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!
The Antwerp Fashion Management Summer School Experience – Day 2 – Van De Velde Lingerie tour!
At last the moment all the guys on the tour had been waiting for, the tour of the Van de Velde Holdings lingerie factory in Schellebelle! Ok, I kid, although I’m sure some had some funny ideas of what to expect. Personally, I knew very little about the company and wasn’t sure what was to come, but it was quite an interesting experience. After another crash course in business planning and practices from Karel Van De Velde, grandson of founders Margaretha and Achiel Van de Velde, who founded the company in 1919 as a corset and private label production company, we were given a tour of the prestigious factory. Van de Velde is actually now a holding company for five major luxury lingerie brands, Marie Jo (BE), Marie Jo L’Aventure (BE), Prima Donna & Prima Donna Twist (NL), catering to larger cup sized women, going all the way up to size I, (yes you know that letter that comes after D, E, F G and H!!) and the sultry Andres Sarda (SP). The company is currently worth a ridiculous 480 billion Euros with 180 million Euros in sales er year. What distinguishes them the most in the market is their dedication to educating women on how to properly wear their brassieres.
The tour consisted of their design and prototyping studios which we were not able to take photos of, but we had a carte blanche of their factory as you will see below. Follow the jump for more pics!
The Antwerp Fashion Management Summer School Experience – Day 2 – Business Models in Fashion 101 – Walter Van Andel
The second half of the morning was dominated by author and marketing, research and business consultant Walter Van Andel, who gave me another much needed crash course focused on business models in the fashion industry. The lecture gave me flashbacks of sitting in class with Jane Bongers at Humber College’s Advertising Copywriting program where we learned the basics of value propositions, strategies, choices and consequences, and value capturing.
His presentation was followed up by a case study of a successful Belgian designer, Natalie Vleeshouwer, who early in her career, following a one-off maternity wear gig, realized that there was a niche to be filled in the high-end maternity wear market. She now has has about a dozen shops worldwide under the Fragile name, with a strong following in Japan, and line extension that simply follows her name due to apologetic requests from mothers who wanted to keep wearing her clothing but were sure that they would no longer be pregnant again! The bonus of her maternitywear line is that it can be worn after pregnancy and the materials are made of extremely sensitive and comfort-focused fabrics.
How America Watches……
Eyebrows up!
Dave Sitek – Shoop Lion
Ok, so why wasn’t Dave Sitek involved in the Snoop Lion project?
Diplo’s rap premiere – “We Are Farmers” – Three LOCO !!!!
Three Loco are Andy Milonakis, RiFF RAFF and Dirt Nasty. Check out Diplo’s rap premier towards the end. Geesus dirty molly christ. I don’t know if they’re the holy trinity of hip-hop but they are definitely something to watch out for, or run far far away from.
Мишка x Sprayground Lamour Supreme Backpack
Yes, because you should be advertising the fact that you are a graffiti writer, as if paint covered hands and that shifty look in your eyes weren’t enough, hehehe. Oh well, it is still a pretty sick retro-inspired bag and design by longtime Mischka collaborator Lamour Supreme and Sprayground Backpacks. Buy it HERE for $65.00
