Behind the front row is a buying-and-selling exercise on which a great many small London businesses depend
London Fashion Week Is a Trade Show Wearing a Very Good Coat
Twice a year, in February and September, a portion of central London becomes very difficult to walk through. Pavements fill with people dressed for a climate that does not exist. Photographers crouch in the road. A person in a hat the size of a patio table waits to be noticed outside a venue she may not be entering. To the casual observer this is London Fashion Week, and it looks like a party to which nobody you know has been invited.
It is in fact a trade show. Strip away the street theatre and what remains is an event with the same purpose as a conference for kitchen fitters: makers show their new products to the people who might buy and publicise them. The difference is that the kitchen fitters do not have to do it in heels. I spent the most recent season following the money rather than the hats, and it is a more interesting story than the front row lets on.
What Is Actually Being Sold
A catwalk show lasts about ten minutes. The business it supports runs for six months. Designers present a collection for a coming season to buyers from department stores, boutiques and online retailers, who then place orders. Those orders decide what gets manufactured, in what quantity, and whether the label will still exist next year. Press coverage matters because it persuades the buyers, and the customers after them, that the clothes are worth wanting.
The real work therefore happens after the applause, in showrooms where buyers go through the rails piece by piece with a calculator. A dress that drew gasps on the runway may sell almost nothing. A plain, beautifully cut shirt that nobody photographed may pay the studio rent. Every designer I spoke to had a story about the unglamorous item that kept the business alive.
London’s Particular Role
Each of the major fashion capitals has a character. Paris has the great houses, Milan has the manufacturing muscle, New York has the commercial clout. London’s reputation is for new talent. The schedule, organised by the British Fashion Council, has long made room for young designers, many of them recent graduates of the city’s colleges, alongside the established names.
This is London’s strength and its difficulty. A city that specialises in beginners is a city whose stars are often lured elsewhere once they succeed. The support schemes that help new labels with show costs, mentoring and business advice exist precisely because the gap between a brilliant graduate collection and a functioning company is wide, and many promising designers fall into it.
The Cost of Ten Minutes
Staging a show is expensive. There is the venue, the models, the hair and make-up, the production crew, the music, the lighting and the samples themselves, which are costly because each is made once. For a small label these bills arrive months before any orders are paid. More than one designer described the season to me as a twice-yearly bet placed with borrowed money.
That is why so many have experimented with other formats. Some hold small presentations where the clothes stand still and the audience moves. Some show by appointment only. Some release a film. Some skip a season altogether and say so honestly. The sums have forced a creativity about the format that is, in its way, as inventive as anything on the rail.
The Street Outside
And what of the crowd on the pavement? It is easy to laugh at, and I have. But the street style circus is also commerce. Many of the people being photographed are wearing borrowed or gifted pieces, and the pictures are advertising. An outfit seen by a few hundred people in a room may be seen by hundreds of thousands on a phone. Brands know this and dress the pavement as carefully as the runway.
This has blurred the line between coverage and promotion, and readers are entitled to be sceptical. When you see a glowing account of a show, it is fair to ask whether the writer paid for her own coat. For the record, I paid for mine. It was from a charity shop in Muswell Hill and it has a mended pocket.
Who Benefits Beyond the Tent
The economic footprint is wider than the designers. A season puts work the way of pattern cutters, machinists, set builders, drivers, caterers, florists and the taxi trade, along with hotels and restaurants. A good many of those are small London firms and freelancers for whom these weeks are a significant part of the year. Fashion is routinely counted among Britain’s major creative industries in official figures, and the government’s own material on the sector is available through GOV.UK for anyone who wants the numbers without the adjectives.
Is It Still Worth Having
People have been asking whether fashion weeks are finished for as long as I have been attending them. The internet was supposed to make them redundant. So was the trend for selling direct to the customer. And yet they continue, because a deadline is useful, a gathering is efficient and human beings, even fashionable ones, like to see a thing with their own eyes before they spend money on it.
What has changed is who the event is for. It is now open to the public in various ways, and it speaks to customers as much as to trade. That is healthy. An industry that depends on public enthusiasm ought not to conduct all its business behind a rope.
A Fair Hearing
Fashion is an easy target, and some of it deserves the teasing. My colleagues who produce British satirical news regard the season as a harvest festival, and the editors behind the house guide on how to run a satirical website list it among the dependable subjects. I do not blame them. But behind the patio hats are several thousand people trying to make a living from making things in an expensive city, and they are worth taking seriously for ten minutes twice a year.
If you are unsure whether a fashion headline is reporting or a joke, the UK satirical news checklist will sort it out in under a minute, and the British Onion page and The Daily Mash will look after you if it turns out to be the latter. My reporting from the showrooms is collected on my fashion and style page at The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/