Yearly Archives: 2011

The Fashion Business

The Zara Juggernaut – Australian Financial review

The Zara Juggernaut

AFR Magazine | April 2o11

by Marion Hume 

Spain’s remote corners are good at revolutions, from the gastrenomic one that began at a Catalonian country restaurant called El Bulli, to the fast-fashion phenomenon that sprang from the wilds of Galicia to conquer the malls of the world.

Given I have travelled across Europe to discuss a miracle, how fitting that the man I’ve come to meet is called Jesus. My pilgrimage has taken me to Spain’s North West, to Galicia, which is as far as you can go from the castanet cliche of the sun-backed south. For this is not the Costa del Sol, but the Costa del Muerte, the coast of death. At the very tip of the landmass, clinging like a barnacle to a rock and battered by sea spray, sits the little city of Coruna and just beyond it, along the rugged coast, Arteixo, a town of just 5,000 souls. Yet it is here that a global fashion phenomenon is headquartered.

If you track the markets, you may know of Inditex, which has experienced the kind of growth that makes you wish you could turn back time to the March 2001 IPO and scoop up some of the 40% equity floated on the Madrid Stock Exchange (60% remains with the founding family). Inditex, born in the late 1960s on an investment of just 30 euros (yes, E30, or 5,000 pesetas as it was in the old money) is now worth more than E 32 billion ($44 billion). So I’m looking forward to asking a man called Jesus Echevarria, the chief spokesman for the company, how that happened.

But first, I need to find him. The taxi arrives at a huge industrial estate. Sorry, what was that? Reception is across that courtyard, then down into the underground car park? When that turns out to be correct, the message is clear: no unannounced callers welcome here. Next, I take the lift up to reception, where a young woman in a headset greets me, then escorts me into a glass-sided lift. We rise up through blank, shiny floors that give no clue as to what happens here and then I wait alone in a boardroom, long enough to gaze out the window and realise that every 30 seconds, another huge truck pulls out from the loading bay down below and drives away.

“Hello! Sorry to keep you waiting. Coffee? I am Jesus,” says a man in a suit, bearing what is, in Spain, a relatively common name. He’s going to tell me more about a name that’s also pretty common, wherever you live in the world. If Inditex, which stands for Industria de Disena Textil might not mean much, have you ever heard of Zara? In the unlikely event you have not, brace yourself. The global fast fashion force is, at last, coming to Australia this month, a full decade after company scouts began arriving to study locations and logistics. The brand will open two stores, the first in Westfield Sydney with Melbourne to follow. “Thank God we won’t be a third world fashion country any more,” is how one Sydney fashion fanatic puts it.

Inditex is probably the biggest fashion company in the world; probably, because it depends on how you measure (there are mega retailers that sell lots of everything, including clothes, although this may not count as fashion). Inditex sells 700 million units per year globally. Within the empire, Zara is by far the most dominant brand (63.8%) and its sales for 2009 (the last full year available) were E7,077 millions. In 2005, Inditex overtook the Swedish fashion giant, Hennes & Mauritz (H&M); in 2008, it overtook the US one, Gap. Of the more than 5,000 stores Inditex has around the world about 1,700 of them are Zara boutiques. The parent company employs over 100,000 people belonging to more than 140 different nationalities.

The Zara name includes womenswear, menswear, children’s wear, homeware, accessories, perfume and now, zara.com. Yet the other Inditex brands are hardly tiddlers. These comprise Pull & Bear, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Stradivarius, Oysho and Uterque, are names which don’t exactly trip off the tongue, but each does significant business around the world. Uterque for instance has some 80 stores in 16 countries. though heaven knows how people pronounce the names in any of them. In contrast, the name Zara works brilliantly because it is pronounced the same in every language bar one. (Ironically, that one is Spanish, where it is pronounced “Tha-ra”).

The choice of this convenient four letter word is however entirely accidental. Back in the ‘60s, the son of a railwayman called Amancio Ortega teamed up with his brother and his brother’s wife and started a business manufacturing shirts and nightwear (the best seller was a pink bathrobe for women). The wholesale business boomed and, in what would prove a turning point, Ortega realised that control, though at this time, not necessarily easy money- lay in owning stores in order to oversee the complete vertical process.

