Making an Impression : Fashion: A few hot but far-from-trendy L.A. designers have been pounding on doors in New York. Now, despite the recession, they’re beginning to open.
Squeezed into a tightly packed schedule of 50 New York shows this spring, one entry seemed out of place.
At first.
Van Buren, a feisty youngster among Los Angeles design firms, was listed on the schedule along with the top names in New York.
But what looked at the time like a stray step has turned out to be part of a stampede.
A tenacious group of young Los Angeles designers is pushing its way into New York’s tightly knit fashion circle. They are opening showrooms, scheduling full-scale shows and making virtual fixtures of themselves in the offices of the store buyers and fashion magazine editors.
And it’s paying off. Such high dividends as in-store designer boutiques, full-page ads sponsored by top retailers and fashion layouts in Vogue, Elle and Mirabella are among the prizes. It is the sort of reception that usually eludes all but the huge-volume Los Angeles design firms--until now.
“All of a sudden, New York stores are unusually open to new L.A. designers,” Kevan Hallsaid recently outside a Manhattan loft, the possible site of his first New York show, next fall. “They need the new energy. Business is bad. They’re losing their shirts.”
Among the hottest names on the L.A. list are Van Buren designers Maggie Barry and Stephen Walker, along with Richard Tyler, Eva Chun and James Tarantino. Smaller-scale Hall is a step or two behind in the move to take Manhattan. Mark Eisen, the undisputed leader of the pack, is several steps ahead.
It isn’t a pack, really. These designers are well past “brat” age. Most are in their 30s or early 40s and have been in business at least three years. Their companies’ annual sales hover around $2 to $4 million, except for Eisen. He designs private-label collections for Ann Taylor and Spiegel, in addition to his own line, and will cross the $10-million mark this year.
What unites these designers is not extreme youth, or style, or the designer-du-jour syndrome. What unites them is that, by New York standards, they don’t fit the L.A. stereotype. They aren’t the trendy, low-priced, “throwaway” things buyers and fashion editors expect to find here.
In fact, Hall says New York retailers are puzzled when they see his structured styles in Los Angeles. “This isn’t trendy enough,” they tell him. And that’s why he and the others carry their latest collections directly to the offices of New York buyers.
In truth, one quick way to describe most of these collections is to say they look as if they came from New York. Eisen’s white pique suit with gold charm buttons was featured in a full-page Macy’s ad this spring. The New York store also gave him a boutique this year, and there is another in the works at I. Magnin, Beverly Hills.
His foothold in New York was secured seven months ago when he opened a large, one-man showroom in the heart of Manhattan’s garment district. Next fall he plans to hold his first show there.
Along the way he has had help from several invaluable, kid-gloved hands.
Macy’s senior vice president and corporate fashion director, Ellin Saltzman, an established promoter of emerging talents, was instrumental in creating the Eisen boutique. “Ellin got me into the clique,” Eisen said.
More recently, Vogue editor Anna Wintour took an interest, Eisen said. During a recent visit to Los Angeles, she reviewed his collection. “Now, with Anna’s excitement, I have people I can call and share ideas with.”
And get advice from, about what will or will not sell, what might or might not fit into the next big fashion layout. Such guidance is key to the creation of a full-scale fashion star. And it is usually reserved for New York talents who can drop by a buyer’s office at a moment’s notice or whip something up for a fashion shoot while the photographer’s camera is still clicking.
Richard Tyler and James Tarantino recently got a call from Vogue too, for a special fall section that will feature Los Angeles. Tyler’s rock ‘n’ royalty designs, with impeccable tailoring and abundant flamboyant flourishes, have made appearances in most major New York fashion publications.
Tyler cracked the big-league Manhattan retail circuit this spring when Bergdorf Goodman filled several Fifth Avenue windows with his clothes and signed him for an in-store designer boutique, opening this fall.
“No one came here (Los Angeles) to see the clothes,” he said. His Beverly Boulevard shop hosts a steady stream of rock-video stylists and stars, from Paula Abdul to Julia Roberts. But to catch New Yorkers’ attention he, and everyone like him, carried the clothes door to door.
One tiny downtown New York boutique called If was the first to say yes. Then Catherine Dietlein, a buyer for cutting-edge boutiques from Atlanta to Chicago, discovered him. “She really spread the word,” Tyler said. His wife and business partner, Lisa Trafficante, as well as his sister-in-law partner, Michelle Trafficante, pursued leads, cramming back-to-back appointments into exhausting, three- or four-day trips.
Orders from Bergdorf, along with steady sales at Wilkes Bashford in San Francisco, have pushed his wholesale business up a staggering 500%. Now Tyler is considering a bi-coastal life.
“I love Los Angeles and I hate to leave,” he said recently. “But out of sight, out of mind. One or the other of us has to be in New York all the time.”
Tarantino’s latest fashion trophies include two pages in Vogue’s May issue. Architecturally angled dresses are his signature; precisely tailored jackets and curvy little skirts are other Tarantino specials.
He says he understands why his label is carried by all the stores on New York’s all-important “B” list: Barney’s, (Henri) Bendel, Bergdorf Goodman and Bloomingdales. (Neiman Marcus, Beverly Hills also carries his label.)
“For store buyers, price is the main issue now,” he said.
His tickets range from about $400 to $1,000. The other L.A. designers charge about the same, except for Eisen ($250 to $650) and Tyler ($800 to $2,000).
For the most part, these prices are considerably lower than those of their New York counterparts--Todd Oldham, Zang Toi and Gemma Kahng.
“The New York designers get the hype,” said Tarantino, who attended New York’s Parsons School of Design with several of the East Coast’s rising stars before moving back to the West. “Press coverage creates the demand. Then, the prices become astronomical.”
Eva Chun says she decided to shift a chunk of her production to New York because of press coverage there. After spending months at a time there, always on business, she is convinced that publicity will move her ahead. “Until now I focused on production,” she said. “Store buyers found me mostly by word of mouth.”
Still, the grapevine has worked well for her so far. Her feminine cocktail dresses and evening gowns appear regularly in the windows of Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman as well as I. Magnin and Fred Hayman in Los Angeles.
From now on she will do half her production work here and keep an address in town.
Van Buren’s stretchy, spandex-laced creations, popular with pop musicians such as Billy Idol and Lenny Kravitz, are far from the structured, tailored works of Tyler, Tarantino and the others. But it was the first company in this group to dare a full-scale New York presentation.
“And we’ll do it again, every season from now on,” Barry said. “The New York press and retailers don’t come to Los Angeles very often. They’re missing the small companies, the city’s design jewels.”
It’s nothing personal. “When business isn’t good, there’s less travel, buyers go to fewer regional markets, “ explained Elyse Kroll, who produces fashion shows and fairs in New York, including the Coterie for women and Designer Collective for men. About 10% of participants are Los Angeles designers.
In the best of financial times, “buyers will go around the world and back to find the new and exciting,” noted Kurt Barnard, a New York publisher of Barnard’s Retail Marketing Report.
But if they can’t afford the trip these days, Barry and company aren’t about to let them get away. “You move where the goal is,” she said.
“It’s not that there will be a mass exodus of design talents,” Hall said.
Maybe not, but it’s beginning to look that way. As Los Angeles designers garner attention from the New York king makers, they find they must be there, or lose their position. Most will continue to produce at least part of each collection here, because rent and labor costs are lower than in New York.
All but Eisen and Tarantino, however, are ready to trade coasts for the sake of bigger success. And Saltzman, for one, approves. “It’s definitely not that New York’s younger designers are more talented than those in Los Angeles,” she said during spring press week in New York. “But the fashion press is here, some of the most powerful stores are here.”
