The Fashion Games

It's that time again. international competitors have gathered to pit their training, hard work and skills against each other to see who is the best of the best. That's right: the fashion shows are under way, those seasonal Olympiads of the rag trade. Fresh from New York and London, they're in Milan this week and they'll soon travel to Paris. While high-fashion consumers wait with charge cards in hand to see what the designers at Gucci, Prada and Christian Dior will tempt them with next spring, the world's fashion editors, store buyers and a smattering of investors are on the hunt for the next big thing.

Being a next big thing now means more than a couple of column inches in the trade press. It can mean, as it did for Alexander McQueen, a profitable stint designing for a legendary house like Givenchy. It can mean, as it did for Helmut Lang, backing from one of the luxury goods conglomerates Prada Group, LVMH, Gucci Group or New York's new Pegasus Apparel Group. With several houses in need of fresh talent and money swilling around the coffers of Gucci Group et al, the likelihood of a next thing actually becoming a big thing is getting better and better.

This prospect is causing bizarre trickle-down effects. Suddenly, to stay ahead of the curve, glossy fashion magazines like Harper's Bazaar and the new London magazine The Fashion are running stories not on Stella McCartney, the designer at Chloe, but on her assistant. Not on shoe-maker Sergio Rossi, but on one of his staffers. They are running stories on people who work out of their apartments, who make clothes that aren't available in any store in the world. They're not the next big things, but the next, next, next ones. Maybe. They make the next big things look like veterans by comparison.

"I find it difficult that they compare me to designers who have been in business for decades," says designer Veronique Branquinho. "I've only had a business for three years." Branquinho and the other designers here are the ones to watch this season. They're on the verge of becoming household names at least in fashionable houses. They make clothes you can buy in the fashion capitals, and their design influence is felt from Avenue Montaigne to the King's Road. Every piece they send down the runway will be scrutinized by the fashion industry.

Although some of them have been in business for years, it was the watershed collections shown last spring and in stores now that got them on the ones-to-watch list for fall. In the fickle world of fashion, a designer is only as good as his last collection. So the next couple of weeks are make or break time, at least until the next round of shows in March.

Some next big things like Hussein Chalayan, who is 30 seem to emerge from design school as fully formed designers. Their names are bandied about the offices of fashion magazines while they are still students, their graduation shows are watched by the right people, their early collections get sold to trendy stores.

Others, like Jeremy Scott, 27, who had moved from Missouri to New York to study and then to Paris to show by age 22 seem to spring onto the catwalk from thin air.

Nicolas Ghesquiere, 29, did it the hard way. With no formal schooling, he worked for years as an assistant for Balenciaga, designing office uniforms and the like for the line's licensees before assisting on the ready-to-wear line. In 1997, the company's directors asked him to take control while they searched for a fashion star an Alexander McQueen to represent their house. "They hired me as an accident," Ghesquiere chuckles. "They couldn't find someone famous and they said, 'O.K., we have Nicolas.'" They gave him six months. After Ghesquiere's stint which went largely unremarked in the fashion press he and his team were let go. A month later they were back, this time for a year. As his collections grew stronger, the length of his contract increased. He is now in the last year of a three-year deal but plans to stay with the house for a long time.

Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren, both 31, have been designing their own line since 1993, but until 1998 their clothes could be found only in art galleries. An exhibition of an early collection featured variations on a white dress that ranged from courtly to cutting-edge. In 1997 the duo launched an odorless perfume, complete with product, advertising campaign and press release. Richard Martin, then curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute in New York, said in a review:

"Viktor & Rolf seize fashion with the same kind of unabashed enthusiasm we associate with the generation of artists of the 1950s and 1960s who appropriated popular culture and its vivid imagery into Pop Art."

That wasn't their intention. "We were trained as fashion designers," says Horsting. "But our work was picked up by the art world." To get back to their fashion roots, they took to the runways at the Paris haute couture shows in January 1998. The clothes they showed were beautiful, though impractical, and sold mostly to museums. But they were on the fashion map. Last March they presented their latest work: a ready-to-wear collection of suits, sweat pants, jeans, tuxedoes and shirts, pants and coats in wild American flag prints. The collection was a success it sold to more than 60 shops and the word wearable entered the lexicon of their reviews.

Treading that line between cult and commercial while keeping the sense of cool that got them noticed in the first place isn't easy. "We've sold out of the most extravagant stuff," said Mats Haglund, a ready-to-wear manager at Paris' trendy boutique Colette, which caters to the fashion set. But too much of it could scare away a more staid, more profitable store.

Fall too far off that line and you risk the wrath of your peers. Two years ago Jeremy Scott was a next, next, next big thing. With only three collections under his belt, he was partying with American Vogue's editor Anna Wintour and was rumored to be up for design jobs at Versace and Nina Ricci. His next show, featuring gold lame and a fur with a hump, was a flop. The press and buyers were not kind. "Your worst nightmare? No, it was Jeremy Scott's fall collection," said U.S. trade paper Women's Wear Daily. "I have lived through something most designers haven't and it showed me the fickleness of fashion," Scott says. "I don't have any regrets at all."

Well, he shouldn't. Everyone knows his name, and now he's back on the hot list. Last season WWD decreed: "This cult hero is on a roll." He has been courted by those luxury goods groups and has started to entertain thoughts of his own stores. His show on Oct. 13 could bring those dreams closer. The backers, the design houses with jobs to offer, will be judging him and the others. Let the games begin.