Had the company remained a manufacturer, it would doubtless be out of business today, as others have pulled production out of Spain in search of cheaper deals in Bulgaria, Romania and beyond. Instead, in 1975, Ortega opened a little shop in La Coruna  – it is still there today – and decided to call it Zorba, as in Zorba the Greek. But the owner of a nearby bar of the same name saw the signage go up he protested. Ortega agreed to change it but, because you need costly moulds to make three dimensional store front lettering, he needed a name which could be made in the moulds already cast. So they repeated the “a” and Zara was born.

You are not about to meet  Amancio Ortega, because the 75-year-old founder has never given an interview. Thus the 9th richest man in the world is far less known than those who sit above him on the Forbes rich list, such as the Mexican telecom titan, Carlos Slim Helu, Americans Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Larry Ellison, the steel magnet Lakshmi Mittal and LVMH’s Bernard Arnault. Before the internet and camera phones, Amancio Ortega was never even knowingly photographed, but then a few pictures appeared online and now Inditex provides an official portrait. Apparently, there’s no mystery  about why this twice married father of three doesn’t speak in public, he just doesn’t chose to. He didn’t even show for the Inditex IPO.

Although it has just been announced that he will move aside at the shareholders’ meeting in July 2011 and the current second-in-command, Pablo Isla Alverez de Tajera, will become both chairman and Chief Executive, Isla is unlikely to be much more available. “He does speak twice a year, at the AGM and the shareholders’ meeting. But no, we don’t expect him to do more,” says Echevarria, who remains the only company voice. So what is the secret of success? ““Maybe because we are on the edge, not at a crossroads,” he says. “We are here alone, which allows us to concentrate. But there’s more.”

A silent CEO is just one of the many ways in which one of the world’s most dynamic fashion forces is different. This is a story of going zig when others go zag. Beyond the obscure location on the edge of the Atlantic, and the odd fact that Zara spends almost nothing on advertising (most fashion brands factor in  a minimum of 4% of turnover a year), nothing Zara actually does is done how others do it, to the point that the company became a subject of a Harvard Business School study which could be titled “Doing everything upside down.” (In fact it is called something so boring, such as “Inditex case study,” that I didn’t write it down).

Most fashion companies work like this; there are the designers. They design. There is a show. Meanwhile fabric is ordered for those designs, takes ages to arrive and then factories start to make the designs; the designs are advertised and the customer goes into the store to find them. At Zara, however, the customer goes into the store, sees a white jacket and says she’d prefer it in cream. If a couple more customers do that, two weeks’ later (perhaps less) there it is. The store is the centre piece and constant drops of new fashion to keep the customer coming back to see what’s new.

There is no Zara “style”, instead there a multiple styles, all of which disappear fast, so you won’t find everyone else wearing them. If a look doesn’t sell, it is pulled. There is , however, an innate Spanishness, which is to say, Spanish women, whether Castilian from Madrid or Catalunyan from Barcelona or Galician from Coruna, tend to have a proud bearing which they want flattered by tailoring; thus Zara’s jackets tend to be somewhat sexier, curvier of cut than others at these prices.

Because the vast geographical spread of the 5,000 Zara stores, a small production run is 30,000 pieces, leading to both economies of scale and the guarantee that hardly anyone you will ever bump into will have what you have. Stores order twice a week and the logistics that make that possible are astonishing (Think factory floors the size of way too many soccer pitches, full of clothing items flying around on tracks suspended from the ceiling and then ending up in specific cardboard boxes on which the store destination is already encoded. Those working in the warehouses move about by bicycle because the distances are so huge.)

As to why it has taken Zara so long to enter the Australian market, the company has been studying it for some time.  “For Australia, we had to be convinced we could give our excellent service to a customer in the Southern Hemisphere,” Echevarria says. “We have 250 womenswear designers specifically thinking of the Northern Hemisphere and then the others of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, where of course we have shared heritage and language (as for Brazil, Galego, the regional language of Galicia, has similarities with Portuguese). We knew we couldn’t do last season’s clothes later for Australia, so we have been sending the design teams many times so they know what will work and at the right moment. It has taken us a long time to be ready because we are Zara and we know people expect us to get it right.”

Fashion folk love Zara, for its style and its speed. (From factory to store in 48 hours and the aim is to do that even for Australia). For those of us who like to poke our noses into company CSR (corporate social responsibility), Zara and parent company Inditex are popular too.

