ATE last February, over lunch in a Paris restaurant, Stefano Pilati, the new designer at Yves Saint Laurent, offered a surprising motive for putting modern-thinking women in tulip skirts and high-necked polka-dot blouses, things that had struck critics as repressively feminine. "My aim was to say, 'We're a fashion elite here,' " Mr. Pilati said. And he is determined to lead. "We should. We're supposed to." You don't have to be a fan of the reality show "Project Runway" to appreciate that fashion has become more and more populist. This is the age, after all, of the adolescent designer, the celebrity designer, the hip-hop designer, and the claimants have been as varied as Sean Combs and Esteban Cortazar, who was 18 when he held his first show.
And though fashion, like politics, is still an insider's game, with its own addicts and agenda-setting editors, nothing, it seems, can compete with the authentic judgment of bloggers and Web viewers. Ask yourself: How elitist can fashion be when the 20 most popular fall 2005 collections on Style.com received a total of 22 million hits in 12 days?
Nevertheless, by the end of the fall shows in March, Mr. Pilati's assertion had been borne out. On the strength of an exceptional series of Paris collections, a new elite had emerged, and with it a sense that every choice these designers made, every proportion and fabric chosen or rejected, represented a superior judgment. They were acting like designers, not stylists or vintage-shop pickers. Retailers, starved for direction, saw the shows as a breakthrough. In New York, despite an influx of new talent, only Marc Jacobs had the power to influence the industry, whether an editor at Condé Nast or the owner of an illicit handbag palace on Canal Street. Milan had Miuccia Prada. In Paris there were six.
Insiders may debate who belongs in this elite class, but they don't dispute the authority of Mr. Pilati, Olivier Theyskens at Rochas, Nicolas Ghesquiere at Balenciaga, Alber Elbaz at Lanvin, Phoebe Philo at Chloé and Mr. Jacobs, who designs his own line and another for Louis Vuitton.
Even fashion industry analysts, who tend to be skeptical of the pronouncements of editors, acknowledge the influence of these designers, whose average age is 35. David Wolfe, the creative director of Doneger Group, which forecasts trends for stores like Nordstrom and Wal-Mart, compares it to that of the Antwerp Six, a group that included Dries van Noten and Martin Margiela, in the early 90's. "They feel the pulse of their times the same way the Belgians did," he said. "And they have the same problem. Everybody feeds off them, except now there's an expectation that your company has to be as big as General Motors. Or Tom Ford."
Is it the air, the Gallic water, les girls? What unites these six designers, only one of whom can claim French birth, and why now? The answer, as simple as it sounds, is fashion.
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...so who IS making money??...why is everyone always crying poor?!?!...it's so depressing and discouraging to me...!!!...
