Here is a Christmas wish, courtesy of Diane von Furstenberg, who issued it during a conversation with me on Friday: Bernard Arnault should take his place as the elder statesman of fashion (after all, he pretty much invented it as an industry) and solve the fashion week date problem once and for all.
Consider, after all, the latest development in what has been a multi-month brouhaha over the timing of the big fashion weeks. Just days after France’s Chambre Syndicale announced it was mad that the CFDA (which manages NY fashion week) and the Camera Nazionale (which manages Milan) had not consulted it about the show dates tussle next September, and it was not agreeing to anything (I’m paraphrasing here), the same Chambre Syndicale also announced it was welcoming Giambattista Valli, an Italian, as a fully-fledged member of that most elite (and French) fashion group, the couture.
In one canny manoeuvre it thus demonstrated its:
1) willingness to embrace Italians who work with it (instead of ignoring it); and
2) position as the hautest of the haute — the table where everyone, even the non-French, wants a place. Nice bit of territory-marking, don’t you think?
Vanessa has been the FT’s fashion editor since 2003, and is based in New York, though she lived in London for 12 years.