Fraser Live: The week that was

I'm wondering whether the April Fashion Week in Sydney will be the last - for a while at least. Despite the organisers' usual trumpeting, the show had been finding the going tough, even before the slide in consumer spending.

You've got to feel some sympathy for the organisers as they battle on two fronts.

Designers, especially, work on scorning the old as they unveil the new. Reinventing Fashion Week each year to be in sync with the designers' mantra is becoming harder, especially when the general demand is that it should cost the participants less. How can it? If it is to be a world class show, then it's going to cost world class loot.

For established labels, money available for flying-the-flag is scarce, while, for the unknown designers, Fashion Week represents a huge outlay that they can afford even less now than they could before.

And as for the herd of overseas buyers who supposedly come here to discover and buy Australian fashion talent, that is a dying myth. This year they came, they saw, they praised, they asked the prices and then they went away again. How much did they buy?

That's always a difficult question for the organisers to answer. Well, um, when you ask how much they bought, are you talking unconfirmed orders, or promised repeats after the tiny trial order, or how much we'll buy when we get home and see how the rest of the lines are looking and where Australian labels might fit it? In other words, it is smoke and mirrors.

Oddly enough, Fashion Week has achieved one of its goals magnificently - and for that we should all be grateful. The media now loves Fashion Week. Once it took the mickey out of fashion in general pausing only briefly to leer at swimwear parades. Now it takes it seriously, both visually and commercially. It has a place in the media calendar, like the federal budget  or the Melbourne Cup.

But although flattering, winning media support plays a faint second fiddle to the business of showing, ordering, delivering and getting paid.  Unfortunately, the organisers overplay the importance of media in the pretence that somehow this will fix sales.

The question you've got to ask yourself is this: if there was no Fashion Week would the trade be any worse off by relying on its sales people and agents to bring in the figures? If you could replace sales people with Fashion Week then the answer would be yes. But because you take a stand and participate in parades at Fashion Week that doesn't allow you to retrench your sales people and sack your agents.

It follows that the only reason for going into Fashion Week is to pick up new business from retailers who did not previously appreciate your talent or suddenly be touched by the magic wand of an overseas buyer. I'd suggest that the chances of coming out on top after that equation are very slim.

Case in point: Akira Isogawa has been a leading light in past Fashion Weeks, both in local media coverage and rapturous discovery by overseas buyers and fashion writers. But did he appear this year? No. Reason? Er, budgetary. In other words, it doesn't pay him to be there.

I might sound like grumpy old bugger, which I am of course, or that I'm trying to get back at Fashion Week for some reason. That is not the case. There is nothing I'd like to see more than a show that delivered on its promise but I doubt that it can.

Slobocracy
It seems that my secret shopper report of two issues ago fell on deaf ears of one particular retailer dealing in accessories. When my companion went back for a revisit, the two female sales assistants casually enquired if she was "okay" and then went back to the much more important topic of social chitchat while they ate toasted vegemite sandwiches they had laid out on the glass counter and washed them down with coffee from takeaway containers.

He loves Levis
I'm passing on a bouquet from an unidentified admirer of Levis. In times past, this premium jeans brand has not always been approachable. A big slice of a popular market can make a company like that seem invincible, but its real test is how it copes with a shrinking market in tough times.

"Levis is listening," the admirer told me. "It is issuing weekly stock reports, communicating with its retailers and, through them, is in touch with its consumer's needs. Sometimes I'll think of something that my customers want and, as if my magic, Levis is offering it to me."

We're all keen on knocking companies, especially the big iconic ones, and I'm no exception. But we recognise good performance too.