San Francisco’s New Mart

Mention Baghdad by the Bay, and visions of cable cars, steamed crab legs and the Golden Gate Bridge pop readily to mind.

But trend-setting fashion? Unlikely in this bastion of liberal thinking but conservative dressing. Not since flower children donned bell-bottoms and tie-dyed T-shirts in the heyday of Haight-Ashbury has San Francisco fomented anything close to a fashion rebellion.

Two developers, based in San Francisco and Atlanta, have joined forces in an attempt to change all that. To showcase the Bay Area’s growing cadre of contemporary designers, as well as established names, they’ve plunged ahead with a gleaming new $90-million wholesale Fashion Center in the city’s funky South of Market district. For now at least, it is open only to the trade.

At its first show this week, the center was host to about 3,000 department and specialty store buyers--mostly from Northern California and the Pacific Northwest--who flocked to the six-floor, 740,000-square-foot building. The center--complete with atrium and tiers of inviting, glass-fronted showrooms--is slated to open officially in August with a holiday/cruise show.

“What the Fashion Center will provide is . . . a recharging of the apparel industry in San Francisco,” said Tom Mitchell, general manager of the facility, two-thirds of which has been leased.

After all, Mitchell noted, San Francisco is no slouch in the garment trade, despite its unintentionally low profile. With apparel manufacturing worth $5 billion a year, San Francisco is the country’s third-largest garment center, after New York and Los Angeles. And the Bay Area weighs in with $6 billion in annual retail sales of clothing.

To be sure, the region is already widely known as the home of such veterans as Levi Strauss, Esprit de Corp, The Gap and Jessica McClintock. But some less-established names--including Lilli Ann, Fong Chong, Suzanne Hanley, Oblong Rhonda and Q Rolo--are hoping the new center will give them needed exposure.

As Mitchell sees it, creating a wholesale “shopping mall” will make it easier for store representatives from the nation’s 11-state Northwest region to spot hot designs and get them quickly to their shelves.

Until now, San Francisco has not had a dependable one-stop-shopping place for displaying lines and holding fashion markets. For the last eight years, shows were held in an exhibition center that also was used for a variety of other trade shows. And the Pacific Apparel Center, where many designers had their showrooms, recently filed for protection under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.

Many stores have sent their buyers instead to Los Angeles, where the 26-year-old California Mart has more than 3 million square feet with 2,000 showrooms occupied year-round. (San Francisco’s center has 550 permanent showrooms.)

One fashion consultant expressed concern that the Fashion Center could face a rough road as it tries to lure store buyers, given the general debt-related shakiness among retailers and the close proximity of the more powerful Los Angeles mart.

“At a time of total confusion in the fashion business,” said Marjorie S. Dean, chief executive of New York-based Tobe Associates, “this just adds to the perplexities.”