Niisiis, eelmine nädal saime eelmise veerandi tulemused kätte… Ehk terve pakitäie hinnatud/parandatud pabereid ja feedback lehe. Lisan siia teile näitamiseks vaid oma investigative piece’i, parandusteta versiooni… Kuigi keeleliselt oligi vaid paar parandust. Vigu leidus rohkem teemaarenduse poolepeal ning sellega olen ma 100% nõus.. Kui mul oleks rohkem aega olnud, oleks ma hoopis vaadanud rohkem seda, kuidas moemajades tööjaotus välja näeb ning üritada selles perfected süsteemis vigu leida, ho -ho. Aga anyway, eks lugege ja hinnake ise. Ja võite pakkuda, mis hinde A-E skaalal sain?

An Industry in Need of Change?

by Liisa Ennuste, Fashion Journalism [Print; Broadcast] Year 2, Term 1

Just a few decades ago, a fashion designer had to create two seasonal collections a year. Today’s frenetic fashion cycle is crammed with cruise and pre-collections, diffusion lines, design collaborations, couture, menswear, shoes and accessories. With John Galliano and Christophe Decarnin seeking help from mental institutions, and Lee McQueen committing suicide, It is becoming a generally accepted fact that the relentless pace of fashion is contributing to the downfall of its greatest talents. One cannot help but wonder, however, if blaming the industry is all there is to it, or are we missing something in the discussion?

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“I don’t understand this marathon of fashion,” says Alber Elbaz, the head designer of Lanvin, to New York Magazine. “Today, designers are expected to produce work that is bigger, better, faster and — these days — cheaper. A singer can quit once he or she has made ten great songs, a director can finish once he or she has made five amazing films, a writer just needs to write three great books. Now let’s look at designers — they produce six to eight shows a year, most designers have a 20-year-long career, so I need to create about 250 collections in that time. Not even Danielle Steel could write 250 books,“ he claims. And Alber makes a valid point. A designer’s profession is remorseless – you are expected to develop new ideas season after season. Working for big corporations such as luxury giant LVMH means naturally that excellent results are expected. There are no second acts in the world of fashion and one wrong move could cause the company’s sales to drop significantly, affecting the livelihoods of thousands of empoyees. Designers should be about envisioning a fairy tale beyond the dull commercial side of the business, but in reality they still carry the weight of millions of pounds of sales on their shoulders. Undeniably all this pressure can overwhelm even the most creative of designers.

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At the end of Balmain’s fall 2011 fashion show during the Paris Fashion Week, no designer was present to take a bow. The French fashion house’s creative director Christophe Decarnin could not attend his own show. This cranked up the rumour mills, saying that the designer had been hospitalized and was being treated for depression. Balmain’s spokesperson denied Decarnin’s mental breakdown and drug-use, but still admitted that Decranin was feeling unwell, because the last season had been „particularly demanding and complicated“. Christophe Decarnin’s breakdown follows hot on the heels of Galliano’s drunk anti-Semitic rantings and Lee Alexander McQueen’s suicide, where a cocktail of drugs and other substances were found in his blood. All these incidents share a common deminator and help reveal the dark underbelly of the fashion world. Fashion can be creative, mischievous and theatrical, but ultimately, it’s still business, where products have to be sold and shareholders want to see profits.

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Analysing Decarnin’s incident, many tend to suspect that the pressure was on the designer to consistently recreate some of Balmain’s blockbuster collections. „The pressures of designing at this level are too much for most people to endure; they continually and relentlessly offer up something deep from within themselves, while their public achievements and failures are ultimately judged by the bottom line,“ comments journalist Libby Banks on the downfall of Balmain’s head designer. Same reasons can be related to Galliano’s comedown. Vanessa Denza, the founder of a recruitment consultancy for the fashion industry, agrees that Galliano’s workload was inhuman. He had been given too much to do and being at the helm of Dior and his namesake label placed a huge amount of psychological pressure. „You cannot expect one person to do everything. There are five people in the Dior design team, I know them all and they are very strong in creating commericial designs, but Galliano gave that little extra to all of it,“ she tells me during an interview in her central London office.

