i have finallly finished reading a book after almost a year of reading sporadically (having a two hour commute to the internship helped me find time). i guess it doesn't help that i also read many books all at once. i found a book called 'The Fashion Conspiracy' at Archives second hand books in the city many, many moons ago. there are ocasionally some gems in the fashion section, but it is usually quite a limited section of the book shelf.
the fact that it involved both fashion + a conspiracy within the title made me die a little on the inside - my two favourite things !
it speaks about all different areas of the industry and somehow manages to be both objective and subjective with the most perfect, humourous and insightful balance.
the fact that it was written in the 80s is also fantastic, because i hadn't known about some of the major players back then, and it was also interesting to read about corporations or figures that are still at large now, and to measure their progress since the publication of the book.
'the larger the fashion industry grows, the fewer the players that really count. in the developed world, fashion emplys eleven million people. and yet, when you pare the cast of leading characters to the minimum, it reduces to sixty. thirty of these are designers: eight in New York, nine in Paris, three in Tokyo, five or six in Milan and three, perhaps four, in London. the next twenty are the fifth colunists: five or six crucial fashion editors, a dozen buyers for stores and boutiques, a handful of backers and entrepreneurs who underwrote the boom. the final five are fashion legends like Paloma Picasso, Tina Chow and Loulou de la Falaise Klossowski, the late French-Tunisian columnist Hebe Dorsay, and John Fairchild, chairman and editorial director of Women's Wear Daily.
it is scarcely surprising, with such a tiny nucleus of opinion-makers hurtling around the world, that the level of paranoia is so high. no industry induces insecurity on the scale of fashion. the structure of the fashion year provokes paranoia. designers become paranoid under the pressure of producing two, sometimes more, collections a year; store buyers become paranoid at buying millions of dollars' worth of clothes that might not sell; fashion editors over the age of 40 become paranoid and begin to fear for their jobs.
twice a year ALL the new collections are shown within a few days of each other, and directly compared.'
- p7
'it was then that i asked Oscar de la Renta, in a the year that his turnover was estimated to have passed $350 million, where he gauged the status of designers in modern America against, say, the husbands of his customers: the world statesmen, record tycoons, arbitrageurs and chairmen of merchant banks. he thought for a long time before replying.
'i don't think that designers have ever been as wealthy as we are now,' he said. 'we have become world businessmen. in the old days fashion designers - seamstresses really - made and sold only dresses; today we sell a lifestyle to the whole world. we have moved into more and more areas of influence, and i think that this has made a huge difference to how we are perceived. it has made the career of fashion designer more socially acceptable. and i think that in the end all social structures come to depend on power and influence. and, of course, on the influence and power that money brings.''
- p27
'most said they were frustrated by the enormity of Seventh Avenue.
'it sucks,' i was told by a raven-haired PA wearing Andrea Pfister fur-topped suede boots. 'if you want to break into fashion now yourself, it's pretty well impossible. the established names, have sewn up the market, so new ones haven't got a prayer. how could they? the guys upstairs in the building are so cosy with the stores there isn't anything left for anyone new. the stores don't want new anyway. they want reliable ideas twice a year from the peopl ethey know, reliable ideas they can promote and be sure of selling. it's got to be blockbuster business or nothing. i think it's wretched.'
it was a theme to which fashion people at adjacent tables could warm.
'Klein and Lauren, even Oscar de la Renta, got into this business almost by accident,' said a skeletal young man with a mop of red hair. 'the prospect of walking into Bloomingdales today with a pile of ties and coming out with an order is zilch. the only new name who has broken through in the past few years is Carolina Herrera, and she wasn't exactly starting from zero.''
- p28
'at each interview i asked the designer about their customer, and heard described the same amorphous woman: married or nearly married and yet the mistress of her own destiny, building a career but with a full round character, confident but confiding, ambitious but yielding, a workaholic but intending one day to quite the rat race for a beach house at Newport. her life sounded so shot through with contradictions that you feared for her sanity. she needs a dress malleable enough to fit into a spongebag, while appreciating the luxury of frills and applique. she requires a wardrobe so versatile that a single garment carries her from power breakfast to bedroom, but she sends a man flowers just because it's raining.'
