George Condo x Supreme Skate Decks| Source: Hypebeast.com

In Part I, we examined how New York-based streetwear company Supreme became a global cult brand with its own myths, iconography and belief systems. Today, we explore the creative and commercial philosophies that underpin Supreme’s lasting success, courtesy of our friends at 032c.

NEW YORK, United States — The mythology behind legendary New York streetwear brand Supreme is so potent, it’s easy to imagine founder James Jebbia as a king pin of downtown Manhattan. But as he will be the first to tell you, that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

In fact, Supreme’s core creative and business philosophies are the sum of Jebbia’s patchwork retail past; not, as one might assume, a storied legacy in skateboarding. His resume reads like a series of interconnected Google-map pins on a late-80s and early-90s SoHo New York. A British-transplant who arrived in New York around 1984, Jebbia got a job working at the now-defunct Parachute clothing store in SoHo.

“I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew I enjoyed clothes,” he says. He quit five years later to open, along with his girlfriend at the time, a small flea market on Wooster Street inspired by the myriad of stuff he coveted from The Face and i-D magazines. The project evolved into his first proper store, Union, an experimental shop on Spring Street that carried “mostly English brands” and one very important streetwear juggernaut at the time by the name of Stüssy. This allowed Jebbia to work with Shawn Stüssy, who asked him to partner with him to open one of his eponymous boutiques on Prince Street in 1991.

When Stüssy left the business, Jebbia opened up Supreme in 1994 in a small storefront on Lafayette, a then-desolate street that was a perfect place for his clientele to skate first, shop second – an order that would very quickly be reversed. “I opened Supreme because there were no other decent skate shops around at the time,” Jebbia says. “I thought, cool, I might as well be the one to do it.”

The store was able to become the holy grail of high youth street culture by curating a mix of the city’s iconography – fashion, music, celebrity and politics – within its walls and then instantly sledge-hammering the city’s high-low playing field.

Limited-edition Damien Hirst skateboards are around the same price as decks featuring lyrics from Public Enemy; custom Spalding basketballs might be sold under the artist Nate Lowman’s gritty canvases hanging on the wall. The brand’s iconic T-shirts, like everything in the store, have become collector’s items that are collages of controversial provocations and heady imagery. Designs have included an oversized New York Times logo, a portrait of Kate Moss, lyrics from the reggae musician Lee “Scratch” Perry, Mickey Mouse’s hands praying with rosary beads, Budweiser labels, and alarmist political slogans such as “Illegal business controls America.”

Juxtapositions abound: images of naked girls playing with a hose pop up in a calendar from 2006 but more cerebral women like Chloë Sevigny and Jenn Brill act as brand ambassadors in Japanese style magazines; one of the brand’s most iconic image is of the rapper Raekwon, an Elmo doll, and an Uzi show by the photographer Kenneth Capello. And really, who would have thought Lou Reed would ever become the label’s face, as he did in 2009?

“Supreme embraces the outsider and always does things off-value from their brand,” says Richardson. “But they’re consistent and have always embraced the outsider and the individual. At the end of the day, Supreme is about the legacy of punk through skateboarding and you can really genuinely feel this in everything they do.”

The brand’s insidery-outsidery brilliance often made them precursors to trends that would later pop-up on the catwalk, such as their collaboration with Richard Prince as part of their art deck series well before Prince joined forces with Marc Jacobs to make handbags. “I like to point that out,” Jebbia says with a smile. “Not to be that guy, but just, you know, to point it out.”

The Supreme brand and its products soon became viable forms of creative expression, which in turn became catnip for a particular breed of male consumer hungry for that indefinable but high-quality cool, resounding most immediately with Japan.

“We never purposefully went after a Japanese customer,” Jebbia says. “It wasn’t like that. It’s always been about that really picky New York customer, but I think that translates all over the world.” Nonetheless, the Japanese consumers hyper-related to Jebbia’s choosy modus operandi and were quick to embrace the Supreme product as something culturally valuable and worth a premium price. “Japanese kids respect underground movements and have a good eye for it,” says Bondaroff.

Supreme now has five stores scattered across Japan and just opened their first store in London, featuring installations from the artists Mark Gonzales and Ari Marcopolous, this past September. “We’ve always really been inspired by London youth,” says Jebbia. Evidence of his grimy South London influence can be seen in many of the Supreme staples, such as military jackets, beanies, and oversized Oxford shirts with a neat fit.

But there is also a business component to setting up shop across the pond. “For us, London is the real gateway to Europe,” Jebbia says. Now kids won’t have to fly from all over Europe to come to New York to get a piece of Supreme. “We hope it makes things easier for them, honestly. It can save them a plane ticket, you know what I mean? But, we’re keeping the shop with the same spirit, it will feel like New York.”

In the past, owning a piece of clothing with the red Supreme logo on it was like a more authentic “I Love NY” T-shirt, a tourist token that instantly made you feel a part of a certain downtown New York ethos. Jebbia is mindful of this, but he doesn’t seem worried about diluting the potency of his brand by going global: “We’re not going to open up stores everywhere, that’s just not us. I can’t even think of somewhere else I would like to open, really.”

Supreme has been able to grow, but Jebbia has always been able to keep his hand right on the faucet, letting out just enough but not too much. “Supreme represents fresh ideas done right,” says Kenneth Capello. “They’re always one step ahead and always limited, so people want it.”

Mr. Jebbia, however, is playfully cautious about the idea that his small production runs are part of an exploitative plan to skew supply and demand to fever-pitch levels. “The main reason behind the short runs is that we don’t want to get stuck with stuff that nobody wants,” he says. But admitting to a kind of customer trickery isn’t exactly the coolest thing to say, so you let him be. “Let me put it this way,” he adds tellingly. “We work really, really hard to make everything seem effortless.”

As the shop is on the horizon of its second decade in business, all that hard work has become the focal point for a type of New York aesthetic that is just now entering the canon of great American dressing. When it first opened, the shop was a reflection of the times: the raw energy of Larry Clark’s film Kids; the haphazard elegance of grunge; the polished grit of the East Coast hip-hop movement of the time. In Jebbia’s conversation with Glenn O’Brien from the piece in Interview he asked me to read, Jebbia spoke about the lasting influence of that era in his brand’s sensibility:

“There’s always, I think, a sense of the early-90s to it. That era is definitely a big influence running though everything we do – that was a really special time. And since we started back then, I think it’s fine for us to always look to that era and get a lot of influence from it. It’s not nostalgic – it’s more like it’s a part of us.”

It’s been almost 20 years since the birth of this aesthetic, and now, with most menswear designers aimlessly searching in tea-soaked history books for authenticity, it has never felt more right. If Polo reflects a sense of country club prep and A.P.C. a type of louche French rock ’n’ roll (two brands Jebbia says he greatly admires), Supreme has then its own unique form of authentic, time-encapsulated style in early-90s skate culture.

But now, the baggy pants are a little bit more fitted; the Oxford shirts come in a more sophisticated palette of colours; the imagery is more mature. And while other designers such as Rag & Bone, Tommy Hilfiger or J.Crew hark back to a phantom sense of American heritage, Supreme actually embodies a new garde of American classicism without dwelling in dusty clichés. The little skate-shop-that-could has unexpectedly grown to foster one of the strongest statements in men’s sportswear – the hallmark of American fashion – in quite some time.

“People think that because we are widely-known as a skate shop, our clientele must be idiots. But they want new things on a high level. All they care about is quality,” says Jebbia.

He is right, after all. Today, the globalized customer demands a certain tasteful efficiency, not the trappings of exclusivity. To date, Supreme has chosen to refine their signature products, not to forge themselves out in wild, unpredictable directions with their design process, but instead to forge themselves out in new directions in the world at large. “The product keeps getting better and better,” Bondaroff told me in a phone interview. “It’s so solid now, it crosses over to so many different types of people depending on how they want to wear it.”

Solid, in this case, means well-proportioned sportswear without a lot of frill; done with a discerning eye for what is wearable – take a long-sleeved double-ply flannel in yellow, brown, or green, for example. Therein lies Supreme’s striking paradox. Underneath its tough exterior, the brand has always traded on something of cool’s polar opposite: pragmatism and utility – with a keen sense of graphics and sharp design, no doubt.

The crucial thing to know about Supreme clothes is that they reflect everyday style for men. But more importantly, they assuage the fears many men who have come of age alongside the store have about wanting to look grown up – or, dare I say, appropriate – while still being true to their core aesthetic values that Jebbia speaks of. Almost two decades later, the Supreme project has become an updated take on that oh-so American sense of function and pragmatism. It’s a design philosophy that has mostly been missing in men’s fashion in recent years.

