Fashion in Dark Times
Image credit: Firstview
In 1931 and 1932, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote two essays, “Echoes of the Jazz Age” and “My Lost City,” in which he described how in just two years New York’s “vaunting pride” and “steady golden roar” born of “fantastic success” and fashionable, youthful free spending came to seem “as far away as the days before the War”—and how the reckless élan that characterized those vanished years had been replaced by a chastened awareness of dashed hopes and circumscribed ambition. Indirectly, Fitzgerald’s pieces remind us that the Depression had insidiously but rather slowly worked its way into the life of New York. The October 1929 crash had been a jolt, but the Christmas shopping season following on its heels was a prosperous one. The market’s precipitous drop seemed, if not a healthy correction, then at least, probably, a manageable one; indeed, Wall Street had recovered a good portion of the losses from the October crash in the mini-rally of early 1930, and the market wouldn’t find its bottom until July 1932. It was really only in the autumn of 1930, perhaps even later, that it became clear to New Yorkers that what Fitzgerald called “the most expensive orgy in history” was irrevocably over.
The current collapse, universally labeled within the fashion world a depression, has struck with a vicious suddenness that can almost be dated to the week. Everything had been different just five months before, in September 2008, at the previous Fashion Week. True, by then everyone knew that some economizing lay ahead, even perhaps, worst-case scenario, something on the order of the 1991 recession. But spending on fashion—on uplift and fantasy—had proved recession-resistant. Saks, for instance, knew its customers and, like most stores of its kind, bet on their desires. At the beginning of 2008 it placed heavy orders on the New York collections and on the collections presented in succession in London, Milan, and Paris over the following months. But in October, in what Stephen Sadove, the CEO of Saks, told The Wall Street Journal was “as short a period of time as you can possibly imagine,” fashion customers just stopped buying. By mid-November, Saks had cut its prices by 70 percent—well below the break-even point. This introduced the most economically ravaging period in the history of American fashion. Saks’s competitors were forced to follow suit, which meant that designers got next to nothing for their fall collections. As Tracey Ross, who ran what was probably the best-curated boutique in Los Angeles (she was forced out of business after nearly 20 years, in December), put it, “I am like, ‘Do the math. I sold your $800 shoes for $50.’”
New York fashion is mostly a lot of small businesses. Even household-name designers often lack backers, which means that they make twice-yearly gambles (on their fall and spring collections) requiring huge cash outlays—for the most part, fabrics have to be bought, patterns cut, garments sewn, and finishes applied before any money comes in. All of which makes the industry unusually vulnerable to the credit squeeze. Fashion is by far the largest manufacturing industry in New York, but it’s mostly made up of piecework (for instance, Lyn Devon, a rising designer known for her well-cut, sexy renditions of classics, relies on four women in Queens to produce all her knitwear). Last season’s sales, then, were “very, very destructive,” as Singer says. “It might be cool to be able to find something for 80 percent off … but that means a lot of people aren’t getting paid, and a lot of businesses are going to go under.” Diane von Furstenberg, who serves as president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, declared with old-world imperiousness that the sales that had devastated the industry “cannot happen again.”
But they’re bound to. Days before Fashion Week, a friend in the fashion world ran into the fashion director of a tony Manhattan department store on the store’s empty main sales floor. Surveying the unsold spring lines, the director said the clothes would sit at full price on the shelves until March (the conventional understanding, violated by Saks in the fall, holds that stores won’t mark down prices for two months), and “then we slash.” For their part, of course, the large retailers are also hemorrhaging: in January, Saks fired 1,100 people, including its director of women’s fashion, Michael Fink, and Neiman’s fired 375 (just after Fashion Week, Neiman’s fired an additional 450 employees).
Given this cataclysmic reality, Fashion Week itself was, depending on one’s point of view, a remnant of an age of gaudy excess or evidence of remarkable and unfounded pluck. A runway show in one of the tents can cost $800,000: the 40 or so outfits must be handmade, the space rented ($50,000), shoes and accessories (usually designed specifically for the collection) bought, and the stylist, lighting designer, hair and makeup artists, and 40-some models (top ones traditionally get $20,000 a show) paid. So the decision Rodriguez made to finance his own tent show (he lost his backer, Liz Claiborne Inc., in October) was gutsy. True, economizing was evident throughout Fashion Week: the models halved their catwalk fees, and a number of designers scaled back their presentations—Marc Jacobs, for instance, cut his guest list from 2,000 to 500, and decided to forgo his once de rigueur after-party. Still, Fashion Week’s purpose is to shimmer, and there were more than enough dos. Their atmosphere did bring to mind Fitzgerald’s description of post-crash cocktail parties in the first years of the 1930s:
A last hollow survival of the days of carnival [in which] a few childish wraiths still played to keep up the pretense that they were alive, betraying by their feverish voices and hectic cheeks the thinness of the masquerade.
