Material Witnesses
Simon Holloway can’t stop himself. He reaches for this one, that one, another and yet another he simply can’t resist. Wait, just one more. Fabric does this to him, makes a sane man--a company vice president, no less--fall apart at the seams.
At least he’s in the right place: Premiere Vision, the world’s leading fabric fair, where twice a year designers and buyers get the 411 on European trends and colors for spring and summer 2000.
More than 40,000 visitors convened here from around the world for four days to pinch, squeeze, even sniff swatches like produce in a grocery stores.
They go crazy for cotton, leap for linen and drool for wool. Ecstatically, they rub the nub of a knit only to be zapped by the fabric bolt of lightning, that inspirational pret-a-porter moment when all that matters is sketching the first spring-summer collection of the millennium.
Bienvenue to Material World, where 1.5 million hankie-sized swatches dangle off racks or are displayed on boards and tabletops spread over 42,000 square feet on the sprawling Parc d’Expositions de Paris, a convention complex near Charles de Gaulle Airport.
At the moment, Holloway, creative designer for Los Angeles-based guru-to-the-stars Richard Tyler, is lost in lace, lots and lots of pretty swatches of the stuff he has yanked off racks and now has stacked on a table in front of him. He is considering the selections for Tyler’s bridal wear for spring 2000.
Never mind that not even a scribble of an idea is on the drawing board. First things first. And that means fabric. PV is ground zero for the latest, hippest must-have fabrics and colors.
“Everything starts with PV,” says Janet Howard, head designer of Los Angeles-based Bisou Bisou. The 1997 Cal-Mart’s Designer of the Year winner is here for her seventh year. Fabric--how it moves, feels, dictates and arouses the fabric-holic senses of designers (they wrap it around skin, press it to their cheeks and close their eyes as hands caress it)--is the first link in the fashion design chain.
It’s PV’s opening day, a special kickoff just for buyers who purchased more than $18,000 the last time they shopped here. Roaming the floor are Jil Sander, John Bartlett, Gene Meyer, Alber Elbaz and Angelenos Kevan Hall, David Dartnell and Howard. Bigger crowds over the next three days will jam the halls like a carnival midway, weavers hawking their wares--including 5,000 never-before-seen fabric creations in the swatch sideshow.
Everywhere are palatial booths, neatly arranged rows of them where designers with dreams of their collections dancing in their heads meet with their dream weavers from some 800 mills from 14 European countries. Browsers drop in to inspect the fabric, to swoon over swatches, to do their homework. They are poured mint tea, champagne, diet Coke and served gourmet cookies, even caviar spread on crackers.
All are on a global millennial mission: What innovative fabric designs will be hot? (Translucent.) What color will rule? (White will be next summer’s pink.)
The Fashion World’s ‘Best-Kept Secret’
In this fast-forward fashion business, it’s all about jumping ahead in time just to stay current with mills churning out new fabrics for new collections. It’s no wonder that the House of Dior and Chanel as well as the House of Gap and Banana Republic are counting on PV’s Powerhouse of Fabric to lead the way.
“We are the world’s best-kept secret,” says PV President Robert Brochier, a former silk weaver, about the 26-year-old biannual fair he helped found in Lyon. There are several other fabric fairs held throughout the United States, Italy, Japan and France. But none, experts agree, quite compares to PV, regarded as the world’s most important fashion barometer because of the depth and breadth of the European mills represented.
Because of PV’s fashion influence, two related events are held at the same time, under the same roof. One is Mod’Amont, an international trade show for fashion trimmings and supplies; the other is Indigo, a textile design show.
Indeed, it was PV that paved the runway for the color gray as this year’s hot hue. And it is PV that is putting us in the pink this spring and summer.
“Fashion is about evolution,” says Laurence Tenturier, PV’s spokeswoman. “So what PV does is build and feed off the previous season so that changes are subtle. For instance, gray was the big color for fall and winter 1999. But it wasn’t an aggressive gray, it was soft. For spring and summer 2000, gray will still be popular, but it will be powdery, like white light thrown over it.”
The same approach is used with fabrics. This winter’s heavy knits will feel like a second skin--in airy and light weaves--for summer 2000. Brochier says PV’s mission is “to keep up and stay flexible with social trends as they relate to fashion. We have to ‘feel’ what is in the air and respond to that so that the mills know what to have in mind as they spin the yarns.”
“This is Europe showing the best of Europe. We prepare the highway of fashion. We provide direction; we never dictate,” Brochier says.
That direction is determined by consumer research in major cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong. Last year, for the first time, the PV research team mailed thousands of questionnaires to consumers in Paris, New York and Mexico City, asking about their thoughts on the year 2000 and current social trends. Focus groups of working moms and daughters, blue-collar dads, artists and activists, club kids and club owners--among others--were put together.
Participants were asked about their lives, futures and their world view. Then, of course, they were hit with the F-word: “What fabrics do they think they will desire? How will they dress? And in what colors?” Brochier says.
