This is what went through my head when I first heard the Council of
Fashion Designers of America had enlisted the help of Boston Consulting
Group to deliver a “roadmap for the future” of their industry in crisis.
The consultants compiled a 12-page study after having interviewed
designers, retailers, executives, and editors to reach their conclusion.
Which was? There was no definitive conclusion.
One of the most talked-about options they provided, the “in-season”
model, involves shifting fashion shows to synch up with the delivery of
merchandise into stores, as opposed to shows happening six months in
advance of deliveries. It’s also referred to as the “see-now/buy-now”
model––which, to my ear, has an air of “buy one, get one free” or “BOGO,”
as it’s abbreviated here in the U.S.
However you call it, this option has been hurriedly employed by Tom
Ford, Burberry and Tommy Hilfiger, as well as smaller labels like Thakoon
and Rebecca Minkoff. Immediacy is a word much in vogue; Product
fatigue a condition of the digital age shopper who doesn’t even have
to own the clothes to be sick of them. While the move to provide
climate-appropriate attire in stores at the right time of year is a
reasonable one, the other main motivation for the CFDA’s investigation is
the need to satisfy today’s customer who doesn’t want to wait six months to
get her grasping mitts on pieces she and her friends have already seen on
the internet, but who believes the merchandise should climb down off the
catwalk and right into her closet. With a snap of her fingers, she wants
it. Apparently, we must respond.
But the Europeans didn’t jump to the finger-snap. Italy’s La Camera
della Moda president Carlo Capasa, valued “a spirit to create” over a drive
“to satisfy a need.“ Members of France’s Fédération Française de la
Couture, du Prêt-à-Porter des Couturiers et des Créateurs de Mode, which
includes houses such as Margiela, Lanvin, Saint Laurent, unanimously voted
against the see-now/buy-now option.
This resounding *“**Non!” *is refreshingly defiant. Europe provides a
beacon of optimism because the Americans have missed the point entirely
with their costly media exercise. It hasn’t been reported how much the CFDA
paid to retain BCG’s services but to place trust in an external panel with
no clue about the day-to-day operations of dozens of individual fashion
businesses is a desperate, reactionary and reprehensible move completely
out of step with where fashion needs to be going. Unfortunately it is
typical of the American fashion industry which is not so much a cage as a
gilded goldfish bowl, in which designers continue to swim in the same
direction hoping the journey will look different every time. Words
like implement,
strategize, incentivize are dropped like fishfood into the bowl.
Billion dollar bonuses are thrown about above it. The fish complete another
circle unable to learn from the past or imagine a future. Their only view
is the immediate.
See-now/buy-now is essentially ushering in a new strain of fast
fashion. The U.S. industry’s adoption of this model is a nod of approval to
the status quo of the past forty-something years, to a middle-aged system
that is at best, bloated and apathetic, at worst, heinously destructive and
corrupted by greed. Not to put to fine a point on it, see-now/buy now is a
laxative to aid the excretion of more crap into the world’s landfills.
After her see-now/buy-now experiment last season, U.S. designer Rebecca
Minkoff said, “Just on the day of the show alone, we sold four times the
amount of spring goods for that day to plan. That’s one store, one day.
It’s already working. Same thing on the website. It’s about traffic. What’s
encouraging is in one style, we only have one piece left, four days after
the presentation.”
Of course, small businesses must turn a profit to succeed. But perhaps
it’s appropriate that a historic maison like, say, Christian Dior chooses
not to follow the same formula as this lesser-known contemporary NYC-based
brand. There used to be an aspirational element to fashion, built into its
tiered price points that has become lost as manufacturers turn acrobatics
to produce the unachievable: quality foreign labor from exhausted workers
who earn poverty pay. It is time to divide the spotlight: move over
immediacy, it’s the return of exclusivity. Because this campaign for an
everything-now-democracy is bringing us down.
The fashion industry, which bears the stains of some of the worse human
rights violations ever reported, and, second only to the agriculture
industry, is responsible for wreaking unimaginable havoc on the earth’s
resources, does not need to speed up, it needs to slow the blazes down. It
doesn’t need to talk to corporate outsiders but listen to the human voice;
the knowledge within.