“Quality” is a word Jebbia stresses over and over again in conversations about his brand. You get a sense that he is growing impatient with just being known for on-the-nose artist collaborations or an effervescent downtown credibility. His brand’s true worth, and what his customers fetishize above anything else, is its casual matter-of-factness. Nothing looks sharper, but there is nothing snobby about that. There is something universal about it, really. If fashion and award shows have any teachable moments, it’s that cool doesn’t last on the fickle world stage. Quality does.

“It’s not really just a cool skateboard thing anymore. People resist that idea still. It frustrates me,” Jebbia says before taking a pause. “Oh well.”

This article was written by Alex Hawgood and was first published by 032c. Click here for a preview of the current issue of 032c.

Looks from Supreme NYC Fall/Winter 2011 Lookbook | Source: Weareyouneak.com

In a two part series, courtesy of our friends at 032c, BoF takes you inside notoriously press shy, New York-based streetwear brand Supreme. Today, in Part I, we examine how Supreme — the Chanel of downtown streetwear —became a global cult brand with its own myths, iconography and belief systems.

NEW YORK, United States — When the controversial young rapper Tyler, The Creator won the award for Best New Artist at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards in August, he offered an enthusiastic, yet expletive-laden acceptance speech. “Yo, I’m excited as fuck right now, yo,” he said. “I wanted this shit since I was nine. I’m about to cry.” But with MTV’s censors on high alert, the speech was broadcast more like this: “Yo, I’m excited as - -— -- -, yo. I wanted -- -- -- – —- --. - -— - --.”

With the audio missing for about a minute straight to avoid any profanities and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) fines, viewers were left with no choice but to absorb Tyler’s image in mute. Clad in skinny dark jeans, an oversize tie-dye T-shirt with an image of a cat’s face on it, and a Supreme baseball hat with a leopard print brim, Tyler, who is 20 years old, was the only artist at the award show who could be said to actually embody how young people dress today. No outfit made from meat, no fancy three-piece suit with a cocked fedora, no oversize bling: Tyler looked exactly how certain young men at this very moment choose to wear their clothes on the streets all over the globe.

It’s no coincidence that the only logo the image-conscious Tyler wished to communicate was the one on his Supreme hat. After all, Tyler’s hodgepodge street aesthetic – a big chunk of skateboard culture and urban hip-hop with a dose of American sportswear prep and a winking, intelligent take on hipster irony – is the one Supreme has been cultivating for the past 17 years since opening its first shop on Lafayette Street in 1994.

The flashy sartorial sensibilities of, say, Russell Brand or Kanye West have mutated into their own category of sub-entertainment and, more often than not, their personal styles do not reflect the current vogue. So how then did the Supreme aesthetic finally become one of the most honest representations of how men choose to wear their clothes in the global mainstream today?

It’s easy to answer that question if one concedes that Supreme currently makes some of the best clothes for men in America right now. And for a brand routinely overlooked by fashion publications and menswear experts as “skate clothes” or, perhaps even worse, just a fad in a niche subculture, this may come as something of a surprise.

But can you blame the press for sleeping on it? For almost two decades, Supreme has existed in a cult-like bubble. Many of their short-run products have a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shelf-life; you’ll pretty much never, ever receive an invite to some Supreme-sponsored open-bar fête (because they almost never happen); and unless you’ve been systematically tracking its product developments on the array of feverish blogs devoted to the brand, or know a mole on the inside who can text you when a new shipment has been delivered, you’ll miss out entirely.

Starting with its swagger-filled moniker, the label certainly has built a colossal and often intimidating public aura. “The most important thing I think is the name – Supreme,” says the art photographer Ari Marcopolous, a frequent collaborator whose images have helped define the brand’s visuals, including having his work silkscreened on an assortment of sneakers for the label’s partnership with Vans. “Really, you cannot do much better than that.”

Being sovereign – the supreme ruler of culture – is the brand’s unofficial mission statement; everything is appropriated, recontextualised and refitted in Supreme’s hands to be made better. (Not the least of which is the fire-truck red box logo ripped from the oeuvre of Barbara Kruger.) Chinos are constructed with military-grade reinforcement, hats are made with a sturdy square brim, and T-shirts are twice as thick. They’ve carefully chosen to cross-pollinate their homegrown image with unhip but timelessly macho brands like Hanes and The North Face, worked with blue-chip artists such as Jeff Koons and Christopher Wool for their art-deck series, and built ad campaigns around a motley crew of celebrities that have no direct connection to skateboarding, including Kermit the Frog, Mike Tyson and the pop star Lady Gaga.

In fact, the brand’s biggest appropriation of all is the very idea of what a skate shop is – or isn’t. “I don’t see Supreme as a skate shop at all,” says Steve Rodriquez, the owner of 5boro Skateboards and one of the founding members of the New York City Skateboarding Association. “It started a whole new genre of store. To some people, it became like a religion.”

Like most religions, James Jebbia, Supreme’s founder, is fiercely protective of his shop’s doctrine, its history, and of who is allowed to retell its myths. To him, most articles in the press about his brand get it all wrong. “All the magazines, if they’re being nice, just think we’re some cool little skate shop doing kick flips downtown,” Jebbia says. “They always write the same thing over and over.”

Because of this belief system, Jebbia and his team are notoriously press shy. Although Jebbia is soft-spoken and quite generous (by the end our conversation he offered me a checkered North Face for Supreme hat that was no longer on the shelf at the store but still in stock), he is cautious and skeptical about the media and those who write for it. “If you don’t understand us, then what’s the point?” he huffs, referring chiefly to the confusion on how to treat the brand (is it an X-games label like Quicksilver and Billabong, or a legitimate small fashion label more similar to agnès B or A.P.C.) and, more troublingly, the frequent pigeonholing of skateboard culture within the fashion industry as just a passing fad, no different from big shoulders or neon colours.

There are so few examples of stories about Supreme that Jebbia finds successful, he treats the chosen pieces like scripture that he is eager to share. The holy writ includes an interview with Glenn O’Brien from Interview magazine from 2009, a 1995 article from Vogue comparing the persnickety shopping habits of the uppity uptown women who peruse the racks at Chanel’s boutique on East 57th Street and the baggy-pants, bed-head boys who wait in line for hours at a time to shop at Supreme in SoHo; and of course, the 300-page retrospective of the brand released by Rizzoli last year (of which Mr. O’Brien wrote the introduction, and in which the Vogue article was reproduced in full.)

The message is clear: Supreme is sacred, and it’s sacrilegious to get the story wrong.

“The fashion industry doesn’t understand Supreme,” says the stylist Andrew Richardson, who has helped facilitate several projects with the label, including a calendar with Larry Clark. “And that doesn’t bother James one bit. They want James out and about, paying for dinners and hosting parties. But he’s not. Fashion people want something that is uncomplicated and easy to digest – those are the opposite things James embraces. But really, at the end of the day, James doesn’t care. Why should he?”

Hearing Jebbia talk about the press, you don’t get the impression that he is paranoid about being criticised or that he is tyrannical over what is written about his beloved brand. Most articles simply do not live up to the gold standard he has set for his label and himself, or the one expected from his fastidious customer-base. The impression is that most writers and publications are not worthy.

“We always try to shoot for the very best and go for it,” he says. “Some people call that snobbery, I guess. But it’s not.”

Indeed, selectivity and exclusivity are an integral part of the brand’s DNA. When the shop opened in 1994, it immediately became an epicentre for what Aaron “A-Ron” Bondaroff, the label’s front man, has called “train-hopping, taxicab-jumping, runaway kids.” And dudes from all over the city followed in reverence, often lining up for hours to be the first to score the latest products to come in, like candy-collared baseball caps or spacious bomber jackets with the Supreme logo shown discreetly on an outside tag. And even if you made it inside, the really real cool kids knew to ask for the hidden, in-the-know merchandise in the back storage room.

Remembers Bondaroff: “The social club wasn’t so inviting, though, and had a lot of attitude. We made the rules and ran a business that was very successful. People were addicted to the clothes like a drug. We didn’t want to work so hard so we developed a sales style that worked in our favour. In the early days, it was like, come in, but don’t touch. You can look with your eyes, but not with your hands. It was a crazy way to sell garments but the customer learned the deal: don’t fuck with us and we won’t fuck with you.”

The store was so cool, it was, well, scary. “I remember being so nervous walking past it, I would walk across the street,” says Jen Brill, a freelance creative director and “friend” of the brand since it’s inception, “even though a lot of the guys that worked in there were my friends. It was effective, though, and set an impeccable aura around the shop.”

