The Fashion Businesseven bourgeois respectability, but with a slightly progressive, ‘modern’
interpretation. The look is hard to define, but easy to recognize and very
widely understood; the collection sells around 500,000 garments per season
worldwide. I have chosen to give Weekend as an example of my work, in
this instance, because I wish to highlight the ‘sub-catwalk’ products that do
not figure largely in academic works in fashion, rather than to talk about
the more glamorous MaxMara line. Weekend is clearly not an avant-garde
or couture collection, its commerciality is plain to see, and yet with coats
retailing at around £400 it is not High Street either. The example I have
chosen is intended to illustrate the creative and rational processes which lead
to the development of a relatively simple fashionable garment, to indicate
the great subtleties of meaning and its derivations, in a way that academic
work on fashion has not fully recognized.
An important area for Weekend, especially in winter collections, is
outerwear, where customers look for an informal, innovative solution
alternative or in addition to the more formal sartorially constructed coats in
the MaxMara line. These are generally known in Italy as ‘giaccone’ which
translates literally as ‘big jackets’, the word ‘cappotto’ or ‘coat’ usually
signifying the more formal outerwear garment. Since there is no equivalent
word in English to ‘giaccone’, I will use the term ‘jacket’.
Figures 5.1a and 5.1b show two of the many thousands of jackets that
we, the design team, have produced. Jacket A is from the Autumn/Winter
1997 collection and Jacket B from the Autumn/Winter 2000 collection. A
sold over 3,000 which is regarded as a fairly good figure, whilst B was
eliminated, that is to say, the sample was presented to the agents, merchan-
disers and clients who diffuse the collection but it was rejected by them and
never went into production. Yet the two jackets look so similar, that many
might mistake one for the other, so what happened?
Jacket A was designed in the winter of 1996 when we had noticed that
certain fashion-conscious individuals in New York, London, Paris and Milan,
those who might be said to be ‘ahead’ in the sense that they seemed to
anticipate trends, had begun to mix garments which would not normally be
worn together, or from different ‘dress codes’ – for example, second-hand
evening dresses in velvet or silky fabrics with chunky sweaters, delicate
feminine blouses with jeans. We concluded that this appropriation of the
inappropriate was a way of creating a ‘frisson’ in the way that exotic motifs
are often plundered to the same end.
The crumpled-evening-dress-with-a-chunky-sweater-and trainers look was
too radical and yet at the same time obviously destined to go downmarket
very quickly, since it could be reproduced so cheaply. We decided to interpret
the look in a ‘richer’ way. Velvets and taffetas in ‘jewel’ colours would be