After the consultants had delivered their findings, Diane Von
Furstenburg, chairman of the CFDA, stepped forward to summarize thus: “The
CFDA has to give designers the freedom to do what is right for them.”
Why did it take a team of suits to arrive at that?
Because it’s the culture of a soulless puppeteered industry. Ethics can
really cramp shareholders’ style; moral stocktaking can shake stock prices
and the immediacy of dollar signs is bowel-loosening.
So, just as it was a futile exercise to involve this team of outsiders,
it’s equally pointless to appeal to those at the top.
Ralph Toledano, president of French fashion’s governing body, explained
their decisive rejection of the idea, like this, “Our clientele is educated
and informed on how the system works.”
Ah. Here in the U.S. the customer is the educator. But, at the moment,
she is so high on the chemical fumes from her 5 dollar T-shirt she couldn’t
pass a breathalyzer taste.
Toledano’s words reflect an appreciation of craftsmanship over commerce
which, if adopted by U.S. companies, might even begin to reverse the
decline in U.S .manufacturing (In 1960, 95 percent of American fashion was
made in the U.S.; in 1990, it had dropped to 50 percent, today it stands at
2 percent) These figures, although funereal, seem to have taught us
nothing.
Dries Van Noten is a designer whose collections evoke a profound
emotional reaction among his legions of covetous fans. For Fall 2016, he
celebrated the “beauty of decadence” and how a woman wears clothes as a
“living work of art.” He adds, “We can use a little bit of that in this
world.”
But can a work of art be produced on the spot? Would one have dared ask
Lucien Freud to complete a portrait like he was taking a Polaroid? Along
with Moschino, Prada, and some others, Van Noten reveals pieces of his
collection to certain buyers approximately a month before the runway show.
But when asked by Business of Fashion’s Tim Blanks if he would be
tempted to adopt the American approach, he responded: “A fashion show is
like the end point of a collection before I can start the next one…I need
the reverb of the reactions to the collection to start really well the next
one. So for me, doing a consumer fashion show is not really my cup of tea.”
Not my cup of tea. How quaint and archaic-sounding. But with
the popularity of the slow food movement, rooftop allotments, and silky
fine cloth spun from recycled water bottles, this quaint rings in tune with
the times.
In contrast, Christopher Bailey, who began his career in the U.S. during
the nineties before taking his talents to Burberry where he worked under
American CEO Angela Ahrendts until 2014, and went on to become the first
Chief Creative to concurrently hold the title of CEO, gushed, “From
livestreams to ordering straight from the runway to live social media
campaigns, this is the latest step in a creative process that will continue
to evolve.”
Or devolve. Soon clothes will be falling off the backs of lorries and if
we position ourselves at sharp corners, we can fill our shopping carts as
they careen by.
Burberry, together with most of the US industry, is not examining the
industry how it needs to be examined. Instead of combatting the evils of
fast fashion, it is attempting to play it at its own game, getting into the
ring and going ten rounds with it. It will be bloody, possibly fatal, and
there will be a loser. But risk is the spur of big business. Is Wynn Las
Vegas taking bets? And will any of us be around to see who wins?
The U.S. industry’s position as a fashion leader has often been under
question for its lack of creativity, but never for its ability to make
money. Now it risks becoming so far out of touch with where fashion is
going that it could usher in a divide not seen since the inter-war years
when American manufacturers went to Paris to bring home couturiers’ grand
ideas to produce less expensive versions to sell in department stores.
Where Paris, purveyors of luxury and innovation led, the US, masters of
repackaging and merchandising, followed.
The CFDA cited with confidence one conclusion in their 12-page
infographics-filled document: The time is ripe for change.
European designers have historically been the arbiters of taste. This
new American model is in extremely poor taste. It creates a chasm and we,
the American consumer, must decide on which side we stand.
Because, here in the U.S., change is down to us. We have the power.
By contributing guest editor Jackie Mallon, who is on the teaching
faculty of several NYC fashion programmes and is the author of Silk for the
Feed Dogs, a novel set in the international fashion industry.