As New York Fashion Week winds down, there have been many designers sitting – watching on the sidelines – due to economic hardship.
Institutions at all levels of the fashion industry – from education to public relations and production – are now racing to try to correct the balance of economic disparity.
He went as far as to call this moment “the most dire for independent designers in the world of modern fashion. There has never been a time when there are less retailers, that it’s been more difficult to produce, you can’t get sponsorship like you used to and there are not a lot of programs or grants.
“We were really following a set of criteria established for our application process and not looking at personal finances – that was not applicable for this grant selection process. We were really reviewing in detail the impact that COVID had on their businesses in terms of year-over-year revenue as well as use cases of how they would use the funds.
While the onus is far from being only on IMG to support the needs of young designers from low-income and middle-class backgrounds, the fund does represent a larger disconnect that many designers complain about – a blind eye to what it costs to start a brand and the struggles of operating a young company.
“It’s definitely been a process, I feel like my major setbacks in starting a brand have been time and finances. Obviously because I have to work to live and it takes longer to get to a point in the brand to live off your sales, I have to work [another job] and that takes up a lot of time away from being able to develop the brand I want,” they said.
By Lamorell’s modest estimate of the cost per season, that would mean needing $30,000 to $40,000 in the bank. “What’s different today than in the past is the trajectory of growth. The expectation is so much faster now than it was for some of the great designers; they grew at a much smaller rate with only two collections a year.
Ultimately, without sufficient sponsorship or funding, McKnight decided the cost of a presentation was too risky to shoulder – especially considering that he already was spending in the ballpark of $20,000 to produce his collection. Ben Barry, the dean at Parsons School of Design The New School, said that, “Part of the challenge is that we have so narrowly defined one route to being successful, that you need to show every fashion week season and this is the path. Designers who don’t have generational wealth have had to find different paths to starting their own business that don’t all require a huge investment of capital – so it’s about finding how we can recognize and validate those as important options.
“We are increasingly working on this in everything from the application process to grading process. We know everyone is not starting from the same place – some students have incredible resources to put together their projects with and others don’t have the same privilege. There is deep work to do when evaluating applications and recognizing the resources that students do or do not have. We are now developing grading rubrics to evaluate the core of assignments,” he said.
While Barry is working to right the long-standing criticisms of Parsons, he is still wary of other built-in luxuries that come with wealth – particularly the luxuries of time and contacts. As an individual in charge of helping to seed the fashion industry with a fresh wave of talent, Barry is think-tanking further ways to assist students from diverse financial backgrounds.
The CFDA, which declined to comment for this story, said that it has worked to streamline its scholarship application process to be more inclusive. It also noted that it charges independent designers a $50 calendar fee and that there may be confusion over the $400 charge.
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