I went to four parties last night, and the best, of course, was the most exclusive. Perhaps you know the type: chardonnay on the kitchen table of an East Side studio. Baby carrots and Carr’s crackers and dip. The hostess was a woman in her mid-20s who works as a buyer at a fancy Manhattan department store. She said that being a buyer is a fun job “if you like fashion and you want to be creative, but you don’t have an aptitude for design.” But really she’s interested in literary nonfiction. Let’s call her Joan.
Because Fashion Week so often gives the appearance of being an extended photo opportunity for Mischa Barton, it’s easy to forget that its central purpose is to woo retailers. Not that the retailers mind Mischa in the least. “It’s validating because so much of what we do is office work,” Joan said. “You spend all day on the phone and working on spreadsheets, and then, a few weeks a year, there’s a lot of flashbulbs going off and you get to feel important.”
Joan’s employer has both a fashion office and a buyers’ office. The job of the first group is conceptual, and the job of the second is strategic, but they’re all looking for trends—”this color, this texture, this shape.” For one reason or another, it’s too early to say what trends have emerged this week. Some people think that designers are playing it safe and sticking with what’s been working; Michael Roberts, the fashion and style director of Vanity Fair, thinks that all trends come from Paris and Milan anyway: “It’s too disparate in New York. There, everything is clear and directional.”
The fashion office looks at the trends and decides “what the story is gonna be.” (One big story for this fall, for instance, is the ” ‘60s/’80s thing … very graphic, black-and-white, mod, booties, big tops over leggings—like Edie Sedgwick.”) The buyers crunch numbers and “write the buy,” but not before, in the coming month or so, they file into designers’ showrooms to look at the clothes up close, as worn by “fit models”: Rather than the anorexic teenagers of the runways, the women will be “like a perfect size 4 or 6.”
Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barneys, told me that the key to running a store is having a point of view: “You have to hate things. You have to love things. You have to be able to wrap together the things you love and stuff them down the consumers’ throats—but without asphyxiating them.” Joan agreed, adding, “You have to be able to convince people that it looks good even when it doesn’t. … These shapeless, boxy tops over leggings can make an average American woman look horrible, but everyone’s gonna buy it.” I see. More chardonnay, please.