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But is the ever-evolving face of fashion the real reason behind the designers falling into depression? The fashion houses of today are not the tiny ateliers they grew out of, , where isolated designers let their creative juices flow. Fashion has been institutionalized and as a result large design teams collaborate to produce the styles we see on the runways or in the stores. This means we can never be sure, how big the artistic director’s contribution to the inter-season collections was. Vanessa [Denza] believes that the additional collections have nothing to do with the increase of pressure on head designers. Resort collections, originally created for wealthy customers and jet-setters, are meant to be more accessible and easy to wear for travel, parties and holidays. „Seasonal collections and mid-season collections are two completely different businesses. The first one is to advertise and the second one to attract people to shops all the time and to make money.“

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On the other hand, is it possible that the real problem isn’t the huge workload on the shoulders of the head designers but their poor time management? „Designers have an obsession and they should be more disciplined. I know a famous designer, who goes out in the middle of the day and comes back 11 in the evening to start working then. They create stress by wasting time on unimportant things. On the whole women are better at being diciplined, but many of the top designers are men, as women have to dedicate their time to families.“ Another underlying problem is the widespread idea in the fashion business that one person is should oversee everything. This is an issue, where human resources personnel is to blame as well. „They often start interfering and pushing their ideas, which on the whole are completely unworkable,“ Denza claims.

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As fashion is an industry based on the pursuit of fresh ideas, there is constant focus on the young talent. So, is the pressure on the up-and-coming designers as demanding? I met up for an interview with lingerie designer Kriss Soonik, who started her career in Agent Provocateur as a retail marketing assistant, which led her to starting her own label Kriss Soonik Loungerie. She finds that designers for smaller brands, like herself, should contradict the fast paced bustle of fashion. „I deliberately don’t change my styles often and promote classical style lines instead, so that people could get used to it and learn to love it,“ she introduces her designing philosophy. „Sometimes I do new campaigns to grab the attention of customers, but I cannot create mystical fashion all the time. I’d just be worn to shreads,“ Kriss adds. Although younger designers can stick to their signature style and don’t need to pull new designs out of their sleeve for each and every collection, they are faced with tackling other kinds of problems. Getting your name and clothes featured in publications, for example. „It’s great that my designs landed on the pages of Elle, but you’re there once and that’s it. To really sell things you have to be there every month until people start noticing you. Consistency is very important,“ she says. Another pressure point is that as you’re small, people tend to impose their will on you and try to sculpt your brand. „Customers often come to me with all sorts of colour and fabric suggestions, but I cannot always listen to them. My job is to sell my designs and if I dont believe in them, I cannot sell them,“ states Kriss.

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According to a survey among BA design students from Westminster University and Central Saint Martins, seven out of ten admit that the pressure is harsh and the statement „ but that’s fashion for you“ comes across over and over again. A first year womenswear design student Roberta claims that she works better under pressure, making a somewhat fitting comparison that „The fashion industry is for women what the banking industry is for men: dreadful competition and 24-hour working days.“
But not all the top designers feel like squeezed out lemons. Karl Lagerfeld, the creative director of Chanel, Fendi and his namesake label, tells The Independent “Please don’t say I work hard. Nobody is forced to do this job and if they don’t like it, they should do another one. If it’s too much, do something else. But don’t start doing it and then say, ‘Aaaah, it’s too much’ /—/ We have to be tough. We cannot talk about our suffering. People buy dresses to be happy, not to hear about somebody who suffered over a piece of taffeta.”

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As always, it seems that the Father of Fashion is right. It is a fact that the fashion cycle has geared up, but the real problems lie beneath the surface. It could be that the division of labor and responsibilities in the big fashion houses should be more organised. Or perhaps, it is the designers themselves, who should re-examine the way they plan their days and practice stricter self-discipline. Because after all said and done, fashion is an industry that has constant change coded in its DNA; the everlasting search for the new, the It, is as much of an integral part of fashion as runway shows and models. Sure it’s not for everyone, but it doesn’t have to be. In a field where ambition is a key driver, passion self-evident and vision for what could be a pre-requisite, one has to understand that being at the top requires a little more than your average day job.