You can't have missed it: London Fashion Week, which starts on Monday, has been revamped, reorganised, and reborn - again. Why should you, the non-fashion people, care? Well, because along with Wimbledon, the film festival, and the Proms (plus the very occasional royal wedding), fashion week is one of the largest events London hosts and it brings huge amounts of money into the city. The British fashion industry, along with the music industry, is one of this country's biggest, most public, and most popular exporters. Fashion is part of Britain's international image and what happens to it matters.
And yet, fashion week often seems more like a local whipping boy than a jewel in our crown. Every season brings news that more home-grown designers have taken their label and decamped to the more chic pastures of New York (Matthew Williamson and Alice Temperley), Milan (Burberry and Pringle) or Paris (Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney). Every season brings news that most of the big international magazine editors and department store buyers are staying away. Still, fashion week struggles on.
This season, there's a new chief executive in town. Hilary Riva has joined the British Fashion Council (BFC), which owns and administers Fashion Week, from high-street behemoth Rubicon Retail. She has taken a fresh approach to the event. Not only will London host 50 catwalk shows (including, for the first time, Giorgio Armani's second line, Emporio Armani) but top models such as Erin O'Connor, thanks to funding by Marks and Spencer. It will also take on the big social issues with an exhibition showcasing ethical/environmental brands. Riva has also been working behind the scenes to secure grants from property developer Westfield to enable a few designers to make the leap from start-up to business. "The fashion calendar has become a fight for your place, and we are fighting by securing content," she says. In other words, next week's shows will be glamorous. They will be socially responsible. They will be written up. They will show all those moaners who say our Fashion Week is an amateur mess that they are wrong. They will silence the critics.
Oh, get real.
These changes, while commendable and impressive, will no more fix the current fate (and state) of London Fashion Week than dying your hair a new colour will fix your life. They will have uplifting, cosmetic results (models make clothes look better; funding makes businesses look healthy; environmentalism makes the industry look hip) but have again failed to address the real problem: the fact that no important American, Asian and European editors and retailers come to London Fashion Week.
Why should we care? Well, because the American market is the biggest single market in the world alongside Japan. And why don't the Americans et al come?
It's the money, stupid.
To fix the London Fashion Week problem, you first have to fix the money problem. Between London, Milan and Paris, the European ready-to-wear shows now last 22 days. Even leaving aside the emotional stress of being away from your family for so long, that's almost a month away from a job, staying in four- or even five-star hotels, with expenses for cars, meals and long-distance phone and internet bills to be met. No company wants to foot such a bill, especially with the dollar in free-fall. But the thing is, there is an easy way to fix the money problem: move Fashion Week.
Get it away from the New York-Milan-Paris circus. London Fashion Week has an opportunity to re-position itself and, in doing so, capture the high ground of the entire fashion industry. It can recast its designers to their benefit and otherwise regain control of its future. All it requires is moving a few months from the ready-to-wear schedule to the couture calendar.
After all, the current sorry state of affairs has nothing to do with the fact that London has amateur models, or is disorganised, or even that its designers often go out of business because they don't understand manufacturing and production. It's not that foreign publications and buyers don't appreciate what a birthplace of talent London is - they do. And it's certainly not because they don't want to come. Most, from Julie Gilhart of Barneys (who is, in fact, making one of her every-few-years stops in the city this season) to Linda Fargo of Bergdorf Goodman to Anna Wintour of US Vogue, talk constantly about how much respect they have for London designers and how interested they are in their collections. But all the goodwill in the world cannot change the reality that to meet budgets, something in those 22 days has to go, and the choice is simple: you drop the place where there is no advertising money to be made.
It's the most basic of equations. A fashion house invests in a publication, the publication invests in the fashion house. There are only two fashion brands with any advertising muscle at all that show in London - Paul Smith and Nicole Farhi - and even then the muscle is pretty paltry (a page or two compared with, say, Chanel's six in this month's American Vogue). Meanwhile, in a classic Catch-22, because no foreign buyers come to London, all British brands take their collections to Paris to sell, so no foreign buyers have to come to London. And if they don't have to, they won't.
