American Fashion Podcast

Almost every week a new store is opening in SoHo, and this week that store is Anita Dongre’s Grassroot, at 484 Broome Street. The store feature’s the premiere Indian designer’s vision of sustainable fashion, featuring the Grassroot line which provides employment to artisan villages in India, as well as a bridal boutique.

In this interview, she discusses where the concept for the label came from, what she hopes to accomplish in New York City, and how she approaches management of the vast House of Anita Dongre fashion company.

Recorded at Voyager HQ in Manhattan.

Guest co-host Pavan Bahl joins for this episode from the Fashion Is Your Business podcast.

This is the second half of American Fashion Podcast’s roadtrip to the Philadelphia Fashion Incubator (PFI).

This roundtable is with current members of the incubator class, Janell Wysock: www.janellwysock.com, Latasha Hall – facebook.com/Lillie-Designs-by-Latasha-172429349472334/, and Sara Keel – www.penrosedesignstudio.com/shop. Executive Director Elissa Bloom helps lead the discussion. Conversation centers on the launch point for new designers and new brands, touching on design, marketing, business strategies, social media, and runway shows.

references:

• The Brooklyn Fashion + Design Accelerator
• The Brooklyn Fashion Incubator

 

note: transportation for this episode was paid for by the Philadelphia Fashion Incubator

Charles is in Pennsylvania at the Philadelphia Fashion Incubator, speaking with PFI founder and executive director Elissa Bloom, as well as incubator alumni Nigel Richards, Milan (Milano di Rouge), Sherrill Mosee (Minkee Blue).

“The Philadelphia Fashion Incubator at Macy’s, Center City, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, is a collaboration between the City of Philadelphia, Macy’s Center City, Center City District, and various educational institutions devoted to fashion design in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Fashion Incubator is the first of its kind in Philadelphia. The city is fortunate to be home to nationally-recognized fashion design schools including Moore College of Art, Drexel University and Philadelphia University.”

Nigel Richards produces a menswear line, which rebranded while he was participating int he incubator. Milan produces streetwear and has a heavy media / events tie-in, and Sherill Mosee produces are handbags with modular sections.

note: transportation for this episode was paid for by the Philadelphia Fashion Incubator

 

 

As the Director of Influencer Talent in the Hearst Branded Content Studio, Brittany Hennessy connects influencers with brands for collaboration. The content they produce is featured by dozens of Hearst publications, including Elle, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, Seventeen, and Redbook. Influencer marketing is a hot business right now. Brittany shares how she cuts through some of the noise to see the players and the field.

Brittany and her husband Alexander are the Co-Founders of CreatorsCollective, which provides advice to influencers and brands about how to work with each other.

“I think it works best when all of the pieces work together. People are very quick to move all their money into influencer marketing, or pull all their money from TV. It works best when it’s all a cohesive plan. And I think that’s the struggle most people have, is they can’t figure out how to make everything work together.” – Brittany Hennessy

Also, Charles discusses his recent work with the Save The Garment Center. STGC is a non-profit which protects the critical infrastructure of the New York fashion industry. They have a new position paper on the future of the garment industry. Join STGC as a member [here].

Mizzen and Main

Kevin Lavelle is CEO of Mizzen and Main, a menswear line that prioritizes function over tradition in its fabric selection. In this interview, the conversation covers…

• running a clothing business from Dallas
• competitive AdWords strategy for e-commerce
• YachtCaptcha and the coming of SkyNet
• making menswear that doesn’t have your customers asking “what was I thinking?” in ten years
• running a designer-less brand

“All the blood in the water that’s happening from the broader retail world… it’s a really exciting time to be an apparel company. Just, with the changing nature of people’s buying habits, and Amazon is just changing the way people think about what it means to buy things online, even more than they already have, pop-ups and retail partnerships… all of those things… there is no shortage of opportunity out there. For all the fear that’s happening, some of the old guards might go away, and that’s sad from a legacy perspective, and it’s going to require some pretty significant changes, but I can’t wait to see what’s next.” – Kevin Lavelle

Julien Labat On Edun’s Sustainable Choices

There is fairly little true long term thinking in the fashion industry, but it’s not surprising to see it come from an LVMH brand. Edun is a very special company, with a very special mission. It was started by Ali Hewson and her husband Bono, with the intention of making sustainable high end fashion in Africa. It has been a long road with a lot of learning and building, and rebuilding, as revealed in this interview with a new New Yorker, CEO Julien Labat.

