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The Critical Choices – AUSTRALIAN FINANCIAL REVIEW

Cultivating concierges at the best hotels has its rewards when a crisis ensues. 

The Critical Choices 

AFR | 2011

by Marion Hume 

There are various choices one must make in a crisis. For me, as the privileged holder of two passports, the first might be “what nationality am I today?”. I know this is a cliché but, were I in a situation which required guts and muscle (these possessed not by me of course, but instead by some taciturn yet decent bloke, possibly to be played in the true­-life movie by Russell Crowe) then I’d be Australian. I suppose if the crisis required sneaky diplomacy issued with velvety vowels, I’d be British. After all, they do say the greatest skill of British diplomats is they can tell people to go to hell and make them believe they will enjoy the trip.

In a smaller crisis; which is to say one not involving fleeing to an embassy and being helicoptered off the roof, there are also choices to be made. Mine, if possible, is “head for nearest five-­star hotel”. Now, to be clear, I do budget. I’m the expert in ‘charming’ hotels where I have to haul my suitcase up the 18th­ century stairs to the attic. But, when budget allows, I’m there at the desk making a friend of the five-­star concierge with four crossed keys on his lapels.

The elite, global band of Les Clefs d’Or concierges was founded by the 11 concierges of the grand Paris hotels in 1929. Today, members must pass challenges far trickier than getting you a table at a restaurant or tickets to a show. A micro-­crisis, such as volcano ash, brings Europe to a standstill? The concierge at the Gritti Palace, Venice, not only booked every minivan in northern Italy to transport guests home, he worked out who would get on with whom with the skill of a society hostess planning a gala, packed posh picnics and made those who had arrived via the splendour of the Orient Express believe three days in a van would be an awfully big adventure.

Suddenly stranded in Hong Kong? The concierge at Lanson Place (a surprisingly tranquil and intimate hotel despite being housed in a 26­-storey skyscraper) won’t just tell you a morning walk will help you get things in perspective, he will literarily lead the way – the hotel offers ‘wow walks’ free of charge or tip, to help guests feel at home in the neighbourhood.

So when my flight home from Geneva was cancelled recently, the first thing I did was phone the concierge at the lovely Le Richemond. “We’re completely full but don’t worry,” Emanuel soothed. The queue to get any flight information was long, the atmosphere charged – not surprising given airspace was closed due to an electrical storm. At times like this the choice is to behave well or not. Showing how not to do it, the bloke with the Brietling watch flashed his frequent­flier gold card, even though this was Geneva where everyone is wealthy and frequent fliers are thick on the ground.

When the woman in front of me finally reached the desk, she did the ‘sobbing act’, protesting she could not possibly fund another hotel night (for which she would be refunded) and where could she sleep at the airport, sob sob? The tantrum didn’t wash with me. This season’s Celine, Manolos and a Roger Vivier handbag, and you don’t have a credit card? OK, so I was surprised I couldn’t get on any flight for 24 hours, but just then Emanuel called, a reservation had been cancelled, I had a room as well as a dinner booking somewhere not expensive “because perhaps you had not budgeted for this evening?” And as to my surprise free day? Les Bains des Paquis, entrance fee €2, is at the end of a pier in the middle of Lake Leman. You can swim then enjoy a set lunch. That I got to dry off on plush mongrammed towels kindly lent by Le Richemond was a very nice touch.

Travel

The People’s Republic of Luxe – 10 Mag

The People’s Republic of Luxe


10 Mag | Issue 41 November 2011

When I was a little girl, before you were born, China was the place they made cheap stuff. Now it’s the place where all the luxury labels have to have their snazziest stores in the world. When I was a teenager, China remained closed  – they only let them out to scoop up all the medals at the Olympics. Now, of course, if you are in fashion, you have to go there to scoop up your share of an annual consumer expenditure estimated to top 1.3 trillion yuan (about £122 billion) by 2020.

by Marion Hume

And we’re not just talking Dior, Chanel, Vuitton. You want a yacht with that handbag? British yacht brand, Sunseeker is out there flogging its Manhattan 73 model for 31.4 million yuan (£3 million). You could toast your purchase with Chateau Lafite 1982 at 445,186 yuan (£42,115) Oh stop fretting, that’s for half a case. Did you think anyone would pay that much for a bottle?

