Catherine Bloom Her Definition of Fashion
Back in the 1920s, the last time we had such a disparity between rich and poor, Jay Gatsby, the fictional namesake of F. Scott Fitzgerald'south The Nifty Gatsby, had no trouble spending his money on finery. "I've got a man in England who buys me clothes," he tells his friends Nick Carraway and Daisy Buchanan as he shows off his wardrobe in his waterfront mansion. "He sends over a selection of things at the starting time of each flavour, spring and fall."
Then Gatsby "took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before u.s., shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they vicious and covered the table in a many-colored disarray." But while the Gatsby-level rich of today—the people we now refer to as the 1 per centum—surely have the means to compile such a vast and luxurious collection of attire, many are having a hard time doing so. In those gilded days and for decades afterward, family-owned luxury companies such as Cartier, Gucci, and Louis Vuitton catered to the upper classes, a bankable customer base that was immune to economical cycles. These houses, as they were called, were niche businesses for a niche clientele.
Simply over the last twenty years or and so luxury brands have switched their focus to a new audience: the Center Market, a broad socioeconomic demographic that spends when flush and tightens the handbag strings when times get tough. To entreatment to that kind of customer, the brands have offered more than "attainable" products (such as logo-stamped accessories), rolled out stores by the score, ramped up their advert, opened outlets, and, not surprisingly, grown into multibillion-dollar publicly traded global conglomerates.
To entreatment to such a wide audition, the brands have sanded down the creative edges of their products to the point of ennui. "Every magazine editorial for the last two years has been a large coat with a flat shoe, or a large men'due south sweater with a flat shoe, or an oversize suit," says stylist George Cortina. "The reason this is happening is that the market has been obliterated by handbags. Information technology's a problem. Afterward the shows in Paris the buyers say, 'There is zip to purchase.' And they're right. There is naught to buy."
Along the way the brands take alienated the i-percent customer. While there is more coin out there than ever—in March 2015, Forbes reported that there are 197 women billionaires in the world—"meridian tier clients take been pushed out of the luxury fashion equation, considering everything has gone so mass," says Cameron Argent, founder of the Los Angeles vintage fashion boutique Decades. "The big brands don't make much money off the 1 percent. They make their money on lipsticks."
"The i percentage doesn't really have any say," Cortina confirms.
And so what is a big spender to practice? Some turn to the old standbys, such equally Charvet, the men'southward haberdashery on Rue de la Paix, steps from Identify Vendôme in Paris. "Charvet has the all-time sense of service," says shoe designer Christian Louboutin, a luxury peddler and consumer who buys his shirts and ties there. "And information technology's absolutely sincere. It's what they exercise. That's how they are. A true elegance." (I know several chic women who swear past Charvet's cotton twill men's pajamas—tailored to fit, of course.)
Another Paris treat is to take lingerie fabricated to measure at Cadolle, on Rue Saint-Honoré. Customers cull the silk, tulle, ribbons, and lace, and the owner, Poupie Cadolle, the 5th generation of women to run the business firm, takes their measurements personally. While Cadolle knows how to make a bra—her cracking-corking-grandmother invented the particular in 1889—the shop's specialty is beautiful (and comfy) corsets. For those who can't get in to the Paris salon, Cadolle travels to New York twice a year and takes appointments at a luxury hotel.
When it comes to accessories, Hermès'due south handmade Kelly and Birkin bags are still de rigueur for the 1-percent customer—who prefers to skip the usual six-month wait. To that end the visitor keeps a pocket-size inventory for such special clients in Paris, and from time to time i of the handbags will arrive in a branch bazaar and a top local client will get the phone call.
Everyone—and I mean everyone—who buys connoisseur luxury goods swoons for the Row, the laurels-winning ready-to-wear characterization founded by Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen. "Information technology's and so chichi and easy to wear," says Dawn Klohs, co-possessor of A'maree'south, a 40-yr-sometime family-run luxury retailer on the harbor in Newport Beach.
Other big brands have upped their game too, to coddle top clients. Louis Vuitton recently renovated its 19th-century compound in the Paris suburb of Asnières-sur-Seine. In that location the company offers appointment-only tours of the Vuittons' former family home, a permanent exhibition of famous annal pieces (such equally Africa explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza's trunk bed), and the original Louis Vuitton workshop, where guests can lookout artisans arts and crafts special orders by hand. Bottega Veneta recently opened a "customization atelier" in its New York store where customers tin personalize a selection of the Italian brand's handbags. And concluding fall Chanel purchased La Pausa, Coco Chanel's grand 1920s villa on the Riviera. Once the renovation is complete, the company plans to stage events and welcome special customers there. (Virtually of the major luxury firms contacted for this story refused to comment.)