- p29
''it's worst in menswear,' he continued. 'it's an old thing: "welcome to menswear but don't change anything about it."''
- p39
''the trouble with Yohji's clothes,' said Meredith, 'is you can't get out of them in a hurry. do you suppose those girls get any sex at all?'
it would certainly have been difficult, had the opportunity presented itself, to know exactly where to start. 'they're clothes for puritans,' she went on, 'mind clothes, not body clothes. Yohji's an intellectual, a recluse. never cracks a smile. Rei Kawakubo's the same. deadly serious. the Japanese will be interesting for a couple more seasons but they've nowhere to develop you'll see.' Meredith eyed the Elle table with the spectral wisdom of an astrologer.
'it's ethnic, that's all. it's old National Geographic school of design.''
- p77
'another problem is that the companies are so small they can only afford to employ half-wits; that's why almost everyone on the periphery of fashion is a half-wit. a journalist friend of mine was asked to do half a dozen pages in advance of the British collections for the New York Times. she narrowed down her list to six designers with great difficulty and invited them to take part. five of the designers failed to produce any clothes for the session. she was astonished. each page in the New York Times is worth $35,000. she couldn't believe the lack of professionalism.
the trouble is that most designers don't have any form of business partners. there's no Pierre Berge in England. it think it's immoral that young people leaving art school should be encouraged to set up fashion businesses with no business strucutre at all. what you need to do is take all those endless graduates and teach them something about marketing and merchandising. fashion isn't there to dream about, it's there to be sold. - Annette Worsley-Taylor'
- p129
''there are a lot of famous designers in New York,' he said, 'but most of them aren't designers at all in the European sense, they're stylists really. i call Karl Lagerfeld a proper designer because he also has a sense of fun. and sometimes he says very true things.
he says, "we're not curing cancer. we're not putting people into space. it's only clothes. let's not take ourselves too seriously." i think that hits the nail on the head. it's just frocks. London understands that. at least most of the English designers know how to have fun.''
- p157
'the average off-the-peg designer suits - Saint Laurent or Chanel - costs 1,500 pounds and takes twelve hours to manufacture from fabric to rail. or, more accurately, the process takes twelve hours which is not quite the same thing since for much of this time the garment is idling on a workbench awaiting attention. a couture suit which costs, say, 10,000 pounds may have 200 hours of concentrated work in it, by a dozen seamstresses in the atelier. in this contrast lies part of the much-vaunted quality of couture.'
- p179
'Lagerfeld has a slightly disconcerting habit, during interviews, of fanning himself languidly with a large eighteenth-century fan.
'actually,' he went on, 'fashion is the apotheosis of flimflam. you can make it work with no real knowledge.. many people in fashion think that instead of stylists they should have been.. architects.. architects! they don't seem to even suspect that one has to study, i mean really study, in order to become an architect. if a house falls apart, people get killed. if a dress doesn't fit, you just don't put it in. they should realise how incredibly lucky we are. we can put our names on a bottle of perfume without knowing a thing about perfume and we make fortunes with it. but no, there they are: suffering.''
- p188
'designers who cannot face their peers with an entirely Gulf-biased (or Rio-biased) collection produce one line as camouflage, then adapt it to export. in the Gulf, these couturiers are more respected than they are at home.
'the French amy not wish to talk about their Arab clients,' an American editor cautioned me, 'but they're even more shakier about the South Americans. all those drug baronesses. without cocaine, half a dozen couture houses would have gone to the wall. but they won't talk about that. no way. deep graveyard.''
- p194
'the selection of merchandise remains a diffuse algebraic compromise of personal taste x corporate policy x 'open to buy' x market buoyancy / the memory of unsold stock from the last season.'
