1.) Dior Haute Couture Satisfies the Critics, But Just Barely:
“The technical wizardry that was the foundation of this couture collection was an affirmation of Dior’s history . . . (but) Dior’s heritage isn’t just about the artistry of craft but also about that kind of life-changing fashion — fashion so directional that it conveyed yearnings for beauty and liberation from the mundane trappings of everyday life. Craft is all well and good, but some direction is needed now, too.”
Fall 2011′s haute couture show, the first after the dismissal of Galliano and a seeming “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead!” moment for the Dior atelier workers as they sent out a collection heavy on 80′s nostalgia and architectural motifs, was near universally savaged by fashion journalists suffering from sudden and severe Galliano-withdrawal and who wanted nothing to do with the kitschy, art-school flourishes of in-house replacement Bill Gaytten.
Dior Haute Couture Fall 2011 received a critical drubbing
Fast forward six months to the haute couture Spring 2012 shows, where Gaytten and company evidently learned their lesson, which was to shelve their own personal excitement at being let loose like kids in a candy store and, instead, produce a show that was respectful of the stylistic heritage of the House of Dior.
Though there can be such a thing as too respectful.
Dior Haute Couture Spring 2012 clings to the tried and true
The differences between the two shows couldn’t be more stark — craftsmanship was front and center, along with traditionally Dior-infused ideas of beauty and form, but the energy was very low-key in comparison to Fall’s collection, with Spring’s collection styled with natural-looking makeup, dark and muted nail polish, somber heels and very little embellishment in the way of jewelry and other accessories.
Which is surprising for a global brand like Dior, where makeup, perfume and accessories do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to generating revenue.
While last Fall’s haute couture collection was met with critical derision, it did offer bold, high-street cues for the rest of the brand to follow through on: bright strappy heels, neon nail polish, graphically inspired chunky necklaces and bracelets in bright Miami-beach hues, overdone eye shadows and a glitzy, gleaming overall theme that was at once aspirational and yet oddly disheveled, as if a cadre of coke-snorting club kids took their parents’ credit cards on a high-flying haute couture binge and invaded the nearest Denny’s in the spoils.
*NOTE 1: The rumor of industrial design student turned fashion enthusiast Raf Simons to take over the head-designer job for Dior is intriguing in that Simons is known for both his architectural flair and his use of high-voltage color choices to set his sleek Jil Sander designs apart from the competition — two things Gaytten attempted in the Dior Fall 2011 haute couture collection.
*Related: Robin Givhan had this to say about Simons and his color choices back in September of 2011: “If you have wondered why J.Crew is zealously cheerleading for teal-blue and sunshine-yellow trousers, why your trendiest friend has been wearing fluorescent orange and retina-searing pink skirts, or why gumdrop colors seem to have abruptly appeared at every price point, you must look to Simons and his work at Jil Sander in the last year. He has been the most exuberant champion of bold colors, the likes of which have not been seen since the Day-Glo days of raves.”
Raf Simons for Jil Sander, Fall 2011
The Dior execs have been making the rounds lately, commenting as to how the absence of Galliano hasn’t hurt their bottom line and that sales numbers for the brand are still good (revenue was actually up 21%), suggesting that either #1) Dior is a big enough brand to absorb a few stylistic misses and keep on ticking, or #2) Bill Gaytten’s risky, color-loaded romp in the haute couture playground six months ago may have been commercially on point even if it was a critical flop.
Fabio Ciquera wrote back in March of 2011 that “we are too oblivious of the recent history of luxury; the shift that happened more than a decade ago, from prestige to masstige . . . and Dior was one of the first brands that went through a major repositioning, shifting its business interests from couture to fast fashion with a vast range of accessories.”
*Like, Totally Related: As if to superglue the new relationship of luxury to fast fashion, Karl Lagerfeld debuted his mass-produced Karl line of clothing in pop-up shops and on Net-a-Porter only days after his Chanel Haute Couture show tripped down the runway in Paris — and customers ate it up.
Karl Lagerfeld’s ‘cut-price’ collection sells out online as hundreds of shoppers queue outside pop-up shops: “Riding on a high after his acclaimed Chanel Paris Couture Week show, Lagerfeld launched his rock-inspired range of leather collars, sparkly dresses, silver shoes and crisp white shirts at a pop-up store in Paris.”
The Karl collection was also launched in pop-up shops in New York, London, Berlin and Sydney, featuring hooded sweatshirts, capri pants, fingerless gloves and t-shirt dresses. The video teaser for Lagerfeld’s foray into self-titled fast fashion is below:
An old dog and his new mix
Compare that to the brand new Chanel Haute Couture collection for Spring 2012:
Comfort couture for the casual travel crowd
Can you spot any similarities — like the boyish silhouettes and a focus on stylish wearability, but still with plenty of sparkle and shine?
