That’s one pricey salad dressing.
Last February at New York Fashion Week, MELKE designer Emma Gage debuted a capsule collection riffing on an unlikely source — a supposed childhood favorite that inspired her to create her latest couture.
No, not Chanel, not Marilyn Monroe — but rather, Hidden Valley Ranch.
The line-up — five pieces bearing price tags of up to $1,000 — was straight-up sponsored by the condiment brand, and featured patterns inspired by its iconic seasoning packet.
Gage’s clothes became a viral sensation — for all the wrong reasons.
While the trade pubs dutifully reported on the baffling matchup, some on social media savaged the pairing — driving yet another stake in the heart of a semi-annual event that New York fashionistas used to live for.
What on earth happened?
Twenty years ago, Bryant Park was the place to be. What took place in the tents those few days, twice a year, wound up making global headlines.
This was a time when a label like Heatherette would send Paris Hilton and Naomi Campbell down the same runway, while Boy George crooned and Anna Nicole Smith made a surprise cameo to close the show — dressed in a pink, rhinestone-studded dress, lip-syncing to Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend.
“A voice said to me ‘Fashion is the new rock and roll’,” recalled People Revolution founder and reality TV fixture Kelly Cutrone, of her earliest years in the business.
She’s worked on shows since the mid 1990s and was a pop culture powerhouse in that era.
“Well, it was, and now it’s not,” she told The Post.
And how. This past year, New York Fashion Week has been all but taken over by sponsors that are more WTF than VIP.
There’s Goldfish (Kate Barton incorporated the popular snack into a handbag), Qdoba (chip pants, with edible accessories), and even The White Lotus (take your pick of brands glomming onto the third season of the HBO mega-hit).
And coming up later this week, cannabis “concept store” Gotham will pair up with a string of designers including Collina Strada — which will send models down the runway in limited-edition button-downs featuring “a discreet vape pocket.” Veuve Clicquot will partner with French designer Simon Porte Jacquemus to celebrate the champagne icon’s bottle design, while Ebay will link up with Erdem to promote the commerce site’s secondhand fashions.
Clothes are increasingly an afterthought — now it’s all about cold, hard cash, and the vibe shift is unmistakable to the city’s snobbiest label hounds.
“When I was growing up, all, I wanted to do was go to fashion shows, be a model or sit there. I was sneaking into every frigging show,” Hayley Corwick, a.k.a. Lila Delilah, of fashion and shopping blog Madison Avenue Spy, told The Post.
“Now, when I get invitations, I don’t feel like taking an Uber there. Even the people in fashion aren’t going to the fashion shows anymore,” she sniffed.
What went wrong?
It’s a problem that’s been brewing since the start of the century, insiders say.
That’s when mega-agency IMG took the reins from OG organizers Council of Fashion Designers of America, in 2001 — quickly showing their aim was to milk as much money as it could from the then-star-studded event. (At least Mercedes Benz, which famously first took title naming rights back in 2007, was classy.)
Erin Hawker, Agentry PR founder and another show fixture, didn’t mince words. “They sold the shit out of it, a $45,000 show package to every international designer who wanted to show in New York,” she said, “And [that] diluted it.”
The calendar ballooned unmanageably, made worse by spats between IMG and CDFA, making coordination near-impossible and show clashes commonplace.
IMG’s attempts to reclaim cachet — underwriting shows for hot designers like Joseph Altuzarra — came too late.
“The damage had been done,” Hawker shrugged.
Then came the Great Recession. Up until then, NYFW was at least centralized — its red velvet-roped pop-up Midtown clubhouse becoming the most in-demand spot in the city.
“I remember walking in there and there was a Moet and Chandon bar with a million champagne glasses,” swoons Hawker, “It was so sexy and so great.”
After 2008, IMG got itchy feet, hopscotching the event around town — never really finding their way back.
The agency’s urge to diverge also drove up costs. Bryant Park’s venues were tried, true and essentially turnkey. Starting from scratch in a standalone space was much harder — and more expensive.
Cutrone told The Post that baseline budgets per show today can easily top six figures: $38-58,000 for a venue, $20,000 for lighting, $15,000 for sound and $40,000 for a model roster — prices that many are hesitant to pay, when they can easily slap up an influencer-led social media campaign for far less.
“The sponsors went to digital marketing campaigns, something with immediate eyeballs,” insider Chris Constable, founder of fashion marketing agency CCPR, told The Post.
“The fashion community were the arbiters of style — think Devil Wears Prada cerulean blue — but now everyone wasn’t looking to fashion magazines, but to influencers.”
It was both cheaper and more effective to splash out on funding some cute content, dressing a few street style types, than pay for a big splash in the tents.
Then, there were other affronts — the ill-advised Fashion’s Night Out event, for example, which launched in 2009 and had a mission of making fashion accessible to the public. (Remember the near-riot situation in SoHo, in 2012?)
Magazine editors, their salaries under threat, even started selling their hard-to-score event tickets to unknowns — diluting the star power of the once obsessed-over seating charts.
And those publicity-driving celebrities, who used to occupy the front rows? Most are now bought up by brands, CCPR’s Constable noted — pointing out that someone like Louis Vuitton ambassador Emma Stone wouldn’t even be contractually permitted to attend rival brands’ runway shows, assuming she even wanted to.
Even City Hall has apparently lost what little passion it may have once had for the event — and appears disinterested in helping restore it to any kind of former glory.
More than one in every twenty New Yorkers is employed by the fashion sector, but according to statistics, Fashion Week receives almost no official support — unlike rivals Paris or Milan, where local authorities have been known to fork over cash to help with event development.
In the cash-is-king Big Apple, designers must grab whatever funding source is on offer — and that funding is increasingly off-brand. Cutrone herself has been partnering with Pornhub as a backer for runway shows, and will do so once more this season.
“Sex and fashion have gone hand in hand since the beginning of time,” she said.
“And where else is a young designer going to get money to pay for the show?”
Read the full article here
