Big luxury companies have turned shopping for clothes into an extravagant sensory experience, a foray into the soothing, rarefied world of high design. In addition to its Tokyo Epicenter, Prada has a $40 million store in New York’s SoHo neighborhood designed by Rem Koolhaas, which features a zebrawood “wave” floor that unfurls from street level to the basement. Hermes hired Renzo Piano to create its glass-brick tower in the Ginza section of Tokyo. Issey Miyake brought in Frank Gehry to create a performing-arts space out of ribbons of steel in his TriBeCa store in New York. Louis Vuitton opened a mammoth flagship in Tokyo last year, designed by architect Jun Aoki to resemble a stack of Vuitton steamer trunks. The idea is to make these stores cultural destinations–and then to seduce curious visitors to buy. It seems to be working: last week both LVMH and the Gucci Group reported slight increases in fashion and leather-goods sales over the last few months.
Perhaps fashion houses are trying to compensate for a distinct lack of oomph in their clothes. As luxury couture has evolved from a cozy business of artists and entrepreneurs into a global network of multibillion-dollar corporations, fashion design as a metier has suffered. Some designers–such as Tom Ford, who oversees the creative direction at Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche–are also major shareholders in their own publicly traded companies. They are as eager to see profits (and dividends) rise as corporate investors are, so they increasingly play it safe by coming up with collections that are more commercial than innovative.
Over the past few years, sluggish sales due to the global recession, SARS and the war in Iraq have only exacerbated the problem, as this month’s womenswear shows proved. Luxury powerhouses like Yves Saint Laurent, Christian Dior, Prada and Chanel sent out formulaic collections of daywear, swimsuits and evening dresses. Even avant-garde designers like the Belgians Ann Demeulemeester, Dries Van Noten and Martin Margiela now do marketable clothes that endear them to department-store retailers.
Luxury companies are also putting more emphasis on accessories, particularly the handbag. At Gucci, accessories make up 70 percent of all sales. Though Marc Jacobs’s ready-to-wear line for Louis Vuitton gets all the hype, it accounts for only 5 percent of sales; the rest comes from purses, wallets, suitcases and knapsacks. At the Chanel show in Paris last week, nearly every model carried a new bag in the shape of a videocassette or a 45rpm record, or had a quilted pillow hanging on a chain from her shoulder.
There is a silver lining to the industry’s current preoccupation with accessories and high-concept stores: it leaves fashion itself in the hands of a fresh crop of designers. And many industry insiders say it’s high time that the next generation took its place. “The major designers of today are getting on in years, and there has to be someone to fill in the ranks,” says Joan Kaner, vice president and fashion director for Neiman Marcus. Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue, recently announced that beginning next September, Vogue will sponsor a mentoring program with the Council of Fashion Designers of America to help two young designers each year successfully maneuver the business side of fashion. “I find they have the creative talent but not the business sense,” says Wintour. “And you have to have the business side to make it.”
Indeed, the new generation of fashion talents tend to eschew the principles of the huge luxury players–as well as the wild eccentricities of the avant-garde set–for a smaller and more sensible approach to clothing design. Call it neo couture: in New York, Paris, Milan, London, Rio and Tokyo, these designers of the moment–among them Ralph Rucci, Martin Grant and Lars Nilsson for Nina Ricci–are creating clothes people can actually wear. They know little about business but love to sew. They profess respect and admiration for their forebears, but build on rather than recycle what has come before. And as they showed during the spring-summer 2004 womenswear collections earlier this month, they are creating some of the most artfully designed clothes seen in years. On the following pages, NEWSWEEK introduces some of the fresh designers we think bear watching in the year ahead.
