The Gucci outlet at The Mall Firenze, about 30 minutes from Florence in the hills of Tuscany.Bernadette Morra/The Globe and Mail
Fashion follows a predictable rhythm. Designers design, factories fill orders, new collections hit stores, magazines appear on shelves – all like clockwork. But once the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the industry’s steady tempo became erratic. Seven months after the virus reached North America, not only has the way many of us shop changed, but the back end of the business has been shaken up like never before.
For some in the industry, the pandemic presented an opportunity to pursue reform. In May, designers including Dries Van Noten, Erdem Moralioglu and Gucci’s Alessandro Michele all signed an open letter in favour of slowing down and producing less. For others, it forced workplace revamps, catalyzed the creation of charitable initiatives or revealed the shortcomings of the traditional retail model. In June, the renewed urgency of the Black Lives Matter movement pressured fashion to reckon with its racial inequity.
To take stock of exactly how much things have changed, we asked Canadians who work in fashion to share how they’ve navigated this disruption and where they go from here.
Fashion often works seasons or even years in advance. But as the pandemic began in early 2020, the timeline that keeps the industry on track went haywire as stores and factories closed.
Tanya Taylor, Canadian designer. Handout.Supplied
Tanya Taylor (designer): We sell to a lot of major retailers – Saks, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, ShopBop, Bergdorf’s – and we immediately jumped on a call with them and started asking about their store closing policy and what their contingency plan around inventory would look like. We tried to cut anything that hadn’t been made yet, to reduce our inventory to save costs. We cancelled 16 events that we had planned between March and the end of May.
Richard Simons, Owner and VP of Buying, Simons. Handout.Supplied
Richard Simons (owner and VP of buying, Simons): Restructuring our inventory and deliveries was key. Our planning and forecasting models were redesigned and updated weekly in a crisis that was changing daily. To be honest, it felt a bit like navigating through the fog. I remember several times making decisions in the morning and reversing them in the afternoon as we received new information. In normal times, managers that change their minds so often would be fired.
Catherine Addai, designer and boutique owner, Kaela Kay.Artists Touch Productions/Supplied
Catherine Addai (designer and boutique owner, Kaela Kay): We ended up putting out a call on Instagram, asking our customers, “Do you want us to launch a collection? Do you want to see something new right now? What’s happening in your life?” We don’t want to come across as insensitive and just about the money. And, thankfully, the feedback we got from literally everybody was like, no, we want to see [new things] even if we don’t shop.
The fashion industry’s community response to the pandemic ranged from global conglomerates such as LVMH retasking its perfume factories to manufacture hand-sanitizing gel to Canadian brands including Smythe and Canada Goose creating masks and hospital scrubs to ease the pressure on personal protective equipment (PPE) supplies.
Rami Helali, CEO of Kotn. Handout
Rami Helali (CEO, Kotn): It’s always important to be conscious of how people are feeling and understand that there are times when people aren’t in the head space to shop. We tried to focus on the positives that were happening throughout the world. We did a pay-it-forward campaign. We had excess inventory and rather than just discount it, we let our customers gift it to any front-line worker they wanted to give to, for free.
Lesley Hampton, president and creative director of Lesley Hampton.Supplied
Lesley Hampton (designer): We shifted to making cloth masks. We partnered with a company called CoverGalls to collaborate with them to develop masks. We did 200. The Canadian Arts and Fashion Awards have an online presence supporting Canadian designers and partnered with Fashion magazine to put on a sale event to assist designers in selling our work as much as we could. [Editor’s note: According to organizers, the two-day initiative resulted in $130,000 in sales for participating designers].
Jennifer Wong, president and COO, Aritzia.
Jennifer Wong (president & COO, Aritzia): We created the Aritzia Community Care Program, which is a $20-million initiative to donate custom-developed clothing packages to front-line health-care workers fighting COVID-19 in Canada and the U.S. PPE isn’t our specialty but high-quality clothing is, so we knew this was a way we could help.
Aurora James, designer at Brother Vellies.NINA WESTERVELT/The New York Times News Service
Aurora James (designer, Brother Vellies): [To support the activism around Black Lives Matter] I had the idea of the 15% Pledge, an initiative to ensure 15 per cent of products available in stores come from Black producers and things moved very quickly. We became a non-profit and signed Sephora to the Pledge as our first major retailer. As a business owner, I have been especially torn up by how much Black businesses were suffering [during the pandemic]. This pledge is one way major retailers can take steps toward financial equality.
Creative collaboration is at the core of how fashion entices us to shop but that process had to be completely reimagined for a remote world. For the June cover of GQ, actor Robert Pattinson photographed himself at his London apartment while other titles including Vanity Fair and Vogue took to Zoom and FaceTime to capture their subjects. That sort of unprecedented flexibility crossed over to the boardroom as designers and retailers reached out to their competitors to figure out how to navigate a new normal.
