FOCUS FOR SPRING: FINISH AND FIT
Byline: Melissa Drier
COLOGNE, Germany — With denim continuing to enjoy strong consumer demand, manufacturers at the recent Inter-Jeans show came prepared with a wide variety of new innovations, including new washes, finishes, constructions and silhouettes for spring-summer 2002.
Low-rise flares with Seventies and Eighties accents were predominant, but manufacturers said they believed the cigarette leg is poised for a comeback. In terms of fabric, many noted that the fashion focus is continuing to shift from dark denim to lighter washes, with bleached looks moving into the foreground.
While denim was the leader, fabrics such as corduroy, sanded poplin and chino also made a strong showing. They were exhibited in many of the same distressed and used finishes and washes used for denim at the three-day event, which wrapped up in Cologne on July 15.
One top denim executive, HIS chief executive Milan Danek, acknowledged one worry in the face of strong demand — that his company would be able to continue turning out new ideas at its current pace.
“There are more washes than one can think of, styling that goes from wide to medium flares and straight legs, plus all the applications like embroidery and painting. Everything that can be done with and to denim is being offered at the same time, which gives me the goose bumps,” he said, “because we’re firing all our ammunition at the same time.”
His worry is whether the industry will be able to “keep up with this pace of innovation, or will we come up blank?” he said. “Some think it will all lead back to basics. That I don’t know, but right now the innovation’s fun while it’s there.”
At Pepe Jeans London, a spokesman suggested that denim would remain in the spotlight for at least another year.”The main thing for next season is obviously denim, with denim back so strongly. And that will continue too for another two or three seasons,” he said. In terms of fabric color, he said he expects spring-summer 2002 to be “a faded season. It was all about super darks [in the past], but now there are all these light and sun-bleached looks.”
Nevertheless, Pepe is covering the indigo spectrum offering denims in a wide variety of shades.
Styling takes its cue from Pepe’s first years in the Seventies and early Eighties, and the company has scanned its own archives for styles including diamond-shaped lozenge pockets; pockets in other fanciful shapes; full flares, and some styles with no rear pockets.
At the same time, Pepe is showing fabrics subjected to complicated finishing processes as well as a slubby denim with a multicount yarn. Other styles feature frayed seams; accent patches created by removing pockets after the jeans are washed, and jeans that are washed while folded to produce a worn effect.
G-Star is pumping up its women’s offering for next season.
“We want to get away from the masculine offer [for women] we had. In the past, our women’s fits were too masculine,” Richard Derr, head of sales for G-Star USA said. “We’re not trying to be super low, super sexy, but commercially sexy, with a cigaret, a straight and a flare. There’s a more fashion tone to it.”
The updated styles feature hand-mounted rivets, a new thick raw-leather label, a new circular back yoke and half-circle detail on the back pocket.
“Spring is about light denims,” he said. “But dark isn’t sleeping. Nowadays, everything is out there. We go from raw to rinsed to darker worn-in to bleached, an antique finished wash and a streaky off white denim.”
It’s not only the premium fashion brands that are pushing denim to new technical limits.
“It’s beginning to feel more like the car industry than the fashion and jeans industry. We don’t talk about fashion but technological developments,” said Heiner Sefranek, ceo of the Mustang Group. His company is developing new denim structures, color casts and distressed, printed and spray applications, but lamented that technological development “costs a lot of money which you don’t get back.
“We’re losing margin at the moment, which forces us to do more turnover,” he said, but added that he believes Mustang’s volume will increase in 2002. “But we could make even more turnover if we could get the [premium] denim we need. We and retailers will lose out, because there’s not enough supply.”
In recent years, European jeans makers have continually lamented that the continent’s denim makers are unable to keep up with their demand. That marks a pronounced difference from the situation in the U.S., where textile executives have more often had to scramble to keep running their mills at full capacity.
With so many innovations around at the moment, Sefranek said “the denim boom will last more than two seasons. But even if denim falls off, there’s corduroy.”
He noted that it is now possible to subject corduroy to a wider variety of finishes than it had been in the past, which allows for a wider diversity of looks.
“I think the next years are jeans years,” he said.
At VF Europe, president of marketing Aidan O’Meara said, “Finishes are driving the market.
“We’re using broken twill in all respects at Lee, overdyed, heavily washed down, in color and in ever-increasing levels of distressed,” he continued. “We’ve had five- and eight-year used, but we’re now showing 15-year used. I don’t know where it’ll end up.”
At Lee, the growth is coming from younger finishes and flares, he said. Wrangler is emphasizing “authentic Seventies cuts,” with pale pastel bleached denim flares, a “heart wash” with a dark heart on the knee, colored stitching, colored washes, a white wash, “silver patch” glitter bells and HotPants, according to O’Meara.
He added that VF is “finding that the attitude pieces are growing much faster than traditional styles. We’re happy with the progress on our repositioning of Lee,” which has been moved up a notch in terms of fashion orientation and price.
Sales have risen across Europe — as much as 70 percent in Scandinavia — which O’Meara said “vindicates our strategy. We have a very positive outlook for next year. Apparel retailing is tough, but jeans are a growth category in every [European] market to varying degrees.”
Overall attendance and exhibitor numbers at the most recent edition of the concurrent Inter-Jeans and Men’s Fashion Week were down, a shift that some attributed from show organizers’ decision to separate the show geographically and on the calendar from the giant CPD women’s apparel show. That event is to be held in Dusseldorf, where Inter-Jeans had also been held in recent seasons, in August.
Buyer attendance came to 36,000 for the two Cologne shows, compared with 41,000 for last August’s edition. The number of exhibitors was 1,246, about 60 to 70 fewer than in 2000, officials said.
Bread & Butter, a new “show for selected brands” made its debut the same weekend in an unrenovated factory building about a mile away from the site of Inter-Jeans. It attracted about 60 jeans, streetwear, and accessories labels, including Levi’s Red and Vintage Clothing, Adidas Originals, THD85 by Tommy Hilfiger Denim, Lee, Asics, Michiko Koshino, Ten to Ten by Dexter Wong, Porn Star, Psycho Cowboy and Ubi.
The mood was club-like, the format completely open, and the exhibition spaces ranged from only 300 to 1,000 square feet compared to enormous mega-stands at Inter-Jeans. Even with the power brands, the presentation was overtly low-budget.
At that show, Levi’s Red showed a new range of denim that senior merchandiser Megan Shenon said was focused on “warps. Glass warps, denim warps, how denim changes shape.”
The collection included a skewed women’s boot-cut model, cut very low and featuring a copper chain from the old-style Western flap pocket to the middle of the leg.
Levi’s Vintage introduced its first women’s-only styles. Taking a page of Levi’s history books, the company showed a pair of jeans copied from a vintage 1966 pair of 501s that a young woman had customized to give a lower waistband, Shenon said.
Tommy Hilfiger at Bread & Butter unveiled its new high-end THD85 line, a collection primarily aimed at men that will be distributed to about 40 key accounts in Europe.
Charles Eisenhour, vice president for Tommy Hilfiger Denim in Europe described THD85 as a “kind of lab for us.” It features premium Italian denim that’s been embedded with dirt, hand-scraped or diagonally patched. The line includes a zigzag-patched flare women’s in hand-scraped denim, as well as a women’s denim jacket.