More than 50% of its offering, comprising most of its fast-fashion pieces, are made in factories it owns in Spain meaning it can guard against the kind of scary labour practices that haunt fast fashion. But as with all fast fashion (not specifically Inditex), once offshore, things are harder to police, this compounded by shoppers having come to expect low prices. Generally, campaigners and trade unions are alarmed at the cost of workers of a decade of deflation in clothing prices. But all Inditex’s 1,237 contracted suppliers are governed by the company’s External Manufacturers and Workshops Code of Conduct and it has also forged strong partnerships with international union bodies.

As to its eco friendliness, the message at HQ is demonstrated by a vast wind turbine soaring overhead. Being fortuitously positioned in a place that is both windy and sunny means much of the energy needs can be generated on the spot. In addition, Echevarria in intent on showing me how energy that would otherwise leech out and be lost has been redirected into the steamers that iron every garment. He is especially proud of the battered state of the cardboard boxes packed with goods for stores all over the world. These are reused and reused before being eventually recycled, he tells me.

Commendably Zara has gone far with its store design. Not only does every store turn its lights off for Earth Day,  the latest opening, in Rome, aims to be the first ever fashion store to achieve the platinum standard certification, a seal of sustainable architecture that is one of the most demanding of its kind in the world. The company is working to make all stores eco efficient and older sites are being retrofitted. Echevarria is reluctant to let me take away a CSR report because it runs to 311 pages and this company hates to consume paper. Plastic bags are oxo biodegradable, meaning they break down to a small amount of biomass within two years, while traditional plastic bags take more than 400.

By studying the small print of  the 22 pages concerning Inditex and society, I learn that the company has made emergency gifts in the multimillions in response to the earthquakes in Haiti and Sumatra,  multiple gifts (of hundreds of thousands of Euro) to community and NGO projects in Cambodia, Morocco, Mali and beyond and that it builds some of its Spanish stores under its “for&from” project, which aims to make it possible for those with severe mental disabilities to join the workforce. So far, so good.

Where Zara does raise ire is when it comes to design, as in its appropriation of other people’s ideas. The model is only possible because both the design team and the customer is strongly inspired by the creation of others- who are neither acknowledged nor paid. While the likes of Topshop have overcome this criticism by supporting both London Fashion Week and British designers from deep pockets and H&M does high profile hi-lo collaborations with designers-most recently with Alber Elbaz of Lanvin- Zara does not.

Hussein Chalayan is just one originator who has seen the result of hours and hours of his labour hanging with a Zara label. Not that the fast fashion shopper, looking for something fabulous at a good price, cares a hoot. In the past, some designers actually used to be happy about Zara using their designs. Before the internet put every style on instant view, Inditex used to send teams around the world with a shopping spend that was legendary. I know of one French fashion label that used to factor in the Zara spend, not minding because Zara was mass and they were high end. Otherwise, designers have tended not to take on fast-fashion brands because altering a sleeve or changing a stripe tends to make clothing copyright cases notoriously difficult to prosecute. Not for nothing has Daniel Piette, then the fashion director of Louis Vuitton described Zara as *the most innovative and devastating retailer in the world”.

In February, Inditex brand Stradivarius was forced to U-turn after teenage style bloggers complained that images they had posted of themselves online had been reproduced rather too faithfully on the front of T-shirts. “It would have been no problem if they asked me,” one blogger told The Guardian. The article suggested that designers working in the vast studios at Inditex may be resorting to the internet to search out images of cool hipsters because of the pressure they are under to hit targets on the number of designs they produce each day. Zara alone is thought to produce some 40,000 designs a year.

While there’s a joke now that there’s a Zara opening somewhere every week, it was far from an overnight success. Ortega was 39 before he opened the first store, but after that it was as if he was making up for lost time. Stores opened at a heady pace, first in Spain, then Portugal. Location was always key – indeed the only Zara store not in a prime location is the first. The company launched itself in the US at a site bang opposite Bloomingdales on Lexington Avenue in 1989 and then on rue du Rivoli Paris in 1990.

The big question though- once Sydney and Melbourne are trading, once other sites across Australia are ear-marked for the Inditex brands as is also happening in South Africa- is where next.  There are already more than 150 Inditex stores in China. Central and South America are conquered and the company has posted its flag all over South East Asia. But once New Zealand gets Zara (no plans yet revealed) where else is left? Especially as the global shopper can go to zara.com?

