Looking For An Island In the Sun

Flying back from Paris last month, I had exhausted the movie options after two turns at "The Queen". Northwest Flight 49 was approaching Newfoundland with four hours yet to go to Detroit, when I came across the 1957 classic "An Island in the Sun". Several minutes into the movie, I remembered a vignette of a year ago, when Hamish Bowles was complaining at the Gaultier Ready-to-Wear show about the miserable winter weather that had dogged the 2006 fashion season. Specifically, he said he'd taken a break between Milan and Paris in order to catch some rays in St. Bart's. I began to wonder if it was really a case of the winter blues, or the fashion blues, that caused the Vogue editor to escape to the Caribbean.

The movie, "An Island in the Sun", stars a young, pre-Dynasty Joan Collins, but is most memorable for the elegant fashion worn by both men and women. It may have been the decadent days of colonial British rule, but Islanders certainly dressed to the nines. Women are featured in an endless array of late 50's couture gowns, while men are decked out according to the hour — sport's jackets for day, trim dark suits for cocktail hour, and oh my for evening, Spencers with cordons, medals, satin trimmed tuxedos, smoking jackets, French-cuffed shirts with gold studs.

By the time we approached Montréal, I had been completely seduced by the elegance of a lost time. Fashion today could not be more different. There is ongoing discussion among the powers that be about what to do with the season. Fashion Houses, whose primary aim in showing these days is to get free advertising, now present the normal summer and winter collections, but then add pre-collections, cruise collections, safari collections and interim collections to the calendar so that the buzz never quite dies. Buyers claim that customers don't want to wait six to eight months to get clothes they've already seen broadcast on fashion TV, or collections posted in entirety on certain fashion websites (those violating French Federation of Couture rules in doing so) and want quicker delivery. Journalists say they are overloaded with the season, and extensions. Manufacturers in Italy say they would like to take July and August off, as they've done for years, and can't be expected to fill orders on shorter notice. And then there's the French Federation, which says it will not adjust the Paris calendar for anyone, for any reason.

How times have changed. In the 50s, Christian Dior showed his spring line in the upper salons of the Avenue Montaigne headquarters, where clients could reach out and touch the folds of the satin in the gowns. Now, even the most famous French labels are owned by large Global corporations, increasingly deriving the lion's share of their profits from other commercial interests. For those Fashionista looking for an artistic edge, a whiff of that 50's elegance, you'd have to turn to a handful of small entrepreneurs, young independent designers, or labels that seem to be, more often than not, in financial difficulty.

Looking out the airplane window approaching the Canadian coast, you could make out an island or two — they look like glimmering diamonds in a dark, blue sea. And maybe that's where fashion is now, in the last throws of a commercial meltdown — consumers oversaturated, buyers perplexed, journalists exhausted. The solution may be as simple as finding an island in the sun.

- Timothy Hagy

Plastic Baggies Have Fashion Comeback

Whoever thought that it would become chic to flaunt a zip lock plastic baggie during international flight travel? Grin and bare it, as we say. Here are some companies that promise fabulous see-through travel helpers ASAP.
www.hipzipz.com.

This site has skull, dragon, Buddha and other hipster motifs on zip lock bags of many convenient sizes.

Caroline Fasulo has a “travel scarf” that contain pockets for credit cards, passports, cash, etc.
caroline@factorypr.com

– Christine

Flying Woes

August 10, 2006 – Just when it seemed flying couldn’t get any worse, today’s announcement by UK authorities of a thwarted a bomb plot to blow up multiple airlines between Britain and the US has sent the misery index sky high. It was bad enough when the level of service on major carriers had declined to historic lows – and I might add that Air France now locks up the bar half way across the Atlantic, while Delta charges for every drop of libation. Then you factor in zombiefied flight attendants who appear like prisoners on their own plane (except in the case of Lufthansa where they act more like wardens), and you might see why flying isn’t what it used to be.

Today’s announcement from MI5 added insult to injury by imposing a new list of travel regulations that banishes all carry on luggage from flights originating in the UK. Passengers are asked to bring what few acceptable items (these include: passport, credit card, cash, contact lens holder without solution, unboxed tampons “sufficient and essential for the flight”, and keys without electrical key fobs) to the screening point in a clear plastic bag.

