The Business of Fashion
Agenda-setting intelligence, analysis and advice for the global fashion community.
Agenda-setting intelligence, analysis and advice for the global fashion community.
Fashion should learn—but probably won’t—“to be less greedy. It became too much this economic machine,” Raf Simons told the New York Times in a joint interview before Prada’s show Sunday, which will be the brands’ first menswear event since he joined as co-creative director last year.
“It’s easy to say consume less, produce less, but then we need to be ready to have less jobs,” Miuccia Prada, the brand’s co-creative director and controlling shareholder said. ”The job of a designer is not just to make clothes anymore. There are so many other issues … I am glad he is here and we can talk about them.”
Prada explained why she has always said “no” to staging co-ed fashion shows, although Simons seems to prefer them. “Now gender is totally mixed up, and it doesn’t make any sense to separate men and women in theory, in reality the women is more flamboyant so always takes away from the men,” Prada said.
Sunday’s show will feature “simple lines but also ideas that are more physical and sexy,” she added.
The group’s flagship Prada brand grew more slowly but remained resilient in the face of a sector-wide slowdown, with retail sales up 7 percent.
The guidance was issued as the French group released first-quarter sales that confirmed forecasts for a slowdown. Weak demand in China and poor performance at flagship Gucci are weighing on the group.
Consumers face less, not more, choice if handbag brands can't scale up to compete with LVMH, argues Andrea Felsted.
As the French luxury group attempts to get back on track, investors, former insiders and industry observers say the group needs a far more drastic overhaul than it has planned, reports Bloomberg.