The answer may well be hidden away in a secret bunker in one of the vast buildings at Arteixo. Echevarria escorts me past extra security and then we walk into a vast empty space, with a heavy industrial curtain to the rear. He pulls it back enough for us to pass through and there is a whole Inditex street, of fully kitted out stores, none like you have seen before,  including a whole new look for Zara women and Zara mens (think “more like Prada” and “more like Gucci” respectively).

But I suspect there is more. The night before my official meeting at Inditex, I have met up with an old friend who has connections deep inside the company. “There’s something completely new,” she tells me. So will the empire keep up the march, with another concept entirely. Tantalizingly, at the end of the secret Inditex street, there’s another curtain, but Echevarria steers me away. “We are thinking all the time of new concepts,” he says. But can’t he tell me more, given I have come all this, way? “We are always thinking,” he says, then adds “lunch?”. This being Spain, it’s past 3pm and I am, it has to be said, ravenously hungry. So Jesus and I head off for bread and fish and wine, Galician style. Whatever might be the next miracle, for now must stay  a secret.

Travel

South Australia – On A Grander Scale – Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair | April 2011 

On A Grander Scale

Forget your Rough Guide. What you’ll really need is a Thesaurus because the landscapes of South Australia will soon have you racking your brain for alternative to “huge”, “amazing”, “awesome” and “wowee”.

 

By Marion Hume

Do not go to South Australia because you want to climb the Harbour Bridge, watch the sun rise over Uluru or find Nemo on the Great Barrier Reef. None of these are in South Australia, where you can’t even crack a convict joke in the state capital of Adelaide without someone pointing the sugar tongs and reminding you that there was never any of that transported unpleasantness around here — it was free-settled in accordance to an 1834 Act of His Majesty’s Parliament. But do go to South Australia, because it will blow your mind.

One and a half times the size of Texas, think of it as a perpetual version of the artist James Turrell’s Bindu Shards, the mysterious hi-tech installation that packed them in at London’s Gagosian Gallery in late 2010 — except out here you won’t have to clamber inside a metal pod in order to witness Technicolor dreams so intense they’re freaky. You’ll feel utterly alone as dawn breaks over the Finders rangers and they pump up the lights. Sure, waking up on the other side of the state line at Uluru (Ayers Rock if you’re not keeping up) is impressive, until someone slurps from a Thermos. But what’s different here is you can’t capture this on a postcard because the immensity makes it photographically impossible.

It’s as if the Zen principles of the Japanese garden have been turned upside down. Every rock in the foreground could be a mountain in the distance — your brain can’t compute the dimensions of the empty space in between, especially without the migratory herds of the African plains on which to lock your viewfinder. Still, look down and there could be a king brown snake, dull-looking but deadly, about to slither up under the axle of your car.

To explore here is both a sensory pleasure — such a cluster of world-class wineries — and a tease. Let’s say you are doing a quick edit of your digital snaps. What you see are Alpine slopes. Where you are is on a bluff bleached by the sun where the pines have shed their needles. Then there’s your ears, which hear the crackle of footsteps on a frosty lawn while your eyes spy kangaroo-paw prints on the salty crust of what was once the ocean floor.

But before we get into the outback, just an hour or so out of Adelaide is the Barossa Valley. Most of its early settlers were Lutherans fleeing religious persecution in Prussia, who thoughtfully stuffed some vines in their bags as they decamped from South Australia.

If you intend to sample the Shiraz, you must stay at The Louise. No you must stay at The Louise — Australia’s drink-driving laws are among the toughest in the world. Then you can also experience the delight of an outdoor shower, before dinner at Appellation, where grilled wagyu mignon wrapped in prosciutto with bacon crumble and creamed white beans convinces you that it is justly renowned.

Another day, another valley of vines, although there aren’t many wineries like Sevenhill Cellars, which has the lay market and the church trade stitched up (the latter is shifting from reds to whites to save on laundering the alter cloths). North Bundaleer, built at the end of the 19th century, sits where the Clare Valley ends. This gracious homestead was built for George Maslin, a sheep farmer made good, so there’s a ballroom under the corrugated-iron roof.

