WASHINGTON POST: Brett Johnson, son of BET’s Bob and Sheila Johnson, launches his own fashion collection

WASHINGTON POST | Roxanne Roberts It started with sneakers. When he was about 10, Brett Johnson began customizing his white Nike Air Force 1’s, adding fabrics and touches to make them one-of-a-kind. “I felt they told a story,” he says. “And my mom would preach that women always look at a man’s shoes.”

Then again, the son of BET founders Bob and Sheila Johnson always had a leg up on other kids when it came to exploring his creative side. His personal shoe collection now numbers 600 pairs, and last fall he launched the Brett Johnson Collection, a line of luxury streetwear for men.

“Dude, I didn’t know you were ballin’ like this!” says former Redskin Darrell Green. “I look good.”

Green showed up at Johnson’s trunk show Saturday in Middleburg, where he slipped on a baby soft leather bomber vest with sheepskin trim. At $1,695, it’s the most expensive item in Johnson’s small collection; Green was also eyeing a black wool vest with leather trim ($695) and another casual jacket. According to its young creator, it’s contemporary clothing designed for fashion-savvy guys who rarely slip on suits but like high-end fabrics and craftsmanship: artists, celebrities, tech moguls and athletes of any age.

“I’m 54 next month and I’m still cool,” Green says with a laugh.

Sold. Johnson is one more satisfied customer closer to his dream.

His self-made parents are worth $1 billion or so, which they split when they divorced a decade ago. That fortune launched their children into a world of almost unlimited choices, with all the advantages and pitfalls extreme wealth can bring. Daughter Paige, 28, fell in love with horses as a young girl and is a champion equestrian; Brett, 24, wanted to be a fashion designer — one of the most challenging and competitive businesses out there.

“Brett always knew he wanted to do this, but I didn’t pay much attention to it because I thought it was just a phase he was going through,” his mother says. Loving fashion — and wearing Louis Vuitton and Lanvin — didn’t mean he could design clothes himself. Both parents insisted he go to college, where he studied sociology instead of business because, as he explains, “I have two of the best professors at home.”

But he quickly bored of classrooms and was itching to start a career in design. His mother was skeptical: “Do you understand what you’re really getting yourself into?” It took two years and a “bit of a tussle” before his parents finally agreed to let him, at age 21, dive into the fashion business.

At first, he just focused on shoes, trying to create a high-end sneaker that sold for $295, something between Nike and Gucci. He started with three styles — all with a signature orange footprint — which he shopped around. The feedback? Cool, but he needed more to create a viable line. Johnson added outerwear and polos for his first collection. (And then pants, sweaters, belts and scarves for the second.)

He headed to Florence, where he picked out leathers and fabrics and began the “very intricate” manufacturing process. Spliting time between his Arlington County home, a Bethesda office and a New York showroom, he’s both boss and student — up at 4 a.m. to micro-manage details via Skype with the Italian factory, touring tanneries to discover new leathers and finishes.

His vision: A line of “contemporary luxury” for “creatives,” all those young power players in hoodies. His designer role models are Brunello Cucinelli, the Italian designer who specializes in cashmere, and London-based Ozwald Boateng, best known for his classic bespoke suits. Johnson is trying to create a brand that blends the best fabrics with a street sensibility. “I look at it as art,” he says. “I’m tired of seeing terrible product.”

Affable but a little shy, he’s humble enough to admit he hit the family lottery and smart enough to understand how hard it will be to be taken seriously. “Being the son of Bob and Sheila Johnson creates another hurdle,” he says. “I just want my work to speak for itself.”

Easier said than done: One of the few VIP heirs with a serious fashion career is Stella McCartney — daughter of the Beatles’ Paul McCartney — who got her start in 1995 when supermodel friends Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss modeled her design school collection; just two years later, she was named head designer at Chloe. Some groused that the McCartney name jump-started her rise, but the designs established her as a talent in her own right.

Johnson has a famous name, famous friends and, like almost every other newcomer in fashion, his family as primary investors and cheerleaders.