“I think you can tell that we’re going through this moment, and it’s about every brand needs to increase this conviction about who they are and the value they stand for, and being sure they offer to the customer something that is relevant but also so they cure a need. I think that the whole thing is about identifying who is the customer at the moment with all this changing, and this political and economic and social change: what the customer really looks for. And I think the answer is that the most of the customers don’t know themselves. And I think it’s where the brand’s work is really to recreate this and definitely also bringing the customer to be comfortable with their purchase.”- Julien Labat “I think we’re going to something which is maybe a little less seasonal, but you need to still refresh your offer, and bring more consistency.” – Julien Labat

 

Stephanie Maslansky Brings Marvel’s Stories To Life On Netflix

Stephanie Maslansky is the costume designer behind several Netflix series based on the Marvel comic book universe: Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and now Iron Fist. She was previously on American Fashion Podcast episode #94, and is now back to deep dive into her work on Iron Fist. In this interview she discusses how she created updated filmable versions of the character looks from the comic books, her appreciation of the cosplay movement, and how her team creates business suits compatible with kung fu.

“I don’t know if you guys know about cosplay. Cosplay is a wonderful thing that I just learned about a couple years ago myself. People dress up as their favorite characters, in superheroes, television shows; it’s really evolved. Just as comicons have evolved. It’s not just about comic book nerds anymore. It’s all the television shows, animated characters, characters you create from your brain.”

“These people who create these costumes, the work is often extraordinary. Just as good, if not better, than what we do. I’ve seen some things that can be compared to visual effects, and yet these people create them in their basements or their garages. It’s quite extraordinary.”

 

Designer Nick Graham (website) refers to his menswear line’s customers as the perennial millennials, and from his rapid retail expansion, he seems to be tapping into something very interesting. The recent New York Fashion Week Men’s show for Nick Graham featured Buzz Aldrin, Bill Nye The Science Guy, and the planet Mars. In this interview he discusses how he built a brand now found in hundreds of retail stores in under three years, and teases the over the top concept for the next fashion week show. His insights on how to start a fashion business both confirm and confound the common wisdom.

“The first three years of a business are critical. The first year you figure out exactly what you are, you take your hits. The second year it starts to gel in your mind and the market’s mind of what you represent, and then you get your sourcing and your production ready. And the third year is really when you launch. The first year is not a lunch year, the third year is always a launch year, I think.” – Nick Graham

References:

• Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction (book)
• John Elliott (designer)
• John Varvatos (designer)
• Paul Smith (designer)

Almost ten years ago, with the 2008 financial collapse and other market forces in the fashion industry, we saw the rug pulled out from under a massive number of both new and established brands. It has been a rough decade, and now with the retail collapse accelerating things continue to look bleak for traditional fashion companies. But is this the real picture?

Independent and Emerging: The State of The Business

Seth, Lisa, Cathy, and Charles are live on stage together for this first live audience podcast, which circles back to the heart of where the show began: wanting to help independent and emerging designers with ecological, social, and financial sustainability.

Guests for this episode are three of the most knowledgeable women in the entire industry when it comes to the wants and needs to independent and emerging designers: Nicole Giordano of StartUp FASHION, and Debera Johnson and Deborah Alden of the Brooklyn Fashion + Design Accelerator (Pratt/BF+DA).

The conversation starts with Seth summarizing the state of the industry ten years back, and goes into where we are now, with detail about direct and wholesale sales, the availability of sustainable materials, and how independent and emerging designers can approach functioning in the chaotic state of the industry today.

This is the first of several planned American Fashion Podcast: LIVE shows, and listeners are encouraged to use the Live Show form to sign up for free tickets to similar upcoming events.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BW-uUpGB10X/?taken-by=americanfashionshow

https://www.instagram.com/p/BW-vyQkBJF9/?taken-by=americanfashionshow

Pop-up stores, experience spaces, temporary showrooms, events, photoshoot locations, and other temporary space needs are the domain of a web and mobile app called Peerspace. They’ve helped us gather a group of experts to talk about the relatively new but certainly growing trend of temporary retail.

In the studio for this episode are Gemma Sole, co-founder of Nineteenth Amendment; Parisa Wang, founder of fashion accessories brand Parisa Wang; Aliana Galan, Senior Project Manager at The Lionesque Group; real estate investor Fred Piumelli; Jason Levine, General Manager at Peerspace; and Rony Chammas, CEO at Peerspace.

Some of the topics on the table include retail fatigue, legal issues around temporary leases, and how landlords are adapting to the new paradigm.

FIYB listeners get a 10% site-wide discount up to $100 through 9/30/17 at www.peerspace.com/p/fashion