Of course, this being Australia, some things are just odd. So you don’t blink when a bloke looks up from under the brim of his Akubra and says his semen price is $60 a dose. He’s talking about his stud ram. And the man in raggedy trousers, leaning on a gate forged out of an old iron bedstead? He only looks like a Depression-era portrait by Dorothea Lange until his iPhone beeps with the Tokyo trading price for sushi-grade abalone, for which he owns a brace of offshore dive licenses. After hours on a bullet-straight road, you’re in a pub and the waitress reappears, cradling a small goat, to offer condom pie for afters. Ah, that would be quandong, a native plum.

Arriving into the little former railway town of Quorn feels like high noon in the Wild West, due to its streets as wide as a movie set-which is what is has been since Maureen O’Hara showed up in the 50s, followed by Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr in the 60s, and then Mel Gibson, who shot scenes for Gallipoli here in 1980, back when he was still beautiful.

There was a camel in Gallipoli; in fact there have been camels in South Australia since 1840. Today there are over a million feral dromedaries roaming the country, descended from those that hauled anything from telegraph cables to the sleepers for the Ghan railway — “Ghan” being short for “Afghan”, a catch-all term for Muslim cameleers. Surnames deriving from Muscat, Yemen and Iraq pepper South Australia. Look hard enough and somewhere you’ll find camel pie.

Arkaba is one of the Luxury Lodges of Australia-Which also include The Louise, the divine Capella off the coast of New South Wales and the new Saffire in Tasmania, as well as Southern Ocean Lodge on Kangaroo Island, of which more in due course. It’s a spirited initiative to trump the successful superlodges of New Zealand. Arkaba’s owner, Charlie Carlow, heir to the earldom of Portarlington, explains: “We are not trying to recreate hotel rooms with mini-bars. Here you just help yourself to drinks- it’s like staying in someone’s home. This is an early settler property, and the original owner had some kind of eating house or pub-there’s an Eating House Creek nearby. Graveyards on the property tell of heroic failures.” The bedheads are made of old fence posts, bed-side tables are glass-topped wool bales and communal dining is round an old wool-sorting table.

Most of all, though, at Arkaba it is possible to get some perspective on the landscape of the rugged Flinders Ranges.

Every August since 1856 professional or “gun” shearers have shown up to work at the Arkaba woolshed, which looks just like the one in Tom Robert’s 19th century masterpiece, Shearing the Rams, a painting that defines a certain strand of Australian art that is at once masculine and misty.

Collectively, the traditional inhabitants of the Flinders Ranges are known as the Adnyamathanha, the hill people. But even the ancient Aboriginal tribes are, in geological terms, johnny-come-latelys in a wonderland that dates back some 1.8 billion years.

Further north, things get more exciting as they get younger (about 550 million years). Because so few people kick about in the Ediacara Hills, no one picked up the key to life until 2003, after which Ross Fargher, whose family own the Prairie Hotel, Parachilna, left his fossil lying on the porch until a palaeontologist realised it beat that of the next oldest vertebrae by 30 million years. No wonder David Attenborough gets breathless when he visits.

When I was editing Vogue Australia, I sent a fashion team to the Prairie Hotel, where the time is always beer o’clock and there’s fancy fayre like wallaby shashlick and emu-egg frittata on the menu. They drove out into the middle of nowhere and just at the model was striking a pose a voice hollered, “Oi! I’ve just raked that!” And then Kate Winslet and Harvey Keitel appeared to shoot a scene for Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke.

Take a small plane south and meet me on Kangaroo Island. You’re still in the same state, but it’s too far to drive unless you’ve got time on your hands.

So you’ve ticked off the African Safari big five? Pens at the ready for an Aussie Noah’s Ark, because this island, eight miles offshore from Cape Jervis, is a natural life raft for endangered creatures, including the Australian sea lion- the world’s more threatened pinniped- and the glossy black cockatoo. It is also where the Heath goanna is making its last stand. Then there’s the New Zealand fur seal, the Tammar wallaby (the wallaby and the kangaroo are cousins) and Koalas (never, please, “koala bears” they’re not bears), which are increasingly rare on much of the mainland- but look, there’s one now, in his furry pyjamas.