In an interview with the graffiti artist KAWS from the Supreme retrospective, Jebbia maintains that, even in his own tank, he too felt like a fish out of water: “There were 50 or 60 skaters who’d just hang out there. And right at that time, too, Larry Clark was filming Kids. For me, again, it wasn’t part of my world, but I knew it felt very rebellious. It felt right and I liked it.”

Hiding out in the back room and letting the kids rule the roost allowed Jebbia to observe the natural habits and tendencies of his clientele, not unlike the objectivity achieved from a behavioural psychologist studiously taking notes behind a two-way mirror. He didn’t have to be a skateboarder at all, he just had to know what this new generation of skate kids wanted and what they weren’t getting anywhere else.

Most importantly, Jebbia developed the cunning to anticipate what they needed next. If you’re too far in it, you can’t see outside. The distance from the lifestyle, conversely, gave Jebbia a sublime ability to understand how best to represent the lifestyle. “I think James is always thinking with a 25-year-old skateboarder somewhere in his mind with everything he does,” says Richardson.

Tomorrow, in Part II, we explore the creative and commercial philosophies that underpin Supreme’s lasting success.

This article was written by Alex Hawgood and was first published by 032c. Click here for a preview of the current issue of 032c.

Screenshot of BoF in 2007 | Source: BoF

LONDON, United Kingdom — This week marks a very special milestone in the history of The Business of Fashion: our 5th birthday!

Back in January 2007, I spent one hundred dollars for an annual Typepad subscription and, with the help of a friend, set up a blog at uberkid.typepad.com. I called it The Business of Fashion, cobbled together a clumsy looking header in Powerpoint and started jotting down ideas and observations about the fashion business.

There was no plan! Looking back, it’s a little cringeworthy to see how the blog shifted haphazardly from one subject to the next: reviewing the Milan menswear shows in one post, covering a Giles Deacon party in the next, analysing the luxury childrenswear market and reporting on senior executive shuffles at the Gap, all within the very first month and without any real editorial direction or strategy!

But we’ve come a long way since then and I’ve also learned a great deal about digital publishing. A few of the media properties that I most respect, including The Atlantic and The Guardian, have been buzzing about their “digital first” strategies. But BoF was born digital from day one, which has enabled us to take a particularly lean and responsive approach to publishing.

Indeed, one of the great strengths of digital – an inherently conversational medium – lies in the on-going dialogue it enables between content creators and the communities they attract. Rather than simply broadcasting to a passive audience, BoF has slowly but surely shaped an editorial voice that reflects the feedback and interests of our growing community of readers.

Through feedback from this community and generous advice from online fashion pioneers like Diane Pernet and Jason Campbell, I quickly learned that one of the most useful things I could offer the nascent fashion blogosphere was opinionated analysis and advice for professionals working in the global fashion business. Rather than simply reporting news, which was widely published elsewhere and rapidly becoming a commodity, I focused on trying to make sense of the news. As it turned out, the timing couldn’t have been better as the fashion industry would soon find itself navigating unprecedented change driven by the forces of economic crisis, rapid globalisation, and, of course, the digital revolution.

In April 2007, a few months after launching BoF, I was invited to the Harvard Business School Retail & Luxury Goods conference to speak on a panel alongside a group of highly respected luxury experts. At one point, the moderator, Milton Pedraza of the Luxury Institute, began asking the panel about social media, in particular a website called Facebook, which by then had attracted a user base of around 20 million people. “How will these new social platforms impact the fashion and luxury world?” Mr Pedraza asked.

Having spent several months immersed in the world of blogging, I ventured that I saw some real, long-term potential for the fashion and luxury sector in social media. After all, if consumers were spending more time on these platforms, it was only logical that brands looking to reach them would need to do the same.

But suffice it to say that my fellow panelists did not see it that way. In fact, my ideas were at best politely dismissed, at worst publicly ridiculed. But when the panel had ended, Mr. Pedraza leaned over and whispered some encouraging words in my ear: “I think you’re onto something,” he said. “Stick with it.”

And so I did. It was one of many helpful pushes I have had along this journey. But, in particular, Mr. Pedraza’s gentle push helped me to realise that by exploring the exciting potential of fashion’s digital future, BoF had an opportunity to add something genuinely distinctive to the fashion dialogue. I had no budget for marketing or PR, so all I could do was create good content and hope our audience would keep coming back and spread the word about BoF to their friends and colleagues.

A year or so later, I realised that for BoF to reach its potential, I had to build a team. In the summer of 2008, Tokyo-based W. David Marx became our first correspondent and New York-based writer Robert Cordero began curating the BoF Daily Digest, a hand-picked selection of the most interesting and important fashion news stories of the day, something we started doing so that the members of our community wouldn’t have to sift through the mountains of daily fashion news themselves.

As for our original articles, we made a special effort to create content that wasn’t available anywhere else. First, BoF became known for a series on the basics of setting up a fashion business. Soon after, I launched Fashion 2.0, our popular on-going inquiry into of the powerful digital currents that are reshaping the business of fashion, and we were often the first in the fashion press to examine new platforms like Tumblr and new trends like social curation.

Next came CEO Talk, our signature series of in-depth interviews with the industry’s top business leaders. We spotted young designers early, as well, and were amongst the first to introduce Camilla Skovgaard, Thomas Tait, and Huishan Zhang to the world. And finally, our live interview series Fashion Pioneers has attracted industry insiders and consumer audiences alike, both virtually and in-person, to hear from inspiring fashion luminaries like Natalie Massenet, Jefferson Hack and Nick Knight.

So, what have we learned from all of this? In today’s environment of media abundance, the power of opinion channeled through analytical editorial, curated news and live events has made BoF a daily destination for a growing number of fashion professionals. We cut through the clutter. Compared to other websites with similar stature and audience, we produced less content, but ensured the highest quality possible, working with a small but highly agile and global network of editors and contributors, who generously contributed their time to the BoF cause.

I first met Vikram Kansara virtually, reading his intelligent feedback on BoF articles in our lively comments section. After we met for tea in London, Vikram started writing for BoF as a contributing editor focused on Fashion 2.0 and is now our managing editor. Several other individuals from the BoF community have also come on board since then, including fashion legend Colin McDowell, leading international expert in the finance of fashion Pierre Mallevays, and Divia Harilela and Timothy Coghlan, our on the ground experts in the enormously important Chinese market, building depth and breadth into our editorial voice. Many, many others have contributed articles from time to time and I am immensely grateful for the time and energy that all of these talented individuals have dedicated to BoF over the years.

But none of this would have been possible without our single greatest asset: the global BoF community. Everywhere I have traveled over the past five years, from Tokyo to Jakarta, Vancouver to Mumbai, Buenos Aires to Tel Aviv, and more than 25 other countries in between, I have been warmly welcomed and hosted by this community. Generous individuals and organisations have opened my eyes to a global industry that is filled with inspiring stories of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship and shared the best and brightest of their local fashion industry with me, so that I could share it with all of you.

Over the recent holidays, this community revealed its wonderful diversity in a rather spontaneous way. When I sent out a short holiday greeting to our followers on Twitter, Sharon Caufield was one of the first to respond with a note that said she was writing from Craigavon, Northern Ireland. It made me wonder: who else was following our tweets on Boxing Day and where were they from? So I asked the community and within minutes, hundreds of tweets had poured in, representing every inhabited continent and more than 80 countries.

With this truly global community in mind, I am very pleased to announced that, alongside Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram, BoF has just launched a Weibo presence. Chinese-language readers can now stay up to date on the latest news and analysis from BoF at weibo.com/businessoffashion.

As I look ahead to 2012, the future of BoF looks brighter than ever. We aim to bring you the best analysis, the most inspiring stories and the first insight into the players, platforms and business models that are reshaping the business of fashion as we know it.

Happy New Year! And I hope you’ll stick with us, as it seems this is only the beginning of our journey.

Imran Amed,
Founder and Editor-in-Chief

Left: Mary Katrantzou’s ‘Jewel Tree’ dress, Right: A look from Christopher Raeburn S/S 2012 | Source: Style.com

LONDON, United Kingdom — Luxury casualwear and demi-couture don’t appear to have much in common. You can’t get much further from a hand-embellished crystal crinoline dress than a silk jersey t-shirt or a sporty windbreaker. But in recent seasons, many of fashion’s brightest young talents have been gravitating towards one extreme or the other. Labels like Alexander Wang, The Row and Christopher Raeburn have struck a chord with their easy, upscale styles, while the likes of Mary Katrantzou, David Koma, Rodarte and Jason Wu have attracted a healthy stream of high-end clientele with hand-worked looks that border on couture.

