cfi-The Look and The Law Aug 09:The Look, The Law & The Knowledge 2009 07/09/2009 13:55 Pag
THE LOOK
5
THE FASHION BUSINESS
There are basically three layers to the fashion cake
GARDEN
1. The High Street
2. The Designer Label
3. Couture (still seen by many as the icing on the cake)
VENT
Of these, at this stage, all you need to know about is the second layer and where
your designer label fits in.
T
CO

A
Ready-to-Wear, womenswear is based on the four major Fashion Capitals: Paris,
Milan, New York & London. Menswear however centres around Paris and Milan.
Anybody working in one of these cities has a head-start but also a disadvantage;
schedules for fashion weeks in Paris, Milan, New York and London are very tight,
slots on the official timetable are fiercely fought for and hard to get for young talents.
And even being on a timetable doesn’t automatically mean the world beats a path
to your door. Press and buyers have to eat; phone their offices or whatever during
fashion weeks and they are not going to miss a major show in order to do so. If
F
ASHION FRINGE
there is a show to be missed, it is usually one by a young, barely known designer -
which is YOU.
Fashion weeks are not for the general public. They are serious professional
gatherings where in order to gain entry to a show a ticket has to be obtained - and
shown. Fashion PRs and security guards are very tough and are trained to spot a
potential gate-crasher at twenty paces. And that means, you probably won’t get
in. This isn’t done to torture the young. It is to bring order to a potentially chaotic
situation with several hundred people needing to be shepherded into the venue,
placed in their right seat, and then sent out at the end as quickly as possible. At all
times, safety is the uppermost thing.
It is all worked around a highly detailed schedule. The fashion week calendars are
planned and published well in advance. In Europe and North America they take
place at designer level twice a year. For womenswear, autumn/winter clothes are
showing in February and March; spring/summer in September and October, with
menswear scheduled in January and June.
The fashion show is your best opportunity to present your clothes, become
fashion’s darling and conquer the world, so we will come back to it in more detail
later. But there is every reason to believe that by the time your label is well-
established, fashion weeks and individual shows could be obsolescent, or even a
thing of the past. Even now, it is obvious that climate change is making seasons
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