As chairman of New York’s Parsons The New School for Design for seven years, his mother introduced him to designer friends such as Donna Karan and Tim Gunn, loaned her private plane and traveled with him to Italy to tour factories. “He had more knowledge than I had ever thought,” she says. “It was a matter of me sitting back and letting him blossom.”

Although she stayed in the background, Saturday’s trunk show was held at Sheila Johnson’s new Salamander Resort & Spa in Middleburg. Waiters offered prosecco and hors d’oeuvres as well-heeled men and women wandered in the resort’s gift shop, where Brett Johnson’s outerwear and sneakers were set up amid sweet-smelling designer soap and golf shirts. The party was something of a two-fer: A couple of family friends dropped by to offer Johnson congratulations and to wish his mother a happy birthday.

His father put up most of the start-up capital for his son’s venture. “Brett’s business model is not just a wealthy dad indulging his son,” says Bob Johnson, well aware that that’s how a lot of people might see it. “He believes in it, I believe in it, and I have some smart outside people who are advising him and encouraged by what he’s trying to achieve.”

As the biggest investor (he declined to discuss the amount), the elder Johnson required his son to come up with a business plan and said he was persuaded by his son’s passion, work ethic and design team. He’s not concerned that Brett didn’t go to design school because, well, he didn’t go to business school before founding BET, and that worked out just fine.

As investors go, a designer couldn’t ask for more: There’s no timetable in years or cap on financial support. “He’ll have time,” Bob Johnson says. “Some things will work and some things will fail, but he’ll have the time and resources to recover.”

Money, time, even fame are no guarantee of success: Rapper Kanye West had all three when he launched a women’s line in 2012. It was largely mocked by fashion insiders as a disaster, mostly because West had the resources to do anything he wanted — and (shocker) didn’t listen to advice.

Most designers last three seasons or less, doomed by a crowded field and store buyers reluctant to give floor space to unproven brands. African American designers have a harder time getting recognition: Only a handful appear in New York’s Fashion Week, and even fewer are featured in top department stores. Tracy Reese, one of the most successful black designers in business today, failed at her first attempt to launch her line. Despite all the talented African American designers working behind the scenes at major labels, none has won a prestigious Council of Fashion Designers of America award, the industry’s top prize — except Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, a celebrity who does not design his own line.

“Breaking into the market today can be challenging for young designers because there are so many brands competing for attention, but there are definitely opportunities for designers that make a strong statement or offer niche collections,” says Robert Burke, chief executive of Robert Burke Associates, a luxury retail consulting group. “If we think about designers like Alexander Wang or Jason Wu, they’ve both achieved success and recognition because they offered fresh perspectives and distinguished themselves from what others were doing.” Johnson’s resources will certainly help, he says, “but the success of that label will ultimately depend on how strong the product is, how focused it is and if it captures the attention of its target audience.”

At this point, nobody knows whether Brett Johnson will be another Stella McCartney or simply another rich kid with his logo on some shoes. The big challenge now is to win over store buyers and then customers. The collection was introduced in a soft launch at parties last fall, and he’s hoping for a New York show. There’s a Web site, ads in luxury magazines and famous friends (the Redskins’ Josh Morgan and Pierre Garcon, celebrities Kevin Hart and Bradley Cooper) interested in helping out. Johnson says he’s sold about 40 pieces of outerwear and 200 pairs of sneakers in the past two months.

“Some good traction,” he says, with a relieved smile. Or, as his father aptly put it, “He’s got runway.”

 

AL JAZEERA: Retail Science - Holiday Wardrobing

Click here to watch clip on Holiday "wardrobing".

BofF: Fashion Inflation: Why Are Prices Rising So Fast?

BUSINESS OF FASHION | LAUREN SHERMAN

NEW YORK, United States — It’s easy to find a nice-looking pair of shoes for $40 these days, and even easier to find a trendy $40 dress. But while “fast fashion” prices are so light on the wallet they almost feel as though they’re going to disappear altogether, the cost of luxury goods continues to rise and rise, with no end in sight.