Fashion, of course, draws far more than its share of such young and foolish creatures, but for every three fashionistas attracted to the glitzy and the trendy of Fashion Week, there was someone more seasoned, enticed by fashion’s singular ability to marry aesthetics and psychology, formalism and eroticism. Those people were far more likely to be at certain presentations (say, L’Wren Scott’s or Francisco Costa’s for Calvin Klein) than at others (Proenza Schouler’s, Alexander Wang’s), and, being mostly of a certain age and leading very busy lives, would eschew those parties anyway. Hardly recreational shoppers, they’d probably been less excessive spenders than many well-off, fashion-minded Manhattanites; but their country’s prevailing culture—and particularly their city’s—had hardly been an ascetic one, and the boom had been long. As is true for most Americans, the period since … well, since the September Fashion Week has amounted to the great chastening experience of their lives. Outside Rodriguez’s show, a woman much photographed by the fashion blogs for her stylish and eccentric dress carried a bag striking for its combination of whimsy and sophistication. The ornamentation, “rather Alice in Wonderland–ish,” as she put it, seemed handmade. “Well, hand- applied,” she explained, “though who really knows where or by whom.” The irony turned to self-disgust as she volunteered that she’d bought it for a modest fortune on Labor Day—“just five months ago. It now just seems so obscene.” She liked the bag, but she had enough bags.
Those given to introspection at Fashion Week were similarly dismayed, not just with themselves and fashion’s readily apparent excesses but with the city’s decades-long, dizzying spree—an attitude that echoed Fitzgerald’s description of New Yorkers’ sobering-up after a similarly immoderate era: “Now once more the belt is tight and we summon the proper expression of horror as we look back at our wasted youth.”
To put it in very different terms, consumers of fashion are undergoing a “values correction,” as the retail consultant Candace Corlett told Reuters. If that’s so, a contingent of people at the heart of American fashion has for years been readying for post-crash style. The great figures in fashion need a kind of clairvoyance, for they have to show women what they want before they know that they want it. Critics given to a crude commercial determinism have long dismissed that as nothing more than the market dictating to hapless consumers what fripperies to buy. But in fact insight into what women want is born of emotional and psychological sympathy and an exquisite sensitivity to the faintest and most distant cultural and commercial tremors.
Fashion is both a form of self-expression and an outward means of defining and altering selfhood. (Indeed, fashion people largely agree that a woman’s sense of style grows out of her youthful vision of the romance of adulthood.) It famously, complicatedly blends art and commerce, and perhaps the highest compliment one can pay a designer is to say that he or she understands the customer: a good part of the art lies in fathoming her mood, her desires, and her ambitions, and the ways these may shift from season to season and year to year and evolve as she ages. The best designers challenge those who wear their clothes—they want to guide and at times even push them, but they’ll fail in every sense when they push in a direction the customer repudiates. Underlying the relationship between designer and customer are a handful of fashion editors and store fashion directors who themselves guide, prod, and educate the other parties. They discover and promote emerging talent, and help established designers refine and enlarge their aesthetic and commercial goals.
Two of the most influential of these matchmakers and tastemakers—Singer and Julie Gilhart, the senior vice president and fashion director of Barneys New York, a store that exercises the greatest sway of any in the country—extracted what substance there was to be had from Fashion Week. Singer, legendary for her work ethic and ferocious energy (and possessed of a near-Talmudic knowledge of the New York subway system), attended upward of 10 presentations a day, shuttling on Saturday, for instance, from Chelsea for the Ohne Titel show (biker/Rick Owens–inspired, lots of chain mail, but also some formfitting dresses and jackets) to far-west Midtown for the VPL show (innerwear as outerwear, dance-girl look), then crosstown to a private presentation by Koi Suwannagate (all cashmere), later to the Roseland ballroom for the show of the Next Huge Thing, Alexander Wang (cropped blazers and body-conscious dresses for what one observer called “the skinny hipster in the city”), and back to Chelsea to a hideously overcrowded loft (the fire marshals seem to look the other way during Fashion Week) for a presentation by the “fashion collective” Threeasfour, which featured geometric shapes and uncharacteristically sharp tailoring. Avoiding the parties, she capped off the evening at a buffet supper in solid, sleepy Cobble Hill, where the theme was a salute to Oregon and the entertainment was folk ballads performed by the hosts’ children. Gilhart, impatient with the glut, jokingly told New York magazine that by Wednesday she was trying to escape Fashion Week. “I started looking for flights: ‘How much would it cost to just fly away to the Dominican Republic? Would Turks and Caicos be cheaper?’” The whole scene “just got excessive.” Though blasé, as she told me, about “runway shows with pretty clothes,” Gilhart (who, when I first met her last summer, was wearing a sundress from Rogan Gregory’s organic, sustainable line for Target, a black-lace Icelandic bracelet, and a gold surfer’s pendant from Abraxas Rex) is surprisingly excited about what she believes the current crash will mean for the future of fashion. She has long maintained that women want—or should want—something different from what they’ve so far been offered by fashion. Now, by necessity, they are going to get it.
Singer and Gilhart have responded with sympathy to what their close friends the designers Ruben and Isabel Toledo call “the fashion plunge” (obviously, many people they love and admire are in financial jeopardy), but they don’t yearn for a return to the fashion spree. Gilhart, who would be meeting with a charitable group in the South Bronx the next weekend, put things in perspective by describing what she sees there: “Now that’s a catastrophe.” Fashion, she said, “will have to take some hits,” but the plunge “will lead us to a new era in fashion, and to a better place”—a place she and Singer have been trying to get to for years. “I’m quite optimistic,” Singer told an audience at a “Conscientious Consumption” panel she helped organize at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles immediately after Fashion Week. This economy, Singer said, has made women think, “My God—why did I need all this stuff?” Gilhart adds that thanks to the recession, “the customer is just thinking more,” which “is preparing the ground for a more conscious consumerism.”
Benjamin Schwarz is The Atlantic’s literary editor and national editor.
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