When I started work, Hong Kong was the gateway to “Mainland China” as it was known (those in the know call it “the PRC” today). Back when Honkers was still a British colony, you could almost count the grains of rice in people’s dinner bowls as the plane swerved around mountains and tower blocks to touch down at Kai Tak, the world’s sixth most dangerous airport. Now, the PRC is peppered with super-dooper airports designed by “star-chitects”. But China’s billionaires don’t fly commercial, although some hire rather than own their own Gulfstreams. Price for Beijing-Shanghai return on a Gulfstream G550: 276,500 yuan (£26,157).

From the far south of Guangzhou, where Louis Vuitton has its largest Chinese flagship store, to the the old silk road staging post of Urumqi, the most inland city in the world – yup, they’ve got a Vuitton there too – China is fashion profit central, even if a recent store renovation is rumoured to have cost Vuitton in the eight digits. The first fashion person I knew who reached “real” China, as in Beijing, was sent by Zara to find a cheap production source. Now, Zara has 70 stores in the PRC.

The first time I went to Beijing, it was to interview newly-successful women, several of whom thought they were wearing designer clothes, but these were funny fake brands that I had never heard of. Then the fake market started to thrive and I seemed to always be clambering through some fat-filled restaurant kitchen, then down a back alley and into a room the size of a toilet pretending to be a customer. The criminal salesmen pretended to believe me as they took photographs of my (real) Fendi Selleria bag. The fake business shows no sign of slowing down as China’s love of luxury booms. The new trend is in counterfeiting an entire experience, although who knew there was anywhere on earth that they would welcome a completely fake branch of IKEA?

Even as recently as five years ago, the picture the photographer had to get was the “contrast shot” of the toothless guy parking his bicycle next to the Louis Vuitton superstore in Shanghai. The shoppers within were still so delighted in the newness of being able to express their individuality through fashion, that they would willingly stop and talk to a stranger with a tape recorder, a photographer and a translator. They told such sad stories of their Mao suit years. One shopper never knew her father. When her mother was pregnant, her parents had been sent to the country to be “re-educated” and they locked her father in a shed until he died. Her mother survived eating frogs and birds eggs. Another was once given a yellow silk shirt from abroad, which gave her great joy every time she looked at it – until her mother dyed it brown so she could get the use out of it. That woman – a very powerful woman – started to cry as she remembered that. The power of fashion is powerful indeed.

Now, the bulk of luxury shoppers – and there are more than 200 million young adults under 30 in the PRC – were born after The Cultural Revolution so have not “eaten bitterness” as their parents did. Far from envying their lifestyles, their mothers tend to encourage them. “If I dress a little bit sexy, she thinks I look beautiful,” one girl told me when I returned to Beijing in 2008. “I’m the youth she didn’t have.”

For the luxury tsars, China’s love of the new is a great plus. “They don’t have a generation before them to refer to style-wise, so they are daring with the choices they make,” one CEO told me, eyes ablaze. The rules are still being written in this high profit battle ground. Beijinger and Shanghainese girls like to write off those from the “second tier cities” as bumpkins who have just learned to say Vuitton, but that doesn’t stop those in cities you’ve hardly heard wanting designer bags. No surprise then that as well as opening stores everywhere,  the likes of Chloe now have Chinese language blogs. Faye Wong, a Chinese singer and actress, does print campaigns for Céline. One of Louis Vuitton’s male models is Taiwanese-Canadian actor and model Godfrey Gao. No prizes for guessing (beyond those gorgeous cheekbones) why he got the gig.

It might be hard to believe this now, but British designers used to quake in their boots when the American department stores came calling. China is expected to be the second-largest consumer market in the world by 2015 and if the USA doesn’t pull its economy out of tailspin, it could come sooner. Guess which buyers get the champers and the Rose Bakery cupcakes these days? But forget any cliches about Chinese shoppers liking the logo-a-gogo stuff. The level of sophistication is obvious when you walk past racks of Vanessa Bruno, Maison Martin Margiela, Rick Owens at the Lane Crawford department store in Beijing.