Currently on luxury e-tailer Net-a-Porter, there are more than 100 pairs of shoes priced over $1,000. (Two pairs of sparkly Christian Louboutins exceed $6,000.) And the price of Chanel’s famous 2.55 bag now rivals that of an Hermès Kelly. That is, an Hermès Kelly a decade ago. In the US market, the famous bag, which in the year 2000 started at $4,800, now starts at $7,600.

A nearly 60 percent price increase may seem excessive — especially when compared to the US Consumer Price Index (a measure of the price level of consumer goods, published by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics), which has increased by 27 percent over the past decade — but it’s typical in the luxury fashion category.

Indeed, in recent years, prices of luxury fashion products have grown at more than twice the rate of general inflation. In 2003, Carrie Bradshaw’s famous Manolo Blahniks cost $485. Exactly ten years later, the same style is $755, a 56 percent increase. (And several pairs of current season Manolos cost well above $1,000.) Ready-to-wear-dresses in the $10,000 and up range barely existed 10 years ago. Now they’re commonplace. In fact, popular luxury fashion e-commerce site Luisa Via Roma is currently selling a Fausto Puglisi embroidered tartan skirt for over $10,000 and a leather-and-bouclé Fendi dress for more than $13,000.

So what’s driving up the prices and how far can they go?

First, let’s consider the rough costs of producing a luxury product. Gross margins for luxury companies typically hover around 65 percent — that sounds like a lot, but it’s what shareholders now expect. It also means that a $3,500 bag costs roughly $1,225 to produce and bring to market, all the way from materials to sale. There are many steps along the way that contribute to the final price. There are the costs of raw materials, design, manufacturing and fulfillment. Then, at retail, there’s the cost of prime real estate and sales staff. And finally, there’s marketing: those glossy fashion adverts cost a pretty penny to produce, let alone to place. Over the past 10 years — and particularly since the end of the recession — many of these costs have increased dramatically.

Raw materials are more expensive and more scarce than ever before. Cattle prices (which are relevant to leather goods) will rise in the US by 7.3 percent in 2013, according to market research firm Allendale. And in the years since the global financial crisis, cotton prices have risen to previously unheard of levels, with demand from China pushing them even further in 2013 — to $93.08 in June 2013, a 13 percent increase year-on-year. Both Louis Vuitton and Hermès have recently invested in Australian crocodile farms to ensure their supply of the expensive skin, while Kering, in March, acquired Normandy-based crocodile tannery France Croco for the same reasons.

Rising labour costs are a factor, too. The wages of private-sector workers in China (where many brands manufacture) increased by 14 percent in 2012, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics. Over the past 10 years, monthly average wages almost doubled in Asia, with an 18 percent increase in Africa, and 15 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean (also important manufacturing centres) according to a report released by the UN’s International Labour Organisation. And it’s not just emerging markets. In France, labour costs will, this year, reach their highest levels ever, according to the OECD.

Perception and desirability play a huge role in the pricing game, too. The more expensive something is, the more exclusive and, therefore, desirable it becomes. Burberry, for instance, said as recently as March that it would raise prices to increase its appeal to the upper end of its customer base and attract new, wealthier customers.

For some brands, the anticipation of markdowns is another factor. “Brands’ biggest fear is having to mark things down,” says New York retail consultant Robert Burke.

Though a few luxury brands, like Hermès and Louis Vuitton, do not discount, it’s typical for most fashion retailers to mark down at least a portion of their product in order to efficiently clear inventory. One need look no further than the department stores and monobrand boutiques currently offering discounts of more than 70 percent on Spring product to see that customers can, with the requisite strategy and patience, easily buy a pair of $1,400 stilettos for a much more palatable $300. “People who are on the really cutting edge of fashion might buy pre-season [at full price] but many folks wait for the discounts,” says journalist Ellen Ruppel Shell, author of Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture.

“Designer brands repeatedly going on sale may eventually be forced to artificially inflate prices to counter the margin pressure,” notes Matthew Walker, Creatures of the Wind chief executive, who served as president of The Row from 2008 to 2011. Though this could “lead to price resistance and eventually impact brand loyalty,” he cautions.

