Fall Fashions: Buying the Line

By JAY COCKS

Or, a crash course in chic merchandising madness

Sure, the clothes are beautiful. But there are problems. There are questions.

Will customers understand the Ferre lapel that eases down to the waist and folds over like a scarf? How about that Comme des Garc,ons dress--is that the armhole or the neckband, and where does all that damned draping go? Do clients want to be elegant and easy with Armani, gilded with Lagerfeld, transported by Miyake to some astral plane where clothes, craft and fine art all cozy up? Do they want to stay with the hard, somber shades of the past few seasons or break loose with the Day-Glo flash of fresh fluorescence? Do they want the newly refined chic of Montana, played down and spiffed up like cotillion costumes for postpunk debs? Or the electric, eclectic, aggressively youthful chic of Jean-Paul Gaultier? Or the Olympian chic of Saint Laurent? And--oh, yes. Is Fort Worth really ready for Versace?

The most prominent local emporium, Neiman-Marcus, says no to the last, but to all those other questions their buyers would probably like to have one collective answer. It would be much the same answer that Bloomingdale's or Saks Fifth Avenue or Bergdorf Goodman might give to anyone who asks, and it is an answer that has very little to do with a store's size. Small, sharp, selective boutiques all over the country, from Maxfield in Los Angeles to Alan Bilzerian in Boston, would reply the same way as the behemoth down the block: the customers should want it all.

After a fine frenzy of activity that began in mid-March with designers' fashion shows in Milan and ended 14 days later in Paris, the order books for autumn were finally closed barely two weeks ago. The big boys and the boutiques shoved their way into the same shows and held down desk space in the same sales offices, as they all dropped a bundle and bought the line. Then they all went home to endure the inevitable surprises when the shipments arrive several months later. "There's not a buyer alive," says Neiman-Marcus Senior Vice President Marilyn

Kaplan, "who doesn't look at the apparel, see something and say, 'Did 7 buy that? I must have been drunk.' "

To minimize such shocks of the new, the refreshment menu at most design sales offices goes easy on the alcohol. Nevertheless, the whole buying process remains a heady, intriguing, enervating and slightly intoxicating business. It can get all tangled up between low math, high fashion and rude stereotyping that becomes a way to identify--indeed, codify--the store's clientele. Bloomingdale's, launching a new addition in southwest Miami this August, is keeping its collective eye on the demographics. "We realize there is a very large Spanish-speaking population, from either Cuba or South American countries," says Bloomingdale's Vice President Kal Ruttenstein. His new store will attempt to appeal with "clothes that might be a little different in coloration--a little more vibrant and also a lot of black."

When David Wolfe of Neiman's went to Rome to buy the extravagant furs that Karl Lagerfeld turns out for Fendi, he and his assistants practiced a serviceable combination of hard business, constructive gossip and applied technology. Wolfe nixed a deluxe fur that was cut like a pullover sweater because "we have to consider those big bouffant Texas hairdos. You can't expect clients to have to drag their furs over them." A dyed gray beaver jacket, with collar, pockets and cuffs furrowed like a plowed field, is "ideal for Mrs. Bowing." (All names have been changed to protect the unsuspecting.) "She sure can't say she's got one, and she can't say her mother had one just like it."

"We have to know everything that's going on," Wolfe explains later. "We could be stock-market consultants." In a sense they are, since buyers regulate the flow of merchandise that determines the rise and fall of the fashion index. Wolfe, like more and more buyers from big stores, has his instincts reinforced by computer analyses of past sales. "If we bought 20 furs and sold 20," he says, "then we didn't buy enough. If we bought 20 and sold twelve, we bought too many and the remainder have to go on sale. Fifteen out of 20 is about right."

Furs, of course, are just a single, cushy corner of the marketplace. Numbers take on even greater weight closer to the hot center. Consider: a big chain like Bloomingdale's will spend somewhere around $10 million on designer apparel in Europe; a store like Maxfield, which is probably one-sixtieth the size of the smallest Neiman-Marcus outlet, may be good for $1 million. (These amounts do not include the budgets for nondesigner or private-label goods, nor do they take into account the money spent in the U.S. when the big-name New York City fashion shows get under way next week.) There were 400 American buyers in Paris who plunked down an estimated $40 million.

Neiman-Marcus left behind 55% of its budget in Paris, 35% in Milan. Using those figures as a general guideline, it is fair to assume that the squadrons of American buyers dropped something near $75 million on the fashion capitals of Europe this spring.

Two home truths may prove useful at this point. One comes courtesy of the uncrowned duke of drop-dead swank, Karl Lagerfeld: "There's no fashion if nobody buys it." Second are the words of Anne-Marie Dubois-Dumee, who assists Maxfield's owner, Tommy Perse: "We're consumers." Now that that has been cleared up, we can--consumers all--move for a moment right into the heavy duty.