A year ago, I got a call from Francois-Henri Pinault’s office. Would I like to join him on a trip to 10 Chinese cities, few of which I had actually heard of (and I’m up on Beijing, Shanghai, Shenyang, Hangzhou, Chengdu, Dalian…)? Alas, I was in a diamond mine in Australia (key global market for Tiffany? Yes, you got that one too) so had to pass on the PPR titan’s tempting invite, but I did once interview Pinault’s rival, Bernard Arnault of LVMH, in a penthouse suite in Beijing. Trying to get to Arnault, both the richest man in fashion and the richest man in France, when you are actually in France is well-nigh impossible. Yet in China, he was as relaxed and warm as a chilly billionaire can be, although he was probably totting up what you get when even 0.001% of a population headed towards 1.35 billion people wants Dior.

But you should never count your Chinese chickens. When Arnault’s mate President Sarkozy said he would be meeting the Dalai Lama (do, please Google exactly why Richard Gere is so passionate about Tibet), the Chinese ambassador in Paris apparently had the luxury titan quaking in his handmade Berlotti shoes at the thought of Chinese Vuitton customers asking for their money back.

Those customers get wooed. Last year it was the Dior extravaganza staged on the Bund in Shanghai; there was the “Culture Chanel” exhibition, the Fendi’s show on the Great Wall and the Ferragamo show within the Forbidden City. But it is not just about wooing the girls. One of the glories of modern China, if you are a luxury tycoon, is this is one of the few markets where men outdo women in their regard of expensive designer goods as trophies of success. Good news for Dunhill and Hugo Boss,

You can’t keep up with who is opening, who is expanding where. There’s Burberry’s upcoming Hong Kong megastore which promises to be a smart shopping destination for an annual 23 million Chinese tourists who come to town. Niche brands like Moncler are making a splash in Beijing, Miu Miu is expanding in Shanghai – the list goes on.

Susan Owens is a China expert whose blog, Paris Cherie, links the world of Paris fashion to Shanghai. She admits she can hardly post content up fast enough or keep track of the Western brands keen to snap up the services of Shanghai model, Du Juan.

What the Chinese luxury consumer is not madly interested in – up to now – is the vast nation’s sartorial past. “There’s no vintage—Chinese don’t wear old clothes,” someone told me. Hello Ralph Lauren, who visited China last year. Cue an autumn-winter 2011 collection of cheongsams inspired by the old silk road. When Ralph Lauren opened his first stores in Britain, back when Princess Diana was young, few thought his coals-to-Newcastle – or more precisely chintz-to-Downton Abbey -offering would work in a land where some people actually owned family silver. How wrong we were so expect to see fashion folk in the PCR dressing “Chinese”

Coming soon, more homegrown designers, more competition. And I leave you with this. In 1997, I was editing Vogue Australia, which meant I was “Asia Pacific” on the Paris show seating plans and thus in the worst seats in the house. Around me would be the first few fashion editors from the PRC. Where are they now? Locate Suzy Menkes and track along a couple of chairs, that’s where. All power to China.

The Fashion Business

Net Prophet – AFR

Net Prophet

The Business of Fashion: The man behind Yoox, Katie Grand’s pyramid, Designer of the moment, China fashion week, ALT’s exhibition

AFR Magazine | November 2011

By Marion Hume 

 

In 1998, which was way back in the dark ages before global internet connectivity, the Australian ‘success guru’ Siimon Reynolds published a little book with the catchy title, When they zig, you zag . Two years later, in 2000, Federico Marchetti, who was born in a small town below Venice on Italy’s Adriatic coast – and has never heard of the book – launched an innovative e-commerce business that has made him an industry titan. The planning that led up to the launch and what has happened since surely distinguish Marchetti as the ultimate ‘zagger’.

