Why American fashion is migrating to LA
The West Coast has movie moguls, the East Coast has editors. But which US city is the home of American fashion?
The global tour of the Autumn/Winter 2020 fashion collections began in Los Angeles this season, despite being part of New York Fashion Week. This oddity was driven by the overlap of the Academy Awards with New York’s fashion calendar, but the fact that the glitz of Hollywood could shift decades of American fashion tradition highlights the quakes that are shaking fashion industry traditions.
Tom Ford revealed his collection with a catwalk that looked more like an Oscars after-party than a fashion show, with Hollywood powerhouses such as Jeff Bezos and Ron Howard mingling there. He generated headlines on the Friday of Oscars weekend with a massive and valuable grab of media attention, which is exactly the point of a fashion show these days. The sheer number of stories suggests that Ford’s move created the sort of return on investment that a fashion show is intended to garner.
But Ford was not the first of the fashion reveals that took place in LA in advance of New York Fashion Week. First came M Missoni on Tuesday, which held a dance-a-thon presentation at the famous — or infamous, depending how you feel about wieners — Pink’s Hot Dogs on La Brea Avenue. Technically, it was the Italian label’s Spring 2020 season, but with see-now-buy-now so fully ensconced on fashion calendars, no one is counting. Dozens of beautiful people lounging about in M Missoni’s vivid knitwear — the newly legal scent of cannabis wafting about — looked as though they were staged for the Italian brand’s next advertising campaign, and images were immediately released on social media.
Three afternoons later, Baja East took over the nightclub at the Edition hotel in West Hollywood, which has a ceiling full of disco balls and, for the show, a floor strewn with colourful woven rugs. That was a fitting location for this hipster-ease label, which exudes a stoned-on-the-beach-after-all-night-partying sensibility.
The Baja East story taps into a wider tale of two cities locked in a rivalry to lead America in cultural relevance. The label started out in New York in 2013, an unapologetically expensive luxury brand that promoted loose ungendered clothing one might want to wear après-surf in Baja. But its designers — then Scott Studenberg and John Targon — were New Yorkers — hence the “East”.
In the seven years since, Baja East has pared its prices dramatically to the so-called contemporary level and cut to one designer, Studenberg. (Targon briefly joined Marc Jacobs, then launched his own line called Fall Risk.) Studenberg migrated to Los Angeles in August 2017, where he lives in Laurel Canyon a few minutes from the Edition hotel where he showed his Autumn/Winter collection to a crowd of friends and fans that included the musical artist Paula Abdul. He says he has no plans to return to New York Fashion Week.
“I don’t like New York. It’s not my vibe anymore,” Studenberg said backstage after his show. “I don’t want to go on Monday, but I’ll go to sell my collection,” he added, giving a nod to the fact that New York is the indispensable home of America’s most productive wholesale showrooms.
A few hours after Baja East, the fashion-going crowd moved several miles east to central Hollywood, where Tom Ford revealed his AW2020 collection to many of the same people who would be attending the Academy Awards two nights later. Ford’s gravitas in Hollywood comes both as the fashion designer who dresses the entertainment industry’s power brokers — a role he took over from Giorgio Armani and Brioni — as well as an accomplished film director.
This created a wholly different front row than any fashion show in recent recall. The Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos was seated in the place of honor beside Anna Wintour. Super agent and Creative Artists Agency partner and managing director Bryan Lourd chatted with producer Brian Grazer. Guests included Jennifer Lopez, Miley Cyrus, Jon Hamm, Jason Momoa and so many more that it’s easy to see why Ford chose LA over New York. He owned the city and the fashion internet that night.
From left: Jeff Bezos, Anna Wintour and Jennifer Lopez at Tom Ford AW20
The event generated $6.1m of media value in the days after the show, according to London-based Launchmetrics, which scrapes the internet for mentions and calculates the financial value if the media had been purchased. That’s 36 per cent more than the $4.5m in media that Launchmetrics estimated Ford’s show generated in September 2019, when he held it in a New York subway station. Showing in LA was a daring move for Ford, who is the newly appointed chairman of the Council of Fashion Designers of America. Many in the industry felt he should remain loyal to New York’s fashion week in order to be more supportive of other designers. However, it’s hard to argue with his results.
The question remains, for designers who lack Ford’s might, how to generate the greatest return from a fashion show. This is something that is too little studied by fashion brands who often lack the finances or know-how. If publicity and pictures are the primary products of fashion shows today, which is more valuable — an audience full of influencers and editors in New York, or the cabal of Hollywood stars and starlets and the organised hype behind them in Los Angeles?
Diving deeper into the numbers suggests that breaking away from the fashion week pack can be highly beneficial to a brand. The stories coming out of Ford’s Hollywood runway tended to be specifically about Ford, rather than mentioning him among other New York designers, according to Launchmetrics. In fact, the analysts calculate that, when accounting for the benefit of celebrities and influencers and lack of shared references with fashion week, the better comparison to media value is a stunning $9.7m rather than the $6.1m measured within the fashion context. That’s bad for New York Fashion Week, but suggests a massive benefit to Ford.