But perhaps the most powerful driver of fast-rising luxury fashion prices is the fact that there are simply more people who are able to pay up. The number of high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) in the world increased by 9.2 percent in 2012 to 12 million people, with combined total assets of $46.2 trillion, according to a report by Capgemini, a management consultancy. North America still hosts the largest number of HNWIs (3.73 million people, up 11.5 percent year-over-year, with $12.7 trillion in assets, up 11.7 percent year-over-year), but the number of HNWIs in the Asia-Pacific region increased by 9.4 percent, during the same period, to 3.68 million, with total assets up 12.2 percent to $12 trillion.

Yes, the rich are getting richer. But is there a limit to what a sane person — billionaire or not — is willing to pay for a pair of shoes? “The question is, how high is high?” Burke asks. “These are people who have their jets outfitted in Hermès leather and Loro Piana vicuna. If demand is there, brands will continue to move up.”

WASHINGTON POST: The agony and ecstasy of creating inaugural gowns

WASHINGTON POST | ROBIN GIVHAN

Winning an inaugural gown commission is the fashion industry’s equivalent of hitting the lottery. Attracting global interest and awash in historical resonance, the first lady’s evening dress is patriotism and politics, hope and pride expressed in a few yards of silk and lace. The dress serves as a reflection of the times and a link to tradition — a symbol of both change and continuity. And for the rarefied designers who have had their work worn by a first lady — and then watched as their creation was installed in the National Museum of American History — the experience is both jolting and validating. For a single night, the eyes of the world bear witness to their talent. Oh the joy, the glory, the fame!

But again and again, in the months following that magical night of optimistic music and sweetly clumsy dancing, fashion’s highflying Icaruses have plummeted to earth, scorched by the white-hot light of celebrity and expectation. An overwhelmed business closes. Savings are lost. New collections go unseen. Fade to black. Curses!

“Designing the inaugural gown doesn’t guarantee anything but exposure,” says New York retail and brand consultant Robert Burke. “It doesn’t guarantee success.” At least not the household-name, big-brand, big-money kind.

For the past 20 years, the designers of the Smithsonian-destined inaugural gowns — only first-term dresses receive that honor — have been little-known men and one woman who had yet to be tested on the national stage. In the aftermath of the hoopla, they were dealt some bruising blows. Hillary Rodham Clinton turned to Sarah Phillips, a 37-year-old New York designer whose company was then only about three years old. After creating Clinton’s violet mousseline gown, Phillips went out of business. Laura Bush relied on her loyal Dallas-based dressmaker Michael Faircloth for her inaugural gown. Afterward, with the attention of the entire fashion industry on him, Faircloth crafted a ready-to-wear collection for the New York runway. But fate had different plans, and he never made it to the big city.

Designers who contributed one-of-a-kind day dresses and suits to the inaugural trousseau haven’t fared much better business-wise. Isabel Toledo, who created the lemongrass-yellow dress and coat Michelle Obama wore to her husband’s 2009 swearing-in, continues as an independent designer — but one still keeping close watch on how to make ends meet. Narciso Rodriguez is just now finding some financial footing after skidding close to bankruptcy even as his clothes were splashed on the front pages of newspapers around the globe. And Maria Pinto, who many fashion observers thought was a shoo-in for the inaugural gown because the Chicago-based designer had furnished Obama with a steady supply of boldly colored sheath dresses during the 2008 campaign, has since shuttered her business.

Wu: ‘I’m a dressmaker’

But then there is Jason Wu — the outlier. The one who beat the odds. He createdObama’s ethereal, ivory, silk gown with its dusting of Swarovski crystals.

