Japan fashion told to forget Paris, focus on Tokyo

Tokyo may be the style capital of Asia, but with South Korea and China snapping at its heels and Japan’s most iconic brands rooted in Europe, the city is being urged to haul its fashion week into the big leagues.

Tokyo Fashion Week kicked off its spring/summer 2017 season showcase on Monday with six days of events intended to promote 50 brands, a mixture of the established and the new.

Yet Japanese labels that are household names in the West — led by Kenzo, Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake and Comme des Garcons — eschew home shores for the bright lights, prestige and visibility of Paris.

Tokyo Fashion Week attracts only 50,000 visitors — just a quarter of the total number that attend New York’s two annual fashion weeks, and also lagging behind London, Paris and Milan.

Held after the fashion merry ground exhausts the “big four”, few make the extra trip to Tokyo, and not many in Japan believe they are missing out.

According to a poll from local website Fashionsnap.com, only 20 percent of the Japanese fashion industry, including designers, stylists and editors, consider Tokyo’s events to be of interest.

The calendar, the no-show by the biggest brands, reluctance to open their doors to the wider public and sluggishness to embrace see-now, buy-now were all listed as shortcomings by the 221 people surveyed.

– ‘Focus on your own’ –

The award-winning, Milan-based Turkish designer Umit Benan, wants to change all that.

“Everyone needs to get together to make the Japanese fashion week much better,” the menswear designer told reporters after making his Tokyo debut, having announced he would ditch Paris fashion week

He called Japan’s menswear the “most sophisticated you’ll see in the streets” and said Tokyo was packed with the world’s most creative buyers and designers, along with some of the most sophisticated consumers around.

“I think you really need to focus on your own fashion week, trying to create new waves in Japan fashion,” he said, joking that he loves Japan so much, he visited 40 times in the last five years.

He called Japanese fabric second only to Italy’s. But unlike in Italy, where high fashion is governed by precision, he said the Japanese were willing to take risks, such as mix nylon with cashmere.

“The Italians don’t have the balls to mix nylon into a 200 euro fabric,” he said. “In Japan they’re very flexible and very creative, spontaneous… when you touch it you’re like my God what is this?”

While Tokyo has long been a springboard for up-and-coming designers, neighbouring Seoul, with its vibrant street style, and Shanghai, as the commercial capital of China, are attracting increased interest.

“To me, Tokyo is the Asian fashion centre with long fashion-forward history,” said Hong Kong designer Vickie Au who brought her “Urban Chill” collection to Tokyo after showing in New York.

The street look, minimal style and clean lines of her House of V label, this season inspired by Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry is well suited to Japanese taste.

– ‘Beauty of the craft’ –

While she has boutiques in Hong Kong, China and Taiwan, and online, she is looking to break into the Japanese and US markets.

Au cited Yamamoto, the famed Japanese designer based in Paris, as an inspiration, praising him as a master of “modern and avant-garde tailoring”.

Christelle Kocher, creative director of up-and-coming French label Koche, also said she had learnt from Yamamoto and that it had been special to be the only French brand participating in Tokyo this season.

“Japanese culture is really refined and I think may be more than other places, they understand the beauty of the craft and the beauty of the time to make beautiful things,” she said.

US retailing giant Amazon is sponsoring Tokyo Fashion Week for the first time, and among the fashion set in Japan there are hopes that it can help rebrand the event into something brighter and larger.

The company is already the largest clothing retailer in the United States and fashion vice president for Amazon Japan, James Peters, signalled that he is determined to replicate that success in Japan.

While Tokyo still follows a six-month delay between catwalk and store, he said Amazon would be happy to help Japanese designers facilitate see-now, buy-now collections increasingly at the fore in New York.

“I think if that’s what the designers want to do, we’re ready to do it,” he told AFP at the week’s launch party.

Paris auction house porters jailed for stealing objects worth millions

Porters who operated a lucrative crime ring at Paris’s most prestigious auction house have been jailed for the theft of objects worth millions.

A judge sentenced 30 people to between 18 months and three years in prison. They were members of a traditional 110-strong union known as the cols rouges because of the red collars on their black uniforms.

Their scam was rumbled following an anonymous tipoff, which led to a police operation that recovered thousands of paintings, sculptures and other objects stolen from auctioneers Hôtel Drouot.

The Union des commissionaires de l’hôtel des ventes (UCHV) – also known as the Savoyards – worked like a secret society whose members made so much money from their systematic pilfering that many drove luxury cars and one evn bought a Parisian bar.

Three auctioneers accused of involvement in the racket were given 18-month suspended sentences and fined €25,000 (£21,000).

The public prosecutor had demanded sentences of up to five years, but the court imposed a maximum of three years – with half the sentences suspended – along with fines of up to €60,000.

Among the 275 tonnes of objects stolen from the auction house were antique furniture, works by Courbet, Chagall and Matisse as well as jewellery. Items from the estate of the Irish furniture designer Eileen Gray worth an estimated €1m, a Ming dynasty Chinese plate worth €325,000 and rare costumes belonging to French mime artist Marcel Marceau also disappeared.

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In March, 49 people were put on trial charged with organised theft, conspiracy to commit a crime and handling stolen goods. Le Monde reported that one of the cols rouges told police: “I cannot give you a single name of a commissioner who didn’t at one time or another steal in the exercise of his job … in fact, at the UCHV, theft was an institution. Everyone had a bite.”

The cols rouges, who could earn up to €60,000 a year, were traditionally exclusively recruited from Alpine villages in eastern France and enjoyed a monopoly and independence granted to them by Napoleon III in 1860. They did not wear name badges but had identification numbers embroidered in gold thread on their collars and chose nicknames, like Chocolat, Corbeau (crow), Beaujolais or Gitan (Gypsy). They could pass on or sell their number to their successor.

The court heard the organisation operated as a kind of secret criminal cooperative for decades, with all revenue collected and distributed equally among members. New recruits were initiated into la yape – pilfering in Savoyard slang – but those who refused to take part were excluded.

During the three-week trial, the prosecution alleged objects were stolen either during valuations of the estates of recently deceased collectors or wealthy individuals, or while the items were being shipped to Hôtel Drouot or held in storage awaiting auction. The auction house handles up to a million items a year. 

Le Parisien reported that as well as stealing whole items, the accused would take part of an object, which would then be sold cheaply at auction as it was incomplete. Having bought the item, the missing piece would be replaced and it would be resold at a far higher price.

If an auctioneer became suspicious, the cols rouges would cause havoc. “He would find objects were broken, that they weren’t in the right auction room or were late, which held things up. For us, it was a way of exerting pressure [on them],” one told police.

The scam was discovered when an anonymous caller tipped off police in 2009 that one of the cols rouges had removed an oil-painting by Courbet called Seascape with Orange Sky six years previously. The painting had been stored at Drouot and went missing in 2003.

Police tapped a porter’s phone and subsequently launched an investigation into the UCHV. Detectives carried out 147 separate searches and found about 6,000 paintings, sculptures, jewellery, furniture and other stolen objects. The union, described by police as concealing a “generalised system of theft … with the complicity of certain auctioneers”, was shut down.

Hôtel Drouot, which was a civil party in the legal action, insisted the cols rouges were independent of them and pointed out they were self-employed, but not everyone is glad to see the back of the Savoyards.

One auctioneer told Le Monde: “They were efficient. With the new transporters, it’s total amateurism.”

 Source: The Guardian UK