Notorious Vandal Strikes Again - The Florentine

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Life in Italy
17
Thursday 20 October 2005
Style & FASHION
Fame & Fashion: The Future is in the Stars?
By Justina Blakeney
Florence is full of fashion
schools: Polimoda, L’Accademia
Italiana, Fashion Design Lab,
Universita’ di Firenze (Architettura,
progettazione Moda), to
only name a few, and Lorenzo de
Medici school’s fashion department
has merged with the Atelier
school to enlarge their fashion program.
Thousands of students from
all over the world come to Florence
to study fashion every year-
-they come with the aspiration of
becoming the next Christopher
Bailey (Head designer of England’s
largest luxury brand Burberry) or
the next Zac Posen (considered
to be the youngest designer with
a successful women’s wear label).
But where do they all go once they
have that semi-precious certificate
after three years of designing, pattern
making, sewing, stitching and
schmoozing?
Back in the day, the fashion
demigods were Chanel, Gucci and
Vuitton: simple folk with style and
serious rags to riches’ stories. Gabrielle
Chanel was an orphan, Guccio
Gucci was a family rebel who was a
maitre d’hotel at the Savoy in London,
and Louis Vuitton was the son
of a carpenter. Their work, their success,
and their longevity as designers
was based upon their formal and
informal training as artists and artisans.
Today, the typical profile of the
world’s big designers is changing
drastically. There are skilled designers
who have talent and eye, but
who were undoubtedly helped in
their careers by celebrity parents,
like Stella McCartney, or by simply
inheriting a fashion house, like in
the case of Donatella Versace and
Angela Missoni. And some of the
most talked about designers are not
designers at all. They are musicians
and actors, or singers that act, or
actors that sing... and maybe they are
celebrities just because they happen
to be filthy rich. The Gwen Stefanis,
Jennifer Lopezes, L’il Kims, Beyoncés,
Eves, and Nikki Hiltons of the
world are changing the way that the
industry works and it is affecting
one of Italy’s biggest industries.
Rapper, producer, and now
“designer” Sean Puffy Combs’ clothing
line Sean John was rated one of
the fastest growing, highest grossing
ready-to-wear companies last year.
Where does that leave today’s
trained designers? (I mean those
designers without the fortune of
being a superstar, a Hilton, or best
friends with Madonna and Gwyneth
Paltrow?)
Once they graduate from fashion
school do they go to a Florentine
ready-to-wear or high fashion
brand like Patrizia Pepe or Roberto
Cavalli only to do a three-monthlong
unpaid internship, and then
maybe be hired for 800 euros a
month?
Workshop, Show Rooms and classes
Do they go the bold route and
start their own fashion line only to
discover that production costs in
Italy can be so high that the college
loan you are still paying off
seems like peanuts? Or do they fall
into the offshore production route,
where both quality and morals may
be compromised? Few alternatives
are left for the emerging designer.
What seemed like a creative, high
energy, glamour-filled occupation
to the hopeful freshman-may easily
deteriorate into a monotonous
desk-job of phone-calls for sourcing
and production haggling.
As a designer, I like to think
of fashion as art. An art than can,
if you’re lucky, be a very lucrative
business. But when quality is
always compromised by cost, when
up and coming designers are being
paid less than the cost of living to
design for some of the largest, and
most admired luxury brands, and
Puff Daddy receives the “Designer
of the Year” awards, one begins to
question what tomorrow’s fashion
designers will need in order to make
it in the industry.
It seems that new ideas, good
taste, skill, experience, research,
schooling and perseverance have
less and less to do with the success
of a designer.
Maybe designers should start
taking acting lessons – seems like
nowadays, the odds of becoming
the next Tom Ford are even slimmer
than those of becoming the
next Tom Cruise. Now all aspiringdesigners
can do is sit around and
wait for the day that Donna Karan
gets cast over Meryl Streep in a
feature film--at least then the odds
would be even.