Apparently, this is the result of the current financial crisis and of the consequent decline in the demand of luxury goods.
Who knows if, come next year, Donatella’s dreams of living in a fantasyland à la Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, one of the inspirations behind the fashion house's S/S 2010 collection, will really manage to restore the group to profitability by 2011 or if the brand will need more than Gianni’s safety pins reinvented by Christopher Kane to increase its sales.
I often think that the problem is not the decline in the demand of luxury goods, but the fact that there are too many clothes and accessories out there.
Please note that with "too many" I don't mean to refer to the wide choice brands and fashion houses offer their customers, but to the actual numbers of things they produce.
Quite a few brands tend indeed to overproduce garments they will never sell or will eventually sell a few seasons after at outlet stores. In fact I think that in Italy genuine designer clothes have found back their market in huge outlets located outside the city centres, such as Prada's, located in Montevarchi, outside Arezzo.
It’s not only the overproduction aspect of fashion that I hate, though. There is another hateful trend that I can’t stand, resurrecting, revamping and revomiting dead brands.
In a world that manages to produce more fashion designer graduates than it can actually employ, I’m amazed that somebody still wants to resurrect dead labels.
The Schiaparelli house is for example still in a limbo after Della Valle bought it a few years ago, but what will happen if it ever gets revamped?
I dread to think about the consequences, but I recently had what I could define as a traumatic fashion experience. I saw in quite a few Italian shops and department stores bags and small accessories by Galitzine.
The first question that came to my mind was “wasn’t she dead?”, then I remembered that a while back the brand had been bought.
For those of you who don’t remember her name, Princess Irene Galitzine was an aristocratic woman of Russian descent. She was born in 1916 in Tiflis (Tbilisi), Georgia, from a Russian princess, Nina Lazareff and an officer of the Tsar Guards, Boris Galitzine.
The Galitzine family moved to Rome when the October Revolution broke out and young Irene first entered the world of fashion working as a model and PR agent for the Fontana Sisters in Rome.
In the late 40s she opened her own atelier and boutique and became famous for designing in the early 60s the "pyjama" or "palazzo" pants, a silky pair of trousers very similar in their cut to pyjamas, characterised by very wide legs.
In the years that followed, Galitzine launched crease resistant lingerie, designed a futuristic collection inspired to kaleidoscopes and also worked on costumes for films such as Luchino Visconti’s Le vaghe stelle dell’Orsa (Sandra of a Thousand Delights) and Berry Gordy’s Mahogany.
As many other Italian designers at the time, Galitzine became a friend of many high profile international politicians, stars, celebrities and actresses, from the Kennedys to Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Sofia Loren and Claudia Cardinale, and also won numerous fashion awards.
In the early 90s the company was bought by Xines and, since then, the latter tried to revamp and revive the brand. Luckily for her, Galitzine died in October 2006, otherwise she would have died of heart attack after seeing what is currently produced under her name. The products branded Galitzine include outerwear, knitwear, accessories and even household linens.
The problem with all the stuff on the market at the moment under Galitzine’s name is that it is third rate stuff, for its design, materials employed and execution.
Most of the bags, gloves or belts look exactly like the umpteenth bag, pair of gloves or belt produced by one of the many factories based in Asia.
If none of the stuff produced looks beautiful, covetable or extremely modern, why producing it? Why even bothering revamping a brand? To make money? I honestly think the only reason why you would produce such things is because you have huge sums of dirty money at your disposal that you want to recycle and make sure they disappear as soon as possible, though this hypothesis would be rather unlikely in this case.
While I hope Galitzine's name will still be remembered in connection with her palazzo pants and not with a bad quality handbag, I also hope that fashion houses and companies out there will seriously start considering the damages overproduction and bad investments have so far caused and take more considerate steps while planning their future strategies.
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