PARIS, London, Milan, New York — a quartet of self-anointed fashion capitals that rolls off the tongue like a catechism. Love them or not, most people are aware when the shows take place because a frenzy of catwalk pictures fills page after page, day after day. Style-wise, they are The Word. End of story.
Or not quite. In the past five years, dozens of pretenders to the fashion capital crown have sprung up while (almost) no one was looking. Some are even beginning to have an impact. Singapore Fashion Week, Korea Fashion Week, Toronto Fashion Week, Baltic Fashion Week, Turkey Fashion Week, and the fashion weeks of Rio,Lucerne, Düsseldorf, Reykjavik, Melbourne, Madrid and Hong Kong may as yet be household names only in the households taking part, but Mercedes-Benz Sydney Fashion Week, Air New Zealand Fashion Week and São Paulo Fashion Week are getting noticed.
It is now possible for dedicated fashion reporters (with no life) to spend almost all year away at shows. With a slap-up dinner for three in Riga, the Latvian capital, costing under £11 and goodie bags at LA Fashion Week containing 16 brands of designer jeans and a $5,000 (£2,700) pair of diamond earrings, there are obvious attractions. The drawback is the overwhelming indifference from targeted audiences. Even within the industry, most people believe that global fashion spins on the axis of the traditional four capitals.
More fool them. Of the nascent fashion weeks, Sydney’s Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week and São Paulo Fashion Week are two of the most commercially successful, with thriving domestic markets. Australian designers such as Sass & Bide and Collette Dinnigan, who has her own shop in London, have growing international recognition. The Australian fashion industry generates A$2.6 billion (£1.08 billion) a year. Meanwhile, Air New Zealand Fashion Week is considered to be the most creatively interesting, with designers such as Zambesi, Nom D and Trelise Cooper — whose last collection was snapped up by Julia Roberts and Reese Witherspoon and turns over NZ$15.5 million (£5.8 million) a year — stocked in the world’s most cutting-edge shops.
With the lustre of the mega-global brand diminishing, hunger for the new means that press and buyers are under pressure to mine previously unimagined fashion seams. Some of the results are dreadful and parochial: the internet may have made global access to the Paris catwalks possible, but some designers are looking at these international stars through the wrong end of a very long telescope.
However, get it right and the potential is huge. Albert Morris, the veteran buyer for Browns, one of London’s most prestigious stockists, pounced on almost all of Sabyasachi’s collection at the Lakme India Fashion Week in Delhi last May. “They’re beautiful clothes,” says Morris, who introduced Dries van Noten, among others, to the UK, “with the same creative spark as Dries.” He might also have added that, as yet, Sabyasachi isn’t stocked anywhere else in the UK — which, assuming Sabyasachi lives up to Morris’s hopes, gives Browns an edge over its rivals.
That India should produce beautiful clothes isn’t a shock. More surprising are the former Eastern bloc countries eager to serve as prospective quarries. Russia, with somewhat self-defeating enthusiasm, hosts three fashion events: Russia Fashion Week, Moscow Fashion Week and Fashion Week in Moscow. Each is brutally competitive, although so far none of them has seized the chance to leap ahead by providing overseas visitors with a schedule in Roman script.
That some of these countries are missing a textile manufacturing base and have only the haziest notion of the infrastructure required to make a fashion week — let alone an industry — viable, seems only to add to the appeal. “Going to any fashion week gives you a concentrated essence of a country’s personality,” says Andrew Tucker, a journalist and British Fashion Council scout. “Russian designers are keen on intellectualising fashion, so you get a lot of neo-peasantry and constructivism which, when badly done, is excruciating. On the other hand, you can imagine buying it in some chi-chi shop in Notting Hill.”
If Russia and New Zealand play their intellectual cards, Miami, Rio and São Paulo are unashamedly glitzy and Tokyo is quaintly traditional, hosting a fashion schedule that has a sedate three shows a day — and lasts for three weeks.
There is a serious point to these style proclamations, beyond the opportunities that they afford local sponsors and dignitaries to mingle with models. With most of Europe increasingly farming out production to China, staging fashion events enables Turkey, for instance, to reinvent itself as more than a source of cheap fashion labour. “For many countries, having a fashion week is a sign that culturally, they’ve arrived,” says Tucker.
The dividends of Cool Britannia, where the combined forces of British music, art, design and film helped to propel London Fashion Week from a 12-show event in 1993 to £700 million of designer clothing sales annually, have been noted. In Auckland, where the loss of the America’s Cup left a serious dent in the city’s financial and cultural buoyancy, there is a tacit hope that fashion week can fill the void, and, along with its flourishing film and music scene, help to position it as a “niche” country.
While the standard was patchy, something is working. New Zealand’s exports were generally up 2 per cent last year, but fashion exports increased by 7.5 per cent to NZ$302 million (£113 million) a year. For designers, the proliferating platforms are potentially beneficial. Victoria Beckham launched her denim line, VB Rocks, during LA Fashion Week — wisely probably, since the laid-back aesthetic there fits with her brand’s identity much more than “dressy ” New York or “edgy” London. Tanya Sarne of Ghost has also shown there (and in New York and London). “Moving around opens new markets,” she says. “But LA needs more press to be taken seriously.”
Not all will survive, even those with strong ties to their tourist industries. Designers who have made international names for themselves — Brazil’s Carlos Miele, New Zealand’s Karen Walker — still had to show in New York or London to succeed. But there are signs that while exports are key to everyone’s survival, the global market can take many forms. In Australia it’s all about the Trans-Tasman market; in Japan they can afford to think domestically. Over in Reykjavik, they’re just happy if anyone shows up: it all helps to put a country on the map.
WANNABE WEEKS
Sydney and Melbourne: Sexy and commercial.
Russia: Three competing fashion weeks. Serious statements made from recycled Coke cans.
India: Exquisite craftsmanship, exuberant colours.
Miami: A Latin-fest of South American designers.
Latvia: Cheap food, great models.
Madrid: Bravely coincided with London, which may explain why the Spanish Government helped pay to fly in some supermodels.
Reykjavik: Wildly eclectic shows held in the city library.
São Paulo: Famous models. Previously competed with Rio Fashion Week, but now on the up.
New Zealand: The self-styled mini Antwerp of the southern hemisphere.
Johannesburg: Lots of new black designers with strong cultural identity, not to be confused with its rival, Cape Town Fashion Week, which is used to brand Cape Town as a carefree place in comparison with Johannesburg.
Korea: 18 terrible shows, two good ones — and the best designer rip-offs in the world, as no one is monitoring them.
