Screenshot of the new Dior.com website | Source: Dior.com

The moral of Dior’s numbers (FT)
“The Christian Dior results are in and, contrary to what some people had predicted in March when John Galliano, Dior designer, was fired for saying bad stuff, they are good. In fact, they are very good.  Revenue for the first nine months is up 21 per cent (at constant exchange rates) to €705m against the same period in 2010 and retail revenue rose by 27 percent.”

Weak economy reins in Russia’s young fashionistas (Reuters)
“Headbands emblazoned with Russian symbols, cheap accessories and military-style clothes sashayed through the Russian Silhouette fashion designer contest in Moscow this week… Some judges said that a slower economy this year had prevented students from displaying the kind of experimentation and whimsical flair seen in past shows.”

Haute Pants: Making A Market In Custom Denim (Forbes)
“Walk into 3×1, a new boutique in Manhattan’s Soho launched in August, and you may discover a team of pattern-makers, sewers and designers, all wearing pristine white lab coats, putting together a pair of jeans right in the middle of the store. Part atelier, part retailer, 3×1 offers limited-edition jeans sewn on site.”

ASVOFF Winner: Elisha Smithe-Leverock (Dazed Digital)
“Recently awarded the fourth A Shaded View on Fashion Film Grand Prize, judged by fashion legend and the awards organizer Diane Pernet alongside Manish Arora, Daphne Guinness and Rossy de Palma. Elisha Leverock-Smith’s witty, telling and hyper-glam film I Want Muscle, takes the fashion film genre and adds a level of social narrative to sharp effect.”

A Profile of Simon Spurr: Tough Swagger Confident (Esquire)
The journey — from boy to man to designer to brand — begins in a tiny village in Kent, in southeast England, a town, Simon says, “with one grocery store and five pubs.” His parents were both bankers, his dad commuting forty minutes each way to London. “I still look up to him,” Spurr says. “As a person, as a man. But he’s also very influential in my aesthetics. My dad had a lot of suits working in a bank, late ’60s, early ’70s. They still had the slim lapel, the narrow shoulder. And I guess it was subconsciously ingrained in me. That’s the decade I always go back to.”

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.

… Continue Reading

Christopher Bailey by Nick Knight | Source: American Vogue

Christopher Bailey: Tech Mate (American Vogue)
“Let us consider Christopher Bailey, the man at the helm of Burberry, a pioneer of all things digital in the fashion industry…a company that he and CEO Angela Ahrendts sketched out on a napkin at lunch in 2006. As Bailey was re-creating the look and feel of Burberry, Ahrendts went to work on the business, turning an overgrown licensing operation into a global retail company to astounding success.”

Galliano’s Departure From Dior Ends a Wild Fashion Ride (IHT)
“John Galliano’s departure as design director at Christian Dior brings to an end a wild fashion ride, in which grace, glamour and shock, in equal measure, sent the once conservative Parisian house leaping forward both in its image and its financial success.”

Galliano Case Tests Dior Brand’s Future (NY Times)
“The firing of Mr. Galliano, 50, a one-time punk stylist whose soaring imagination helped turn Dior into a multimillion-dollar brand, was the expected culmination of one of the strangest episodes in recent fashion history.”

Influence Metrics Make It Harder for Traditional Publishers to Survive (Ad Age)
“Page views, ComScore uniques and click-through rates (CTRs) only tell part of the story when it comes to online ad effectiveness. Vogue might attract nearly 600,000 monthly uniques but how many of them were actually influenced by the Hermes roadblock that ran for two days?”

Lady Gaga to walk for Thierry Mugler at Paris Fashion Week (Catwalk Queen)
“It has been confirmed – Lady Gaga will walk in Nicola Formichetti’s debut womenswear runway show for Thierry Mugler in Paris.”

Vacheron Constantin Timepiece detail | Source: Vacheron Constantin

Richemont’s Earnings Rise 88 percent (Reuters)
“Cartier watchmaker Richemont said strong demand for pricey timepieces in Asia and the Americas boosted first-half profit, which beat expectations, adding the brisk pace of growth continued in October.”

Ermenegildo Zegna: Fashionably Alive (The Economist)
“Zegna has not been left unscathed by globalisation, an economic downturn and the capriciousness of fashion: sales fell by 8.4% to €797m ($1.1 billion) last year and net profits slumped to €17.3m from €62m in 2008.”

Tod’s sees excellent 2011 results, shares up (Reuters)
“The world’s fourth-biggest shoemaker by market value, which includes the Fay, Hogan, and Roger Vivier brands, reported… double-digit percentage growth in all markets where it is present, led by a 20.5 percent rise in Europe.”

Dior sponsors W magazine’s online Fashion on Film experience (Luxury Daily)
“Christian Dior has partnered with Conde Nast’s W for a sponsorship of the magazine’s online, interactive Fashion on Film festival [spanning] a number of different tactics such as traditional banner displays, video spots [and] a young filmmaker competition.”

Homegrown, With a World View (NY Times)
“Jesse Finkelstein and Katie King are not immune to the problems of young business owners — they are entrepreneurs as much as they are designers — but they have found a way around at least some of them.”

Christian Dior Couture 2010 | Source: style.com

Wintour Calls for French Fashion Stimulus (WSJ)
“In between fashion shows Monday, Anna Wintour, the influential editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine, told French officials that the country doesn’t do enough to support its fashion sector… Ms. Wintour encouraged the French government to provide more backing for young designers.”

Luxottica Q4 sales down, optimistic on 2010 (Reuters)
“Luxottica, the world’s biggest premium eyewear company, said 2010 would mark a ‘return to ‘normal’ for the maker of Prada and Ray-Ban sunglasses, resulting in growing sales, a more than proportional increase in margins and ‘an appreciable reduction’ in the ratio of net debt to earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.”

As recession stops splurges, luxury retailers retool (Boston Globe)
“Wyman is emblematic of the “aspirational shoppers’’ – middle-class consumers with luxury tastes – who have disappeared during the Great Recession. Their newfound frugality has contributed to an estimated 16 percent plunge in luxury spending over the past year.”

Dior: Hand of History (IHT)
“That feeling of a film fading or a fairy tale ending has never seemed so powerful and elegiac at this fashion house as it did after the poetic parade that John Galliano sent out on Monday.”

Sarah Brown and Naomi Campbell join forces to help Haiti (In Style)
“The Prime Minister’s wife together with supermodels, Naomi Campbell, Yasmin Le Bon and Erin O’Connor have got together to raise money for earthquake victims.”