“This gravitating to extremes is a reflection on the way that today’s luxury-wearing women are dressing,” said Ruth Runberg, buying director at Browns, the influential London-based fashion boutique. “Very few are still living every hour of every day in a designer skirtsuit with matching heels and handbag — it is simply too formal and too stiff to be modern,” she continued. “While this client may still demand from designers the more special, high-design pieces for certain times, she also has a need for clothes to wear when she doesn’t need to be ‘dressed.’”

The rise of the dressed-down day-to-day look is also a clear response to the troubled economy. “When the recession hit, we saw demand grow exponentially for designers offering this cooler, more casual luxury look — The Row, Alexander Wang, ACNE,” said Runberg. “Generally, very formal dressing felt appropriate or tasteful at fewer and fewer occasions in the wake of the financial crisis.” But for those occasions when women do need a fancy frock, they are increasingly requesting only the most exquisite, intricate pieces, she explained. “In response to this shift in demand, young designers have gone the direction of offering their clients either very special demi-couture or luxury casualwear.”

When London-based Mary Katrantzou — 2011 winner of the British Fashion Award for Emerging Talent in Womenswear — first introduced her printed lampshade skirts for Spring/Summer 2011, pieces which required hours, and sometimes days, of handwork to shape their wired frames and ensure their signature digital designs were perfectly symmetrical, she did it merely to push herself and her team. “At that stage, it was just a challenge to try and build a showpiece in our collection that really translated the theme of the season. But [these demi-couture pieces became] something that was wanted not only by people who buy privately, but also by our stores,” said Katrantzou.

Indeed, the designer sold 18 units of her £8,300 Fall 2011 Jewel Tree dress, an appliqué velvet frock, embellished with enamel flowers, lace and Swarovski crystals, that took so much work that it actually made Katrantzou’s machinist cry. “I think the customer is inundated with so many different options. They have so many things to choose from but if women who collect fashion don’t see something that really strikes them as unique, they don’t bother anymore,” explained Katrantzou. “It’s a new way of buying.”

“Customers are looking for something special,” concurs London-based designer David Koma, whose figure-flattering hand-embroidered frocks can cost up to £8000 and take up to two weeks to complete. “Now, you can buy almost anything at any price. There’s a huge market for commercial brands so I feel if [customers] are buying something expensive and buying something special, there should be a lot of handwork and craftsmanship involved to make them feel that their money is well spent.”

The customer’s desire for uniqueness and quality craftsmanship is reflected in the rise of luxury sportswear, as well. “There was a period where everything began to get very casual and I think many designers, even if they were designing sportswear, began to take a more refined approach to what they were offering. Not by changing the genre of sportswear entirely, but by offering luxe details or evening fabrics for daywear,” Daniella Vitale, chief merchant and executive vice president of Barneys New York, told BoF.

“I think there’s certainly evidence that in tough economic times, people tend to buy more unique things. They want pieces that are very special,” said luxury sportswear designer Christopher Raeburn, 2011 winner of the British Fashion Award for Emerging Talent in Menswear. “It’s very important that our garments have functionality, but our clients are really looking for something with high quality fabrics, as well as workmanship,” he added. “We’re very keen on the best levels of production that we can find,” said Raeburn, who makes his colourful anoraks crafted from reappropriated military materials and smartly-trimmed wool dress coats in England. Even his new range of jersey t-shirt dresses, featuring intricate prints and pockets, are made from English materials.

“The Barneys customer is looking for rare, exclusive product that has a strong price value and fits into their lifestyle,” said Vitale. “Frivolity is not in their vocabulary, which does not mean they will not spend money or pay a high price for something; it means they actually intend to wear it — more than once. And they want pieces that not everyone has.”

Indeed, although they inhabit opposite ends of the ready-to-wear spectrum, demi-couture and luxury sportswear share commonalities that are completely in sync with today’s luxury consumer: they both deliver high quality as well as high perceived value, either by virtue of being very special, almost one of a kind, or by being highly functional and enabling repeat usage over time.

Katharine K. Zarrella is a freelance fashion journalist.

Chloe Spring/Summer 2012 show at Jardins des Tuileries, Paris | Photo: BoF

LONDON, United Kingdom — It’s hard to believe 2011 is coming to a close. It’s been an action packed year in the business of fashion. From the rise of digital to the fall of Galliano, and everything in between, BoF has found itself exploring the heart of an ever-changing fashion ecosystem, fuelled by creativity, digital innovation and globalisation.

We are grateful to all of the fashion visionaries, entrepreneurs and professionals who have shared their stories with us over the past year, offering us lessons from fashion’s front-lines. Their insights have sparked conversations here on BoF, across the social web, and in boardrooms, classrooms and studios all over the world. Thank you to everyone for your continued support and interest in BoF.

As the year comes to a close, it’s time for us to take a break. The BoF team will be off until 3 January, 2012. Until then, to whet your appetites for 2012, we look back the defining BoF stories in 2011.

Happy holidays to everyone!

1. The Business of Blogging

Scott Schuman | Photo: Garance Doré

Bloggers’ businesses have been garnering headlines in the mainstream media in recent months, but BoF has been exploring the business models emerging from the fashion blogosphere since 2007. This year, we launched a series of in-depth interviews with some of the world’s leading fashion bloggers, revealing that there is as much variety in their approaches to business as there is in the ways they express themselves online. The Business of Blogging series was by far the most shared and discussed content on BoF this year. Our interview with The Sartorialist Scott Schuman alone has been viewed more than 80,000 times.

The Business of Blogging | The Sartorialist

The Business of Blogging | Elin King

The Business of Blogging | Susie Bubble

The Business of Blogging | Tommy Ton

The Business of Blogging | Bag Snob

2. Trouble with iPad Magazines

Vanity Fair’s June 2011 iPad Issue | Source: Vanity Fair

Magazines have jumped into the iPad fray with gusto, but how are they succeeding in creating a digital magazine experience that is genuinely new? Our managing editor Vikram Kansara investigates.

3. Fashion PR in the Digital Age

YSL Tweet Denying Pilati Rumours | Source: Twitter

In the speedy new world of fashion communication, PR’s operate in an ‘always-on’ viral world where rumours can spread faster than ever before and new fashion communities are springing up everyday. BoF talks to the fashion industry’s leading PR agencies about their strategies for managing communication in the digital age.

4. Finding the Luxury in Mass Customisation 

Prada SS11 Lace-Up Project | Source: Prada

Could new technologies help to revive one of the original tenets of luxury? The rise of a new mode of production called “mass customisation” promises to restore individuality to the product design process, bringing a variety of new personalised product experiences to consumers.

5. Social Curation Start-ups Target Fashion Industry

Lyst Screenshot | Source: Lyst

Filtering content through recommendations from our friends and colleagues has become an important way of sorting through all the noise. Now, a gr0up of innovative social curation startups are providing a new way to discover and enjoy content, and are attracting investor attention. Since our report in April, Pinterest raised $37m in funding with a valuation greater than $200m, and The Fancy, received a $10m investment from PPR, valuing the business at $100m.

6. The French Contemporary Wave That’s Reshaping Ready-To-Wear

Couples from The Kooples ad campaigns | Source: The Kooples

Over the past couple of years, a slew of French contemporary brands including Sandro, Maje, The Kooples and Zadig & Voltaire have attempted to conquer London and New York, two of the most competitive retail landscapes on the planet. Is contemporary pricing the future of a failing ready-to-wear model that’s increasingly out of sync with consumer expectations and budgets?

7. How Commercial Content is Changing Editorial

Mr Porter Screenshot | Source: Mr Porter

It seems that there are almost weekly reports announcing that yet another magazine veteran has fled a traditional publishing company to take up a position at a brand or retailer. BoF guest contributor Ken Miller explores the implications of  the content-meets-commerce fashion fusion.

8. The Long View | How Realtime Data is Reshaping the Fashion Business

Julia Fowler and Geoff Watts | Source: Editd

EDITd is the London-based start-up whose real-time analytics of social data serve up predictions on trends, colours and silhouettes in the seasons to come. BoF sat down with founders Julia Fowler and Geoff Watts to learn more.

9. BoF Exclusive | Style.com to Launch Magazine and ‘Dip Toes’ in E-Commerce

Dirk Standen, Editor-in-Chief, Style.com | Photo: Style.com/Lexie Moreland

We’ve all seen print media go digital, but when digital goes print, you know something interesting is happening in fashion media. I spoke to Dirk Standen, editor-in-chief of Style.com, in a BoF Exclusive on the launch of Style.com Print magazine.