How adorable are the waddling squadrons of fairy penguins! As for mail-order queens, genetically pure K.I bees are in demand by international apiarists. But just because there are no foxes, no rabbits, to destroy this Antipodean Galapagos doesn’t mean there’s nothing that can kill you. “Gotcha!” hisses the tiger snake, and you sincerely hope it’s joking- one bite and, without antivenom, odds on you’re a goner.

And so to the four-headed penis of the male short-beaked echidna, which isn’t enough for the female that looks like a porcupine but makes like a princess as she leads up to eight randy chaps on a six- week Animal Magic excursion called an echidna (love) train, at the end of which only one gets a shag. About 24 days later, mama lays an egg, which she wiggles up into her pouch, where it stays until it hatches into a puggle. It’s knowledge like that which makes you wish Trivial Pursuit had not gone the way of the Victorian parlour game.

Egg-laying monotremes are the oldest surviving mammals on Earth, and if that isn’t enough to get an island named after you, blame Captain Matthew Finders, who was starving when he and his men landed in 1802 and threw roos in the pot. Nicholas Baudin, who made landfall that same spring, was French, so he nabbed a kangaroo to parade around Paris- though he (the Frenchman) only made it to Madagascar before he died. Both explorers must surely have been surprised that they encountered no Aboriginal people on an island seven times the size of Singapore. Nor has an Aboriginal skeleton been found since. Tools dating back 16,000 years suggests that whoever did live here was fending off marsupial Godzillas- possums and wombats the size of rhinos- so may have made a dash for it over a long-gone land bridge.

I won’t be surprised if you already know about Southern Ocean Lodge, given it has won just about every travel gong going since it opened in 2008. Why will be particularly clear if your billet is the exhilarating Osprey Suite, with its peerless glass-walled views over the pounding surf. You’d expect this game-changing luxury lodge, which slithers almost invisibly down a bluff, to be eco-this, eco-that. It is also near-carbon-neutral, what with crab-meat omelette for breakfast, line-caught snapper for lunch, and dinner’s oysters followed by South Rock lamb, all locally-sourced. The Henschke Julius Riesling, however, had to travel from the Barossa Valley.

You’ll be glad it did, and you did, as you stand at sunset, glass in hand, for kangaroos and canapés and a mob of roos bounds across the horizon.

Columns

FIN! – Australian financial review

Fin!

AFR | May 2011

By Marion Hume 

We used to fret that the internet would render fashion shows obsolete. While the opposite is the case, it’s us, the professional audience, whose days must be numbered.

There’s no such thing as “fashionably late” in a world of live streaming.

Time was when, if the invitation said 4pm, you could dawdle over to a cafe near the venue, enjoy a cup of tea, or, if you were feeling full-on fashionista, a glass of champagne, yet still fret that, by turning up before 5pm, you’d be revealing yourself as a rookie who was frightfully keen.

Today, 4pm means in your seat at 3.45 pm or the designer’s PR will be SMSing frantically. It means sitting up straight and slapping on your catwalk smile by 3.50pm, then it’s lights down, music up and a huge screen running a countdown as viewers in Dubai, Hong Kong, Los Angeles are welcomed to start “shopping the show”. You can buy the coats at Burberry, to arrive months later, in 150 countries, as they are appearing on a catwalk in London. What you can’t do is bribe your way in once a show has started – as I discovered at 4.01pm. Opps.

Lesson learned. Over in Paris, I got to Louis Vuitton so horribly early, I had to sneak off for a coffee so as not to linger with the kids who snap the arrival of the front row set for their blogs. The Vuitton show was staged at the Cour Carree du Louvre, as it has been for several seasons now, but just to make things interesting, they changed the point of entry. Cue scores of people, myself included, who glancing over and, seeing no line yet, relaxed and ordered another “cafe creme”.

People may think we fashion folk are so dumb, we can’t walk and chew gum, but let me tell you, once I realised entry was via the gate around the corner, I was sprinting, texting to friends in five inch heels to “move it from the café, now!” and thinking how HUGE the Louvre is, all at the same time. True, I couldn’t remember exactly which Louis had extended the old chateau of Francois Ist until it became a palace that seems to take up half of France but I did keep wishing he’d put in more cut-throughs. Luckily, I was in my seat when the show started, but as it featured women in handcuffs, I got hot under my feminist collar all over again.

