LFW - The Buildings Behind the Brands

(Article published in the AJ 05.03.09)

The venues build the clothing brands as much as the models at London Fashion Week, writes Crystal Bennes

London Fashion Week, 20-25 February, various venues, London

London Fashion Week (LFW) celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, and while you may think that there�s not much of a connection between LFW and London�s architecture, you�d be mistaken. Catwalk shows in venues like the Royal Opera House, a carpark in Brewer Street and the Korean Embassy are a crucial part of the designers� managing of their brands.

Since 2006, the home of LFW has been the Natural History Museum in Kensington, where the British Fashion Council (BFC) � the body that promotes British fashion designers � has its tent. While the white tents of LFW have not become as iconic as those of New York Fashion Week in Bryant Park, for fashion-forward Londoners they represent the glamorous lifestyle associated with the capital�s fashion industry.

Though designers don�t like to admit it, the recession has had an impact on the excesses of fashion week. This year saw only one tent on the lawns of the museum, as more and more designers are taking their pick of London�s buildings for use as runway stages. Showing outside of the BFC tent is not only more cost effective, it also allows the designer to appropriate a building to extend its brand image in a way not possible in the one-size-fits-all BFC tent.

Take two very different brands: Nicole Farhi and PPQ. Farhi has been in business for 27 years and is one of Britain�s most established designers. Her clothes are refined but playful, with an emphasis on tailoring in beautiful fabrics. PPQ on the other hand describe their look as �luxe pop-chic and underground London cool� and are favoured by indie-pop stars. Neither brands showed at the BFC tent. Instead, Farhi showed at Edward Middleton Barry�s Royal Opera House, in the glass-domed Floral Hall (1860), and PPQ showed in the Samuel Ware-designed Burlington Arcade (1819).

Not only does the architectural stage serve as the backdrop for the runway spectacle, but the constraints of the space also dictate the fashion world�s strict hierarchy. At Farhi, the catwalk was arranged in a square, instead of the traditional long rectangle, with the biggest names in the fashion press on one side, buyers across from them, lesser press on the third side, with VIPs in the front row, on display as much as the models. PPQ�s venue provided its own constraints, both to the staging but also to the all-important industry hierarchy, when nearly everyone became front-row, given the arcade�s confined space.

The Farhi-Opera House partnership is a good fit as both brands identify with refinement, luxury and sophistication; it clearly works for Farhi, as she has shown there for the past four years.

PPQ-Burlington Arcade, however, is a marriage of practicality. After closing their Conduit Street store last year, the company will soon open a pop-up shop in the Burlington Arcade. While Amy Molyneaux, one of PPQ�s designers, said that a pop-up shop would allow more versatility than the fixed layout of their previous store, certainly a short-term lease in the Burlington Arcade is also less financially demanding than a four-storey Mayfair boutique.

To show or not to show: a question fashion designers may soon be asking themselves in these economically uncertain times � especially when a single catwalk show can cost up to �600,000. If these grand spaces are invisible in the catwalk snaps published in fashion magazines worldwide, why go to the trouble and expense of a major show? Buyers and editors could just as easily look at the collections online. This season, British designer Alice Temperley eschewed a costly runway show in favour of showing her latest collection via a digital installation at her shop, for example.

The numerous considerations involved in producing a show means that the decision to stage must be more about brand management than ease of use. As any fashion insider will tell you, the point of fashion week and its catwalks is spectacle. The celebrities, the unusual venues, the aura of exclusivity: if nothing else, these lavish circuses sell perfume to those who can�t afford the clothes but who still want a piece of the lifestyle associated with these fantastic spectacles. Build something grand enough and your building may serve as the backdrop for a future catwalk.

but Larkin will never go out of fashion...

Nicole Farhi A/W '09 at the Royal Opera House

Even though London Fashion Week isn't technically over, my involvement in it is as the copy for my piece on LFW is just about finished (not half as crap as I thought it would be). I wouldn't say I enjoyed the shows, but it was interesting to see how they operated. It's funny because I think I'd enjoy them a lot more were they less laden with all the weird fashionista self-righteousness: I want to scream at these people 'you work for fashion magazines! you don't even make clothes, you sell them by wearing them! why so smug?' Via the forces of PR, the fashion world has created an aura of 'exclusivity' and I'll tell you why that aura is so essential for the success of the industry. If you knew just how shallow the people were, how uneventful the shows are, how scary the models look in real life, but especially how crap the parties are, you'd never ever shell out the big bucks for a pair of Prada shoes. Sure, you might still admire the man-hours involved in making an avant-garde McQueen dress, but it wouldn't be surrounded in a halo of celebrity-coveting desire if the 'fashion world' lost its lustrous lustre (tautology, I know).