10. Introducing the Calgary bag and Crowdsourcing Experiment with Bill Amberg

The Calgary bag panorama | Photo: Bill Amberg

And last but not least, the Calgary bag, a collaboration and crowd-sourcing project with leather goods craftsman Bill Amberg, sparked a huge reaction amongst the BoF community, with people from all over the world weighing in on the merits (and demerits) of fashion crowdsourcing, and revealing some interesting results in the process. The Calgary bag has now sold out twice on BillAmberg.com and more are due in early next year.

Imran Amed is founder and editor-in-chief of The Business of Fashion

BoF Archive Screenshot | Source: BoF

LONDON, United Kingdom – Welcome to the new BoF. Almost a year in the making and based on helpful input and feedback from our global community of readers, we have given BoF a facelift to better showcase our best assets and help you find the content you are looking for.

Our underlying mission has not changed. Amidst a fashion landscape that is being radically reshaped by the forces of digital revolution, rapid globalisation and an uncertain economic outlook, BoF has carved out a distinct position at the intersection of fashion, business and digital media. As always, our objective is not to simply report news, but to offer insight and analysis to foster discussion, online and off, and help make sense of what the news actually means.

Free Access
After much debate and consideration of market feedback, we have decided to keep access to BoF in all its forms — web, email newsletter and online events — completely free. However, as we are a budding business too with operating costs to bear in mind, we have incorporated new sponsorship opportunities for relevant brands and partners into our new presence. This sponsorship will always remain completely separate from our editorial process. For brands and partners interested in sponsoring the BoF, please contact us.

Deep Archive
With more than 1500 posts since BoF began back in 2007, we have a rich and growing archive of content that offers insight and analysis that is still relevant today. In fact, we find that for many people, BoF is the first place they turn when conducting fashion industry research. So to assist you in finding the articles that are most relevant to you, alongside our universal search functionality, we have added a new Archive page that we invite you to explore.

Video Interviews
Over the years, BoF has sat down with scores of interesting fashion business leaders, creative visionaries and inspiring entrepreneurs. Now, there is a home for all of these interviews in our new Video section, where you can find and enjoy our interviews with the likes of Dolce & Gabbana, Karl Lagerfeld and Fashion Pioneers Natalie Massenet, Jefferson Hack and Nick Knight. In the coming months, the video section will also become a repository for our favourite fashion films, so whenever you are looking for some online fashion inspiration, you’ll know exactly where to go.

Social Sharing
BoF has always embraced the social media revolution and has built significant followings and communities on Twitter (300,000 followers), Tumblr (40,000 followers), Facebook (14,000 fans) and Instagram (2,000 followers). In many cases, we use these social platforms to report live from fashion events around the world, sharing photos and anecdotes that bring you closer to the action. With today’s launch, all of this live reporting will be visible to BoF readers, directly on the site, including tweets and images from our Instagram and Tumblr accounts, as well as the posts your friends have shared on Facebook. Our new ‘Trending’ tab will also tell you which of our articles are sparking the most discussion here on BoF and across the social web.

More to come
This is only the first step in a roadmap that contains several upgrades and improvements to The Business of Fashion that you will be seeing in the coming months. Newsletter subscribers will not notice any immediate changes in their inbox today, but expect a new and improved BoF Daily Newsletter very soon.

I will keep you apprised of these changes and more, as we endeavour to bring you the best of the business of fashion every day.

Imran Amed
Founder and Editor-in-Chief

Pitti Uomo Magical Tour by F. Guazzelli | Source: Pitti Immagine

LONDON, United Kingdom — Physical trade shows, held over a few days in large exhibition halls, have long been the most effective and efficient way for suppliers to showcase and sell their products to customers. But today, the internet is making it increasingly easy to exchange information and conduct business regardless of physical location. On top of this, with the global economy in a state of turmoil, buyers are being more conservative with their travel budgets, putting new pressure on trade shows to compete for their attention and offer value for money.

In response to these shifts, many of the big trade shows are taking steps to digitally enhance their offerings. But for a system that’s rooted in face-to-face interaction, this presents unique challenges and prompts the inevitable question: can the in-person experience of a trade show ever really be replicated digitally?

Pitti Immagine, a series of fashion trade fairs based in Florence since the 1950s, might be one of the longest running shows. But last season, Pitti became a digital leader in its field, launching e-Pitti.com, a website that’s host to digital versions of Pitti Uomo, Pitti W and Pitti Bimbo.

Speaking with BoF, Pitti Immagine’s CEO, Raffaello Napoleone, was quick to point out that launching a digital presence was necessary to move the business forward. “In the last six years we’ve been monitoring the growing impact of digital media on the fashion industry,” he said. “Such impact has mainly hit the interaction between brands and consumers. What is lacking, from our point of view, is the application of digital media to the commercial relationship between brands and professional buyers,” he continued. “The trade fair industry has not yet started to leverage digital media to evolve — it’s still in the same way it was at the beginning. Trade shows are mainly physical events, with all the good things this means, but also with serious limits in terms of time and space.”

The power of the ‘always on’ trade show

In June of this year, e-Pitti.com was launched with 1080 participating brands (approximately seventy percent of the total number of Pitti’s exhibitors) and now offers an online marketplace, which features branded digital showrooms complete with 360 degree imagery and enables users to close deals online.

Mr. Napoleone expects these online showrooms to attract 150 brands by the end of 2011 and that e-Pitti at large will break even next year, emphasising that the ‘always on’ nature of digital makes the platform a highly convenient, value-added business tool. “We encourage brands to see e-Pitti.com as a 24-hour-a-day, 365-days-a-year open marketplace,” he said, explaining that e-Pitti is included in the €221 per square metre that exhibitors currently pay for their for physical stands.

The concept of the ‘365-days-a-year trade show’ is at the very heart of new digital initiatives like e-Pitti, which allows buyers and exhibitors to communicate and transact well beyond the confines of a traditional three to four day fair. At the physical Pitti show, where over 1,000 brands exhibit, a typical buyer attends for roughly two days and visits approximately fifty stands. The advent of an online platform like e-Pitti not only allows buyers to browse virtually, but gives those other 950 brands a second chance to gain new business.

Critically, a 365-days-a-year trade show also gives buyers the flexibility to order ‘out of season,’ allowing their organizations to respond more efficiently to market realities with reorders of fabrics or garments that have sold well, for example, something that’s especially valuable given changes to the fashion cycle and the broader climate of economic uncertainty.

Andrew Pollard, president of US trade show Project, agrees that implementing new technology is good for business, underscoring the power of an ‘always on’ event. “In 2012, we will be launching a digital solution that will allow our exhibitors and attendees to engage with each other in a convenient and modern way,” he said. “Like many industries, the business of fashion has undergone a transformation over the past few years; an online platform will allow us to efficiently communicate both creatively and commercially 365-days-a-year.”

These sentiments were echoed by Chris DeMoulin, international president of sister show Magic, which is also using digital to engage buyers and brands year round. “We have recently re-launched our website, magiconline.com, to act as a portal and provide a place to connect throughout the year,” he said. “These digital technologies and strategies — before, during and after the show — are literally transforming our twice-a-year event into a 365-days-per-year community.”

Magic is also leveraging digital to better enable their customers to create connections, not only with other businesses, but directly with consumers. “In an effort to increase the number of B2B and B2C connections our brands, retailers and other stakeholders have the ability to create through our network, we have launched a campaign that includes such efforts as bringing over 40 bloggers to our show to write and curate content, as well as applying a host of technologies, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pose, Bumebox and more,” added Mr. DeMoulin.

Face time still crucial. Digital is a complementary tool.

But while the heads of some of the world’s most important trade shows agree that, in the internet age, their events require a robust online presence, in fashion, a touchy feely business that has always thrived on physical contact with product and building relationships through face-to-face engagement, some feel certain that the physical trade show will never be replaced by digital, especially when it comes to fairs that focus on the earlier stages of the supply chain, such as sourcing fabrics.

“Real life sensations are fundamental and necessary for buying and selling in our industry,” said Pier Luigi Loro Piana, president of the Italian textile fair Milano Unica. “At the moment, there is still no better way to do real business in textiles than at an environment like a trade fair,” he continued. “I hardly think, in the short term at least, that the centrality of the textile fairs will be replicated by some alternative — not while human contact and face-to-face relationships between producers, buyers and tactile products are still so crucial,” he added. “Certainly, there’s no denying the rapid development and growing importance of new digital technologies, but from my personal point of view, these are largely complementary instruments which can be used to strengthen one’s position, not something to replace it.”

