Fashionable, but no buzz
L.A.’s thriving fashion industry teems with entrepreneurs, despite its lack of publicity.
Another Los Angeles fashion week is wrapping up, without the buzz of counterparts in New York, Paris and Milan, Italy — a relatively low profile that masks a thriving, entrepreneurial L.A. fashion industry.
“It’s easier to get into business here,” said Ilse Metchek, president of the California Fashion Assn. “We are not looking for the runways of Paris and Milan. We do our own thing.”
Among the factors feeding the regional fashion industry are the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which provide easy access to imports of clothing and textiles. The city’s apparel manufacturing base, although severely depleted after years of foreign competition, still offers the option of making clothes in the same place where they are designed. And the region’s deep pool of design and art schools churn out graduates that are eager to get into the retail industry.
That’s led to a growth in designers based in Los Angeles. Last year, 4,130 fashion designers were employed in the region, up 9.5% from 3,770 in 2012, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In America’s other fashion hub, New York, the number of fashion designers dropped 3.4% to 7,030 in the same period.
Aspiring designers tend to be more start-up oriented in the Southland compared to the Big Apple, where a long-established culture usually requires designers to work under a big brand before going solo, Metchek said. L.A. doesn’t have that kind of rigid tradition, she said, so many young creatives are opening their own businesses immediately.
“People here want to be entrepreneurs, they don’t want to be Calvin Klein’s assistant,” Metchek said. “It’s so hard to get established in New York.”
Robert Lohman and Matthew Boelk, owners of Groceries Apparel, say the Southland offers unique advantages for newcomers in the fashion space.
Lohman started by selling screen-printed T-shirts on the Venice boardwalk,
and in 2010, he founded the line of organic cotton basics with Boelk, his college friend. The pair set up a factory in downtown Los Angeles with the goal of producing made-in-America garments at competitive prices.
The region’s big supply of sewers was key to Groceries’ business model. Lohman said they used to go to the bus stop favored by American Apparel employees and hand out fliers offering jobs. Those workers were critical to producing high-quality apparel, he said. The company employs about 50 sewers. “The talent base for the sewers is here,” Boelk said. “There isn’t the talent level in the Bay Area. Doing everything in New York is so dang expensive.”
The company, which is leasing a Vernon factory, is on track for up to $6 million in sales this year, from $4 million last year. Aside from local sewers, Lohman said they’ve hired two designers from downtown’s Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising.
The pair are also considering participating in L.A’s fashion week next year after getting heavily recruited by organizers of the competing organizations that offer runway shows and other events twice a year aimed at store buyers and fashion industry media.
“We want the L.A. fashion scene to be more prominent,” Lohman said.
But retail experts are torn about whether fashion week gives Los Angeles’ fashion industry tangible benefits.
Kelsi Smith, who has helped produce shows for L.A. for several years, said she stopped doing so when she saw how little help it offered designers.
“The problem of L.A. fashion week is it’s at the end of the buying cycle,” she said. Buyers from department stores to smaller boutiques have often “settled their money.”
But fashion show organizers say that designers who participate in a show or presentation get valuable exposure, if not a direct bump in sales.
“It’s kind of like a leaping off point,” said Erin Whitaker, who produces Art Hearts Fashion. “They are able to start here, and we can showcase them in New York once they get a following.”
Veronica Kerzner, the founder and producer of Style Fashion Week, said she is actively working with the city of Los Angeles and the L.A. Fashion District to create a “central point” for L.A.
Instead of an umbrella group that sets the calendar, three organizations — Art Hearts Fashion, Style Fashion Week and LA Fashion Week — are all putting on shows and events this month. Kerzner’s organization just took over Fashion Week LA, yet another group that had once been a competitor.
“People think we are a mess and it does look like we are completely disorganized,” Kerzner said. “We’re trying to work on that.”
These efforts come as fashion weeks all over the world are fighting for relevancy.
Shoppers and buyers now have access to detailed photos of clothing directly on their smartphones, tablets and computers — diminishing the importance of fashion weeks in general for the retail industry, experts said.
New York Fashion Week this year lost its main sponsor, Mercedes-Benz. It also got booted out of its Lincoln Center home, reportedly for lease violations.
“It’s a global problem,” Smith said.
“I haven’t seen business happening at fashion week for a while,” she added. “Buyers may be going to trade shows and straight to designers they already have a relationship with.”