On the US front, the FAA responded to the British restrictions in kind by banishing shampoo, sun tan lotion, tooth paste and hair gel and “other similar items” from all US domestic flights as of 4 am. So much for holiday plans – it might be better to visit the tanning salon and put on a CD of ocean waves.

-Timothy Hagy

Tokyo Fashion

Back on the West Coast

Since I’ve returned, life seems to move at the pace of molasses here on the West Coast; quite a welcome pace after a year’s stint living at the speed of light in Tokyo. I leapt over the Pacific to catch up on the Tokyo fashion scene, pursue freelance curating and writing, and discover some of my roots all while working as an English Teacher. I dropped everything (my friends, family, loyal boyfriend, and yawn-inducing desk job) to dwell in the very heart of the city’s fast-paced fashion and youth culture, Shibuya. What I loved so deeply about Tokyo fashion was the freedom to wear whatever you wanted however you wanted to any degree of fashion schizophrenia. Did I take advantage of it? Of course. My name is Chako Suzuki, I’m 27 years old, and I have a knock-down dirty love affair with fashion.

La Foret

This feverish love affair led me through two survival-of-the-fittest bi-annual sales in Tokyo at the famous La Foret department store in Harajuku. The city has only two sales during the entire year. This was a shocking new concept for me coming from America where there are ten million sales going on simultaneously all over the country and discount stores are a dime-a-dozen. In Japan, there is so much frenzy over new clothes and accessories that most items never even see a sale, despite the ridiculous price tags. Fashion companies are able to turn out copies from the runway in a matter of weeks to indulge fashion frenzies and refill empty sales racks; it takes the US several months. By the time a trend hits America, it has already long been binged and purged by obsessed Japanese fashion bulimics (a current example is the re-gurgitation of leggings into mainstream fashion).

Crazed Shoppers

Before the four-day long chaotic bargain hunt, small hordes of crazed shoppers camp out overnight in front of department stores in either July’s sweltering 90-degree, 80%-humidity heat or January’s frigid 30-degree winters to bust the down doors at the 7 a.m. grand opening. I decided to check out See By Chloe’s sale and found out that they were having a “time sale” in fifteen minutes. Time sales are secret 1-hour slots allotted to partial or full markdown on the entire store (signs are posted for them within an hour before they start) and they also mean that even more pushing, shoving, elbow-throwing, and swiping will commence once the curtain drops. Sales in Tokyo are always a no-holds-barred sport — we shoppers are all gladiators and only the strongest get the good stuff.

The Net

With my sister and a friend, we spotted a group of girls lining up and got in line. There was a net blocking the entrance to the store and shop girls were running around frantically changing the 60% off signs to 80% off. The buzz and the crowd grew and, as all hardcore shoppers would, we started to make a game plan to maximize our savings. When the net dropped, we’d rush in and grab whatever we could. More and more girls were lining up, the pressure was mounting, but the three of us had ironclad shoppers’ will.

The net dropped and the stereo blasted. They were playing The Offspring, which spurned a shoppers’ anarchy. I felt like we were back in high school at some Backstreet Boys concert in a mess of overeager teenage fans. It was an anxiety-ridden five minutes, but we were able to converge somehow among the tiny sea of grabbing hands and jutting elbows to be spit out, breathless and empty-handed. This was probably the most exciting guerilla shopping expedition I’d ever braved.

I love It , Baby

Tokyo-ites do a bang-up job of stirring up the shopping hysteria. The music is blasted in every little boutique and shop girls are on soapboxes yelling at shoppers to come in and save. Expensive clothes are thrown in cardboard boxes and shoppers are clattering around in their heels trying to grab whatever they can and pay for it. The sale becomes less about what you can get on sale than about what you can get at all. Would this sales model work in the United States or are we far too pessimistic to brave sales where agility and endurance are key factors? I think I couldn’t be bothered to go to sales like that if they happened here (I usually won’t even go to sample sales because of the competition), but overseas, I love getting swept up in sale-season pandemonium. In Tokyo, that’s how it was, how it is, and how it will always be. Love it or leave it, baby, and I love it.

- Chako Suzuki
Photos by Tamiko Suzuki