The last time every big editor-in-chief came to London, including Wintour, Patrick McCarthy of W, Gilles Bensimon of US Elle, and Franca Sozzani of Italian Vogue, was in 1999 when Burberry launched its Prorsum line. Burberry is an important advertiser. Then Burberry moved its show to Milan and they all stopped coming. Yes, Wintour came last season but that was because she was chairing the Anglomania show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York - proof of her support for British designers - not because she had a change of heart about London. She's not here this season.
As for the great old days of yesteryear when Alexander McQueen and Hussein Chalayan used to show in London and more press used to come, there were three reasons - the whole thing was shorter; the dollar was stronger; and they were mostly sending junior editors who were allowed to come to London as a treat. I know this because I worked at US Elle at the time. Content will only get you so far if there's no money behind it.
There is some awareness of the problem of a lack of big brands in London. There is a lot of chest-beating about the loss of success stories such as Burberry, McQueen, McCartney and John Galliano; the absence of artistic pace-makers such as Hussein Chalayan and Sophia Kokosalaki; and the lack of party dress darlings such as Matthew Williamson, Alice Temperley and Luella Bartley. But the truth is they'll never come back, not in any long-term way. It's not personal - it's business. They need to go where the press and buyers are, and they need to be seen in the context of what they consider to be competition: for Burberry, that means global brands such as Gucci and Armani; for McQueen and Chalayan, fellow visionaries such as Lanvin and Balenciaga.
How, then, to fix things? Well, if the problem is not with London Fashion Week itself, it's with where London Fashion Week is on the international calendar, sitting miserably alongside its flashy siblings in New York, Paris and Milan.
The BFC has occasionally considered changing its dates but the actions it has taken to address the issue have been so minor that they don't really constitute actions at all. Last season, it moved fashion week three days (three days!) closer to Milan to make it easier to go from one city to another. It made no difference. Foreigners still have to be away an extra five days, which is five days too many. Suggestions have also been made that London should somehow be squeezed into two days between Milan and Paris. Practically, this would put so much pressure on travel and time that editors would probably still forgo London.
There is another time in the calendar when London could steal some limelight. Couture, a shrinking branch of fashion, happens over three days in Paris in January and July as do the "pre-collections" - displays of the collections that are delivered to stores before the main (ie catwalk) collections and which now account for more of what's on display in shops. So, every January and July, all the big buyers and all the editors-in-chief are in Paris for pre-collections and couture respectively. They stay only for a week or less. Ergo, why not move London Fashion Week to the end of couture?
"Well, if we move, New York would love to slide into our place and, who knows?, São Paulo could jump in," says Riva. "Doing something radical could be the answer or it could be the end." Yes, there's a risk, but what's the alternative? A slow slide into irrelevance?
Couture is three days; London four. Together they create a whole. Couture is the oldest fashion art and London is continually trying to position itself as the home for the newest fashion designers. They could be yin and yang. (Didier Grumbach, the head of the Chambre Syndicale, French fashion's governing body, is actually trying to do something like this and recently persuaded the respected but under-funded young British brand Boudicca to show its ready-to-wear during couture.) As Riva says: "Whenever someone wants to launch something new, they come to London - that's what we stand for: breaking new ground and taking more risks." So use that - make it a signature. It would be easy for the buyers and press to take the Eurostar over to London for half of the week and wouldn't require significant investment on their part. It would enable them to support London as they want without demanding they overtax their time and budgets to do it.
They're not the only ones. Burberry could throw a party, perhaps to launch the event, and showcase its pre-collection, which they would have just sold in Milan. Gucci Group, which has headquarters in London, could throw a closing party with similar showcases for their Brits, Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney. In between there would be three or four days of British shows.
As for a presence on the main fashion stage, the couture fashion photos are published in the editions of the glossy magazines that are released during the ready-to-wear collections. So while London would not be on the catwalk, it would be in every magazine.
Bringing your collection forward two months certainly requires a psychological adjustment but you could give designers two years to do it. Yes, the British Fashion Council is a notoriously immovable force but, in only a few months, Riva did the impossible by pulling it out of bankruptcy and rationalising its employment structure. Now it's a lean, mean, fighting-for-its-fashion machine (well, a leaner one then it was before anyway). Now it's actually in a place where it can do something bigger and braver than ever before. Here's the bet: move it, and they will come.
Vanessa Friedman is the FT's fashion editor
