Thale TIFF Preview
I will be attending the screening and have a chance to interview the director of the Scandinavian troll-ish fantasy that is Thale tomorrow. Stay tuned for the director interview, I can’t wait!
NYFW Infographic
This is so incredibly à propos, especially after the awesome lecture I had at the Antwerp University’s Fashion Management lecture in Fashion Tourism from Prof. Craik!
Rickard’s Cardigan – Canadian Beer Gets ‘fashionable’
Ok, so it’s not exactly a high-end label cross over like Diet Coke and Jean-Paul Gaulthier as in Europe but it’s still kind of a fun and funky project that will no doubt be tapping into somebody’s fashion friendly pockets.
From the press release, the beer is described as:
An autumn spiced lager infused with seasonal spices of cinnamon, nutmeg, clove and a hint of brown sugar, Rickard’s Cardigan features fall flavours that are as familiar as putting on your go-to knit.
Rickard’s Cardigan will be available in liquor and beer stores across Canada in 6 packs, with release date and price varying by province.
The Antwerp Fashion Management Summer School Experience – Day 4 – Delvaux Handbags
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If yesterday’s trip to the Van De Velde lingerie factory was a highlight for the guys, the Brussels Delvaux factory tour was clearly the ‘must see’ moment for the ladies. Delvaux is a Belgian luxury handbag company founded in 1829, a year before Belgian even got it’s independence from The Netherlands, meaning, the company is older than the country its self. Not too shabby. Like other luxe bags such as Louis Vuitton, Delvaux got its start making luggage and travel cases for the refined explorer and world-traveller. Sometimes referred to as the Hermes of Belgium, Delvaux is mostly an under-the-radar brand that doesn’t really advertise, so if you live outside of Belgium, there’s a good chance you may not know them, and you’d just have to know to ask for them at finer department stores around the world. Delvaux is praised for it’s incredible customer service, and is able to offer free repair service on any bag bought in the last 70 years and they have the leather supplies to prove it. See below for snaps of their archives. This is quite impressive for a country like Belgium whose customer service is notoriously unremarkable. Other things of note, all of Delvaux’s hides are purchased from Europe-based tanneries, although a majority share has recently been purchased by the Fung Brand of Hong Kong.
Other exciting news, seeking to escape the current ‘Burger King-esque’ crown logo, Delvaux will soon be launching a re-brand, and will be offering bags not just exclusively made of high-end leather, but also in high-end, funky plastics in the 400 Euro range.
The Antwerp Fashion Management Summer School Experience – Day 3 – FINANCING!
I’m scared of numbers and not actually in a position to be mapping out finances for my own fashion design collection, or someone elses, so today’s topic was naturally intimidating. But Raf Vermeiren of CultuurInvest, a cultural loan and investment firm tried to demystify the process of building cash flow and business plans using examples in forms of the kind of figure charts and graphs you’d expect to see in MBA classes. As much as I try to admit that I hated it, this is an essential aspect of the industry so I did my best to keep my focus. While the topic was dry, CultuurInvest is a fascinating company that has been bankrolling creative endeavours for the past five years. Over this time, 52 out of 500 applying companies in fashion, media, gaming, indie music, arts and the entertainment sector have found life thanks to them. But let’s not forget to state some caveats before thinking of applying for a loan, CultuurInvest will only invest in Belgium-based businesses that are demonstrating serious growth potential, with commercial backing on board. Despite it all, this is pretty amazing. I can’t think of any such agencies that do this at home in Canada.
The Antwerp Fashion Management Summer School Experience – Day 1 – MOMU
The MoMu or ModeMuseum is Antwerp’s fashion collection archive, housed within the prestigious Antwerp Fashion Academy where 60 out of 500 applicants get in every year, and only an average of 8 eke it out to the bitter yet beautiful end. At the time of our visit, the museum team were busily setting up their next installation, a tribute Madame Grès (or slate, a nickname she acquired), a true icon in the industry, who started her fashion house in Paris in 1943. Grès despised sewing so most of her magic was created through the use of pleats. The exhibition will display originals on loan as well as tribute pieces from haute-couture heroes like Comme Des Garçons, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Marc Jacobs, Lanvin and so on. So instead of exploring an exhibition, we were given a backstage tour of the museum’s fashion collection archives (and the upcoming expo seen below) which are mostly acquired through donations from private owners. The archive contains hundreds of pieces dating across the century, and most particularly is the largest repository of designs from German yet Belgian residing avant-garde designer, Bernard Wilhelm. Wilhelm’s wacky career has seen him assisting greats like Walter Van Beirendonck, Alexander Mc Queen, Vivienne Westwood and Dirk Bikkembergs.
