California Apparel News

A San Francisco group’s second effort to organize its first international fashion week blew up in a high-tension drama that left international designers stranded and local designers searching for an alternate venue.

“It was just chaos,” said South African designer Paul Munroe, who said he was promised plane tickets and hotel accommodations for himself and his business partner, Mark Griffiths, to participate in the show.

Instead, Munroe said he spent close to $20,000 of his own money to fly himself and his partner from Johannesburg to San Francisco and back only to find no one at the airport to meet him and no hotel accommodations.

“It has been very costly and extremely stressful,” Munroe said before returning to South Africa. “The stress sometimes was unbearable.”

San Francisco International Fashion Week was scheduled to take place Oct. 21–23 at Fort Mason Center.

An impressive lineup of local and international designers was set to participate in the three-day event, which was being organized by Jacinta Law, a local fashion-show producer.

Law did not return repeated calls to explain the show’s demise. Designers and sponsors also said they had been unsuccessful in reaching her by phone.

Designers scheduled to show their Spring ’06 collections at SFIFW included French designer Lloyd Klein, based in Los Angeles; Manish Arora and Payal Jain from India; Rajo Laurel from the Philippines; Sebastien Meunier, Gaspard Yurkievich, Isabelle Ballu and Pierre-Henri Mattout from France; and Joseph Domingo and Cari Borja from San Francisco.

But two days before the event was expected to start, Law informed participants that the venue would change, designers said. Instead of Fort Mason Center, a seaside location that houses a museum and restaurants, designers said that Law called them saying the runway shows would be held at Terra, a creative space and events venue in the artsy district south of Market Street.

From there, the show apparently began to collapse. Several international designers who had been promised airline tickets said they never received them and so did not make the trip.

The one French designer who did arrive, Afshin Feiz, who traveled with three people from his company, encountered a series of problems.

His luxury hotel accommodations were not where they had been promised. Instead he was taken to The Ramada Plaza. The designer said he accepted the change, but when the makeup sponsor pulled out of his show and he learned that he would have to buy his own makeup and find makeup artists, he decided to pull out.

Feiz was at the show venue when a scheduled press conference for the event was to be held. A small group of journalists had been waiting for the press conference to begin, the designer said, when he spotted Law and ran after her for an explanation. “I asked her what on earth is going on,” he said in an e-mail from France. “Her sister starts screaming at me and I start screaming back.”

In the end, the police were called to calm everyone down.

Feiz said he thought his airline tickets had been paid for by Law, but when he went to board his return flight on Air France on Oct. 24, he found that that was not the case. In the end, Feiz paid for four tickets back to France and another night’s hotel stay for his staff.

Unraveling

Two major supporters of the show, Industry415, a San Francisco entertainment marketing group, and Graffiti PR, a New York public relations company, also pulled out days before the event.

Melissa Maynard, editor-in-chief of Factio-Magazine.com, a Chicago-based online magazine that covers fashion, beauty and the arts, had lined up several major sponsors, including her own publication.

Maynard helped sign on Vertu, a Nokia subsidiary that makes high-end cell phones with sapphire faces. They were to be a major sponsor, for $12,000. Maynard said Vertu flew in its international global marketing manager from Singapore. Vertu also had set up a private dinner for some of its VIP clients, including author Danielle Steel, a San Francisco resident, and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.

But Vertu withdrew its sponsorship after hearing there was an organizational fiasco and venue change. The dinner was also canceled.

Other sponsors Maynard helped line up included Black Vodka, Fiji Water, RockStar Energy Drink and Rene Furterer Paris beauty and hair products. It is not known whether these companies paid their sponsorships to Law.

Maynard, who flew to San Francisco to help coordinate gift bags and create a style guide, which never got printed, said her organization lost about $15,000.

“This was supposed to be our big coming-out moment in San Francisco,” said the online editor. “The designers were high-end and from all over the world, the location at Fort Mason was gorgeous, and Jacinta seemed professional. My partner was calling her almost every day. There were no red flags there.”

But two days before the event, sources said Law appeared not to have the money to pay for the Fort Mason location, and people were having a hard time contacting her.

On Oct. 21, the day the international fashion show was to begin, Lloyd Klein executives sent out an e-mail announcing their withdrawal from the program. “This past week, we were informed that there were changes in venue, and production values that were not at the level promised,” John Arguelles, president of Lloyd Klein, said in an e-mail.

Arguelles said he had arranged for 30 of Lloyd Klein’s top-end customers to be at the runway show. He had to call them up and tell them not to go.

“One lesson I have learned is to look into whomever you make a commitment with,” Arguelles said.

Two fashion weeks

SFIFW was originally slated to bow in October 2004 with a designer lineup that included Zac Posen, as well as Stephen Burrows, Esteban Cortazar and Zang Toi. A citywide hotel strike and a last-minute cancellation by an unnamed sponsor led Law to cancel that event. At the time, she said she planned to reschedule the event for this year.

Law’s event was to come on the heels of another, unrelated fashion event, San Francisco Fashion Week, which featured a lineup of predominantly San Francisco–based designers. Organized by Mystery Girl Productions, San Francisco Fashion Week had a successful launch in August 2004 at The Palace of Fine Arts and returned again last August with a schedule that included 18 runway shows, a handful of parties and several workshops for fashion, art and makeup artistry.

Show goes on—kind of

When this year’s SFIFW fell apart, some of the local designers and fashion industry people were able to pull together a one-day event Oct. 23 with seven runway shows.

It was done with the help of Denny Derouen, the majority partner at Terra, who has been called a “fashion angel” for donating the space at the cavernous locale. Models from five different agencies also donated their time to walk down the catwalk for seven runway shows.

Those shows included looks created by Alpaca Fashions by Peru, Rubina Anjum of Revelation, San Francisco designer Cari Borja and custom designer Joseph Domingo, South African designer Munroe, the South African label Black Coffee, and Indian designer Anu Mahal.

As many as 300 people attended some of the shows. Factio-Magazine’s Maynard observed that it was great that at least something got organized, but this was far from what she had expected. “Every fashion week has its drama,” she said. “But this was a circus.”