Mr. DeMoulin of Magic agreed. “We believe that digital technologies must be employed to complement the trade show format, but that there is no replacement for the value we provide by bringing the fashion business together in one place every February and August,” he said. “You can’t replace the face-to-face interaction, the networking, the live seminars, the events.”

Alana Wallace contributed reporting to this article.

Chloe Raises the Roof at the Tuileries Tent in Paris | Photo: BoF

LONDON, United Kingdom — It was a fashion season of extreme weather. After the New York Fashion Week schedule was upended, first by an earthquake and then by the State of Emergency declaration that came courtesy of Hurricane Irene, an unprecedented heat wave in Paris threw buyers, editors and bloggers into a wardrobe tailspin.

The American editors were worst off, having packed for the European shows two weeks before Paris with no prior notice of the heat wave that was to come. After a few days of shows in impossibly hot venues, some of them resorted to ripping the sleeves off their outfits or just wearing their ‘airplane clothes.’

Brands tried to ease the pain. Fans were distributed at shows alongside champagne and much to everyone’s relief, Chloe arranged for the roof of the Tuileries tent to be removed for their show, letting in the sun and much welcome breeze. Meanwhile Net-a-Porter, always on top of a new market opportunity, delivered heat wave friendly clothes to editors caught without weather-appropriate attire.

But of course the real action was on the runway and in conversations between BoF and the good and the great of the global fashion tribe at a season filled with its fair share of events and parties.

Without further ado, it’s time to look back at Spring/Summer 2012, the season that was.

1. FASHION’S ENDLESS PLAYGROUND

Louis Vuitton Carrousel | Photo: BoF

At the opening of Marc Jacobs’ stunning show for Louis Vuitton on the last day of Paris Fashion Week, a large circular curtain was lifted to unveil models in dresses as light as feathers, perched coquettishly on white horses that sat atop a highly stylised carrousel. Those assembled gasped with audible pleasure and then erupted into spontaneous applause. But more than a visual delight alone, Mr. Jacobs’ magical set was a clear metaphor for an industry in constant motion, with its endless cycle of fashion shows, not to mention the musical chairs of creative directors moving from house to house.

This was the defining moment of the Spring/Summer 2012 collections, a season during which rumours continued to engulf Mr. Jacobs and other designers at the helm of major fashion houses, including Stefano Pilati, who seems safe — for now.

For others, the news was not so good. Immediately following the Vionnet show, it was announced that Rodolfo Paglialunga had been replaced. And just before Paris Fashion Week, Ungaro announced that the house and Giles Deacon had mutually agreed to part ways. Deacon was Ungaro’s fifth creative director in as many years and The Wall Street Journal reported at the end of September that Ungaro chief executive Jeffry Aronsson believes that “in-house talent can mine Ungaro’s heritage—bright colours, silk prints and sexy draped dresses—better than a high-profile designer from outside.”

But while some brands were severing ties with their creative directors, others were debuting new ones. Olivier Rousteing took the bow at the end of the Balmain show. There were also debuts from former Pringle designer Claire Waight Keller at Chloe and Manish Arora at Paco Rabanne — and, of course, the torrent of industry speculation about Galliano’s soon-to-be-announced replacement at Christian Dior.

2. BUZZ, EDGE AND SPORT COUTURE IN NEW YORK

Altuzarra prints and backpack detail | Photo: BoF

But fashion month begins in New York, which boasts more than 250 shows in a span of eight days, making it by far the busiest and buzziest fashion week of all. As one editor put it to me, “In New York we are great at picking up the leaves and throwing them up in the air and saying, ’It’s Fashion Week!’”

The unofficial kick-off for the Spring/Summer collections happens a couple of days into NY fashion week, with Fashion’s Night Out. Spearheaded by American Vogue, with individual events in almost every retail establishment across the city, it is a format that has been exported around the world. But though it has become a global phenomenon, the return on investment for brands and retailers remains in question. Most designers and retailers said it simply wasn’t worth the expenditure of time and resources, especially at one of the busiest moments in the fashion calendar. Barneys effectively sat this round out, eschewing the kind of elaborate in-store entertainment favoured by other retailers and issuing a statement that they were refocusing all efforts “on the shopping experience” and would donate ten percent of their Fashion’s Night Out sales to a fund for the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.

And with that, the New York shows were on and we entered a weekend of vibrant prints, inspired by places all around the world. It was a colourful vibe that New York designers seemed to have caught from London. But they gave it their own unique, New York spin with mesh fabrics and athletic details, making “sport couture” the buzzword on the lips of editors and buyers everywhere, from Joseph Altuzarra and Rag & Bone, to Alexander Wang, who has made athletic-inspired fashion part of his brand’s identity.

The week’s highlights came from power design duos Proenza Schouler and Rodarte, whose shows are now, deservedly, two of the most anticipated shows of New York Fashion Week. And both Jason Wu and Prabal Gurung took edgy steps forward from the red carpet and ladylike fare of their previous collections. These are some of the names amongst a healthy crop of promising young designers working in New York at the moment, pushing the boundaries of American fashion.

3. LONDON’S SHINING MOMENT

Giles Deacon swan hat, by Stephen Jones | Photo: BoF

It’s a shame that conflict over the global fashion calendar is putting London Fashion Week under threat just as the event really seems to be hitting its stride. This season, fashion stars in London shone brighter than ever, benefitting from the pulsating creativity of designers and digital print artists, who are largely based in the East London neighbourhoods of Hackney, Shoreditch and Dalston.

Of course, previous generations of young London designers were also praised for their creativity, but they were never able to translate this into commercial success. Garments were of poor quality and deliveries were often late. But that seems to be changing now. Indeed, Natalie Massenet, founder of Net-a-Porter told the Financial Times that “if people have been paying attention, they will see there is a new crop of extraordinary talent, which is young and dynamic and have learnt commercialism is not a dirty word.”

Bergdorf Goodman’s Linda Fargo told Suzy Menkes that although she was primarily in town to see Burberry and Tom Ford, it was the young talents who really excited her. “My camera is going and my notepad’s flying,” she said. “Between the prints and the quality, I am blown away.”

Not really ‘emerging’ designers anymore, Christopher Kane, Peter Pilotto, Jonathan Saunders, Giles Deacon and Erdem Moralioglu all put on very strong shows. Mary Katrantzou and Michael van der Ham both pushed their signature techniques forward. And the two new names in London that everyone was watching were JW Anderson (who put on both mens and womens shows within a span of five days) and Thomas Tait, a name familiar to long time readers of BoF. Cathy Horyn of The New York Times said Tait’s clothes were “imaginative and inspiring” — high praise from one of fashion’s most respected critics.

But will London’s recent successes be hijacked by the current scheduling complications? And if a sensible resolution isn’t found, will editors really choose to see independent designers in London over major advertisers in Milan? Watch this space.

4. THE RISE OF FASHION DIPLOMACY

Tods Light Installation at Italian Ambassador's residence in Paris | Photo: BoF

With all the bickering and back-and-forth between the fashion capitals, it somehow seems appropriate that national ambassadors, much better versed in the ins and outs of international diplomacy, are using their muscle to support young designers, senior editors, and famous national brands.

In Paris, the Italian ambassador invited the fashion glitterati to a special event for Tod’s, at which Chairman Diego Della Valle was present, to celebrate the launch of the brand’s Signature collection. Sir Peter Westmacott, the British ambassador to France, along with the prime minister’s wife Samantha Cameron, continued to show their support for London-based designers — Nicholas Kirkwood, Erdem Moralioglu, Roland Mouret, Antonio Berardi, Jonathan Saunders and Katie Hillier, to name a few — with a lavish event at the ambassador’s residence. And, Glenda Bailey was hosted by the American ambassador to France for a celebration of her book commemorating her ten year tenure at Harpers Bazaar USA.

5. MOUZAT AND MENKES GO VIRAL

Mark Holgate and Anna Wintour of American Vogue at Burberry Spring/Summer 2012 show | Photo: BoF

Fashion editors from two important newspapers flexed their editorial muscle this season, creating ripples throughout the fashion industry.

The season’s first viral moment came courtesy of Virginie Mouzat, fashion editor of Le Figaro, one of France’s most respected daily newspapers. Though her name is not widely known outside elite fashion circles, Mouzat’s scathing critique of Tom Ford’s private London presentation had everyone talking, even if only a select few were there to witness what Mouzat described as “a nightmare.”

