Hollywood and Fashion The Demise of Fashion
Not that this grim decade was entirely devoid of hope. By now the most interesting thing on the catwalk was definitely in prêt-à-porter, with extraordinary creations from Jean-Paul Gaultier, Thierry Mugler and Kenzo. In the UK, while providing flashy City boys with eccentrically reworked interpretations of the tailored suit - his trademark 'classics with a twist' - Paul Smith also discovered the Filofax, a leather-bound 'personal organizer' manufactured by a tiny East End company. Ralph was brought up on the Hollywood movies of the 40s and 50s, mentally filing away images of Cary Grant and Fred Astaire so that he could recreate their style. He got his start in the fashion company promoting fits at Brooks Brothers, and later grew to become a wholesaler of ties and gloves in New York's garment district. She goes on to say that Lauren's stores 'stirred all kinds of longings in people, the dream that the upwardly mobile shared for prestige, wealth and exotic adventure'. Lauren created a world of aristocratic good taste, but it was pure invention. In The End of Fashion, Teri Agins suggests that ladies lost curiosity in fashion mainly because they were even more involved about their careers: '[They] commenced to behave far more like males in adopting their very own uniform: skirts and blazers and pantsuits that gave them an authoritative, polished, energy glance. Even supermodels began to look less 'super'. As Teri Agins explains, 'Such fashion homes just also take place being publicly traded organizations, which must preserve regular, predictable development for their shareholders. Today, while branding remains as crucial as ever, its raison d'être has changed. Nine years on from the publication of Agins' book, fashion has - inevitably - transformed itself once more.
The Regrowth of Fashion
As Carine Roitfeld, the editor of French Vogue and a one-time collaborator of the American designer, says, 'In the background of fashion, there's most certainly a pre-Tom Ford and also a post-Tom Ford interval. He was not a snob about his work - he wanted to sell. It was fine that in winter 1995 Ford showed a collection of sexy, sophisticated clothes that attracted the attention of Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow. Even better that he reintroduced the bamboo-handled bags that had been the making of Gucci back in the 1950s. But he also redesigned every single facet of your model, from print commercials to retailers, guaranteeing that every thing gelled to produce an 'ideal' of what the Gucci title designed. According to Guillaume Erner, 'The Texan turned the style of the brand upside down: previously everything that bore the Gucci name had been brown, soft, and rounded. As Roitfeld observes, '[Ford] created clothes people wanted to wear, and then he explained to them that if they couldn't afford the dress, they could at least buy the sunglasses. Bernard Arnault was already on the rise in 1984, when he acquired Christian Dior. And although the two men have radically different personalities, Arnault's tactics are not dissimilar to those of Tom Ford. Of course, as we've already pointed out, few ordinary folk could afford a Prada suit or a Dior dress.
Surviving the Lowpoint
Their white knight arrived in the form of François Pinault, who snapped up 40 per cent of Gucci's shares. The flurry of acquisitions that followed on both sides looked like a duel between billionaires - Monopoly played for real. Finally, in the economic dip provoked by the dotcom crash - and almost as if he sensed that he needed to conserve his resources for the difficult period ahead - Arnault gave up the fight. The industry was therefore witness to the horror that was to cause its latest nervous breakdown. It seems almost churlish to try to place an event as tragic and far-reaching as 11 September 2001 within the context of fashion. On 19 December 2001, an article in The Independent reported, 'Profits fall by half at Gucci and Italian fashion giant predicts no upturn until late 2002'. We need to take a break from it occasionally, but sooner or later we come back for more.
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