- p268, The Fashion Conspiracy - Nicholas Coleridge
the fact that it involved both fashion + a conspiracy within the title made me die a little on the inside - my two favourite things !
it speaks about all different areas of the industry and somehow manages to be both objective and subjective with the most perfect, humourous and insightful balance.
the fact that it was written in the 80s is also fantastic, because i hadn't known about some of the major players back then, and it was also interesting to read about corporations or figures that are still at large now, and to measure their progress since the publication of the book.
'the larger the fashion industry grows, the fewer the players that really count. in the developed world, fashion emplys eleven million people. and yet, when you pare the cast of leading characters to the minimum, it reduces to sixty. thirty of these are designers: eight in New York, nine in Paris, three in Tokyo, five or six in Milan and three, perhaps four, in London. the next twenty are the fifth colunists: five or six crucial fashion editors, a dozen buyers for stores and boutiques, a handful of backers and entrepreneurs who underwrote the boom. the final five are fashion legends like Paloma Picasso, Tina Chow and Loulou de la Falaise Klossowski, the late French-Tunisian columnist Hebe Dorsay, and John Fairchild, chairman and editorial director of Women's Wear Daily.
it is scarcely surprising, with such a tiny nucleus of opinion-makers hurtling around the world, that the level of paranoia is so high. no industry induces insecurity on the scale of fashion. the structure of the fashion year provokes paranoia. designers become paranoid under the pressure of producing two, sometimes more, collections a year; store buyers become paranoid at buying millions of dollars' worth of clothes that might not sell; fashion editors over the age of 40 become paranoid and begin to fear for their jobs.
twice a year ALL the new collections are shown within a few days of each other, and directly compared.'
- p7
'it was then that i asked Oscar de la Renta, in a the year that his turnover was estimated to have passed $350 million, where he gauged the status of designers in modern America against, say, the husbands of his customers: the world statesmen, record tycoons, arbitrageurs and chairmen of merchant banks. he thought for a long time before replying.
'i don't think that designers have ever been as wealthy as we are now,' he said. 'we have become world businessmen. in the old days fashion designers - seamstresses really - made and sold only dresses; today we sell a lifestyle to the whole world. we have moved into more and more areas of influence, and i think that this has made a huge difference to how we are perceived. it has made the career of fashion designer more socially acceptable. and i think that in the end all social structures come to depend on power and influence. and, of course, on the influence and power that money brings.''
- p27
'most said they were frustrated by the enormity of Seventh Avenue.
'it sucks,' i was told by a raven-haired PA wearing Andrea Pfister fur-topped suede boots. 'if you want to break into fashion now yourself, it's pretty well impossible. the established names, have sewn up the market, so new ones haven't got a prayer. how could they? the guys upstairs in the building are so cosy with the stores there isn't anything left for anyone new. the stores don't want new anyway. they want reliable ideas twice a year from the peopl ethey know, reliable ideas they can promote and be sure of selling. it's got to be blockbuster business or nothing. i think it's wretched.'
it was a theme to which fashion people at adjacent tables could warm.
'Klein and Lauren, even Oscar de la Renta, got into this business almost by accident,' said a skeletal young man with a mop of red hair. 'the prospect of walking into Bloomingdales today with a pile of ties and coming out with an order is zilch. the only new name who has broken through in the past few years is Carolina Herrera, and she wasn't exactly starting from zero.''
- p28
'at each interview i asked the designer about their customer, and heard described the same amorphous woman: married or nearly married and yet the mistress of her own destiny, building a career but with a full round character, confident but confiding, ambitious but yielding, a workaholic but intending one day to quite the rat race for a beach house at Newport. her life sounded so shot through with contradictions that you feared for her sanity. she needs a dress malleable enough to fit into a spongebag, while appreciating the luxury of frills and applique. she requires a wardrobe so versatile that a single garment carries her from power breakfast to bedroom, but she sends a man flowers just because it's raining.'
- p29
''it's worst in menswear,' he continued. 'it's an old thing: "welcome to menswear but don't change anything about it."''
