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“I feel calm. It’s my new thing,” declares Area designer and co-founder Piotrek Panszczyk, speaking from a showroom visit earlier this week. He and the label’s CEO and co-founder Beckett Fogg were busy casting their upcoming New York Fashion Week show, which will officially kick off the Spring/Summer 2025 calendar this afternoon.
It’s a momentous season for the New York-based cult label: Area is celebrating its 10th anniversary, having launched its first collection in 2014, and is opening the official NYFW calendar, an honour either bestowed to the city’s buzziest or its truest stalwarts — has Area grown up to become both?
When Area broke onto the scene a decade ago, it quickly became known for its sparkly and playful going-out dresses. Back then, Area was on the mood board and in the wardrobes of the post-indie sleaze party girl, alongside the likes of Alexander Wang and American Apparel. Owning this space as part of the NYFW landscape gave the label some quick clout, but, in hindsight, it helped place Area in limbo. The American fashion industry often turns its nose up at those who make more youthful, underground or simply playful fashion, perennially labelling these designers as ‘emerging’ and often dismissing them. But Area wouldn’t be dismissed. And now, 10 years in and much more grown up, it’s become New York’s dark horse.
Creativity and concept
When approaching this season’s anniversary collection, Panszczyk says they thought of looking at their past, as these milestones usually go. But Area is not, at least aesthetically, the kind of brand that operates under those sorts of preconceptions.
The direction this season became an exploration of identity. With a venture into Area’s past came a reflection of its DNA, which then led to a survey of such by the hand of (pun intended) fingerprint and palm motifs. Area has made it its signature to craft collections based on a singular symbol, often a literal interpretation of a broader concept, and iterate on it in every possible way with an emphasis on novelty. These themes — fruits three seasons ago; eyes last — are explored on everything from jeans and jersey separates to sculptural couture. It’s this same kind of directionality and focus on creativity and concept that New York Fashion Week generally lacks, but never Area, even if they’re not always at the centre of the conversation when it pertains to American fashion.
Because of those big, often iconoclastic ideas, running Area as a business has become a balance between the creative and the commercial, the fun and the practical. These directional ideas make noise, and, when they find virality or celebrity attention, grow legs of their own. “You get to a point where the brand is bigger than the business,” Fogg says. It takes focus and restraint to manage that perceived growth, while being realistic about the actual scale of the business.
A series of changes
Area currently runs with a team of 20, split between New York and Milan. It was a larger operation before the pandemic with around 30 employees, but the pair cut back during that time.
“We have learnt so much from those moments where we didn’t necessarily structure things properly or approach business in the right way,” says Fogg of the past decade. “It’s been about fusing what we’re good at, what we want to do,” says Panszczyk, “and what we are ready to do,” adds Fogg. Many buzzy brands jump into partnerships with wholesalers as they come, eager to scale their businesses even when they’re not fully ready to take on the workload. Early on, Area was not immune to this phenomenon. It’s since reshaped its business with a series of restructurings in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic.
“We saw then [during the pandemic] how dangerous and difficult it can be when everything is too highly concentrated and you don’t have too many options as a business to pivot when you need to,” says Fogg. “Diversifying in general has been a huge initiative for us.”
First came a switch to a see-now, buy-now presentation schedule starting with the delivery of its resort 2021 collection. “Being first [with an idea], and having the product available on our website as the show comes out has been very important,” explains Panszczyk of the switch. “People want to be a part of the conversation as it happens.” With a label like Area that sets forth splashy ideas that make noise or impact but are not always instant classics, the way to keep the consumer excited and committed has been to invite them to participate immediately, while everything feels new.
A direct-to-consumer (DTC) push followed, and became key to Area’s present success. The label’s first big account was the now defunct Barneys. Much has changed in the retail landscape since as the industry has consolidated both on and offline. “This is when DTC becomes even more important, because it balances out the wholesale side of the business,” says Fogg. Area’s DTC business now represents 35 per cent of all sales, and DTC revenue has grown around 750 per cent since 2020, says Fogg. “DTC also gives you more clarity as to where you’re going and how people react to what you’re doing,” says Panszczyk. The brand doesn’t disclose revenue figures, but shares that sales have increased fourfold from 2020 to 2023.
As part of this diversification came the decision to trim down their team and split it between both cities in the aftermath of the pandemic. “We actioned upon a lot of these things, like opening a Milan satellite office and switching presentation schedules, that a lot of brands weren’t able to do,” explains Fogg. The objective since has been to keep Area nimble enough to switch strategies when needed.
The reasoning for the New York-Milan split is that Area is represented globally across top retailers — and the company and its supply chain should follow suit. “It also lends itself to our DTC strategy where we can have flexibility with minimums,” she adds. “It’s about maintaining as much control as you can throughout this process.”
A final but key part of the puzzle was Fogg formally stepping into the role of CEO, with Panszczyk becoming the public-facing creative lead. “We both have a creative background, but I geared more onto the business side a few years in,” says Fogg. “Piotrek’s identity is Area. He’s such an incredibly directional designer, so we needed to lean into that, and I think that was the correct move.”
A hand full of possibilities
Moving into the future, daywear and a core line have become central to Area’s growth. “We were seen as this occasion, party girl dress brand,” says Panszczyk with a laugh, “which was great, but it offered a bigger opportunity for us to expand the identity of Area and infuse our unique perspective of glamour into daywear.”
Core, which Area markets as its “signature” collection — including its famous jeans in a range of colours, crystal-logo tank tops and other jersey styles — is now 25 per cent of the business, up from 17 per cent when it officially launched last year. Denim, a growing category for most labels at the moment, has become almost 25 per cent of Area’s business, and the expectation is for it to hit 30 per cent by the end of the year. (It was less than 1 per cent before 2020.) Taylor Swift, for one, is a big fan — she famously wore a pair of Area butterfly cut-out jeans last year in April, a pair of Area shorts to an NFL game in October (which sold out immediately after), plus another pair of black jeans to the Super Bowl in February.
“We’ve been around for 10 years, but there’s so much runway left for Area,” says Fogg. The label has only just scratched the surface of its daywear and DTC opportunities, so they will continue to be top priority.
Area also launched a couture offering for the spring 2021 season. Every now and then, Panszczyk says, a customer will purchase a couture look (which are presented alongside their main-line offerings), and while there is opportunity to expand on that portion of the business, together with made-to-measure, it will all happen “in due time”.
Ditto for retail. The goal would be to grow to the point where a brick-and-mortar space is feasible, but in the meantime, Area is looking at pop-ups and other physical retail opportunities to continue working their clientele. “We now have more experience and more data to learn from, so our way forward is to understand how to better analyse it,” says Fogg.
Ten years in, Area has never been nominated for a CFDA Award, aka the Oscars of American fashion, despite having been a CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund finalist in 2016 and a mainstay in the NYFW landscape. But Fogg and Panszczyk, in true iconoclastic form, are not concerned by this kind of inside-baseball industry recognition.
“New York is a very bittersweet city for fashion,” Panszczyk says. “It’s complicated because there’s so much growth here, but it’s also about the right people co-signing it, which can really distract you. We have learnt to accept that we’re very individual and not everyone’s cup of tea, but I know that the people who care, really care about it.”
Fashion is less of a sprint than it is a marathon, after all. “You said we are a dark horse, and I think we’re OK with that,” Panszczyk concludes.
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