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Every season since designer Adam Lippes began showing at New York Fashion Week in 2014, he has invited the fashion set into his home for breakfast — first in Soho, more recently in his Brooklyn Heights abode. The caterer? “Sant Ambroeus, of course.”
On 8 September, however, Lippes is shifting his breakfast date to lunch — and to Dallas rather than New York. He’s heading to the Texan city for Neiman Marcus’s 49th annual fashion show and luncheon with The Crystal Ball Charity, which supports children’s charities in Dallas. Here, consumers — rather than press and buyers — will fill the front-row seats.
Back in 2020, Lippes told Vogue Runway that “when everyone is saying that New York Fashion Week is dead, it seems like the perfect time to show.” Now, he’s taking a different tack.
An Oscar de la Renta alumnus, Lippes is very familiar with the Dallas event hosted annually by Neiman Marcus (de la Renta was the featured label in 2018; Dolce Gabbana in 2022). Typically, designers send current pieces down the runway, as is typical for charity events. But when Lippes found out the date — the opening day of NYFW — he questioned how he could show in Dallas and present his new collection in New York three days later. “It didn’t seem possible,” he recalls. The solution? Lippes is to debut his Spring/Summer 2024 ready-to-wear collection in Dallas.
“We are constantly looking for ways to inspire our customers by providing them with unique experiences,” says Jodi Kahn, VP of luxury fashion at Neiman Marcus. “We are honoured that Adam has chosen to unveil his SS24 collection exclusively at Neiman Marcus.” She adds that Lippes’s choice to do so over show at NYFW is a testament to the strength of the retailer’s relationship with the brand.
That decision marks a first — for Neiman, the charity and Lippes. The designer describes it as the push he needed to explore alternative avenues to an on-calendar show. “We’ve been thinking about showing in some of our big areas for a long time — about doing something interesting for our customers.”
The move is not without risk. “I thought, jeez, all the press is in New York. Is this going to be a problem?” says Lippes. “Is it going to be a problem for any of the other big stores that we’re showing in partnership with Neiman Marcus?”
In the end, he’s decided to give it a go. And if it doesn’t work? “The good thing about fashion,” he says, “is that we do it every three months.”
The designer will not miss NYFW entirely. “You can’t beat the vibrancy of New York Fashion Week,” he says. “I’ll be back for fashion week. We’ll do lots of appointments in the showroom with stores, press and clients. So it’s kind of the best of both worlds.”
Bringing consumers into the fold
The Dallas show is an extension of Lippes’s approach to the marketing of his collection. Every year, he spends time travelling around the US meeting with retailers and consumers. This season, for example, he’s got 12 to 14 store visits scheduled. “I’ll work with 30 to 50 consumers to walk them through the collection because, yes, they have Instagram, yes, they have Vogue Runway, but they’re missing that personal one-on-one.”
In short, relationship building is at the heart of Lippes’s marketing strategy.
The Dallas event will also serve as much-valued consumer research, he says. “We’re going to show 45 looks to get an immediate read from the end-use customer on what they want and what they don’t.” This, he says, will help give his team a better guide as to what to produce. Not every look on the catwalk will be produced and sold. “It’ll be so good to have it in front of the eyes of the ultimate consumer instead of us guessing,” he says. It’ll also feed into what the brand buys for its own stores.
A new model for shows?
Could this approach offer potential for other designers? Lippes is keen to emphasise his belief in the value of show format, whether it’s in New York or Dallas. “I started as a non-believer in fashion shows,” he says. “When we were forced not to do them through the pandemic is when my mind changed — about the importance of a show as part of fashion. That ‘putting on a show’ is part of our cycle that I didn’t respect enough.”
What Lippes is less convinced of is where the show has to be. “As you can see: I’m going to Dallas,” he says with a smile.
Destination shows are being treated as an increasingly important marketing add-on by the luxury superbrands. They have the budget and resources to stage both destination events as well as fashion week shows, treating the former primarily as high-impact marketing for the end consumer. Gary Wassner, CEO and principal of Hilldun Corporation, a New York-based fashion financier, told Vogue Business in May: “These global extravaganzas are no longer for the trade but primarily for the public, social media, influencers and marketing teams. It’s theatre, not previews of a collection for retail buyers.”
It’s a relatively new concept, though, for smaller luxury labels. “Is there a way to do it on a more independent designer scale?” Lippes asks. Perhaps so — by taking the Lippes approach of bringing the focus back to sales and finding an appropriate partner for financial support.
The Dallas event could be a good business model, Lippes argues. “It will certainly [have] a much more direct, immediate business effect than doing it in New York,” he says. “There will be 500 of our customers sitting at that show.”
Consumers will be able to pre-order the collection during and after the show, alongside shopping the AW23 collection, Lippes says. “We have big business plans for what’s happening here, which is a big departure from what happens in New York,” he says. “We do a lot of sales during the week [in New York] through private clients — stores will bring their top clients into the showroom — but not five hundred of them.”
Looking ahead, Lippes muses a blended approach might work best. “Maybe it’s one season you do on the road, one season in New York.”
Growing physical presence
It’s the right time for Lippes to show in Texas, an important market for designer fashion. He estimates that about 15 per cent of his consumer base lives in the state. In October, Lippes is opening a store in Houston – with Fort Worth, Houston and Austin also on his radar as locations for further openings.
In total, Adam Lippes has 18 US store openings planned for the next five years, joining the Houston location and his downtown New York space in Battery Park’s Brookfield Place, which opened in 2021. “Brookfield Place has exceeded plans by three times — we’re up 150 per cent over last year,” he says.
The value of physical spaces and live shows is similar, Lippes says. “It goes back to the value of having live interaction,” he says. “The same can be said for shows as stores. It’s something people missed. And, it really does make a difference.” Even when there isn’t a Sant Ambroeus next door.
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