Bernadette Morra, Editor-in-chief of FASHION magazine. Handout.Supplied
Bernadette Morra (editor-in-chief, Fashion): After lockdown began, any original art that we had to produce suddenly became very problematic. We had a cover story, which was going to involve flying a crew down to Austin, Tex., to photograph Antoni Porowski from Queer Eye. We had to do it all remotely. George Antonopoulos, our creative and fashion director, first had all the clothing shipped to his own condo in Toronto. He styled it out the way he wanted Antoni to wear it, photographed everything, repacked it, sent it down. Antoni had to steam and iron and do all the things a stylist would normally do. We thought that we would be able to get Antoni to shoot himself on his iPhone but that didn’t work out. We ended up hiring a photographer in Austin, and she shot him outside and from afar. For cover shoots, you usually have lots of lighting and a digital technician who’s looking at the images right away and advising on different technical aspects of the shoot. There was none of that.
Jon Hennessey, @j_hennessey on Instagram. Handout/Jon Hennessey/InstagramSupplied
Jon Hennessey (makeup artist and owner of Nobasura artist management): We’re seeing certain clients we work with from an e-commerce perspective that are shipping products to influencers or to models to shoot in their own environments. That’s something that’s new. And the results are there’s a lot of beautiful content that’s being created.
Conor Cunningham.Supplied
Conor Cunningham (photographer): A couple of weeks into lockdown, I was starting to get a little stir-crazy and I saw people were doing FaceTime shoots. I thought, I guess if I could make it look like it wasn’t through FaceTime, if I could find a way to produce work that looked like what I would normally do, I would give it a shot. Now, I’ve been able to book shoots with people that I normally would have to travel to do anything with. And it’s opened the door to work with brands that may not have been able to afford to fly me out somewhere.
Taylor: This has been a moment where a traditionally private and sometimes protective industry where brands don’t share their secrets has really opened up. Within the first month of lockdown, the conversations that I was invited to have with other CEOs of companies that are our competitors are conversations I would have never been able to have before. It was a really collaborative brainstorming around how we change the calendar, how we change our relationships with wholesalers.
As the industry planned its restart, brands and creative talent diverged on how to respond to some key questions. Is this the end of seasonal fads? How do you make things such as fashion shows and photo shoots as safe as possible? Should you tweak your collection to cater to a more home-focused lifestyle? And what is the future of physical stores?
Vanessa Craft, Editor-in-chief of Elle Canada. HandoutSupplied
Vanessa Craft (editor-in-chief, Elle Canada): For a long time, we have been talking as a team about the relevancy of things like trend reports. This industry is obviously a beast that constantly needs feeding. And now, there is a reckoning that is happening. And that is a very positive thing in terms of everyone in the industry looking at what is our responsibility here. Going into September, the thing that is on most people’s minds in the magazine industry is what is the reality of clothing? What are designers doing right now? Just from a logistical point of view, is there anything that we would want to photograph? And if so, has it even been produced? Then the next thing, of course, that we’re focused on is what is a relevant and helpful conversation to be having with fashion right now. You know, this constant need to have new things. There needs to be conversations around sustainability.
Hennessey: As a makeup artist, we can’t have the model in the chair wearing a mask while we’re doing their makeup. So it’s on the artists themselves to take on that responsibility: wearing masks, gloves, sanitizing surfaces. We’re streamlining kits down to just essential elements so that they’re easier to maintain. We also connected with a company called Beauty So Clean, which is in Toronto, and they provide products for cosmetic sanitation. So it’s taking a lot of those things that you do behind the scenes and making it part of our protocol to do them in front of the client.
Hampton: We as a brand have our evening wear collection, but we also have an athleisure line. Moving forward, we’re going to focus more on the athleisure collection, mostly because everyone has gotten used to work-from-home outfits. Even if people re-enter the workspace, they’re going to want something comfortable. And the gala events may not return in the next year.
Helali: A lot of retailers rely on the uptick of sales around the holidays, and I think many of us aren’t sure if that’s going to exist this year. People are trying to hedge their decisions with both inventory and new store openings. We had a handful of new store openings that have been put on pause for now, just until we have a little more visibility of what’s coming. We feel very strongly that physical retail is part of our road map, it’s just about timing.
As stores reopen and in-person runway shows begin for the Spring 2021 season in cities such as London and Paris, many in the industry are wondering if the new road map was actually just a temporary detour. For real change to take hold, the digital surge, more streamlined collections and a sustained focus on inclusiveness will have to become the norm beyond the pandemic.
Morra: The breakdown of the wholesale model is being accelerated. The power of the big department store just no longer exists. In the last few years, we’ve seen the rise of a lot of brands that are ignoring wholesale altogether and doing direct to consumer. And so that is something that I think is going to accelerate. Anybody who wasn’t making e-commerce a priority definitely is now.
Simons: The industry is now acknowledging some major issues that need to change, such as too many collections being presented throughout the fashion calendar, excessive travel by the industry at large and overproduction of garments leading to mass discounting and markdowns. I am confident many of these problems will be resolved through the use of technology, such as new platforms to manage inventories and decrease supply. In a way, COVID-19 has simply been the accelerator of change that is greatly needed.
Craft: The biggest changes will come from not only the logistics or the practicalities of the fashion calendar and shopping and when collections hit the stores. I think we also cannot keep having these elitist conversations that only cater to a certain audience and cut out a significant portion of the population who are just as deserving of the magic of fashion as anybody else. I’m hoping that everyone in the industry can keep having uncomfortable conversations and face up to the need for authentically diverse voices. It’s better for storytelling. It’s better for creativity.
These interviews have been condensed and edited.
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