A quick whizz through his zags goes like this: As a teen, while others did what they wanted, Marchetti, in the quest for his long term goal, did what he didn’t want in the short term. An entrepreneur, he chose to launch into the online arena while living in a nation which, back then, boasted little expertise in internet technology. When did he launch? Just as the internet stock bubble was bursting. What did he do after asking his best friends to review a list of brand names? He chose Yoox – the one none of them liked. In 2008, as the financial crisis roiled markets, an undeterred Marchetti started the process of taking his global internet retailer public. Fast-forward to 2011 when, in the six months to June, Yoox Group’s net sales rose 36 per cent on the previous year to €131.2 million. All this by never going zig.
Marchetti (not to be confused with the Italian footballer) doesn’t even look the part. He is nervy and intense and when he speaks he sounds more like a literature professor than one of fashion’s category shifters. As for his style, there isn’t even the status indicator of an expensive watch – instead no watch. And swagger? None. Marchetti hates socialising, preferring to stay home reading books and eating minestrone. What did he do the night after Yoox successfully went public after a nail-biting run-up through the worst financial meltdown in decades? He went home and had soup. Damn it but – working two days a week in Milan, two in Bologna, the rest wherever needed – he doesn’t even drive a Ferrari. “I’m not a big fan of these symbols,” shrugs Marchetti, having ordered us two single, tart espressos when we meet in Florence, where he has travelled by train, as he insists all his staff do too.
You may not have heard of Yoox and you wouldn’t be alone; many in fashion who are all-too-familiar with its key competitor, Net-a-Porter, haven’t heard of it either. Yoox is headquartered in Milan and has a vast warehousing complex at Interporto near Bologna as well as logistics centres in New Jersey, Shanghai and just outside Tokyo. In the past decade, Yoox has shifted more than 1 million shirts, 800,000 pairs of shoes and 700,000 pairs of jeans to more than 100 countries by either same-day or next-day delivery (the company’s biggest single expense is its UPS [United Parcel Service] account). Yet the man behind it all is low key. “I hate networking,” he says. “I think it’s the worst. When I don’t work, I stay home by myself or with my girlfriend. I don’t do anything. I hate people that need to meet other people to feel important.”
Federico Marchetti has always judged only one person’s view to be important: his own. Even as a boy he knew that what he wanted was to be the king of a single big idea. He has been astonishingly pragmatic in accomplishing this. Claiming that his independence, determination and clarity comes from “my childhood”, he then adds that neither of his parents – “cultured people” – had any entrepreneurial spirit at all.
Yet even at school, Marchetti gravitated to subjects he didn’t like much because he thought they would be useful. At university, he picked economics while his heart said psychology. “I wanted to learn as much as possible in the shortest possible time in order to make the fewest possible mistakes,” is how he puts it now. So, after leaving home at 19 (unusual in Italy, where undergraduates tend to live at home) and reading business at Bocconi, Milan, he took jobs in corporate finance and management consulting, got an MBA from Columbia, New York and then, eureka!
It was late in 1999 and the first big fashion internet start-ups were pressing panic buttons because they were about to tank. Yet Marchetti knew, with certainty, that gold lay in marrying fashion’s exclusivity with the accessibility of the net – not in the US, where he had been living, but back in Italy, then a country with minimal I know-how, yet world famous for its fashion.
First, Marchetti found venture capital funding from the US, then he joined forces with a bricks and mortar store in Bologna, taking stock on consignment and selling it online. Next, he started cultivating big fashion names, acutely aware of how sensitive they were to selling in an arena which, back then, seemed somewhat downmarket. So he worked with them to shift end-of season stock on the multi-brand site of yoox.com, never obviously “on sale” but instead at a “Yoox price”
Then he persuaded some of the mightiest brands to use Yoox’s established logistics, warehousing, customer care, to create their own mono-brand online stores, powered by Yoox. Valentino, Giorgio Armani, Jil Sander, Roberto Cavalli, Dolce & Gabbana, Alberta Ferretti, Moncler are just a few of the leading fashion brand websites where everything – from radio frequency identification tags, to the studios full of photographers taking the pictures – is done by Yoox, which then supplies customer demand in more than 100 countries from hubs on three continents. Yoox started in menswear and now covers womenswear, kids, home, even pets.
The name Yoox came, recalls Marchetti “from my own imagination. The Y and the X are like the chromosomes for men and women; that’s why we are so good at talking about men and women – it is part of our DNA – and then the OO is also like the DNA of the internet, because it’s the zero from the binary code.” Marchetti had a list of possible names, “and I asked friends and everybody liked brands that were more common … I realised they liked the past, I liked the future, so I picked the one no one chose”.