Wu is a slight young man — born in Taiwan, raised in Vancouver and living in New York. With an oval face, peach-fuzz hair and a serious but genial mien, he was known among fashion editors and high-end retailers but had no profile outside that insular world. He wasn’t quite a fashion yearling, but close. He’d left Parsons TheNew School for Design in his senior year and had been in business for two years. He was 26 when Ikram Goldman, the owner of the eponymous Chicago boutique who was serving as the facilitator of the inaugural wardrobe, asked him to craft a special gown for a special client. Wu made the dress in his tiny New York workroom and flew with it to the Windy City.

He didn’t know Obama had chosen his gown until she stepped in front of the cameras at the Neighborhood Inaugural Ball.

“I was being pulled every which way in a matter of seconds. The next morning I was sitting next to Meredith Vieira [on ‘Today’],” Wu recalls. “The toughest question I’d ever been asked was ‘What was your inspiration?’ I had no media training. Suddenly people expected me to have something to say. It was crazy."

The experience was a lot like that for Phillips, and for Faircloth as well: the excitement, the interviews, the attention. But when it was all over, they didn’t have ready-to-wear, shoes and accessories being sold by Bergdorf Goodman and Saks Fifth Avenue. They were not expanding into new products, dressing celebrities and slowly solidifying a place in the popular consciousness. Only Wu has been able to make something out of the dizzy, fizzy froth of inauguration.

“Life hands you luck, but what you do with it is up to you,” Wu says. “At the end of the day, I’m a dressmaker. I never forgot that. That’s what kept me focused.”

But make no mistake; Wu is also a businessman.

“I always ran my company like a company. I wanted people to recognize my work and I wanted to sell clothes,” Wu says. “It’s such a silly and obvious thing, but so many designers with lots of press don’t sell clothes. My goal has always been to make exceptionally beautiful clothes that women want to own.”

Four years ago, Wu headed a five-person operation with about $1 million in sales. Now the privately held company has estimated sales of $15 million and a staff of 35, including a communications director who once served in a similar capacity for Chanel. Wu created a limited-edition collection for Target — and art-directed and starred in the advertisements for it. This month, he launched a secondary line, Miss Wu. (Obama wore a dress from the collection in October.) He even designs a line of high-end faucets for Brizio, which sponsors his runway shows as a way of connecting its brand to fashion’s contemporary aura of youth and glamour.

“Jason was a very quick study. He quickly realized there had to be a strategy to the growth of his business,” says Burke, a former Bergdorf Goodman executive, who informally advised Wu on such topics has how to price the collection. “He understood the dangers of over-promising and under-delivering. He understood the needs of retailers today.”

Wu has no outside investors; his company continues to be 100 percent self-financed. And although he has been tempted to take on partners whose cash injection would allow him to open his own stores, he has resisted, choosing slower growth and more control. “I’ve always grown based on whatever I can afford,” Wu says. “I know what I’m spending. It’s my money. It’s kept me quite realistic in what I can do.”

That philosophy will ultimately make his company more attractive to any future moneymen. “We advise a lot of investors, and the longer a young designer remains independent, the greater the value,” Burke says. “The longer they can last and be self-sustaining and continue to grow, the better.”

Wu also has an admirable aesthetic eye. If there is any distinguishing characteristic of Obama’s gown, it’s that it was the dress Wu wanted to make. Unlike his predecessors, he’d had no contact with his client. The idea had not been watered down, tweaked or compromised. It was a fanciful frock by a young man who had spent his adolescence enjoying a part-time career creating fancy clothes for collectible dolls. “Jason was well-represented by that dress,” Burke says. “Whether he had dressed Mrs. Obama or not, Jason would be successful.”

Phillips: ‘It can trip you up’

Sarah Phillips also studied at Parsons, and left before graduation to work at Ralph Lauren and Yves Saint Laurent before opening her own business. Clinton discovered her frocks at Barbara Jean Ltd., a small women’s boutique in Little Rock. The future first lady wore one of Phillips’s suits to the Democratic National Convention, and afterward a buyer from the store invited the designer to submit sketches for the inaugural gown. Phillips was a modernist with a sculptural sensibility. Her clothes tended to be free of fussy embellishments — austere in shape but aglow with lively colors. “I didn’t really do evening gowns,” Phillips recalls. “I was thinking of what she would like and I made some suggestions. Some of the cleaner designs I had, she didn’t want.” Ultimately, Phillips created a dress that was wholly outside her aesthetic vernacular.

