California Apparel News

With little fanfare, Los Angeles Fashion Week will return in October to showcase Los Angeles designers and also define the city’s place in global fashion.

Some veterans of Los Angeles Fashion Weeks past will return to produce runway shows, while other organizers will enter the fray for a fashion week that always has strived to forge a unique identity for local fashion. Critics have called on the events’ producers to prove themselves in a forum that many say is unfairly compared with other fashion weeks around the country and across the world.

L.A. Fashion Week has been the domain of a handful of independent production companies since 2008, when IMG Fashion—the producer of fashion weeks around the world, including New York, Miami, Toronto, London, Tokyo, Moscow and Sydney—announced that it would stop producing fashion weeks in Los Angeles after five years in downtown Los Angeles and in Culver City at Smashbox Studios.

The upcoming Los Angeles Fashion Week starts Oct. 10 with a new production—the Spring 2013 Collections, a fashion presentation, runway, on-site showroom and event for media and store buyers. The debut event will run until Oct. 11 and be produced by Kelsi Smith at Carondelet House in Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park neighborhood. Ending the week of runway shows and presentations will be L.A. Fashion Weekend, which runs Oct. 18–21 at a soundstage at the Sunset Gower Studios in Hollywood.

In between, there will be glamorous events featuring high fashion and emerging designers produced by Style Fashion Week L.A. at Vibiana, a former Catholic cathedral in downtown Los Angeles, along with Concept Los Angeles, which will be produced Oct. 12–14 at Ace Gallery. Also returning will be the Fashion Week shows by groups Project Ethos and Fashion Minga, which host runway shows in Los Angeles throughout the year.Project Ethos will be held Oct. 11 at the Exchange Los Angeles nightclub in downtown. Fashion Minga is scheduled for Oct. 18 at Exchange Los Angeles.

The new Men’s Fashion Week L.A. is scheduled to hold a preview event Oct. 11 at the Martini Factory showroom in Los Angeles, although the full event—planned with runway shows, trade show exhibits and pop-up showrooms—will not bow until June 2013.

On Oct. 16, nonprofit educational group Fashion Business Inc. will present a fundraiser for its educational programs, called All Aboard L.A.’s Fashion Platform, at the Rose Garden of Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. At the event, emceed by television personality Melissa Rivers, fashion shows will be produced and the “Moss Adams Fashion Innovator Award” will be presented.

While all show producers have announced dates for their events, few have released a lineup. The Spring 2013 Collections will include designers The Bohemian Society, Curly V, Koro Vilas, Again, ISM Mode, Jen Awad and Lavuk. Mikey Koffman, chief executive officer of the L.A. Fashion Weekend, will announce her show’s lineup at her production company’s Fashion’s Night Out event on Sept. 6 at the Beverly Hills Porsche dealership in Beverly Hills.

Los Angeles is different

Although The Spring 2013 Collections will kick off the Los Angeles Fashion Week calendar, Smith, the producer of The Spring 2013 Collections, said she is not calling the group of events a fashion week. “It immediately brings up comparisons with New York and Milan, and we’re not there yet,” she said.

Los Angeles Fashion Week events still need to prove that they can deliver exposure with fashion press and other media along with demonstrating that they are able to connect with designers and retailers, Smith said.

“We need to prove that we’re not all [T-shirts] and flip-flops,” Smith said. “It will take a while. It will not be an overnight success.”

Los Angeles Fashion Week also needs to handle costs for producing shows, Smith said. Still, Los Angeles is a bargain compared with other cities’ fashion-week events. The price tag for producing a L.A. Fashion Week runway show in Los Angeles ranges from $30,000 to $75,000, according to designers interviewed for this article.For New York Fashion Week shows, the price could shoot past $250,000.

Koffman, founder and producer of the L.A. Fashion Weekend, said that her event has delivered in providing media attention and sales for the labels that exhibit. Los Angeles–based red-carpet label Dina Bar-El has presented runway shows at Koffman’s event, as has Lizzie Parker, an alumna from NBC fashion reality show “Fashion Star.”

Koffman agreed that the wider Los Angeles Fashion Week has suffered from a problem of perception. But it is an unfair perception because Los Angeles has a different, less-formal style than New York. Koffman said L.A. Fashion Weekend has a different focus than traditional fashion-week events.

“We’re trying to focus on consumer-driven fashion,” she said. “We’re setting ourselves apart.”

Fashion Business Inc. founder Frances Harder said Los Angeles Fashion Weeks need to embrace the region’s formidable strengths, which are different than New York’s. “The sad thing is that it doesn’t include half of the market,” she said. She recommended getting the region’s action-sports labels to participate more, along with more juniors labels and fast fashion.

Yet the fashion-week business might get its best results from local retailers, said Mike Vensel, producer with Concept Los Angeles. “L.A. Fashion Week is best for giving Los Angeles designers an opportunity to show their newest collections to local press and buyers. I think it helps give many brands credibility by showing that they are designing interesting, cohesive collections that rival many of the top designers worldwide and are not the typical commercial products that L.A. has become known for,” Vensel said.

Amber Reed, co-founder of independent fashion-week event Fashion Minga, said the fashion week could gain more strength and popularity if the public is invited to the shows. Consumers will give designers the most clear reaction to new designs they will receive, Reed said. With social media, consumers could give new designers a powerful word of mouth. “Everyone has a cellphone camera; everyone has YouTube. Word-of-mouth is key to get people talking about and creating a buzz on a fashion line,” she said.

Fashion weeks often are dominated by high-end designers, but the upcoming Los Angeles Fashion Week will not see shows from many of the city’s red-carpet designers and labels such as Lloyd Klein—brands that have been part of past fashion weeks in Los Angeles. Others, such as Kevan Hall, have not confirmed a runway show for the upcoming fashion week.

Lloyd Klein last produced a runway event at L.A. Fashion Week in 2004. These days, the label gets better financial results from holding runway shows at El Paseo Fashion Week in Palm Desert, Calif., where attendees are wealthy consumers, not media and buyers. New York serves red-carpet labels well because of the event’s delivery of press and luxury-store buyers, said John Arguelles, media director of Lloyd Klein. “It’s not right here unless you are opening a store and it can translate into sales,” he said. “In this economy, I don’t know anyone who has the money to throw away.”

Still, the city continues to draw fashion event organizers, such as Pamela Williams, executive producer of Men’s Fashion Week L.A., who sees opportunity in Los Angeles.“Paris, Milan and Vancouver have Men’s Fashion Weeks,” she said. “London has one, too. There’s a ton of menswear designers who need a platform.”

See our L.A. Fashion Week fall 2012 calendar here.