“And it’s very contemporary. If I go to Japan, they think it’s Japanese. If I go to China, they think it’s Chinese. If I go to America, they think it’s American. It’s very neutral, very global and I never wanted to be a local player.” He adds: “I consider myself a miracle. Every day when I wake up, I say thank god for this gift of knowing what I want.”
Starting with menswear proved a competitive advantage; the long-held belief in the luxury business that men hated to shop left the category more open. Online, it soon became clear that without the fuss of sales assistants, in anonymity and with a “no questions asked” returns policy, men were keen to buy.
After more than a decade of e-commerce, it can be assessed that, while men rarely browse and are not frequent purchasers when they do shop, they buy more and often at the beginning of the season rather than waiting to purchase on impulse in the sales. Yoox research shows Americans buy the most bow ties, the French like hats and Italians prefer briefs to boxers. Irrespective of nationality, men like black, navy and grey, although the Spanish also like red. Swedes and Norwegians are most likely to tick the eco-shipping option.
Yoox offers all the basics and the big brands. For those of more esoteric tastes, thecorner.com, launched in 2008 for men and a year later for women, is a series of mini boutiques, each highly customised in keeping with the brand messages of cutting-edge designers including Viktor & Rolf and Hussein Chalayan. Designers such as Ann Demeulemeester, Haider Ackermann and Dries Van Noten choose thecorner.com as their official internet retailing partner.
Yoox’s listing on the Milan bourse at the end of 2009 was the first in the European tech sector since the financial downturn, and Marchetti admits there was a time when he felt he was running towards a cliff not knowing if he would take flight or tumble. “I did have a very strong feeling it was the right thing to do,” he says now, although he admits advisers (Goldman Sachs and Mediobanca were the co-ordinators of the sale) told him they might suddenly suggest he call a halt. The high pricing came as a collective relief.
Right now, as the Italian economy wobbles, that Yoox Group is both international and nimble is a considerable advantage, especially for a company with a vast warehouse in Shanghai. China’s online adventures are just beginning. McKinsey research shows that while more than one-third of the world’s most populous nation are web users, less than a third of that number have started shopping online (against a global average of 86 per cent), implying considerable upswing ahead, even in a nation where the likes of Armani Group already has close to 200 real-life stores. The other area of growth, albeit much smaller, says Marchetti, is Australia, thanks to a hunger for international luxury goods and a robust economy. “It’s not big, but it is significant as one of the highest-growing markets for us. In the last couple of years, it has grown 10 times over,” he says.
To a question of life-work balance, Marchetti responds: “It’s easy to answer because fortunately or unfortunately, I don’t consider what I’m doing to be work. It’s not work, it’s my child that I’m very proud of; it’s part of my style – I put a lot of myself into it.” Yet he is, he claims, “quite well balanced” about switching off. “This year, I went on holiday with some friends and I took four days off. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, four days in Greece and I turned [my BlackBerry] off.” He adds that, for the first two hours, it was hell.
He tries to trade in as ecological a manner as possible – ECO_mmerce as it is referred to in Yoox-speak – to the point where there’s a complete ‘green site’ within the site, called Yooxygen, dedicated to ethical fashion. The industry-wide challenge is that some of the clothes on offer in this niche are less than enticing (a notable exception being Vivienne Westwood’s snazzy 100 per cent ethical bags made in Africa with UN agency ITC. But as I consult on the project, I would say that, wouldn’t I?)
Marchetti says regretfully he doesn’t think ethical fashion will become just’fashion’- that all fashion will have wised up to ethics-any time soon. “It is a niche,” he says and one where Yoox may face competition when ex=Barneys New York buying guru, Julie Gilhart, who had impeccable ‘green’ credentials, finds her feet in her new role as fashion consultant for amazon.com. Still, Yoox scores marks for its ecobox packaging, which is made using cellulose gathered under environmentally socially and economically sustainable conditions.
Yet in cyber world, things get ever more glossy, as brands sign movie stars and tap Hollywood special effects guys, such as Avatar’s James Lima, to bring more bang. “We are still so close to the beginning of the story,” says Marachetti who tells me his favourite activity away from work is “nothing. I get all the adrenalin I need with Yoox” (having conducted this whole interview on just one small sniff of Florentine coffee). “Elsewhere in my life, I don’t look for more.”