When an English translation of Mouzat’s article was emailed from the American Vogue office in Paris to its senior editors in London and New York, it wasn’t long before the email was circulating throughout the global Conde Nast empire and, indeed, throughout the industry. Incredible chains of emails — from one front row name to the next, from one senior magazine editor to another, from one global brand executive to his colleagues — was a lesson in how closely tied this industry really is. Ms. Mouzat had clearly struck a chord amongst the fashion establishment, for whom email, not Twitter, is still the most powerful viral tool.

Suzy Menkes, fashion editor of the IHT, set off her own viral frenzy, this time on Twitter, with the assistance of her colleague Jessica Michault. In her review of Raf Simons’ collection for Jil Sander in Milan, Ms. Menkes suggested that Mr. Simons was in talks to take over from Stefano Pilati at Yves Saint Laurent. When Michault tweeted the breaking news, which coincided with the Aquilano Rimondi show in Milan, attendees were reportedly glued to their iPhones and Blackberries, while debate quickly broke out across the social web about whether Suzy Menkes was actually saying Simons was going to YSL.

The next day, Yves Saint Laurent quelled the rumours in an official statement, which while firm, still seems to leave open the possibility that Mr. Simons, or someone else, could indeed design for YSLin the not-too-distant future. Will Suzy Menkes still be proven right? Time will tell.

6. PRE-TAIL GAINS MOMENTUM, BUT FACES OPERATIONAL ROADBLOCKS

Edgy Glamour at Jason Wu Spring/Summer 2012 | Photo: BoF

When Aslaug Magnusdottir and Lauren Santo Domingo launched their “pre-tail” start-up Moda Operandi (MO) last season, they must have known that the model would generate copycats, just as Gilt Groupe (itself inspired by Vente Privee) and Groupon were copied by hundreds of other similar businesses.

But as it turns out, Moda Operandi’s fast followers have not been other startups. Rather, it’s major media and retail brands who got into the pre-ordering game this season. Online industry bible Style.com debuted an “Instant Get” program for one-off products from six New York-based designers and venerable New York luxury retailer Bergdorf Goodman partnered with Jason Wu to offer pre-orders on selected items from his Spring/Summer 2012 collection. Sister company Neiman Marcus posted an exclusive pre-ordering opportunity for Donna Karan’s Spring 2012 collection, along with an interview between fashion director Ken Downing and Ms. Karan herself.

But fresh with a $10 million capital injection from New Enterprise Associates, a venture capital firm, the MO team had big plans of their own, announcing a partnership with Vogue.com just in time for fashion week, which directly linked the latest runway images to MO’s pre-order platform.

“We’ve experienced a steady rate of growth since our launch in February,” said Ms. Magnusdottir at the end of New York Fashion Week, “but the collaboration with Vogue has accelerated the rate of growth of both member acquisition and sales.” Indeed, Magnusdottir said that membership is expected to grow from 15,000 just after launch, a customer base built primarily on the personal networks of the founders, to an expected 100,000 members by the end of the year, driven by affiliations with Vogue.com and GOOP, the online media brand of Gwyneth Paltrow.

But despite the clear momentum, the model still faces a major roadblock that is out of the control of pre-tail players like MO: inefficiency in the fashion supply chain. As it stands, consumers still have to wait four to five months to receive most pre-ordered products. If pre-ordering is really going to provide instant gratification to consumers who are interested in buying from the runway, brands and retailers will ultimately need to deliver products more quickly than this. Burberry delivers its pre-ordered products within eight weeks, and Style.com’s ‘Instant Get’ products were due to be available within a few days of the 31 October launch.

Indeed, the broad success of the pre-ordering model rests on the ability of designers to compress delivery lead times. In response to this suggestion, Ms. Magnusdottir said she expected that supply chains would eventually be compressed over time, enabling MO to better match demand with product delivery.

Based on this season’s pre-commerce momentum, it can’t be long before other major fashion e-commerce players such as Net-a-Porter and Shopbop get in on the pre-ordering game. If the industry manages to sort out its supply chain issues, better aligning the operations and media cycles by delivering goods closer to the peak of consumer interest, could pre-commerce eventually just become plain old e-commerce?

Imran Amed is founder and editor-in-chief of The Business of Fashion

Scott Schuman | Photo: Garance Doré

Scott Schuman’s rise to international blogging fame is well known, but until now he has never discussed his business model in detail. In our latest instalment of The Business of Blogging, BoF gets the exclusive on how The Sartorialist makes bank

PARIS, France — With high-profile campaigns for Burberry and DKNY Jeans, a best-selling book, and a place on TIME magazine’s 2007 list of Top 100 Design Influencers, Scott Schuman is the streetstyle blogger that paved the way for hundreds of others who have followed in his trailblazing footsteps. For the fashion flock, being shot for The Sartorialist website is still the ultimate badge of honour.

But Mr. Schuman’s influence is felt far beyond the blogosphere. His beautifully framed photos, which feature fashion insiders and football fans alike, now appear on mood boards in design studios around the world. His photographic style has inspired countless advertising campaigns and editorials.

This week, as he celebrates his blog’s sixth anniversary, traffic numbers are spiking. The Sartorialist had around 13 million page views last month, a 44 percent increase over the same month last year, something Schuman attributes to a recent site redesign for which he manually re-tagged more than five years of posts himself, enabling visitors to more easily search his growing archive.

This could turn out to be a particularly savvy investment of time and money. If current traffic levels are sustained and significant portion of the advertising inventory on The Sartorialist is sold, it could theoretically make Scott Schuman fashion’s first million dollar a year blogger.

According to Mr. Schuman, The Sartorialist was originally inspired by Brooklyn-based writer Grace Bonney’s interior design blog Design*Sponge. “I could tell she was doing it by herself and I liked the idea that she was having an interaction,” he said. “She had like 30 comments on a post and I thought that was really cool.” Schuman decided to start a similar blog for fashion after examining a series of photos he had taken of a few stylish guys in New York’s Fulton fish market while on a photography course.

Since these beginnings, the fashion industry has witnessed an explosion of ‘front-row’ fashion bloggers, something that has not always pleased Schuman, at least not at first. Last week, a controversial interview with Schuman was published, showing Schuman’s apparent disdain for some of his much younger blogging peers. “I’ve kind of changed my mind [about that],” he told BoF, looking back with some contrition and pointing out that the interview in question is more than 18 months old. “With everybody, our relationships have really evolved. As I got to know Bryanboy and Tavi more, I’ve come to respect their seriousness of it. It’s a struggle to try and build [something] and still maintain who you are.”

But even if he is now more at ease with his blogging brethren, from the beginning Schuman understood the value of strategically associating himself with the mainstream fashion media, who took interest in his photographic style. “There were no important blogs at that time, so [I needed] to saddle up with someone to get that stamp of approval,” he explained. “The very first season, Style.com called me. They took a chance and said ‘Why don’t you [cover the shows] for us?’ They didn’t pay me very much money, but I give them credit for just taking that chance.”

“I knew exactly what I wanted to do. Style.com was the internet place to be; GQ was the men’s magazine to be [in],” he said. “The one thing that really helped was that I really took full advantage of every opportunity I was given. I worked my ass off, posting every night on my blog and Style.com. I remember the first time I went to Milan I had four meals in five days because I just didn’t stop. I had to get to the shows.”

But once The Sartorialist began to attract serious global attention, Schuman left these high-profile gigs behind to focus on building his own business. With his newfound independence, Schuman knew he would have to build out his own revenue streams. “You have to constantly spread out your streams, so if one stream starts to dry up you can go on,” he said. “The only stream coming in the beginning was working with GQ and Style.com.”

In 2008, James Danziger called. His eponymous gallery in New York hosted an exhibition for Schuman, selling his prints as “increasingly accomplished works of art in their own right,” according to the gallery’s website. The exhibit was an instant success, selling more than fifty prints at prices ranging from $1500 to $4000 each. But this proved not to be a stable source of income, said Schuman. “You don’t do an exhibit every year, so you’re constantly asking yourself how am I going to make that money next year?”

Mr. Schuman began thinking about his blog more deeply. “At the very beginning I had to decide: do I want this to be a blog about fashion, or do I want it to be an artistic photographic thing? I kept going back and forth. At some point I think I finally decided that I didn’t want to be a magazine. I decided to take a more photographic route.”

Schuman cites as inspiration the photography of documentary style cameramen like National Geographic’s Steve McCurry, the man behind the now-famous June 1985 cover photo featuring an Afghani girl with haunting sea green eyes. Looking at Schuman’s photos, you can sense that he is trying to capture the inner spirit of his subjects, not only their fashion sense. “I’m not reporting on a bag; who’s carrying what bag and who’s wearing what dress. I’m not reporting on people,” he explained. “What I am looking for is a certain grace.”