When Perse and Dubois-Dumee spend a day buying the cerebral, sensual extravagances of Issey Miyake, the same general rules apply as when Kaplan cases Armani or when Judy Krull checks out Lagerfeld's surprisingly direct and swellegant new line, the first under his own name. In the showroom, armed with order forms, style books, color charts, the buyers, with occasional encouragement and sweet talk from the designers, start to act just like serious shoppers. They pull clothes off racks, hold them up, try them on. Armani's definitive long coats and shorter sexy skirts; his loose, liquid, wool jumpsuits; his jackets with turned-down lapels; his heart-stopping evening wear... heaven on a hanger! Claude Montana's huge coats in electroshock colors; Yohji Yamamoto's sweaters in colors like a deep-sea bottom! Saint Laurent's peerless pants! It is easy enough, in the midst of all this, for any buyer to go nicely nuts. "This is it! This is the end!" said Krull, leaping to her feet at the sight of a black silk jersey, beaded Lagerfeld number. When Ruttenstein inquired just how a woman might go about getting herself into such an elaborate design, Krull answered, "We'll hire somebody to get them into it. It's the most exciting dress in the collection."

Bloomingdale's liked Lagerfeld's collection so much that there are already plans to "get behind it" in five of the chain's 15 stores. Perse of Maxfield liked it too, but the Lagerfeld company's insistence on a minimum order of $50,000 cooled his enthusiasm just a touch, especially since his customers go for the less striated styling of Miyake and Yamamoto.

Budgets may be a matter of greater moment to smaller operations like Maxfield's than to Bloomingdale's or Bergdorf's. But when a buyer prices a garment ($48 for a Comme des Garc,ons wool T shirt, $523 for one of the shearling coats Montana designs for Complice) it is usually presented at "first cost." The designer's fee, as well as the tab for actually making the garment, and the designer's sales expenses and promotion budget are often included. What a U.S. store pays, however, can be as much as 1 1/2 times the first cost--the "landed" cost of the clothes, which covers all the freight, customs and handling charges. Lest any aspiring store owner shrink from such an investment, it should be recalled that each store marks up these imported garments between three and 3 1/2 times its first cost. That's retail to you, Jack, and perhaps now it comes a little clearer how stores can make a profit even on half-price sales.

With those numbers somewhere in mind, and operating with a psychic sketch of their collective clientele that is approximately as accurate as a police composite ("The average customer will never understand that," said Kaplan, dismissing one particularly intricate Ferre blouse), the buyers run through the racks of clothes. If it can be said to exist at all, fashion sense is an amalgam of taste, whim, herd instinct and anxiety. Buying clothes for a store may not be a weighty responsibility, but it is a significant one. By determining what parts of a collection are bought, and in what quantity, the buyer affects not only the fortunes of a designer's company but also the public perception of his entire line. Only the press, the buyers and a few friends see any designer's work whole. In this way, buyers are a little like producers who look at a movie and pick out some of the best scenes to make the sleekest short subject.

If such a chilling procedure seems like the bill that craft pays to commerce, it still unsettles those designers, usually the best ones, who put a premium on their creativity. "I create an image, but this look often disappears in the stores," says Giorgio Armani. "Buyers tend to misinterpret the idea and the allure of the designers," grouses Jean-Paul Gaultier, whose clothes attempt to transform the pandemonium of London rock fashion into a whimsical redefinition of youth a la mode. "They buy a big, oversized suit in a small size so it becomes superclassic, not all me." Issey Miyake expects buyers "to be creative. Sometimes they're afraid and I say, please, try. I expect people I work with to do something fresh. That way they don't get tired of me and I don't get tired of them."

"Designers," responds Tommy Perse, "think everything they do is a seller. But they're wrong." If they think they are right, however, or if they do not like the way the store features their clothes, or if their business managers think the store has spent too little, designers can refuse to fill further orders. Miyake, who correctly sees himself as an international designer, declined to be part of an upcoming Bloomingdale's "Japanese promotion" and will open his own boutique at Bergdorf s this summer.

Designer boutiques are the most direct line the designer can set up to the public. There is,probably no other creative endeavor that reaches its audience in such a piecemeal, erratic and subjective way as fashion. A kind of half-frenzied, operational friendliness animates buying sessions, covering--but not consistently concealing--certain inevitable animosities. The buyers think they are being pushed too hard to spend too much. The designers keep a little distance, knowing, at least, that any buyer is capable of the kind of catty commercial aside that was overheard in Miyake's Paris salesroom: "All my Issey customers have fat asses."

If that is all one buyer could see in the wondrous fall of Miyake's fabric and the eye-dazzling depths of his layering, two things become apparent: she should not have been buying his clothes at all, and, surely, she will not be buying them well, simply because she does not understand them. But all designers are subject to such whims, and the public pays for them. Customers cannot shop in showrooms. They must rely on stores, whether run by conglomerates or a single entrepreneur, and on the taste of the buyers. No one doubts the profitability of such an operation, but there is also, inescapably, something slightly strange about it. Clients, collectively, are not only customers; they become children for whom Mommy and Daddy are still buying clothes. And what you can get is only what you see.

--By Jay Cocks. Reported by Doric Denbigh/Paris and Elizabeth Rudulph/New York

With reporting by Doric Denbigh/Paris and Elizabeth Rudulph/New York