I find it kind of fascinating how Lagerfeld can use the global pulpit of Chanel to steer haute couture tastes in a direction that complements and flatters (and likely will make much more profitable) his own forays into street fashion.
*Relevant aside: This release of Lagerfeld’s new cut-rate Karl collection (dirt cheap by Chanel standards, though still highly expensive when compared to the usual mainstream suspects) comes hot on the heels of news that Swedish fast-fashion chain H&M reported a fifth consecutive drop in quarterly profits: “H&M, which sells dresses for less than $12.95, said the macroeconomic climate will remain “tough” in many markets during 2012 . . . Profitability was affected by record cotton prices in the first half of last year and increased discounting . . . The number of markdowns in the first quarter of this year will be higher than a year earlier because of an increase in inventory, the retailer said.”
The drop in profit occurred despite H&M’s massively hyped collaboration with Versace, a collection that sold out almost instantly but was plagued by high returns amid complaints of poor fit and quality.
So could this signify that luxury brands and designers are taking the lessons learned from fast-fashion collaborations and launching out on their own — bypassing the middleman, so to speak? After all, Lagerfeld arguably ignited the cheap chic craze with his partnership with H&M in 2004, and now he’s taking matters into his own fingerless-gloved hands, partnering up with Net-a-Porter to sell his collection exclusively online and at a higher-quality level of marketing hype.
If Lagerfeld is always a little ahead of the curve (at least in terms of incorporating street trends and exploiting commercial opportunities within the luxury realm), then I wouldn’t be surprised to see a number of other once rarified luxury brands give in to mainstream temptations and start pandering directly to the cut-rate consumer.
Because, really, why lend their reputations and affluent glow to someone else’s brand when they can keep it all to themselves? Gaytten may have stumbled out of the gate with his own take on the “Street Meets Luxe” concept back in July, but if the Raf Simons for Dior rumors are true, it seems the Dior execs might be particularly keen on the idea themselves.
*NOTE 2: Marc Jacobs was similarly rumored to be in talks for the head Dior design job, and Jacobs is nothing if not heavily into street and pop-culture influences (remember his infamous 1992 Grunge Collection for Perry Ellis?).
*Speaking of Cashing In: The Chinese are celebrating the arrival of a new Year of the Dragon, with Western luxury brands only too eager to chip in and do their part, offering up dragon etched watches (Piaget), dragon moniker cars (Rolls Royce), dragon painted handbags (Versace) and more.
Luxury looks to cash in on the Dragon: “The Western brands’ focus on dragons and Chinese culture is a result of the rapidly growing market for luxury goods in China, especially as consumption in the West declines, according to experts. Bain & Company, a management consulting firm, predicts that China will overtake Japan as the world’s top consumer of luxury goods in the Year of the Dragon.”
Chinese customers have rapidly become the biggest purchaser of the Rolls Royce brand, making up 30% of its global market: “‘China has emerged so quickly. We are very pleased,’ said Torsten Müller-Ötvös, Rolls-Royce’s chief executive, in an interview in Hong Kong. He pointed out that sales in Greater China, which includes Taiwan and Hong Kong, grew almost 60% last year. The top-selling Rolls-Royce dealerships are now in Beijing and Shanghai, both of which now outsell the historic leading showrooms in Beverly Hills and London.”
The article notes that Hong Kong now has the highest concentration of Rolls-Royces in the world, which lends support to the Hey Big Spender model that luxury brands employ in Asia.
*As long as we’re on the subject of China, the New Year and Spending: Chinese Pawnshops Set To Benefit After Luxury Gift-Giving Glut — “As Jing Daily noted in 2010, luxury watches started to show up in pawnshops in Beijing in the mid-’90s, with pawning activity increasing dramatically since around 2000 and creating big business in the Chinese capital and some of the country’s wealthier cities . . . more ultra-wealthy Chinese looking to sell their high-end goods for quick cash means that the second-hand luxury market should be a segment that enjoys huge industry growth this year.”
China is a culture that places an emphasis on gift-giving as a way of getting things done, and Western luxury brands have been only too happy to rush in where others have feared to tread: In China, luxury goods become the currency of bribes — “The Swiss watches, Chanel perfume and Louis Vuitton handbags bring great pleasure to the buyers – but they have a less healthy role: they are one of the main currencies of China’s rampant corruption, given to officials of the government and the Communist party, their wives, their families and their mistresses.”
Luxury brands ignore their role in China’s corruption scandals at their own risk.
Case in point: Dolce & Gabbana recently found itself the target of protestors in Hong Kong over the brand’s insistence that Hong Kong citizens not take pictures of the store from the sidewalk, a request that was allegedly designed to protect a mainland Chinese government official who shopped at the Hong Kong boutique and didn’t want pictures of him in the high-priced store showing up on the internet.