But no matter, it was for the inauguration. And once Clinton stepped into the spotlight, Phillips was thrust there, too.

“All the press took me away from the business. It completely blindsided me,” she says. “It got in the way of my business. People were asking me, ‘What do you want to do? Do you want to write a book?’ No, I just wanted to design.

“It was like I was mid-stride and this was thrown at me,” she says. “It can trip you up.”

Within months of the inauguration, Phillips’s business was in trouble. She had heightened interest in her work from retailers but no money to take advantage of the opportunities. Stores do not pay designers in advance for their wares; designers must bear the cost of producing a collection and wait to be paid.

Phillips searched for financing, but in the early 1990s, the fashion industry was mostly a collection of mom-and-pop companies. It had not evolved into an industry of publicly traded lifestyle brands that could reap riches for investors. There were no opportunities with mass merchants such as Target and H&M to create a one-time collection for a tidy paycheck. The Council of Fashion Designers of America and Vogue hadn’t gotten together to establish the Fashion Fund, which offers financial support and business mentoring to young designers. Phillips never found the influx of cash.

Her company closed not long after her famous gown was installed in the Smithsonian. She was there for the ceremony but has not been back since.

A cloud of disappointment, a son struggling in school and the death of her father took her away from the fashion industry. A garrulous, tawny-haired woman, Phillips lives in Connecticut with her husband, an artist. Two decades later, she’s relaunching her brand. She has a Web site and a publicist. And she’s planning to focus mostly on private clients. “It took me 20 years to figure it out,” Phillips says. Creating the inaugural gown “was bittersweet. It was wonderful in many respects. And it was really difficult.” And if she had it to do all over again, she is not quite sure that she would.

Faircloth: ‘I lost all the money’

There was little doubt about who would create Laura Bush’s first inaugural gown. She had long been a client of Dallas designer Faircloth, and when the messy 2000 election was finally settled, she told him to get to work. At the time, Faircloth was set up at the Lily Dodson boutique — known for its bold fashions and its cameo in the Richard Gere film “Dr. T and the Women.” In the days before the inauguration, Faircloth spoke easily about Bush’s personal style and how he would try to broker a compromise between her desires, the public’s expectations and his instincts as a designer. “I’m taking into consideration the likes and dislikes of the American people, because she represents the American people,” Faircloth said in 2001. “I have to compromise. It’s half my dress and half Mrs. Bush’s dress.” The result was a scoop-neck, floor-length dress in red Chantilly lace.

Faircloth, a dark-haired, square-jawed native Texan, expected that the inaugural commission would fuel a transformation of his local, private-client business into a national company. After all, he was attracting new customers from as far away as Switzerland and Germany. He separated from Lily Dodson and opened his own studio. He had a heightened swagger. Creating the inaugural gown “gives a little more confidence to a designer,” he says now. “It gave me a sense that what I did was good and is good.”

He decided to invest his money — thousands of dollars — in a ready-to-wear collection. He produced samples, loaded them into trunks and boarded a New York-bound plane for fashion week in Bryant Park. It was Sept. 11, 2001. “We landed in North Carolina,” he recalls. “We had to drive back to Dallas. I lost all the money.”

Faircloth has since made peace with New York’s catwalk. He had other opportunities to expand, he says, “but I had to trust my gut and make slow progress. I didn’t want to venture too far away from what I knew.”

After 29 years in business, he now designs for the daughters and granddaughters of his original clients. And he continues to work with Bush.

Unrealistic expectations

Was Wu a smarter businessman and a more dazzling designer than his predecessors? Perhaps. Was he lucky to have dressed a historic first lady whose fashion sense captured the public imagination? Absolutely. But the culture surrounding fashion has changed, too — particularly for young designers.