If nothing else, I'm glad I went if only to strengthen existing beliefs. Yeah - cool, well-constructed clothes are fun, but when people start using designer labels (and all that they imply) to prop up an ailing sense of self, then the fashion, advertising, and PR people are doing their jobs too well.

On to more interesting things... Far more desirable, and strangely enough almost more difficult to obtain, were tickets to the great Josephine Hart's poetry evening at the British Library. A few of these evenings have been broadcast on Radio 4 and I heard a repeat broadcast one sunny afternoon last May (of the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning) and have been trying to get tickets ever since. Hart is an Irish novelist, married to the other Saatchi (Maurice), and has brilliant connections in the acting world. The premise of her evenings is based on a simple idea: poetry is meant to be heard with the ear, not seen with the eye. She picks a different poet for each monthly reading and then selects a number of actors for their affinity to the selected poet's work. This month's poet was Philip Larkin and the readers were Charles Dance (best know as Mr Tulkinghorn in Bleak House) and Dominic West (apparently plays Jimmy McNulty in some show called the Wire). Hart is absolutely right about the necessity of hearing poetry and not reading it, and it is so much better to have actors performing the poems rather than the author's stilting and self-conscious reading. I've never been a huge Larkin fan and before the readings began I was secretly disappointed to have missed other, favoured poets, but the actors made the poems come alive in such an inspiring way, that you can't help but make immediate connections. I absolutely loved it and when I got home later that night I tried to book for March's reading (Wilde!!), but it was already sold out...

A little Larkin to leave you. I really liked this poem, read last night, called 'Dockery and Son':

'Dockery was junior to you,
Wasn't he?' said the Dean. 'His son's here now.'
Death-suited, visitant, I nod. 'And do
You keep in touch with-' Or remember how
Black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight
We used to stand before that desk, to give
'Our version' of 'these incidents last night'?
I try the door of where I used to live:

Locked. The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide.
A known bell chimes. I catch my train, ignored.
Canal and clouds and colleges subside
Slowly from view. But Dockery, good Lord,
Anyone up today must have been born
In '43, when I was twenty-one.
If he was younger, did he get this son
At nineteen, twenty? Was he that withdrawn

High-collared public-schoolboy, sharing rooms
With Cartwright who was killed? Well, it just shows
How much . . . How little . . . Yawning, I suppose
I fell asleep, waking at the fumes
And furnace-glares of Sheffield, where I changed,
And ate an awful pie, and walked along
The platform to its end to see the ranged
Joining and parting lines reflect a strong

Unhindered moon. To have no son, no wife,
No house or land still seemed quite natural.
Only a numbness registered the shock
Of finding out how much had gone of life,
How widely from the others. Dockery, now:
Only nineteen, he must have taken stock
Of what he wanted, and been capable
Of . . . No, that's not the difference: rather, how

Convinced he was he should be added to!
Why did he think adding meant increase?
To me it was dilution. Where do these
Innate assumptions come from? Not from what
We think truest, or most want to do:
Those warp tight-shut, like doors. They're more a style
Our lives bring with them: habit for a while,
Suddenly they harden into all we've got

And how we got it; looked back on, they rear
Like sand-clouds, thick and close, embodying
For Dockery a son, for me nothing,
Nothing with all a son's harsh patronage.
Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.

Why fashion people piss me off

So I'm writing a piece on the "architecture of fashion week" for the AJ (no, I don't know how it's going to work either...) and I thought it would be cool to hit up four or five shows and then talk about how they use all the cool old buildings of London - the Natural History Museum and the royal Opera House - to produce their spectacular, spectaculars. However the complete bitchy snobbery of London's fahion PR people has put a massive dent in my plans. Only the nice head of the PR team at Nicole Farhi sorted me out with a ticket, about four other houses promised me a ticket only to bail with two or three days to go.

The problem is that most fashion companies hire PR wenches to do their bidding, theoretically leaving the "creatives" free to deal with the creative stuff. And I get the whole need to whip up an aura of exclusivity around the brand - I mean would PPQ or Christopher Kane really want people to think their A-list status was slipping by making sure only celbs like Lilly Allen and Peaches Geldof were in attendance at their shows? Um, right... Teeny boppers who idolise Peaches and Lilly and the clothes they wear aren't going to go out and actually buy PPQ - they're going to wait until Primark or Topshop rips the designs and then buy the, for a song.

The temptation to stomp my feet and scream at these evil minxes who are reserving tickets for all the sugary pop tarts in town and the assistant's assistants of crappy fashion magazines is quite high, but I'm trying to behave myself. It just makes it a lot harder to write an already impossible to write piece...

Rant over.