By GUY TREBAY
There are probably more scientific ways to measure the bulge at the upper end of the economy, but the season's hot Prada coat is one way to tell how much disposable income is floating around. The coat is black wool and has jet beading at the lapel and collar. It is fitted, severe, and as chic as widow's weeds. The person who puts one on immediately assumes the sleek and impertinent air of an urban crow. That the price of the coat is around $5,500 has apparently done little to deter sales. Since the first fall shipments, even the Prada stores have had trouble keeping the coats in stock.
Price resistance is not typically the first thing on people's minds during Fashion Week. But even industry die-hards have been forced into a new, and slightly uneasy, relationship with what people outside the business might think of as reality.
"I'm a real person and I'm, like, totally sticker-shocked," said Lauren Ezersky, the Style channel commentator, before the Duckie Brown men's wear show on Friday. An inveterate clotheshorse, she has recently had to cut back on her wardrobe outlay.
"Prices have gotten insane," Ms. Ezersky said, the reasons having to do partly with the continued weakness of the dollar against the euro and partly, one assumes, with the proliferation of an expanded cast of what marketers term the super-affluent. "You used to be able to buy a pair of Manolos for $500, and now every pair of shoes is 800 bucks," she said indignantly.
For most Americans, the idea of buying a $500 pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes is so far outside the realm of the possible that it is not so much an aspiration as a delusion.
The argument is often made that Fashion Week sets the bar aesthetically and gives the knockoff specialists and discounters something to steal.
More people get their fashion information from supermarket tabloids like The National Enquirer than Vogue, after all, and those magazines routinely publish articles demonstrating how readers can look as stylishly indifferent to style as Drew Barrymore does, and for under $100. (Last week's Mirror Image feature in The Enquirer offered rhinestone-studded jeans from loehmanns.com for $7 and, from shoepavilion.com, boots for $18.99.)
Most stars, of course, are given their clothes. And, while Miuccia Prada once wisecracked about the efficiency with which the so-called High Street brands like Zara and Top Shop could "interpret" her designs, even Ms. Prada has had to reckon with an increasingly polarized marketplace.
Prada's way of doing this has been to introduce a new line of underwear, T-shirts and jeans. Anything but a bargain, they nevertheless reflect a truth rarely discussed in the industry: All consumers now have access to the same information. Relatively few earn enough to buy what they see.
So when Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barneys New York, said on Friday that business was surprisingly strong, it was with the caveat, "I'm shocked that there's no price resistance anymore." For this season's must-have jacket from Marc Jacobs, Mr. Doonan said, Barneys shoppers will blithely pay $4,000.
Despite his high profile and, presumably, income, Mr. Doonan retains a level-headedness to be expected from someone raised in working-class England in the 1950's. "I personally have huge price resistance," he said. "If something costs more than $1,000, I want it to be custom."
Among those whose business it is this week to put across high-end fashion, Mr. Doonan and his attitude would be something of an anomaly. "I'm personally in a little bit of a strange economic bracket, so I don't really look at price tags," the lingerie entrepreneur Sarah Siegel-Magness said at the Esteban Cortazar show on Friday afternoon, as her 6-year-old daughter, Camryn, dressed in a Burberry sundress, squirmed in her lap.
Ms. Siegel-Magness is the daughter of Mo Siegel, the former Colorado hippie who made his fortune on Celestial Seasonings herbal teas. And she is married to Gary Magness, the son of the late cable television magnate Bob Magness, whose fortune was estimated by Forbes at $875 million in 2004.
"My friends look at the prices of my clothes and my bags, and they're like, you've got to be kidding," said Ms. Siegel-Magness, who flies in from Boulder, Colo., to attend the twice yearly New York collections for the fun of it and because, as she said, "If I only lived in my world, I would be out of touch."
It may no longer be possible, as Mr. Doonan suggested, to reconcile the disparity between people like Ms. Siegel-Magness and the images that have filled the press these past weeks of people who Barbara Bush characterized as "underprivileged anyway." No one expects the fashion world to sort out a class quagmire that has confounded the canniest politicians. But there are worse places to look for clues about our economic future than the Bryant Park tents.
No comments:
Post a Comment