From The Atlantic: Fashion in Dark Times.
New York fashion is mostly a lot of small businesses. Even household-name designers often lack backers, which means that they make twice-yearly gambles (on their fall and spring collections) requiring huge cash outlays-for the most part, fabrics have to be bought, patterns cut, garments sewn, and finishes applied before any money comes in. All of which makes the industry unusually vulnerable to the credit squeeze. Fashion is by far the largest manufacturing industry in New York, but it’s mostly made up of piecework (for instance, Lyn Devon, a rising designer known for her well-cut, sexy renditions of classics, relies on four women in Queens to produce all her knitwear). Last season’s sales, then, were “very, very destructive,” as Singer says. “It might be cool to be able to find something for 80 percent off … but that means a lot of people aren’t getting paid, and a lot of businesses are going to go under.” Diane von Furstenberg, who serves as president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, declared with old-world imperiousness that the sales that had devastated the industry “cannot happen again.”
But they’re bound to. Days before Fashion Week, a friend in the fashion world ran into the fashion director of a tony Manhattan department store on the store’s empty main sales floor. Surveying the unsold spring lines, the director said the clothes would sit at full price on the shelves until March (the conventional understanding, violated by Saks in the fall, holds that stores won’t mark down prices for two months), and “then we slash.” For their part, of course, the large retailers are also hemorrhaging: in January, Saks fired 1,100 people, including its director of women’s fashion, Michael Fink, and Neiman’s fired 375 (just after Fashion Week, Neiman’s fired an additional 450 employees).
Given this cataclysmic reality, Fashion Week itself was, depending on one’s point of view, a remnant of an age of gaudy excess or evidence of remarkable and unfounded pluck.
