Troubling Signs Around the Shows NY Times Fashion Diary
By
GUY TREBAY
Published: February 18, 2009
The New York Times
Backstage at Rodarte.
Thumbs cocked, the two were having a backstage showdown, a BlackBerry quick draw. Everybody, from makeup artists to publicists to hairdressers, was similarly squaring off. Who would be first to record the very latest and most supercrucial bit of subtrivia to transmit to “friends” in the cybersphere?
Can we agree that most Twitter posts are about little beyond the fact of their own occurrence? Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that something existential is afoot? Is the sum of human knowledge much advanced by learning, instant by instant, that Marc Jacobs is having his hair dyed black, that Marc Jacobs is eating a McDonald’s burger and drinking a Diet Coke, that the beautiful
Patti Smith look-alike model Jamie Bochert just got engaged, that the handsome and heavily-inked hairdresser Lorenzo Martone is not Marc Jacobs’s boyfriend? (He just happens to share a name with the person who is.) There are those who suspect that, behind all the hoopla, the viral communications, the artificial urgency of
New York Fashion Week, there lies an aging and substantially dysfunctional industry slumping toward ... well, extinction is probably too strong a word.
It probably means something, though, that Bloomingdale’s, to name a beleaguered retailer, is leaning on Barbie to salvage its quarterly bottom line. “We’re doing fantastic business with Barbie,” said Stephanie Solomon, the fashion director of Bloomingdale’s, where a promotion celebrates the 50th anniversary of Barbie (real name: Barbara Millicent Roberts), the weird and enduringly compelling “fashion” doll based on a “working girl” toy developed in postwar Germany.
While it is good news that Bloomingdale’s can raise earnings selling apparel for a plastic woman measuring 12 inches in heels, the tidings, as everyone under the Bryant Park tents is aware, are less hopeful for designers and merchants offering clothes for real folks.
Anyone looking for evidence of this could have checked in this week at Rosebud, a SoHo shop that showcases clothes by Israeli designers like Kedem Sasson and Ronen Chen. In terms of Fashion Week glamour, Thompson Street is a universe away from the goings-on at the Bryant Park tents. And while its owner, Fern Penn, does not participate in Fashion Week, except as a passionate observer and besotted fan, the plight of her shop may be representative in many ways of that facing the entire industry.
“We’re at the point where we’re dipping into our savings to stay alive,” Ms. Penn said, following a hastily convened meeting of an ad hoc coalition of 50 neighborhood retailers, organized in hopes of luring shoppers back into stores.
“It seems like there is absolutely no good news on the horizon,” added Ms. Penn, a graduate of the
Fashion Institute of Technology and a former buyer for Macy’s. “It just feels very scary because the stores are empty. Big stores, little stores, it doesn’t matter. Everybody is scared.”
Despite that, she said, “You have to try to stay optimistic, because what choice do you have? You have to reshuffle the floor and make things look good because you can’t just cave in. You have to give the consumer the sense that there’s hope.”
Lately it can seem as if the “Shopocalypse” prophesied for years by the New York performance artist Reverend Billy is actually coming to pass. Evangelizing across the country’s malls and retail centers every
Black Friday, Reverend Billy for years preached the gospel of the Church of Stop Shopping. His goal was the creation of a national "Buy Nothing Day.”
Well, now it has happened and, while it says a lot about the troupers of New York Fashion Week that they have kept their jitters under control, throwing themselves into the task of stoking consumer appetites, it has been hard this week to ignore a prevalent feeling of retrenchment and low-level dread.
“I’m really excited about the Happy Meal,” the model Sean O’Pry said dryly backstage at the Duckie Brown show last Friday. He was referring to the $10 McDonald’s gift certificate that was part of what models were paid for working the show. (They also got a pair of Duckie Brown for Florsheim shoes.)
A year ago, Mr. O’Pry was such a hot runway commodity that there were bidding wars for his services. He remains in demand this season, he said, but has had to adapt to a slower schedule forced on him by a drooping economy.
Was it just 16 months ago that
Roberto Cavalli opened a Fifth Avenue store with a party that attracted crowds so large the police were forced to erect barricades? Thousands turned out for that wingding, whose invitees were funneled into a retail space so sardine-packed that even models had to move sideways.
Contrast that with the opening Monday night of the 20,000-square-foot Diesel flagship, a three-story showplace built in what was, until recently, the primary New York outpost of Gucci.
Having torn out the cool “Thomas Crown Affair” spaces designed by Studio Sofield, the Diesel designers and craftsmen spent 14 months replacing them with an interior of recycled wood and distressed industrial-grade steel. This may have required, as a Diesel spokeswoman said, a team of Italian craftsmen working with 250 Americans to cast and create components like “cash wraps, stairwells and fixtures.” But the result essentially resembles every other jeans store in the world.
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A version of this article appeared in print on February 19, 2009, on page E1 of the New York edition.