Those of us who watch fashion shows for a living are increasingly questioning what they are for, (although kinky handcuffs, are, you have to admit, a whole new product category to brand). The truth is dawning, chillingly, that shows are no longer for those on the seasonal schlepp from New York to London to Milan to Paris. We used to fret that the internet would render fashion shows obsolete. While the opposite is the case, it’s us, the professional audience, whose days must be numbered. “Shopping the show” online still requires skinny girls (one of whom, this season, is a boy) walking up and down in the clothes to click and buy. The vast lobby of net-a-porter, the pioneer of luxury online, is dominated by a gigantic screen showing designer shows. The Burberry website, the Burberry stores, feature more catwalk footage. The equation of “1,000 seater show staged like a rock concert + clothes to click on now” is key to how this British brand has become a GBP 5.1 billion fashion megalith.

But what of the 1,000 people who are invited to attend? What purpose do we serve, now that anyone can go to London’s Piccadilly Circus and watch the Burberry show, simultaneously, on a 32-metre digital screen? (As I did)  What is the point of fashion critics now the public, on twitter, on apps, shopping as they go, votes on what’s fashionable now? As for those of us who go to actual shows (if we are not locked out, at 4.01pm), how long before they just paint us in by CGI?

Ethical Fashion

Cut From A Different Cloth – Finantial Times

cloth1

Financial Times | March 2011

Cut From A Different Cloth

by Marion Hume

Last September, I had a telephone call from Pier Luigi Loro Piana. He heads the family business that bears his surname – an Italian textile group with 135 stores in prime addresses, including London’s Bond Street and Avenue Montaigne in Paris. One of its coats can cost £5,000, a sweater £500.
This sixth-generation family firm is led as a job-share between Pier Luigi, 59, and his brother Sergio, 62. While both run the business, the younger brother also searches worldwide for the best raw materials that can be turned into yarn.
Loro Piana wanted to tell me about a new project. He had found a community that makes a fabric that cools down the wearer (perfect for the humid cities that are home to the emerging ultra-rich). This, he said, was new to the west, yet legendary in the Asia – but the know-how to weave it was almost lost. Just one isolated community was left with the skills to make it, and they live on houses on stilts on a lake. I was spellbound. He wanted me to go out there with him, to take a look for myself. Then he told me the village was in Burma.
There are many reasons to avoid doing business in Burma. It is run by a repressive military junta, practically unchanged since 1962. Sanctions were first imposed by the US in 1993 and the European Union in 1996. The EU extended its measures in 2007 after anti-government demonstrations led by monks in Burma were quashed by force.
Reporters without Borders ranks Burma 171st out of 175 countries in the world in its Press Freedom Index (only Iran, Turkmenistan, North Korea and Eritrea fare worse).
Although trade in textiles with Burma is not barred by the EU, almost nothing is allowed into the US from Burma. (It makes an exception for teak, when used in decking by American boatbuilders.)
Loro Piana is aware of the moral dilemma of doing business in Burma. In an e-mail to me, he wrote that by finding out more about the country, “We can be more sensitive … Our venture is directed to the … ‘informal economy’ represented by the majority of the local population, and mainly supported by agriculture and craftsmanship.”
I said I would not even consider such a visit until Aung San Suu Kyi was freed. The Burmese opposition leader had endured almost 15 years of incarceration. Then, last November, she was released from house arrest. I recognise that this alone does not make Burma a place to visit lightly. And so I canvassed activists and correspondents based in the region, and was pleased that they felt, as I did, that I should now go to Burma, if offered the chance. (Still, such is the sensitivity of the subject that most of my contacts were unwilling to be quoted on the record.)
Mark Farmaner is a director of human rights group Burma Campaign UK, which has called for targeted sanctions against the regime. Of the Loro Piana project, Farmaner says: “In principle, we have no objection to this. There was never a call for total sanctions against Burma. It is always about targeting the generals and their business cronies.”
So I accepted Loro Piana’s invitation to inspect his “miracle fabric”.
I have been a fashion journalist for 20 years – some of them at the Financial Times – but two years ago I also took on a consulting role with the Ethical Fashion Programme of the International Trade Centre, a joint body of the United Nations and the World Trade Organisation. My role is to forge links between the best-known labels and the poorest people of sub-Saharan Africa. In my visa application, I wrote “fashion consultant”. However, I also have a US journalist visa in my passport, which the Burmese embassy held for weeks and returned, visa granted, with departure only days away.