Some uberrich women buy couture—though fewer and fewer each year, as it'south a fourth dimension eater, as well as being stratospherically expensive. "I accept other things to practise than four or v fittings for one apparel that costs $200,000," says Shawn Goodman, a pretty, blonde one-percenter from Seattle whose husband made his fortune in existent estate. "It's amazing, the craftsmanship. I totally respect and admire it. But for me it's difficult to justify. I'd rather become downwards to the Boys & Girls Clubs and requite them $300,000 than buy a dress I will wear merely once."
Lauren Santo Domingo, co-founder of Moda Operandi, a five-year-sometime online luxury retailer that allows customers to preorder rail looks directly from designers, concurs: "Top clients inquire nigh couture and get scared off past the prices. Couture is an caused taste and an investment of time. Ane-percent customers today are more than likely to buy ten $8,000 dresses in the bat of an centre than spend $80,000 on one."
And it'south preferable if those dresses are from someone you've never heard of, similar Herno, an Italian firm headquartered on Lago Maggiore that makes stylish, lightweight high-tech clothes; or Dosa, an Fifty.A.-based bohemian fashion company known for its absurd handcrafted textiles; or Luisa Cevese Riedizioni, a Milanese company that produces beautiful, sustainable handbags fabricated of plastic and material scraps (from major brands); or Dusan, a clothing line designed in Milan by Serbian-born Dusan Paunovic, who assisted the pioneering minimalist Zoran for several years. "You have to be everyone's best-kept secret," says Lauren Adriana, a young jewelry designer based in London who produces about two dozen pieces each year and sells them through Fred Leighton in New York.
"Five years agone this customer would wear simply loftier designers—Hermès, Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Christian Louboutin—and that was information technology," Santo Domingo says. "Today it's well-nigh having things that other people can't have."
That's where high-end eastward-retailers similar Moda Operandi and Net-a-Porter, luxury department stores like Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman, local branches of major brands, and cool independent boutiques like Maxfield and Just 1 Eye in Los Angeles, Ikram in Chicago, Colette in Paris, and A'maree's in Newport Beach come into play. "More than always y'all have to stay in front of the top customer," says Neiman Marcus style adviser Catherine Bloom. "You need to know what they need before they recognize it."
Like a pair of D'Lish'southward bunny chamber slippers made from recycled mink coats, at Maxfield on Melrose in West Hollywood. "Sometimes crazy ideas walk through the door," Maxfield owner Tommy Perse cracked when he showed them to me. (I'll admit I coveted them.)
Or an $eighteen,000 crocodile Cornelian Taurus handbag by Daisuke Iwanaga, a picayune-known Japanese designer. "There is no name printed on the purse," A'maree'south Dawn Klohs pointed out every bit she handed me one. It weighs side by side to nothing, too.
Or Adriano Goldschmied's jeans, made "in a new Japanese denim that is amazing," Klohs raved.
Or L.A.-based cobbler George Esquivel's handmade gold oxfords. "Nosotros have an extra cushion put in, because nosotros are all about comfort," Klohs said.
Or a pair of $25,000 Converse Chuck Taylor loftier-tops that American artist Nate Lowman made by paw from slices of his colorful Marilyn Monroe painting—or the drib textile he used while painting it. In that location were 21 pairs (viii from the Monroe sheet and thirteen from drop fabric) when the collection went on sale in Oct 2013 at Just One Eye, the four-year-quondam gallery/luxury boutique housed in Howard Hughes'due south sometime headquarters off La Brea in Hollywood. Just one-half a dozen remain.
Or one of the dozen $55,000 crocodile backpacks the Row produced with British creative person Damien Hirst in 2012, likewise for Just I Middle.
Or the $12,500 limited edition top-of-the-line Survival Kit that 4C'southward Consulting created with quondam Navy SEALs, which includes a cashmere blanket designed past Raif Adelberg, as well every bit night-vision goggles. "Nosotros sold those kits to niche clients with bunkers in their homes—the sort who have those concerns," says Simply One Eye buyer Farrah Katina.
"I think the big brands are concentrating on everything but the product," Klohs said as we sat at the big dining tabular array in the center of her sun-filled shop. "The wealthy customers can see through that. They don't buy the hype."