Survey Says: Concern for Environment Is High
Brochier and his staff met with weavers, designers and stylists six months ago to discuss the findings. Consumers, he told the gathering, are interested in the environment, concerned about the oceans, the skies, the Earth’s vegetation and its animals. They also shared their joy in the world’s blending of cultures, food, rituals, celebrations and language--a hybrid of humanity.
How does that break down at colossal cloth world?
For starters, a yellow sidewalk weaving through the floor like a Yellow Brick Road is a hue hint, as are the blue and green water-colored walls and bamboo trees boxed in sheer white panels. All are color cues seen in the majority of swatches with white--from bright to eggshell--playing a key role. It will stand alone or will be veiled or dusted over colors of yellow to create a buttery shade, over green for celadon and blue for a heavenly hue like the sky seen through a thin patch of clouds.
Of course, other shades need no description: sand, clay, honey, wicker, pistachio and pimiento--all evoking Mother Nature.
Fabric weaves, says PV’s fashion director Jean-Yves Alombert, also will be hybrid in nature, playing off the diverse universe theme in the consumer survey. A blend of natural and man-made fibers will shine, crinkle, stretch, seem like paper, have a sheer veneer or be tougher than, say, Elizabeth Dole’s hairdo.
Alombert, a former fabric designer for a French mill, excitedly reaches for boxes stacked on the floor containing fabrics marked “transparent,” “sculptural,” “double-faced,” “nature” and “techno with nature.”
He pulls out swatch after swatch, all of them featherweight, almost tissue-thin and very sheer. The hybrid show of wrinkled and smooth, structured and flat, stretchy and loose, begins:
A seersucker that stretches is mixed with linen that feels like cotton. Indigo-dyed linen looks like denim but is silky. White polka-dots on another shade of white called “filter” is sandwiched between two other swatches of off-white called “earth light.” Butterflies and flowers in soft yellow (called “beacon”), a light green (“firefly”) and a faded lavender (“faded”) are embroidered on organza. A linen netting in navy is covered with transparent plastic sequins.
Other swatches are adorned with tiny pearls that look like water drops, ultra-light appliques and organza ribbons shaped like flowers and vines. More fabrics are metallized, irregularly pleated, basket woven and monochromatic. And prints, many with roses--the most popular flower--are treated unconventionally: powdered, abstract, splotched and sketched in matte white on pale backgrounds.
The swatches of silks, knits, linens, denim and lace get the gallery treatment, showcased like artworks at the Louvre and protected as such by stone-faced security guards and police officers ensuring that no one photographs, draws or even writes long descriptions of the fabrics, which are all protected under copyright laws.
Don’t even think about snipping a swatch of a swatch. Brandishing scissors here is like going through a metal detector with a handgun at the airport. Break the rules and you’re in big trouble, buddy.
“Buyers and designers know better than to pull out a pair of scissors and help themselves,” Brochier says. Last year four Korean buyers cut pieces off swatches and were swept off to the slammer. “They started the day at PV and ended it in jail. It was all over the Paris news.”
Woven Fabrics Are Result of Six Months’ Work
Francois Damide, an exhibitor and president of Solstiss Inc., supplier of lace fabric to Donna Karan, Oscar de la Renta, Calvin Klein and others, watches over his swatches with an eagle eye.
He is protective of his product, including 300 exquisite new lace designs on display because “we have been working for six months on our weaves for this moment. For instance, this is a very new blend of silk and linen. Feel this. Is this not fantastic? And this,” he says reaching for a lace swatch beaded with crystals and sequins that sells for $630 a yard. “But you only need three yards for a gown,” he says, almost apologetically.
Marie-Ange Bienaime, DKNY’s European kidswear designer, pops in on Damide, a friend, while searching for sporty, dyed fabrics. “I will find most everything” for her collection she says about her “one-stop shopping” in this, her 20th year at PV.
This is Cliff Pershes’ first visit. “It’s overwhelming,” says the former Todd Oldham designer, who recently joined the San Francisco-based Bebe women’s wear company. Pershes and Jennifer Groves, Bebe’s design director, are on the move, darting from the linen swatch gallery to a cubicle appointment. They huddle with a sales rep who jots down an order and then they’re off to the next appointment, a routine they will repeat over the next few days.
So will Howard of Bisou Bisou, who loves “not knowing what to expect at PV.” But after three nonstop days of playing with the themes of air, earth and water, ocean blues, organic greens and fabric hybrids, Howard, an energetic designing diva, has her plan all sewn up.
She is wowed by crinkled and crushed fabrics she calls “the new pleat,” double-faced sheers “which are very sexy,” and the colors white, celadon and blues in every hue from pale to indigo. “I’m loving all the translucent stuff,” she says.
But not all designers are cut of the same cloth.
Elbaz, new designer for the Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche ready-to-wear collection, popped in at PV “to get a feeling, a direction, a concept.” After a few hours of roaming, Elbaz, who drew a crowd everywhere he went, knew “the organic, rustic, natural fiber stuff” wasn’t for him.
Still, not all was a loss.
“Sometimes you take an idea from here, use it, develop it and go forward.”
So which was he doing?
“Going forward,” he says, standing not far from the exit. “I’m going home. I’ve got to pick up a pencil and start sketching.”
