Every year in late summer and early winter, if you happen to be in New York and have the desire to shop, there is a corner of the city that you may never have noticed that is well worth a stroll, in addition to the usual guidebooks that point you to Fifth Avenue or Soho for shopping. And perhaps, after strolling you will feel more than the Fifth Avenue to make you obsessed. Most of these places are hidden in the garment district of midtown Manhattan, hidden in a busy fashion company office building, no advertising, no flyers, and often only last two or three days fleeting, therefore, not much for outsiders to know, also does not seem to want for outsiders to know. For such two or three days, many beauty lovers will begin to think about early, early in the calendar to make a good mark. The first few days of the season, especially in the early winter, will be a little more intense because of the proximity of the year.
It sounds like an end-of-year company party, but no, I’m just talking about a messy but lively clearance sale organized by the fashion company itself.
It’s hard for anyone who hasn’t worked in a fashion house to imagine how many samples of good, bad, defective, and acceptable samples can pile up in each company, in each designer’s house, next to the pattern makers and production managers, after each design season. The old firm practice used to be to put these samples into warehouses and store them as archives. But with Manhattan real estate doubling several times in the last decade, few companies can afford to rent a warehouse, and these samples become a burden to the company by the end of a sales season. Gradually, many companies are either handing out samples or selling them to internal employees at almost no cost – $2 or $5 a piece, or $20 a pack – or, as in recent years, holding semi-public clearance sales within the company to give back to the community and make some income from it. This time of year, in Manhattan’s fashion district, although the exterior of a company building may seem calm, but if you go up a few floors, you will find almost every floor has one or two stalls in full swing. The company’s business is a very important one.
Much of what happened at clearance sales like this before last year was that larger companies, such as local brands Rebecca Taylor and Nanette Lepore, would vacate or rent an entire floor of hundreds or thousands of square meters and pile racks full of samples into them. The women who received the news from various sources rushed to line up early in the morning like a market, and the crowd was so big that it was like crowding the elevator room. The company opened when the time came, and these women swarmed in like the stock market, running to the racks, not caring to look closely, grabbing as many clothes as they could in three or two handfuls.
There are usually no fitting rooms at these clearance sales, and some don’t even have curtains, just a few mirrors on the floor. The company’s main business is to provide a wide range of products and services to its customers. A few years ago, Han Feng, a designer from the mainland, also had a rare clearance sale, but it was still “civilized”. I came out that day and saw Mrs. Tan Dun going in. A few days later, she appeared at the Oscars to applaud Tan Dun on stage, wearing the same green dress she wore at that clearance sale.
But such a buzz disappeared immediately the previous September, the first winter after Lehman Brothers collapsed. There’s still plenty of stock, and Tracy Reese still occupies an entire store – so the fashion industry is unprepared for the sudden changes on Wall Street, but it’s not just the fashion industry that’s unprepared. But there are fewer people, especially the faces of white women, almost none of them are visible, the most seen are women from Hong Kong and China, and they can still take out their wallets leisurely. It is said that the Chinese habit of saving money is valuable in times of crisis, and the clearance sales are a testament to that.
This year, the picture is even more bleak. The volume of goods is greatly reduced, NanetteLepore in previous years how to put out eight rows of sample shelves, this year only two rows. It is clear that the fashion industry is already making adjustments. In the face of uncertainty in the market, cutting production can be the most conservative and safest, but the psychological damage to people is also not small. The biggest change is the runway samples, in previous years a wall full of runway samples, this year there are only a few pieces left, indicating that this season’s big-name fashion companies are also greatly compressed new designs, it is no wonder that this year there are so many designers out of work.
The sight of it made our hearts beat even harder.