PARIS — The buzz among fashion folk here last week was all about Who’s Next, the new fashion fair that’s a showcase for streetwear, club gear and youth apparel.
Staged in a giant circus tent beside Pret-a-Porter Paris, Who’s Next attracted about 10,000 mainly young people to its debut show, which featured lasers, competing acidrave deejays, funky bars, club lighting and 60 exhibitors.
But even though Who’s Next, which ended Sept. 5, drew a lot of traffic, many exhibitors complained that the noise from the dance floors and the dark atmosphere made it very difficult to do business — like, say, writing orders.
Yet the show, the brainchild of Premiere Classe organizers Bertrand Foache and Xavier Clergerie, seems to have tapped into a major market: a new generation of fashion consumers with radically different tastes.
“We are delighted to be in a show that understands what we are all about. And you can see from the crowds here that there’s a big pent-up demand,” said Raff Brodie, head of promotions for Daniel Poole, the London-based designer. The Poole collection featured haute functional jackets with high tech fabrics, to be worn to a rave or on a ski jump. Sweatshirts, T-shirts and jackets all screamed with text heralding the new international techno-tribal culture. Across the floor, Pierre-Yves Azuelos, the exclusive French importer of Prison Blues from Oregon, was less enthused. “It’s a very distinctive concept, but it’s impossible to work here. There’s too much noise, and whenever you see a real buyer, they stay five minutes and then leave,” Azuelos shouted over the din.
Nevertheless, the Prison Blues collection, essentially jeans and convict wear made by the inmates of an Oregon jail, did attract plenty of interest from the young fashion folk, especially the T-shirts, which bear the logo “Made on the Inside, to be Worn on the Outside.” Nearby, Magic Circle showed sherbet-colored, three-piece gangster suits, perfect for clubbing, and tight little vinyl baseball jackets wholesaling for just $12 (65 francs at current exchange rates).
“It is a little crazy in here, but you have to hand it to the show, the traffic has been very heavy,” said Magic Circle designer Joyce Marie Kraus.