Schuman frowns upon the idea of putting a price on posts that appear in his content feed. “What I don’t like is advertorial posts that are under the table. When I did the Burberry thing – it’s Burberry, a humongous company with such control – and yet I shot that whole thing just like I would shoot everything,” he said, referring to his work for the British megabrand’s “Art of the Trench” social media campaign. We cast some of the people, we got people from the blog. Some people had their own Burberry coats, some people we gave them. I was very proud, so I shot 100 of them and I picked nine that I really loved [and said to my readers] ‘Here is the link to this Burberry project that I did.’”

Schuman has also worked on a product collaboration with American skin, hair, and body care brand Kiehl’s, creating a dopp kit with a variety of Kiehl’s products in exchange for a fixed fee. “We had Luca Roda manufacture it in Italy. As I was a stay-at-home Dad, I really wanted to push this Father’s Day thing. So, we went to the park where I took my kids, where I learnt photography, [and] we got 10 dads to run around with their kids and said ‘We want to take pictures of you having fun with your kids,’ and those were the photographs that we got. So, I wrote something very heartfelt [on my blog] about what it was like to be a stay-at-home Dad.”

At first, Schuman hesitates when asked whether he was contractually obligated to write about the Kiehl’s collaboration on his blog, but then offers: “I’m the one that pitched it in. I’m the one who said I wanted it to be about Father’s Day. It was because of me. I wanted to do this photo thing. So it was part of the contract because I wanted to do it. It was a fun process.”

Of course, like other photo bloggers, Schuman also sells his images to magazines, through his agent, Jedroot. But by far his biggest (and most stable) source of revenue now comes from ad sales on The Sartorialist website. Initially, Schuman worked with Style.com to sell his advertising inventory, but has taken this function back in-house, explaining that he is in a much better position to sell the ads himself because he understands the website better than anyone else could.

“I’ve been doing the ads for me and Garance for the last year,” he said, referring to his girlfriend Garance Doré, another superstar blogger, known for her illustrations, writing and photography. “Just like it took me forever to learn photography, it took me forever to learn how to sell [ads] like real agencies” on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) basis, instead of the monthly sponsorship or affiliate commission models used by many other independent fashion blogs.

“American Apparel and Net-a-Porter came from Style.com and they were just buying a month [of ads] for a flat amount of money. But I didn’t think that was right and I knew that’s not how we were going to grow. We were going to have to talk the talk like everybody else. We couldn’t just say ‘Oh, we’re just a little blog.’ If we’re going to make a business here, we’ve got to talk their language.”

And talk their language he does. Schuman rattles off digital media lingo with ease, speaking fluently about ‘geo-targeting’ and digital ad unit dimensions. He declined to reveal his exact CPM rate, but said that it has been increasing steadily over time, going above the thirty dollar range for the most valuable inventory. “People would tell me all these crazy numbers and say ‘It’s premium, it should be way up here,’” he said, motioning to the ceiling. “But like anything, you start out at a price where people are willing to buy. It doesn’t help to have a $40 CPM if nobody’s buying it,” he said.

But at his current traffic levels, even with a $20 CPM and only 50 percent of total inventory sold, Schuman could theoretically earn over $100,000 per month on advertising alone, easily earning him more than a million dollars of revenue per year from advertisers that now include blue chip luxury brands like Tiffany, Coach, and Ferragamo. Removing some nominal overheads and salaries, this makes for a very profitable niche media business.

And then of course, there’s his best-selling book, The Sartorialist, published by Penguin in September 2009, which has sold over 100,000 copies. “It did good,” said Schuman with a smile, expressing his surprise at the success of the book, for which he earned a six-figure advance against royalties. He received two royalty cheques on top of the advance within the first year of publishing. “I was shocked I even got one,” he says.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise however that Schuman has another book up his sleeve. “Now the process is much easier, because I know how to approach it. And Penguin is very excited.” With the current book still selling briskly, Penguin is waiting for the right time to publish Schuman’s next book, which could be published as early as 2012.

“You can really make a living out of this,” said Schuman emphatically. “It’s tough, but if you work really hard you can create a business, if you’re smart about it and have something real to say.”

Imran Amed is founder and editor of The Business of Fashion

Raeya Sofia Popatia and The Calgary Bag | Photo: BoF

LONDON, United Kingdom – Better late, than never! Over the weekend, some of you may have seen a piece in the Financial Times, where readers from Tokyo, London and New York – two men and one woman – roadtested the Calgary bag, a design and crowdsourcing collaboration I did with British leather designer and craftsman Bill Amberg.

As some of you will recall, the Calgary bag debuted during New York Fashion Week back in February and quickly sparked a debate on Twitter and the blogosphere about the merits of crowdsourcing — outsourcing tasks or problems to the wisdom of a community — in the fashion business. We surveyed the BoF community to gather feedback on three options: brown cowhide, black smooth leather and grey patent leather.

After what has admittedly been a long delay, we are pleased to announce that not only do we have the results of our crowdsourcing experiment, in which over 600 people participated, but also that the most popular bags have been produced in the quantities and colourways suggested by the ‘crowd.’

The feedback was clear. Forty-five percent of respondents preferred the brown version, as pictured above with my adorable new niece Raeya Sofia Popatia. However, there were also significant groups of people who preferred the black version (30 percent) and the grey patent one (25 percent). We also solicited qualitative feedback from readers, which revealed that many men were hesitant about the ‘tote’ shape, a sentiment shared by one of the FT reviewers, Sam Hopkins in London. While he perceived the shape as a touch too feminine for a macho man, the functionality of the bag, with its internal pockets and the ability to stuff all and sundry inside, still won him over.

But while the unisex shape was a turn-off for some of the men who answered our survey, it did open up a whole new market for working women and young mothers, who are always having to cart a lot of stuff around and don’t want to look like they are carrying a “laundry bag,” as Alexandra Lebenthal, another of the FT reviewers put it.

So why the delay in announcing our results? Over the last six months, Bill Amberg and his team have been searching for an external manufacturer to create The Calgary bag at a more accessible price than the bespoke one made in his studio, which cost £950. It took much back-and-forth before they eventually found a factory in Turkey, a country known for its leather goods expertise, that could create a product in line with the quality standards of the Bill Amberg name, but priced at a much more affordable £295, or about $450.

So what does everyone think of crowdsourcing? Several commenters said that designers who solicited feedback on their designs from the public must have no vision of their own. But others enjoyed being part of the process, and saw the value in this kind of consumer engagement. It’s one thing to have a vision. But that doesn’t preclude one’s ability to gather feedback to better understand how products can be improved and to produce the ones that resonate most with consumers.

Around the same time as the debut of the Calgary bag, New York-based designer Derek Lam launched a crowdsourced collection with internet giant eBay, gathering feedback on dress designs from a community of fans, to help determine production quantities of a collection that’s more accessibly priced than Lam’s main line, for which dresses can run at $1000 or more.

Derek Lam also used the crowdsourcing project as a kind of large-scale focus group to learn more about their target consumers. CEO Jan Schlottmann told BoF after the Derek Lam + eBay presentation at New York Fashion Week: “The great thing about eBay is that they are very open to sharing their knowledge. We know that we have a lot of fans out there on the web, not all of them can afford Collection. We do have plans in the future to do something more affordable, so [the Derek Lam + eBay initiative] will give us a lot of insight: what is her lifestyle, where does she live, who else does she shop, what does she like, what are her needs.” Not long after the interview, Derek Lam launched his accessibly priced contemporary label, 10 Crosby.

Schlottman also sees crowdsourcing as a way of eliminating waste that must otherwise be factored into the cost of goods sold. “You include in the cost of good a certain amount of return on products that don’t sell – now you don’t have to do that because you know already what they like,” he explained.

As for Bill Amberg, he too felt there was something for the fashion industry to learn from crowdsourcing, based on our shared experience. “It’s a new and very interesting way to respond to the market,” Bill told me as we sat down for some Mexican food to do a post-mortem on our collaborative project. “It’s good to have the hard facts.”

Indeed, having some clear data can add a little bit of science into the way fashion products are designed and produced. This doesn’t preclude the importance of instinct and emotion in the design and merchandising process, it simply provides another data point to consider in making these decisions.

Finally, I am pleased to announce that Isabel Bradley of Rancho Palos Verdes, California is the recipient of a grey patent leather version of the Calgary bag, as the lucky survey respondent to win a Calgary bag of her choice. Congratulations Isabel. We’ll be in touch with you soon!

Imran Amed is founder and editor of The Business of Fashion