- p39
''the trouble with Yohji's clothes,' said Meredith, 'is you can't get out of them in a hurry. do you suppose those girls get any sex at all?'
it would certainly have been difficult, had the opportunity presented itself, to know exactly where to start. 'they're clothes for puritans,' she went on, 'mind clothes, not body clothes. Yohji's an intellectual, a recluse. never cracks a smile. Rei Kawakubo's the same. deadly serious. the Japanese will be interesting for a couple more seasons but they've nowhere to develop you'll see.' Meredith eyed the Elle table with the spectral wisdom of an astrologer.
'it's ethnic, that's all. it's old National Geographic school of design.''
- p77
'another problem is that the companies are so small they can only afford to employ half-wits; that's why almost everyone on the periphery of fashion is a half-wit. a journalist friend of mine was asked to do half a dozen pages in advance of the British collections for the New York Times. she narrowed down her list to six designers with great difficulty and invited them to take part. five of the designers failed to produce any clothes for the session. she was astonished. each page in the New York Times is worth $35,000. she couldn't believe the lack of professionalism.
the trouble is that most designers don't have any form of business partners. there's no Pierre Berge in England. it think it's immoral that young people leaving art school should be encouraged to set up fashion businesses with no business strucutre at all. what you need to do is take all those endless graduates and teach them something about marketing and merchandising. fashion isn't there to dream about, it's there to be sold. - Annette Worsley-Taylor'
- p129
''there are a lot of famous designers in New York,' he said, 'but most of them aren't designers at all in the European sense, they're stylists really. i call Karl Lagerfeld a proper designer because he also has a sense of fun. and sometimes he says very true things.
he says, "we're not curing cancer. we're not putting people into space. it's only clothes. let's not take ourselves too seriously." i think that hits the nail on the head. it's just frocks. London understands that. at least most of the English designers know how to have fun.''
- p157
'the average off-the-peg designer suits - Saint Laurent or Chanel - costs 1,500 pounds and takes twelve hours to manufacture from fabric to rail. or, more accurately, the process takes twelve hours which is not quite the same thing since for much of this time the garment is idling on a workbench awaiting attention. a couture suit which costs, say, 10,000 pounds may have 200 hours of concentrated work in it, by a dozen seamstresses in the atelier. in this contrast lies part of the much-vaunted quality of couture.'
- p179
'Lagerfeld has a slightly disconcerting habit, during interviews, of fanning himself languidly with a large eighteenth-century fan.
'actually,' he went on, 'fashion is the apotheosis of flimflam. you can make it work with no real knowledge.. many people in fashion think that instead of stylists they should have been.. architects.. architects! they don't seem to even suspect that one has to study, i mean really study, in order to become an architect. if a house falls apart, people get killed. if a dress doesn't fit, you just don't put it in. they should realise how incredibly lucky we are. we can put our names on a bottle of perfume without knowing a thing about perfume and we make fortunes with it. but no, there they are: suffering.''
- p188
'designers who cannot face their peers with an entirely Gulf-biased (or Rio-biased) collection produce one line as camouflage, then adapt it to export. in the Gulf, these couturiers are more respected than they are at home.
'the French amy not wish to talk about their Arab clients,' an American editor cautioned me, 'but they're even more shakier about the South Americans. all those drug baronesses. without cocaine, half a dozen couture houses would have gone to the wall. but they won't talk about that. no way. deep graveyard.''
- p194
'the selection of merchandise remains a diffuse algebraic compromise of personal taste x corporate policy x 'open to buy' x market buoyancy / the memory of unsold stock from the last season.'
- p268, The Fashion Conspiracy - Nicholas Coleridge
I love reading your quotes! I take it you write them down as you read? I need to start doing this, because I always get to the end of books and lose track of all the good stuff.
ReplyDeleteHow interesting is that quote about Rei and Yohji..I agree that they are 'mind designers' but thats whats so special about them and the praise that comme des garcons recieved earlier this year with the AW womenswear is a testament to that.