But despite the recent uptick of spending by Chinese consumers, overall economic conditions around the globe are in a slowdown, which is likely to have a cooling affect on the growth of the Chinese economy due to decreased exports, resulting in decreased manufacturing, fewer factories and rising unemployment.
Which could see a dampening of luxury spending across the board, whether it’s in Hong Kong, Paris, London, Shanghai or New York.
2.) INDUSTRY QUICK HITS:
A.) Soon after luxury conglomerate PPR purchased high-end Italian menswear brand Brioni, LVMH announced that it was expanding its small footwear company Berluti into a major menswear force with a full range of wardrobe and accessory items designed by Alessandro Sartori, formerly of Ermenegildo Zegna.
Below is the video clip of Berluti’s first menswear presentation in Paris a week ago, a relatively low-key affair in comparison to the runway shows of its larger menswear rivals:
The house that shoes built
Berluti hopes to cash in on the rising demand for high-end menswear in China, where the majority of luxury purchases are by and for men: “China is the world’s biggest luxury goods market in terms of growth, with sales rising on average about 20-25 percent a year, and men make up three-quarters of that market, estimated to be worth about 23 billion euros overall.”
NOTE 3: And within the menswear sector, it’s the bespoke and custom options that are witness to a surprising surge in demand: “Increasingly, luxury goods companies are catering to men who want accessories and leather goods that, basically, no other man has. They are buying premium items where the price is not an issue. For men, it’s becoming more and more about exclusivity, having something made just for them.”
The new Berluti expansion is headed by Antoine Arnault, the son of LVMH Chief Executive Bernard Arnault, who made waves last week by announcing that the era of bling for LVMH is done and over: “We are going to enter an era in which logo and ostentation is going to be less successful. It will be about real quality.’”
*Things that beg to be said: Which only tends to make one think, “Uhm, so, all that blinged-out logo-covered stuff you were pushing for years before this? Not so much about quality, then . . . ?”
Yet while the Berluti collection is undeniably nice, I’m personally partial to Ami by Alexandre Mattiussi, a fairly recent arrival on the designer luxury scene, and with a more rustic (yet very trendy) countryside influence:
Because we all want a weekend home in the country, am I right?
About Mattiussi’s Ami brand, Esquire wrote: “While department stores rely on people to refresh their wardrobe each season, right now they also need people to buy stuff. Period. Looking at the two AMI collections last year, it’s obvious why Barneys wanted AMI for themselves — because they thought timeless, masculine clothes would sell (and they did).”
B.) Victoria’s Secret Direct online & catalogue business is twice as big Neiman Marcus direct, and eight times the size of online luxury retailer Net-a-Porter. Analysts attribute the success of Victoria’s Secret to the fact that when it shows product on the runway, it’s already available in the stores.
“”The obvious difference is that we’re showing fashion in real-time, during the season, things that are accessible in the stores now,” said Ed Razek, Chief Marketing Officer of creative services of Limited Brands, the parent company of Victoria’s Secret. “They (the other fashion and luxury brands) are showing Fall in Spring,and Spring in Fall. How does the end customer connect with that, particularly with all of the live-streaming?”
A video clip below of the 2011 Victoria’s Secret runway show, a $13 million dollar extravaganza that’s perfectly timed to coincide with holiday gift purchasing:
Showing only what they’ve got
The article linked above makes very valid points about the outdated model of the present fashion cycle, which shows product lines up to six months in advance of when they’re available to purchase in the stores — meaning that most brands are losing valuable sales opportunities by continuing to follow the present system.
When runway shows were mainly newspaper and magazine editor affairs, the sixth month wait between showing the product and then making it available to the consumer didn’t matter, as this gave magazines plenty of lead time to shoot editorials and get next season’s issues ready for publication, but now that runway shows are directly and immediately available to the consumer via video clips and online websites, the old system seems irrelevant, if not detrimental.
Mr. Razek states that orders for Victoria Secret products skyrocket directly after their runway shows are aired. Wouldn’t most brands benefit from the same approach?
For example, Burberry is a major global brand that’s begun offering a limited range of its items for pre-order directly after their runways shows, and the company just recently reported a 22% increase in revenue for the 3rd quarter of 2011.
Not all of that is due to the adoption of the pre-order approach, of course, but it’s certainly bound to help. The same article notes that “Prada is down 12%, PPR, which owns Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, is down 1% and LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton remains flat for the same 52-week period.”
None of those brands offer pre-order sales after their runway shows.
*NOTE 4: It might be worth mentioning that Prada, Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Yves St. Laurent are French companies, yet there seems to be a strong British style revival right now, which could be yet another factor in favor of Burberry.
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