In 2000, Tim Gunn — now the “Project Runway” mentor — arrived at Parsons to run its fashion program. The curriculum had not been updated much since the 1950s, when Parsons was “educating designers to be assistants to great brands or work behind a titular designer head,” Gunn says. “But that wasn’t how the industry worked anymore.” Under his guidance, the program began to focus on educating “young, entrepreneurial-thinking designers.” Among the first of that lot were Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough, whose senior collection in 2002 was bought by Barneys New York, and their Proenza Schouler brand was launched.

“It was a turning point for the way the industry perceived young designers,” Gunn says.

Indeed, the fashion industry — and its attendant groupies — now sees young designers as lucrative investment opportunities. The higher their public profile, the faster they are propped up, supported and dubbed successful. And there are endless opportunities for raising their profile, from “Project Runway” to Twitter.

“I think it’s a good time to be a young designer. The difficult part is you have all that support, but people have expectations that are sometime unrealistic,” Wu says. “You’re expected to make an impact, open stores and do four collections a year. You’re expected to do what it took others before you 15 or 20 years to accomplish. In that way, it’s not good. It’s a double-edged sword.”

Audiences come to Wu’s shows expecting to see a fully formed designer. When he presented his fall 2012 collection in New York, his backstage had all the telltale signs of the establishment: a flock of the most sought-after, birdlike models with their hair slicked into impeccable ponytails, editors trolling for snippets of quotable fashion chatter, a CNN crew awaiting the designer’s attention.

Wu’s sensibility has moved away from the spun sugar of the inaugural gown. The fall collection was a deeply personal one. He’d gone back to Taiwan with his father for the first time in a decade and created a collection imbued with traditional Chinese imagery, Hollywood glamour and Wu’s own understanding of his multicultural heritage. “I feel like it’s my aesthetic but channeled through this personal biography,” he said after the presentation.

For spring, his aesthetic has taken yet another turn — going dark and aggressive. “As I’ve matured as a designer, the ladylike clothes have met with a little subversion. They’re a little sexier,” says Wu, 30. “Four years ago, my collection was inspired by fairy tales. For spring, it was inspired by Helmut Newton.” Which could serve as the starting point for an especially interesting second-term inaugural gown.

FASHION MAGAZINE: It's Personal

FASHION MAGAZINE | AMY VERNER

When the Louis Vuitton Maison opens its impres- sive doors in Toronto this fall, those with an itch for something exceptional can head straight to the store’s second floor—after making the requisite appoint- ment. There, a plush private salon has been allocated to the Haute Maroquinerie, a special-order handbag service offered in only six locations around the world. Five handbags— three of the brand’s beloved styles plus two new silhouettes—can be fully customized in eight leathers and skins and 27 colours. Vuit- ton has done the math so we don’t have to: this equals 40,000 unique possibilities. It’s an altogether different proposition than buying a classic monogram style straight off the shelf—not that there’s anything wrong with that. But as luxury brands become increasingly accessible with more stores, more product and more demand, mass customization has gradually become a means of enhancing exclusivity.

Christian Dior officially began a made-to-order service for its Lady Dior, Miss Dior and Diorissimo handbags in 2010. Given the choices of style, size, finish, fabric and colour, more than 1,000 permutations are possible. This fall, Gucci is expanding its made-to-order program, now available in Canada with an expanded range of models. Three of Gucci’s greatest hits (the New Bamboo, New Jackie and Stirrup) can be tricked out to ultra-luxe levels. Crocodile can be ordered with a shiny, matte or metallic finish. Don’t like shiny gold hardware? Swap it for silver, or better yet, antiqued gold or silver. Initials embossed in gold, silver or dry-stone can be added to the bag’s interior. The final product is delivered in special packaging with made-to-order script.

Last month marked the debut of Ferragamo Travel, a made-to-order luggage collection from Salvatore Ferragamo available in various colours and materials, ranging from dura- ble canvas to exotic skins. If committing to customization is too overwhelming (or expen- sive), you can at least play around on Burberry’s website, where a user-friendly interface allows you to create a customized trench coat. With Burberry Bespoke, one person’s classic is another’s street-style savvy, especially given such options as fuchsia Haymarket check lining, brass finish buttons, studded collars and leather epaulets.