©afr.co

Ethical Fashion

Catching the Moment – AFR

 

CHANEL1Ulan Bator1 Ulan Bator2 Ulan Bator3

Catching the Moment

AFR | September 2011

Where is fashion marching now, asks international fashion editor Marion Hume. Forget Borat jokes; Kazakhstan is a new luxury nexus with the oil-rich city of Almaty the No.1 seller of shoemaker Christian Louboutin’s crocodile stilettos. Yes, luxury labels have reached Ulan Bator. And all other corners of the earth besides.

When fashion wants to look back, it is a sure sign of its unease at looking forward. Of course, fashion continually takes inspiration from ‘vintage’ but that’s not what I’m talking about. Instead, it seems to me, people are looking in the rear view mirror as if wondering, “how on earth did we get here?”

‘Here’ is a world where luxury labels have us so addicted, you almost suspect there’s nicotine in the handbag leather. ‘Here’ is a world where, when it comes to basics, we seem to believe it is others who should take responsibility that the cotton in our clothes is not the same cotton that causes lakes to run dry. ‘Here’ is a place where a clutch bag in iridescent python is described as “so on trend!” despite grave concern elsewhere that the number of snakes slaughtered for style could lead to an explosion of the rat population and then a spread of human contagion.

It can be ugly, this business driven by desire for beautiful things. So thank heavens for Botox, injected into snakeskin to make that clutch bag feel scaly not flakey. I had no idea of that little detail until I read “To Die For. Is Fashion Wearing out the World?” by Lucy Siegle. I’ll hold back on her description of what happens in the slow process of snakes being slaughtered only because losing you too early hardly serves my purpose in writing the rest of this article.

But who’d want such a ludicrous display of wealth as a python purse anyway? Not you, of course; you prefer to dress down. So that cotton T­shirt? Did you check it hasn’t reached your back via the labour of schoolchildren – and their teachers – who are forced out of the classroom every summer to harvest the cotton crops of Uzbekistan? Those new jeans that already look old? We need other people – poorer people – to get the look for us by sandblasting, which is big in Bangladesh, where garment workers are dying of silicosis. Sandblasting is the new fur. You shouldn’t be seen dead in it. Donatella Versace is the latest designer to join the campaign to outlaw it. Expect the next trend in denim to be a direct reaction; dark indigo, except that’s turning vital rivers in India bright blue. It would be wrong to suggest that all the big fashion brands are up to no good. Most of them try quite hard not to be bad.

I can’t think of a single one that has ignored consumer pressure to get with the eco agenda. But now they have done the easy stuff (cutting down on packaging, changing the light bulbs, re­routing grey water to flush the loos), it’s a hard road ahead. For those just entering the business, that road must seem almost impassable. Even if a young designer does get a break, financial pressure now translates as shareholder demands front of mind. And if our young talent still believes in fashion as ‘art’, what chilling examples are to be found: Alexander McQueen dead by his own hand in London; John Galliano, who killed his career with anti­semitic rantings in a Paris bar.

The pressures of producing endless fantastical collections generating those endless dollars can prove unbearable. Which leads me to looking back. About a year ago, I started getting random requests for a six ­part BBC fashion documentary called The Look which I worked on from 1990 to 1992. In the past six months, interest has increased from England, Australia, Korea . . . and unsolicited emails arrive from those just born when it was first broadcast. They are reacting to the six episodes posted on vimeo (video­sharing website used by creatives) with the wonder of archeologists stumbling into Tutankhamun’s tomb. (OK, that’s a gigantic exaggeration, but one thing that will never go out of fashion is the industry’s ease with hyperbole).

Anyway, the other day, I too found The Look online. I understood instantly why the clothes appeal now; they are so utterly out of fashion, they are on the way back in. I suppose watching the late Gianni Versace, Moschino and Yves Saint Laurent appeals to this constituency the way The History Channel does to guys obsessed with WWII.

