JUST THOGHT THIS ARTICLE MIGHT HELP THE DISCUSSION
FASHION'S FAVOURITE
Mar 4th 2004
Which centre takes the crown?
"THE French really believe in fashion," says Patrick McCarthy, the
editor of America's WOMEN'S WEAR DAILY, in his Manhattan office. He has
a good word for the Italians too: "They're much more in the American
mould, seeing fashion as a business." And the British? Oh dear, not
even Norman Hartnell, dressmaker to the queen, made any real money.
Britain, says Mr McCarthy with a rueful smile, "just didn't have the
infrastructure and the belief in fashion"; its great textile companies,
such as Courtaulds and ICI, "never supported fashion".
The London of the swinging 60s, when Mary Quant celebrated the
miniskirt and the Beatles bought their clothes in Carnaby Street,
flattered to deceive. Britain's fashion schools still produce a
disproportionately large share of the world's most talented designers
but, witness today's stars such as John Galliano or Alexander McQueen,
all too often they must go to Paris to prosper.
This helps explain why the upper reaches of the fashion industry today
have only three centres of power: Paris, Milan and New York. Paris
represents the tradition of HAUTE COUTURE ("high sewing", ie, custom
dressmaking) and its PReT-a-PORTER (ready-to-wear) offspring; Milan
reflects generations of northern Italian craftsmanship, especially in
textiles, shoes and leatherwear; and New York represents casual
smartness and a century of powerful retailers such as Saks Fifth
Avenue, Barneys and Bergdorf Goodman.
But power is not equally divided among these three cities. With due
deference to Giorgio Armani in Milan or Ralph Lauren in New York, the
true capital of fashion is undoubtedly Paris. It is home to the most
famous brands, such as Chanel, Dior and Hermes. It is the headquarters
of the biggest fashion conglomerate, LVMH, controlled by Bernard
Arnault, and the home of his rival, Francois Pinault, who controls the
third-biggest conglomerate, the Gucci Group. And it has the greatest
concentration of creative talent, most of it foreign, thanks to the
stifling rigidity of the French educational system. What happens in
Paris reverberates around the world.
The reason is both history and design. In 1858 Napoleon III, wanting
nothing but the best for his wife, Empress Eugenie, asked Charles
Frederick Worth, an English dressmaker who had become a big hit in
Paris, to design her wardrobe. One royal commission led to many others,
right across Europe, and then to cheaper copies of Worth's creations.
To protect what would now be called his intellectual property, Worth in
1868 founded the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture to promote and
market Parisian tailoring.
Just over a century later, in 1973, the chamber was joined by two new
organisations: the Chambre Syndicale du Pret-a-Porter des Couturiers et
des Createurs de Mode, representing ready-to-wear, and for menswear the
Chambre Syndicale de la Mode Masculine. Together they make up the
Federation Francaise de la Couture, du Pret-a-Porter des Couturiers et
des Createurs de Mode, the organisation that sets the fashion
calendar--and sets the rules. No fashion house can qualify as HAUTE
COUTURE, for example, unless it employs at least 20 people in its
workshop and presents a minimum of 50 designs at the twice-yearly Paris
collections (the spring/summer shows take place in January; the
autumn/winter ones in July).
What is the point of top-end fashion? An HAUTE COUTURE dress, which may
involve 700 hours of painstaking labour, can cost more than $100,000.
Not surprisingly, the customers for HAUTE COUTURE have dwindled to at
most 2,000 women around the world (their names kept discreetly private
by the fashion houses). At this January's HAUTE COUTURE collection for
spring and summer, only 20 designers put their creative talents to the
catwalk test.
For each of them, this involved a frighteningly intense period of
preparation. First comes the idea, then the sketching, then the draping
of white toile (muslin), first over a mannequin and later over a live
model, and finally the cutting of samples on a pattern that translates
the temporary magic of the toile into a permanent garment in the fabric
and colours of the designer's choice. Everything is done by hand, from
draping and pinning the toile to stitching perfect seams, and all of it
requires complex skills. The draping is an art in itself ("sculpting
with fabric", in the words of Sue Jenkyn Jones, who teaches at London's
Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design). The sewing is a craft
that has to be much practised to be perfect, which is why the house of
Dior so values the PETITES MAINS ("little hands") who toil away in the
studio above the Paris flagship store on Avenue Montaigne.
CHEAP AT THE PRICE
The commercial point of it all is that HAUTE COUTURE is every
traditional fashion house's loss-leader. It creates and sustains the
aura of the brand, and so persuades someone who would never dream of
paying $20,000 for a hand-made, custom-fitted dress to pay $2,000 for
an off-the-peg dress with the same label--or $500 for the fashion
house's shoes, or $50 for its fragrance.
However expensive and exaggerated the runway show, the publicity it
generates works out cheaper and more effective than spending $80,000 a
page on advertisements in the glossy fashion magazines. One New York
consultancy, the Right Angle Group, calculates that a 20-minute runway
show, which could cost up to $500,000, will generate editorial coverage
worth $7m in American fashion magazines alone. No wonder Messrs
Galliano, Gaultier and McQueen are so keen to give the media something
to play with. The fact that the clothes may not be wearable is
irrelevant: the idea is to create a buzz.
The French authorities have always understood this. State-owned
television channels compete with private-sector stations to flatter the
fashion houses; subsidies are available to encourage couturiers to use
French fabrics; and designers are able to show their runway collections
in state-owned buildings, notably the Louvre museum, where the
government in 1989 financed the construction of a salon that
encompasses four halls and has room for 4,000 people.
Although free-market purists might object, to most people in the
fashion industry this supportive policy seems perfectly rational.
Pascal Morand, director of the Institut Francais de la Mode, notes that
France's fashion and luxury-goods industry, as defined by government
statisticians, represents some 2,000 firms, 200,000 jobs and 5% of
total industrial production. Include the textile industry, with 60,000
employees, plus packaging and bottling firms, and the share of
industrial activity rises to 8%. Then count in things like advertising,
graphic design, showroom management, video production and media
coverage, and it all begins to add up to real economic weight. Note,
too, that much of the industry's output is exported.
The problem for those in power is, of course, to retain that power. Can
Paris, for all its assets, continue to dominate? Designers come and go,
but what if Messrs Arnault and Pinault were to leave and their empires
were to fragment? As for Milan, what will happen when Giorgio Armani,
now 69, leaves the scene? And how will the northern Italian mills that
supply Mr Armani with such beautiful fabrics survive against the
growing Asian competition? Perhaps New York, with its huge domestic
market and a new burst of creative talent, will become fashion's centre
in the decades to come. Meanwhile, the challenge for everyone is to
sell: after all, fashion is a business.
, but i think that if he continues having orders, why not to keep on doing them right?
