Ready-to-wear

From FT.com June 14, 2013

Once upon a time, to most people, “the woman in red” meant a mediocre 1980s comedy starring Gene Wilder and Kelly LeBrock. Not any more. These days, the phrase is shorthand for the protests in Turkey over the past two weeks. That the latter has so overtaken the former is testament to the power of the image in the age of social media. And clothing has a lot to do with that power. Read more

Posted in Accessories, Beauty, Luxury goods, Menswear, Ready-to-wear, Womenswear |
From FT.com June 7, 2013

Dries Van Noten is one of the world’s most successful independent designers. An original member of the Antwerp Six, the group of Belgians who transformed the city into a locus of avant-garde fashion in the mid-1980s, he is sold at more than 500 outlets worldwide, and has won the international award of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA).

Elizabeth Peyton is an American artist known for her stylised figurative portraits of well-known people; her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Pompidou in Paris, and the Kunstmuseum in Basel. The two have been friends since 2009. Read more

Posted in Accessories, Beauty, Fashion, Jewellery, Luxury goods, Ready-to-wear |

Marc Jacobs adds fuel to London fashion fire

May 31, 2013 11:28 am by Vanessa Friedman

After the growing, and counter-intuitive success of the London Collections: Men, aka the only fashion week on the calendar these days with any buzz; after the purchase of Christopher Kane by the-former-PPR-now-known-as-Kering; after Jefferson Hack’s work with Tod’s; today comes yet another announcement that adds fuel to the growing sense that London is the fashion city of the moment: Katie Hillier, British accessories designer, and Luella Bartley, the YBD, are joining Marc by Marc Jacobs as creative director and design director of womenswear, respectively. Bring on the Brits! If you want to be a buzzy brand, these days, apparently, you need some of your own.

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Posted in Accessories, Fashion, Ready-to-wear, Womenswear |

Rumble in Milan

May 20, 2013 2:39 pm by Vanessa Friedman

Oooh, the trash talk out of Milan. Having finally woken up to the fact that London Fashion Week is getting buzzier, and that such a development could be a threat to Milan, its collections, and the related economic windfall that comes to a city during showtime, Milanese designers are joining forces to defend their territory – but the infighting has already begun. The gossip and name-calling is fun to watch, but behind it is a real issue currently afflicting every fashion week: the tension between national industry interest and a brand’s self-interest. Read more

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Posted in Fashion, Ready-to-wear, Shows |

Hedi Slimane’s revenge: despite PPR/Kering slowdown, YSL is selling

April 26, 2013 1:57 pm by Vanessa Friedman

Yesterday Kering, the group-formerly-known-as-PPR, announced their Q1 results, and, as with rival LVMH, they were a little…slimmer than usual: up only 3.1% on a comparable basis and 1.0% on first-quarter 2012 (the luxury was up 6.4%, but the sports lifestyle side was struggling). To paraphrase the reaction: shock, horror, luxury slowdown! Except for one thing: the bright spot in the presentation was YSL. This is, of course, the first test of new creative director Hedi Slimane, and despite a large amount of angst surrounding his debut, at least on the part of the industry, he seems to have passed it pretty well. So how did everyone (except the guys who hired him) get it so wrong?  Read more

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Posted in Fashion, Financial results, Ready-to-wear, Shows, Womenswear |

When size is a national issue

April 18, 2013 4:07 pm by Vanessa Friedman

No, this is not about Michelle Obama’s Get Fit campaign. The issue of size – of one’s body, as measured by the clothes one wears – has always been a touchy matter, not because of national epidemics of obesity, but because of our global individual body dysmorphia. Fashion has been an enabler of this all, not in the way you might think – not because of skinny models, or the deification of youth, for example, though it is certainly a factor in both – but because of its collusion in a less-discussed but equally problematic issue: the total elasticity of size. For fashion, size has become a tool of perception and subconscious seduction – oooh, look, this brand thinks I am so slim! I love it! – as opposed to reality. Except now one company, Alvanon, wants to change all that. And I wonder: Do we really want to know the truth? Read more

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Posted in Fashion, Marketing, Ready-to-wear, Womenswear |
From FT.com March 22, 2012

What does it mean to be the face of a movement? Well, it means, literally, that your face (not to mention the body below it) is a symbol. It means, like it or not, having to take responsibility for how the cause looks – ie, how you look.

And yet as far as I can tell, Sheryl Sandberg, author of the much-ballyhooed third-wave feminist book/exhortation Lean In, does not seem to have realised this – despite putting herself on the cover of the book; despite the fact that she is also on the cover of this month’s new Cosmo Careers magazine supplement because of it; and despite the fact that everyone else is more than happy to discuss it for her. Read more

Posted in Accessories, Beauty, Ready-to-wear, Womenswear |

PPR is dead; long live the company-that-tomorrow-will-be-formerly-known-as-PPR

March 21, 2013 4:01 am by Vanessa Friedman

Tomorrow French luxury and sports lifestyle Group PPR will announce it has a new name. Earlier this week, journalists received a mysterious evite to a meeting in Paris Friday to unveil the “new” PPR, one which has finally shed its old retail/catalogue arms, FNAC, Conforma and Redcats, to become a pure two-sector player. According to an insider, this unveiling is, in fact, the unveiling of the fact it is no longer called PPR. So far the Group has refused to divulge its new title, though it has registered at least two alternatives. Let’s see if they are any good.

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Posted in Fashion, Luxury goods, Marketing, Ready-to-wear |

CFDA awards have a ‘Groundhog Day’ problem

March 14, 2013 12:52 pm by Vanessa Friedman

The finalists and honorees of the CFDA awards are out, and it’s a surprising list. Actually, that’s not true: it’s a totally predictable list, but it’s also an instructive one. It both shows how meaningless it is to define an “American” designer in a world where Americans design for foreign houses, and foreigners show in America, and how, despite the fact that the fashion schedule gets ever-more crowded, there still seems an extraordinarily thin layer of internationally recognised talent. Which points up yet another truth: there is a major flaw in the time logic of the awards system itself.
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Posted in Accessories, Fashion, Menswear, Ready-to-wear, Shows, Womenswear |

Condé Nast becomes next big investor in ecommerce

March 11, 2013 1:04 pm by Vanessa Friedman

After last week’s announcement that Conde Nast International had made a significant investment (for them) in Farfetch.com comes news that Advance Publications, ie the parent company of Conde Nast, just led the latest $20 million fundraising round for Renttherunway.com, the web site that allows consumers to rent a catwalk look for an event. The first move got a lot of play, and this one has been slightly quieter (another investor, Highland Capital, issued the release), but put them together and you get what looks like an interesting picture developing, no?
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Posted in Fashion, Internet, Ready-to-wear, Womenswear |
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