Bear in mind that for every set of hands that touches a Vuitton Noé draw- string bag in the Asnières workshop in France or a Gucci New Jackie tote in Italy, there’s still a basic template that allows for efficient, modernized production. This evolution in accessories melds savoir-faire with specialty manufacturing and enrobes the result in a supple layer of cachet. In turn, this generates desire. “Fashion is the ultimate snobbism—if people see too much of [something], they lose interest,” says Robert Burke, a fashion retail vet- eran who now helms luxury consultancy Robert Burke Associates. “Customization or, ultimately, bespoke is a way to main- tain attention.”

You don’t need to be a fashion consultant, a venture capitalist, a global trend spotter or Douglas Coupland to observe that we are living in an age of mass cus- tomization. Consider how much we already customize: our coffee, our salads, our playlists, our Twitter streams. A handbag designed to our specifications simply represents a rarefied level of have-it- our-way consumerism. But personalization and customization (or made-to-order) mean differ- ent things. Although they are used interchange- ably, the former refers to a less labour-intensive way of adding a unique flourish. Vuitton’s Mon Monogram service, first introduced in 2008, allows people to add their initials or colourful stripes to the Speedy, Neverfull and Keepall bags—similar to the personalized lettering that’s long been offered by Goyard. Prada fol- lowed suit last January with a blocky Saffiano leather alphabet that could be applied to totes, backpacks and luggage.

By comparison, customization veers closer to bespoke. Think of Hermès, where spe- cial-order bags are part of the brand’s dna. Sophie Doran, a Paris-based editor at the Luxury Society, which bills itself as the most influential online community of top luxury executives, says customization appeals to high-net-worth individuals seeking to “truly differentiate themselves from the crowd,” as well as aspirational consumers who crave the next hot thing. “I imagine that it would give the aspirational consumer a feeling of satisfaction, and potentially pride, in knowing they took that extra step in their luxury purchase.”

Not surprisingly, customization comes at a premium. Ferragamo’s sleek trolleys begin at $1,500 and top out around $20,000 for alligator cladding. Entry prices for Haute Maroquinerie orders are in the high four-figures. As much a consideration as price is time. Customization generally requires an average wait of six months.

For many luxury brands, personalization isn’t new; in fact, it’s part of their heri- tage. In the mid-1800s, Louis Vuitton built his business on custom-order trunks, anticipating an explosion of leisure travel. The luggage specifications were modi- fied according to each customer’s trousseau. Jennifer Carter, president and ceo of Hermès Canada, half-jokingly notes that the first Hermès client in 1837 was a horse, and that every order at the time was singular in its specifications. She goes on to explain that the first silk scarf was born from a custom order. Ditto the ties. The Birkin bag did not exist before it was designed for actress ⁄singer Jane Birkin. Each time, however, the one-off turned into a mainstay. “Customization is firstly for us about taking care of clients and about service, and it has been since day one,” she says. “But it has also contributed to the Maison’s creativity because it gives us ideas.” Doran agrees that customization is “a nod to the golden days”—with a caveat. “I’m not sure the current services take the idea far enough to be returning the status quo to true luxury,” she says. “If anything, they are opening up another facet of some- thing once reserved for the affluent to the masses, and potentially threatening its meaning.” Burke isn’t concerned about customization being taken too far, mainly because many brands lack the infrastructure to execute specialized orders. “It’s not natural in quick-turning fashion to offer customization, and I’m not sure it would even make sense,” he says. Even so, retailers like J. Crew and C. Wonder—the latest fashion venture from Chris Burch (Tory Burch’s ex-husband)—offer monogram ser- vices for everything from pyjamas to pillows. When brands invite customers to be involved in the design process, the experience forges a connection that is not possible in conventional transactions. But Doran wonders if this trend toward personaliza- tion will threaten the exclusivity factor within the luxury goods world: “Yes, it gives consumers a story to tell, but what happens when everyone has the same story?”