It is 10am and Loro Piana looks somewhat rumpled. We had arrived in Rangoon (renamed Yangon by the junta, which also renamed the country Myanmar) the night before, and this morning we had flown onwards to Helo, in eastern Burma. Now we’ve just travelled a further hour by bumpy road. Yet Loro Piana’s jacket, a prototype made of the fabric we are here to see, looks pristine. “See – it doesn’t need ironing. Unlike me,” he jokes as we clamber into a longboat. We pull out of the reeds on to the expanse of Inle Lake, ringed by mountains. The Intha people subsist by fishing and by growing vegetables on floating gardens built using bamboo and lotus flowers. It is those lotus flowers, or more accurately, their stems, that are made into the magical yarns.
We arrive at a thatched house standing on stilts, the kind imitated by watery five-star resorts across Asia. Access is via a rickety pontoon of bamboo poles and wobbly wooden stairs. Once inside, the co-chief executive of a company with a €480m turnover squats down on the floor next to a woman who is extracting sappy filaments, each about one metre long, from lotus flower stems – which is a painstaking process. Another woman rubs the filaments together at extraordinary speed. A third woman sits spinning yarn using a contraption made from wooden bobbins and an old bicycle wheel. Loro Piana scrunches the finished yarn in his hands.
It is his second visit to Inle Lake. He first came a year ago, having learned from a Japanese friend that lotus flower cloth was still being woven here. His friend urged him to save the craft from disappearing forever. The textile baron instantly saw the potential of the Nelumbo nucifera that grows here: it is, among other astonishing properties, featherlight, “slubby” in appearance (like linen), wonderfully cool and also of a good natural colour. Some 26,000 stems are needed for one blazer.
There are, at most, just 300 Intha people who know how to harvest the wild lotus flower stems (they must be pulled from the water by hand – never scythed, which kills the root). About 200 others know how to extract the filaments and process these to skeins, which must be done within 24 hours of picking to prevent deterioration. Lotus flower robes were once worn on ceremonial days by the most senior monks, but they have had to find a cheaper alternative.
When Loro Piana first came to Burma, the fabric was being made into pricey scarves for the few tourists who visit the country. On that first trip, he guaranteed to purchase all the fabric. “This is a key point in the success of the project,” he says. “We commit to buy, not from time to time, but everything. We pay in advance.”
There are four looms operated by women using foot treadles. This involves passing shuttles under the warp threads, back and forth by hand – but they can do so for no more than four hours a day, which equates to about an inch of cloth. Loro Piana is not pushing for more production, mindful that it might force the youngest teenage girls into working at the looms rather than attending school.
Is Loro Piana exploiting these workers? The UN calculates that the living wage for a manual worker in Burma is $1.20 per day. Those working here are skilled. My guess is that they earn at least five times that figure. However, as the project is in its first season, there are no reliable records of pay yet.
There is a whiff of change in Burma – not regime change, but the feeling that the country, so rich in rubies, oil and teak, is about to re-open for business. Thai entrepreneurs are pushing for road development along the two countries’ shared border.
Still, the Burmese officials who granted us visas knew what we were doing in the country – at no time were we “off radar” – we were accompanied at all times by an English-speaking official guide.
The position on sanctions is still complicated. In a speech to the World Economic Forum in January, Suu Kyi said Burma needed ethical foreign investment, but a report from the National League for Democracy, the party she leads, recently concluded that sanctions should remain in place for the time being.
In Burma itself, strangers can be bold, despite the dangers of speaking out. “Our government has a suicidal policy, if I may speak frankly, of stopping people from coming here. Thank you for ignoring it,” someone told me in Rangoon.
Loro Piana admits that he was not especially clued up politically before he began working in Burma. Now, though, his project is helping a few more communities to join the lucrative fashion value chain. The indications are that they will be properly rewarded for doing so, and in decent working conditions.
As Mark Farmaner of Burma Campaign UK puts it: “This is the kind of trade, working with ordinary people, preserving traditions and culture, and paying accordingly, that we support. It is the large-scale, low-wage element of the clothing sector that is a problem.”

Was I right to go there? I think so.

“These are delicate times,” Loro Piana says to me. “But I believe what you have seen is positive and it opens your eyes.”