AN INITIATIVE TO SAVE THE FASHION INDUSTRY
The uncertainty and gloom that plague the world due to the Covid-19 pandemic has heavily affected the global fashion industry. Even in the few places where there are no lockdowns, the fashion factories have come to a halt – there’s hardly a market for their outputs. In places where quarantine measures are in effect, the fashion stores are mostly closed.
There’s no doubt about how the stoppage has alarmed the major players of the fashion world. Abroad, the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) and Vogue Magazine have established “A Common Thread, the Covid-19 Relief Fund” to aid those in the American fashion industry impacted by the current health crisis. In fact, the Fund has just announced the recipients of its first round of grants. Some 800 applications were sorted by the 10-person committee that included Thom Browne president Rodrigo Bazan; 3.1 Phillip Lim CEO Wen Zhou; and Vogue’s Mark Holgate. The applicants were a mix of famous and unfamiliar names spread across the U.S., from New York to Los Angeles. The selection process was stringent. “We were really careful and deliberate that this didn’t become a CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund best-of-all-time grant,” CFDA President Steven Kolb relates.
Only American companies with revenues below $10 million and fewer than 30 employees were eligible. Nicole Phelps, as www.vogue.com, reports that “the applications were judged on a set of criteria: need, viability, and feasibility (basically how good of an idea the business is and how likely it is to succeed), geography, and social and cultural relevance.” The final approval of the committee’s selections comes from Tom Ford, the chairman of the CFDA board; Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue, U.S., and artistic director and global content advisor of Condé Nast; and Kolb.
“It’s about putting cash back into the system,” Kolb explains. “[The recipients] could be a store who has invoices that haven’t been paid for delivered merchandise, a brand that owed money to a factory for work that was done, or another brand that didn’t get PPP (Paycheck Protection Program) money. You’re paying one that’s paying another; it feeds the ecosystem of fashion.”
The CFDA isn’t disclosing who will receive how much. But there’s definitely reason for optimism for 44 designers, retailers, and factories. The first round of grants will distribute approximately $2.2 million of the $5 million raised by the relief fund so far.
The grants are actually no guarantee that the selected designers, retailers, and factories will overcome the challenges of running a fashion business in a postpandemic world, but in making their selections the committee had a keen eye for future success, according to Kolb. “Brands that were more entrenched in direct-toconsumer, or that saw an opportunity to pivot to a more direct-to-consumer model, those that were thinking differently in terms of how their brands need to evolve, brands focused on sustainability – those were more likely to get money,” he says.
There have been names that were new to the committee, Kolb admits. “We tend to live in our [own] universe and [through this process] we saw that the fashion universe is a lot bigger.” It seems that during desperate times, familiarity does not matter much – everyone tends to go true-to-purpose.
In the end, the “A Common Thread” fund is a gesture of the fashion industry trying to help itself. All other distressed industries all over the world should follow this American example. It probably won’t work this time to wait for a ‘big brother’ to come to the rescue – big brother might have also been hit by Covid-19.