To accost this fact, Santo Domingo has opened the Mews, a individual salon in a 2-story London townhouse on a gated cobblestone street steps from Buckingham Palace. There, in processed-pinkish rooms with costly sofas, fireplaces, and loads of attentive, uniformed staff, she and her team host teas, cocktail parties, dinners, trunk shows, and curated individual visits to show off fabulous, hard-to-find products. "Here are M2Malletier numberless, which we launched," Santo Domingo said as she gave me a tour of the Mews final fall. "And L'Objet. In French republic these are vases," she said as she handed me a tumbler-size glass vessel. "In America they're drinking spectacles."
She pointed out a 24K gold iPad in a showcase—a best-seller. She picked up a beautifully decorated clothbound book from a stack on top of the case: Fitzgerald'southward This Side of Paradise. "Juniper Books, from Colorado," she said. "Nosotros sell these like crazy."
Of Moda Operandi's 17,000 customers, 1,300 work with stylists and spend $25,000 to $50,000 annually; an additional 56 clients run up bills in the six-figure range annually. "That's our one per centum," said Jamie Freed, vice president for customer feel, "and it's growing chop-chop." In September, Moda Operandi rang up its biggest sale ever: A mother and three daughters from the Middle East dropped more than a meg dollars in one day on jewelry. "When these customers come hither they say, 'I'll never become to a department shop again when I can accept my ain private mini–department store with half dozen people waiting on me, everything is my size, my gustation, they know exactly what I have and don't have, and everything is new and my adjacent door neighbor can't purchase it,' " Santo Domingo said.
A long with offering special items, retailers provide exclusive services for their meridian tier clients—or EIPs (extremely important people), equally they are known at Net-a-Porter. Some of the demands the retailers receive: picking and overnighting an outfit for a coming together; remaking a runway gown in white for a nuptials; personalizing pieces (monograms are very pop); pulling in collections they don't normally carry; visiting homes anywhere in the world; and consulting on wardrobes and closets.
The ne plus ultra service, yet, is the destination wardrobe. "Someone might say, 'I'one thousand going for four days, I accept two black tie events, it's by a embankment—tin yous put something together for me and send it there?' " says Net-a-Porter'due south VP of global marketing, Heather Kaminetsky. The wearable is pulled, styled, bagged, and shipped to the destination, where personnel will steam it and hang information technology in the closet in the club of the client's schedule before he or she arrives. One time the trip is complete, hotel staff will pack it all up and send information technology abode. "I can't retrieve of a chicer way to travel than without luggage," Freed says.
Violet Grayness, the Los Angeles-based luxury beauty company, embraces the same philosophy for the one-pct customer. In 2014 information technology opened a jewel box of a bazaar in the sometime headquarters of celebrated Midcentury L.A. architect John Elgin Woolf, on Melrose Place in Due west Hollywood. There, customers can choose from a highly curated selection of products, or sit down in Dean Martin's former makeup chair in the Bill Sofield–designed salon and have their makeup done. "Violet Grey is most lost glamour," says its founder, Cassandra Grey. (The violet in the name is a nod to Elizabeth Taylor'southward eyes.)
At Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills, Catherine Bloom has created Bloom's Room, an apartment-similar v-room luxury shopping space on the second floor where she and her team advisedly get together a choice selection of items that entreatment to ane-percent tastes. The products vary in style likewise as price range, such as Mario Luca Giusti'south gem-tone constructed stemware and dishes—they look like cut crystal but don't break—which retail for less than $100 and are perfect "past the pool or on the boat," Blossom says. Or Hermès's studded diamond lookout with crocodile strap, which retails for about $52,000. "For a collector of Hermès who has every bag and has a Cartier watch, there isn't much you tin can give her that volition satisfy her and knock her socks off. This spotter does."
Jewelry, and in particular high jewelry (one-off pieces that cost n of $100,000), is catnip for the one-percentage shopper. The reason, according to Jon Male monarch, Tiffany & Co. senior vice president for production and store design, is that "jewelry takes on an important role. Information technology has meaning."
To make information technology more than alluring, Tiffany offers its VIPs exclusivity when information technology comes to choosing both stones and pieces. Every spring since 1845 the company has sent its famous Blueish Book, a cute hardcover itemize of its choice one-of-a-kind pieces, to its best clients. "Every bit shortly as they see it they say they want the first appointment," Rex says. "At that place's jostling for position, and they come in with Mail service-its on the pages and say, 'I accept to take this, I have to have that.' " Information technology gets tricky when a piece has already been sold to a customer who had an earlier time slot. "We take to piece of work it out," he says.