In The Look, names now thought of as brands still belong to people; in the program Donna Karan admits in it she has only recently stopped opened all the mail with her name on it. The supermodels are in their prime.  “I don’t know what a supermodel is. Does it mean I’m super?” squeaks Linda Evangelista, her voice surely as shocking as when silent stars switched to talkies. And there’s Carla Bruni, with the face she was born with, wisely saying nothing, missing nothing; good training for the future First Lady of France.

The doco seems to capture a golden age; a moment in time before things went absolutely crazy. Not that all was calm. In 1992, the series was aired around the world, perhaps to the chagrin of marie claire editor, Jackie Frank, then a New York based stylist, whose feisty reaction to a scrum scene outside a Jean-Paul Gaultier show was viewed by the folks back in Melbourne. Crowd control has much improved, but otherwise, that lack of organization had advantages. PRs were posh women in pearls. Today’s media managers would never let anyone get the equivalent of a shot that goes on and on as Yves Saint Laurent ‘Elnetts’ his bouffant backstage.

Lurking about was a guy in a tie we never bothered to interview. Bernard Arnault was in his early 40s when The Look was being filmed and looks vulpine, stealthy, as he circles his prey. The rhetoric the chairman and chief executive of LVMH pushes today is that fashion stars don’t matter as much as they did. Now it’s all about the product. (This from the man who – at time of writing – has no viable designer for Dior).

But in 1990, he was the star maker to Christian Lacroix, an experiment that would fail to the tune of  €150 million in losses over the years. That Arnault’s other instincts were more sound is evidenced by his current status as the wealthiest man in France, with a Forbes-estimated worth of US$41 billion.

Today, the money is on the quiet ones, specifically Phoebe Philo, who heads up Celine and is independent of spirit (though not in business, Celine is part of LVMH). She creates uncluttered clothes for busy women and references her own needs as the stylish mother of two young children. Yet her sartorial statements echo those of the leading minimalist we talked to back in the early ‘90s. Giorgio Armani’s muted palate and unadorned silhouettes were exactly what sophisticated women yearned for back then, although this being TV, we cut away from frocks to shots of his home, complete with five colour-coordinated Persian cats.

The landscape of fashion was expanding, literally; it was the beginning of the identikit designer superstore in London, New York, LA (although we would have to wait until the millennium for most brands to open in Australia). That territorial land grab goes on. Twenty years ago, China was the place that made the cheap stuff. Now 20% of goods labelled Prada are, legitimately, made in China.

Where else is fashion marching? Forget Borat jokes; Kazakhstan is a new luxury nexus and its oil-rich city of Almaty the No.1 seller of shoemaker, Christian Louboutin’s crocodile stilettos. Where there’s muck, there’s frocks and fashion mags; Cosmo Mongolia launched in the wake of Rio Tinto mining the massive Oyu Tolgoi copper and gold deposits. Yes, luxury labels have reached Ulan Bator. And all other corners of the earth besides, thanks to e-commerce.

Asked in 1990 what her life’s ambition was, New Yorker, Donna Karan shot back, “A Broadway Show!” Today, her response would be more holistic; her company is, for example, among pioneers trying to source product out of Haiti to aid its reconstruction. Vivienne Westwood played the pantomime dame in The Look; her fault and ours, given she was the one cavorting around in a nude body suit with a gold fig leaf. But we didn’t listen when she went on about global responsibility. We just thought she was bonkers. And great TV.

Recently I’ve been working closely with Dame Vivienne and know her to be wise. I consult for the UN-World-Trade Organization agency, the International Trade Centre, on the Ethical Fashion Program which links top designers to some of the world’s poorest people. A growing percentage of Vivienne Westwood accessories is produced in the slums and drought-stricken regions of East Africa. Driving across Northern Kenya, seeing hardly a tree because those farmers whose animals had died had felled them to burn and sell for charcoal in order to feed their families, the designer’s ardent advocacy that climate change cannot be ignored makes poignant, sound sense.

Fashion as a vehicle out of poverty? Who would have thought that in 1990 when we were getting excited by who had a mansion, who had a yacht? Yet you can create lovely beads from the carcasses of cows dumped in a slum, you can make handbag hardware from brass salvaged from abandoned cars. Artisan skills, from screen printing to embroidery, can be done by those displaced by conflict, quickly earning them a living wage.