The photos below also show one of the museum’s restoration experts repairing a 1950s cocktail dress that was shipped especially from the US for delicate repair.
The Antwerp Fashion Management Summer School Experience – Day 2 – Challenges & Strategies in Fashion Business – An Moons
Day Two was a crash course in organizational planning for up and coming fashion designers and business owners. An Moons helped outline some of the biggest pitfalls that are encountered in the Belgian indpendant design field. As with any creative business, finding capital, not just hard cash but what Bourdieu calls Cultural Capital (creative, commercial {sales, business, marketing, pr}, organizational, technical, R&D, and legal is probably one of the biggest challenges. Not to mention
However,what what can truly make or break a brand is the designer’s willingness to balance the creative design or “symbolic” value (in academic terms) with the garment’s actual functionality. The struggle between business and creative is never ending, but only second to the struggle between designer versus production teams, manufacturers and distribution chain.
My Big Business terminology was given a much-needed refresher as Moons outlined key integration terms from multi-sector and diagonal integration (for cross promotions á la LVMH) to upstream buying (where a manufacturer buys a designer). The concept of how of ‘artificial scarcity’ was touched on. Apparently it takes a lot of power to to create limited short run collections, mostly through ownership of distribution and retail channels. Ain’t that right, Heisenberg? It’s gotta be the blue stuff!
The Antwerp Fashion Management Summer School Experience – Day 1 – LUNCH!
A light champagne lunch (they really know how to do it right in Belgium!) was hosted in the reception room attached to the wedding chapel inside Antwerp’s stunning city hall.
The Antwerp Fashion Management Summer School Experience – Day 1 – Fashion Tourism & Global Culture
Our first lecture of the week was kicked off by Professor Jennifer Craik of the School of Fashion & Textiles at the RMIT University of Melbourne, Australia, author of The Face Of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion. Prof. Craik took our morning class on a global tour, showing us how fashion and tourism have intersected in our daily lives, to the point where destination shopping has become as equally valued as destination traveling. Starting with the history of Louis Vuitton and their seminal, stylized, and waterproof canvas bags and steamer cases originally designed for explorers of the late 19th century, leading into the creation of department stores in the 1900s, which were intended as homes away from homes for the upper-class, complete with chapels, libraries and other domestic accoutrements.
Not much has actually changed. It really made you think about some of the absurdities that we thought were things of the past but that we come to embrace in the 21st century, where stores have been advertised as even bigger and better than the tourist attractions we are supposed to be visiting.
A footnote to fashion tourism are Fashion Weeks. Our flashy little blue planet is now home to over 300 Fashion Weeks world wide with some cities like New York and LA hosting as many as 22 per year. I had no idea. I always thought the intention of these events was to cater to buyers within the industry but it seems that municipal organizations have always had their place in the events, starting with the first of their kind in New York in 1943. As I discovered, Fashion Weeks are as much industry as they are city marketing and PR.
Jesse Dreams of Belgium: The Antwerp Fashion Management Summer School Experience – Day 1
It’s been a few years since I’ve found myself back in school. After some lucky timing on a pre-planned trip to Belgium and the right ‘network’, I’ve again found myself in a university lecture hall, a situation I have not encountered since my last awkward dream of sitting naked and strung out, chewing on my nails as I struggle to write an exam or essay which I have not prepared.
I hope and pray my experience at the Antwerp Fashion Summer School will not be the same. Lucky for me, it is not. I’m neither naked, nor strung out, but feeling warmly accepted by a group of bright, eager, and incredibly well-dressed and well-spoken group of 40 + international students from incredibly diverse backgrounds from fledgling label owners, wearable technology innovators, stylists, pr, HR, masters students and even a ph.d candidate in supply chain management. My new friends hail from (of course Belgium), but also England, China, Estonia, Latvia, Hungary, and other regions of the EU.
Led by the charming Annick Schramme (Course Director, Academic Coordinator Master Cultural Management (UA) and Master Class Cultural Management (Antwerp Management School)) and her assistant Laila De Bruyne (Education Assistant in Cultural Management) our curriculum for the week will focus on a variety of guest lectures, tours and activities around Antwerp and Brussels. I can’t wait for it to begin!