Tiffany's best clients get other perks, too: private appointments to see new stones and work with designers to create unique baubles; the Tiffany concierge, who books tables at in-demand restaurants, scores tickets to the hottest shows or sporting events, and even helps organize parties; tours of the seventh-floor workshop to watch artisans craft pieces; and home visits anywhere in the world. "Because of these deep relationships, some of our sales professionals have ended upwards the best man at weddings or been involved in important family occasions," King says. "Information technology's not unusual to go a part of their lives."
Shawn Goodman is the perfect case of this procedure. She is a devoted Bulgari client, with a collection of the company'southward snake-themed Serpenti line. "That'due south how I like to spend my money," she confesses. "I'll sit down in my bathing accommodate at my business firm and clothing my Serpenti high jewelry."
Goodman's relationship with Bulgari began by run a risk. A friend talked her into attending a Neiman Marcus result in Seattle, and she constitute herself seated next to Nicola Bulgari, the company's vice chairman and a grandson of the founder. "I said, 'My xix-yr-sometime son is going to see his girlfriend in Italy, and he needs some addresses. Can you advise anything?' He took my son's number and called him and had someone have him everywhere in Rome." From in that location, she says, "I formed a human relationship with them, which makes a big difference to me when I'm spending money on items."
The Goodmans are regularly invited to spectacular Bulgari events all over the globe. About a year agone they went to one in South Beach, with a dinner in the former Versace mansion. Last summer they attended a multiday gathering in Florence. At ane result, in a big villa outside the metropolis, "they had a white piano suspended from 2 cranes and someone playing it, and a ballerina on top of the piano, dancing," she recalls. "They treated united states as people instead of another number on the board: 'Sell, sell, sell to her.' "
If there'due south one affair the one-percent client can't acquit, it'due south being seen every bit a wallet with legs. "You've got to exist as cultured every bit they are—go to the same places, read the same books, run across the same museum shows," Lauren Adriana says. "You have to be where they are without ever looking as if y'all're selling to them. You take to announced to be higher up commerce—above the human activity of selling."
There are other major faux pas, such every bit marker down prices shortly afterwards an item hits the sales floor. "Nosotros dropped a major French luxury brand this flavour considering we had a client—a woman who can afford anything—who bought a $iv,000 peak to wear to an Eli Broad dinner, and she went to a department store the adjacent day and it was 60 pct off," Klohs says. Klohs gave the woman a credit, then called the house and canceled that season'southward gild. Overexposure—in advert, on Instagram, or, heaven assistance the states, on a red carpet—tin impale the salability of an item to the one percentage in a wink. "The client does non desire to see it on a celebrity," says Just One Center's Farrah Katina. "I had iii of ane design, but then Miley Cyrus wore information technology on a ruby carpeting and that dress was over. No i wanted it."
The worst sin, however, is ignoring the client. That'south why Dolce & Gabbana came up with Alta Moda, a four-mean solar day issue held each summer to show the visitor's fabricated-to-measure collections to its ane-percent clients. "The well-nigh luxurious thing a customer can have is a relationship with the creator," says Silver, who has attended the event 3 times—in Taormina, Capri, and last July in Portofino. "Alber Elbaz understood that beautifully at Lanvin, and Dolce & Gabbana understands that. When you go to the Alta Moda prove, they know everybody'due south proper noun, the husband's proper name, they enquire about the kids. They have a vested interest. Of class, it's non as profitable as selling a T-shirt with a Madonna on it. But it'south important—information technology gives the house a sense of integrity and actuality. And information technology's not replicated by whatever other brand."
Shawn Goodman went to her first Alta Moda last summer; she took a girlfriend with her because her hubby was racing vintage race cars in Canada. They stayed at the Hotel Splendido ("I of my favorite hotels," she gushes), and when they arrived they found a pile of gifts on their beds. For four days they went shopping (Goodman admits she "dropped about $50,000" at the Dolce & Gabbana pop-up store), to dinners, to parties, and to fashion shows. At 1 dinner, she says, "the gorgeous waiters had purses hanging on their artillery, and they said, 'Take one! Take i!' "
The climax of the affair was a "huge party" with anybody dressed in gilded, including the evening'south entertainment, Kylie Minogue. "They took united states of america by Riva boats over to the nightclub," Goodman says. "We had to hike to it, then we wore flip-flops, and when we got there we changed into our high heels. Information technology was so hot nosotros were fanning ourselves. But we didn't care. It was just neat, and everybody was having a expert time."
"You know," she says, reflecting on her luxury adventures, "sometimes I practice compression myself and say, 'Oh my, this is a treat.'"
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