BoF Daily Newsletter: The Creative Archives | Aligning New Talent With Tradition

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The Creative Archives | Aligning New Talent With Tradition Posted: 02 Jun 2010 12:44 PM PDT Scarves by Mungo Gurney | Source: The Creative Archives FLORENCE, Italy — In the shadow of luxury giants like Gucci and Louis Vuitton, a Florence-based business called The Creative Archives has been quietly offering emerging designers from the UK a rare chance to see their work produced by authentic traditional craftsmen, whose skills are increasingly under threat in a machine-made luxury world. The idea is neatly reciprocal: emerging designers get access to highly-skilled labour-intensive services that they might not normally be able to afford; artisans get the opportunity to apply their techniques to new, buzz-worthy designs and keep their skills alive; and consumers get exclusive, limited edition products.Everybody, as they say, wins. Shwetal Patel launched The Creative Archives, or TCA, six months ago as a project of passion. Patel, 31, was born in India, raised partly in Zambia and partly in Buckinghamshire, England, and is now, constantly mobile. He travels non-stop with his finger on the transnational pulse, and attends the many of the world's Biennales and art fairs in the name of creative consulting and research. When he was 14 years old, he spent two weeks at Browns fashion boutique in London for work experience, where he later returned to work regularly as a sales assistant, while attending university. It was there that he first came to appreciate the power of true craftsmanship and the finishing of a garment. "Now," Shwetal says, "[the shopping experience] just seems much more industrialised." Years later, he co-founded Pauric Sweeney Bags alongside the London-based fashion designer, and moved to Florence to be closer to his sources of production. In Italy, he familiarised himself with the technical process and traditions of producing luxury goods. "When people sort of ask what's the idea [behind TCA], they say how benevolent it must be and ask what I get out of it, and I say 'well, it's a business,' and sort of leave it at that," Patel remarks in earnest. Each season, TCA receives proposals from recent design graduates or lesser-known designers. Patel's selection criteria is simple. "I don't believe in giving young designers a chance as a purely philanthropic exercise, it has to be merited," he says. He is also quick to differentiate TCA from fashion grants and prizes. TCA, he says, helps designers with production, logistics, quality control, sales and press, as well as financing. For SS10 and AW10, TCA's signature products are digitally printed scarves by award-winning designer Mungo Gurney, a 2006 Central Saint Martins graduate. Gurney worked under the direction of Patel and his team and interacted closely with Achille Pinto, a historied factory in Como, Italy that produced the scarves. As part of the collaboration, Gurney receives an 8 percent royalty on sales, similar to a traditional licensing and production deal. For Christmas, TCA is planning to expand their product range beyond scarves, working in collaboration with innovative fashion designer Hussein Chalayan to develop printed suede gloves, sold exclusively at Browns boutique in London. To help attract more consumers, TCA hopes to provide a little bit of curiosity, "much like the idea of buying something at the farmer's market," Patel says, "where you feel you're supporting a young designer and you're buying something that's beautiful and conscientiously sourced." He goes on to mention that pricing is key, "I don't think things should be overpriced, and luxury brands have a huge mark-up." But can a niche enterprise like this succeed as a business? On this, Patel sounds an optimistic note. "Currently, we're in the red. In the first season we picked up six or seven accounts, and we did about 30,000 euros in sales, and we did a profit of about 8,000 euros. I think by the end of the year, we should be in the black," he asserts. Ideally, Patel would like to work with 200-250 of the best multibrand stores in the world, with each of them placing orders of between 3,000 and 5,000 euros a season. "If that happened [the business] would have the right size and reach," he says. With a production process that's completely transparent, TCA is a micro-sized alternative to big luxury brands whose products are made in mass quantities, often by machine. Indeed, Patel hopes to help instill a commitment to high-quality manufacturing amongst a new generation of young creatives while making them commercially successful at the same time. Elizabeth Peng, an M.A. student in Fashion Journalism at Central St Martins, is an editorial intern at The Business of Fashion.

BoF Daily Digest | Back to the core, How we shop, Mystique of the handmade, Valentino not for sale, Fashion copyrights Posted: 02 Jun 2010 04:03 AM PDT Balenciaga Giant Part Time Handbag | Source: Balenciaga Luxury Market Turns Its Attention Back to Core Customers (Retail Traffic) “Most consumers have curbed spending, paid down debts and started to replenish their savings. ‘That doesn't leave you a whole lot of money at the end of the month to buy a $6,000 handbag.’” How we shop now (Times Online) “The politicians say it is an age of austerity, yet sales of It bags are booming. Welcome to the era of considered consumption, where we spend more on better-quality pieces, but buy fewer of them.” The Mystique of the Handmade (WSJ) “Why the preference for the handmade, anyway? Yes, there are still goods where skilled craftsmanship makes all the difference… But does it matter whether a product is crafted by hand or stamped out by machine, if the consumer can’t tell the difference?” Valentino not for sale, has to grow: CEO (Reuters) “Valentino’s owners plan to build up the Italian fashion house before selling it and are not putting out feelers to potential buyers, its chief executive said, responding to speculation a deal could be afoot.” Does Fashion Need Copyright Protection? (NY Times) “Johanna Blakley, of the University of Southern California's Norman Lear Center, recently gave a TED talk on the "culture of copying" in fashion, and why this industry… has been able to thrive even without copyright protection.”

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