodman. Several are on the go-to list for opinions on collections, campaigns, magazine covers, models, the industry and are maturing as rapidly as they shot from behind a computer screen to stories in Vogue and the NYTimes. The industry was forced to figure out what to do with the bloggeratti along with understanding which scintillate and how to deal with them.
Some were journalists that have come to blogging (
Wendy Brandes and Sasha Wilkins of
Liberty London Girl) and the masthead of W Magazine, InStyle and the assorted Vogues are overweight blogs by their own and guests.
Groupon and Living Social and the spawn that showed up daily, even more, in my inbox has been unsubscribed, sent to spam and over. The flash websites, especially the ones associated with Bazaar and Elle make me angry. There are shops, real world and online, buying and stocking these pieces and being sabotaged. Sabotage in a fragile recovery ready to swoop to recession and a new round of layoffs is simply unacceptable. The slap in the face of reading great reviews of Prabal Gurung's show today and receiving an email from Moda Operandi inviting me to preorder the collection feels like enough, more than enough. Mr. Gurung is accepting appointments from shop buyers who will leave orders and eventually receive his gorgeous pieces to sell. But oh fowl play, dirty business. It is not ok for a designer, not even a fashion designer with hefty prices and a unique clientele, to harm the very shop owners who support him.
I don't think I'm missing something, I don't think that this is wonderful. It's nasty and I can't imagine why any shop owner could accept this threat to their business. Mr. Gurung is not the only one, not at all, and did I say his collection is beautiful? It is. Does the business of fashion believe that they should trump the stores that pay their bills? Bergdorf's is certainly helping to do away with this egregious form of business by inviting its customers into the store to preorder from a number of designers. Easier for them to do it now and they will have fewer markdowns and the designer has the chance to fatten the orders, from a combination of special and stock orders. Rooting for stores and shops and hoping this nasty moment goes away quickly.
Let fashion be immediate in a way that benefits the people who are playing in it for money, not benefit cute ideas that harm shops. Seditious in the worst way, not in the fashion collectible way-early Vivienne Westwood kind of way.
Dear designers, do not harm the shops that feed you. Love, Madeleine
And do read the brilliant Vanessa Friedman's post "
Facebook, fashion and fantasy."
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