Not that the Mighty UN is the only body to have identified fashion’s unique power. There are scores of smaller initiatives: from Ecuador (The Andean Collection, which offers natty felt hats to Manhattan urbanites) to Ethiopia (Sammy Ethiopia, whose featherlight scarves, wrapped over bikinis, are a summer hit among the Med set). Spurred by its success in Uganda and Cambodia, the Spotlight Stitch in Time program operates in Australia’s Top End where, it is hoped, the provision of sewing machines and support could mean that indigenous women, among the world’s most marginalised, may earn a place in a lucrative value chain.

While small companies can react to changing needs and, designers such as Vivienne Westwood can be nimble because she retains control of a business (with estimated annual sales in excess of £120 million ($189 million), plus ownership of all key retail real estate. Who’s bonkers now?), the fast fashion juggernauts require a longer turning curve. It is encouraging that Pablo Isla, the new man at the top of Inditex (owner of Zara) has pledged to make sustainability a cornerstone of all of activities and has announced that his company has signed on to the Better Cotton Initiative and The CEO Water Mandate.

At the dawn of the ‘90s, it was the Ladies-who-lunch who fascinated. I’d certainly never met anyone like couture-clad Texan, Lynn Wyatt, a damn good sport who agreed to wear a wire so we could listen in to the front row set. Now, those I record (entirely legally) might be scientists, hardly a profession known as best dressed.  Fashion professional Helen Storey works with boffin, Tony Ryan, to create dresses which disappear, thereby demonstrating that detergent bottles of the same material  (polyvinyl alcohol) can “knowingly” reduce to a compostable gel once empty. There’s Dr. Helen Crowley of the Wildlife Conservation Society whose biodiversity objectives include sustainable cashmere, this to stop over-grazing of goats and so save the rare Przewalski’s horse from extinction.

Fashion really is everywhere, (Benin Fashion Week followed Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Australia, by the way), its glitter sprinkled  even on Magnum ice-creams (Karl Lagerfeld just shot the TV commercial). Yet the given is, it always reacts to what has gone before, hence Tom Ford, – he of Gucci runways vast enough to land an A380 – now favours salon presentations, no cameras allowed. While Vuitton-checkered flags flutter over all points of the compass, upcomers want just a handful of stores, or only one, in Paris. When you can get everything everywhere, a thrill lies in something you can only find somewhere.

In the days of The Look, we never spoke about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR); now those in power recognise fashion must become more fair to respond to consumer demand. While eco is a trend with staying power, claims for eco cred must become more intelligent. Pack purchases in paper in a world short on trees yet littered in plastic bags? Let’s rethink that. Marginalized women across Africa are cleaning and crocheting waste that would otherwise be burned releasing dangerous dioxins. A plastic-bag crocheted tote from Zambia, with no designer label, has replaced the Birkin as the schlepp bag of choice for a New York tastemaker I know.

Last year, Naomi Campbell was called to testify at the international court of justice at the Hague. Her memories of 1997 when she was given those “dirty looking stones” reminded us what a filthy business the diamond trade used to be. The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS), formally adopted in November 2002, has done much to clean up things, to the point that if you splash out on something sparkly from a reputable jeweller, you can be confident there’s no blood on your hands.

Fashion is much more diverse than the international gem trade (itself still grappling with the transit of illicit precious stones from Burma, Zimbabwe, etcetera and it should be noted, the KPCS does not cover environmental concerns nor guarantee fair trade). It will take wisdom, time, effort for a clear international system of ethical labeling to become as useful as the one inside your jacket that directs you to cool iron or dry clean. While the 21st century journey of that jacket to your back is way too complex to fit on an actual label, there are positive developments.

Just as e-commerce has made it possible for the consumer to voice concerns (much easier via pressing “contact us” than trying to get answers from a harried shop assistant), so might m-commerce on smartphones allow us to receive the life story of clothes just as we are deciding whether of not to buy them.

There are no plans I’m aware of to make a sequel to The Look but if there were, what moment might it capture now? I think this is the time where those of us who love fashion face up to responsibilities that include saying “no” if something seems too cheap, in the awareness that it may carry other costs we can’t countenance. The Look captured a moment of style. If a sequel could capture the moment of style equaling substance, wouldn’t that be good?