Le Mario de Poje: Cro-A-Por qué?

Boris Pavlin FW 2010.

First and foremost I would like to remind on the disclaimer written bellow on my blog. I am not completely biased while writing this as I am working for the company sponsoring another fashion event in Croatia - Dreft Fashion Week.

The other event I am commenting here is being organized in another smaller city in a different zip code and sponsored by a smaller competitor company to mine so I will refrain from commenting on this company inputs to the event as this blog is about fashion only.

CROATIAN FASHION INDUSTRY SITUATION

As I have written before in my posts. There are three main fashion events in Croatia: fashion.hr, Cro-a-porter and Fashion Week Zagreb. Each claiming to be the best.

Just based on the country size, available talent pool, lack of proper/modern fashion and business education, available budgets and capability of all the organizers, all of these people gathered together (if their egos and willingness to share the profits would allow) would maybe be capable to put together one decent fashion event per season which could export talent outside of the country and ressurect fallen Croatian fashion industry and local textile mass production.

They are indeed all fashion professionals, some with more experience than the others but so far none has shown consistency in quality, continuous improvement and willingness to invest in their event long term. This current situation is really, really bad for such a tinny market - as the decision lays in hands of a hand full of people some of which are long overdue to finally retire.

This is not totally organizers fault, not at all. If designers would be more entrepreneurial and more business savvy maybe the organizers would need to spend less energy on motivating them to create more wearable collections, which normal people could afford to buy and wear, and teaching them how to properly present themselves and would have enough time to negotiate sponsorships, partnerships and other complicated technicalities of the complex and labor intensive event organization (knowing the lack of financial resources, countries bureaucracy overall and current old school clans in Croatian fashion industry one has to be careful not to erode).

CRO-A-PORTE

Last night I came back from the final night of Cro-a-porte.

First, to be honest with you I could not get over the fact that this fashion event is organized outside of the countries capital in a shopping mall, in what seems to be an empty store location.

Second, it was obvious that there was limited space but the crowd there was not what designers needed. It seemed like the seats were limited, but there were a lot of people who were (based on their comments): family members, friends of the designers, there were kids, dogs and many people who were in some way part of the organization.

Local celebrities as we all know came to promote themselves as they mostly borrow local designer’s clothes and never really cash out for it but rather buy foreign already established designer clothing (and why wouldn’t they when it is similar in price as the Croatian "no name" designers).
In addition, there was no showroom so designers who do not have their own store were left to find their own way to return the invested fast as the collections they have shown now are for the current season F/W 2010. (which retail is already discounting).

Lastly, the events website is really bad, not updated timely and not all designers contact info/website links and the full shown collections are uploaded.

There is a facebook fan page with only cc 300 members and no Twitter profile. There was an attempt, based on global trends to include local bloggers. This resulted in selecting bloggers who so far wrote a hand full of posts (with an exception of croator.net) in total (most related to this particular event) and were extremely biased while reporting without disclaiming their agreed endorsement to the event, this is simply not fair towards their readers and not the way bloggers should function.

This seasons Cro-a-porte had positive sides as well. They are equipped with many good designers, many of which really do sell well and are really creative. Models wearing the shows were really well casted and other than being in the shopping mall, the rest areas with leather chairs and the bars surrounding the runway were much better positioned than years before.

My intention here is not to bash any of the three events, I am just writing down and posting comments I hear from local fashionistas, editors, journalists, photographers who's publishing house politics do not allow them to comment on the route cause of current fashion event orvedose in Croatia due to business connections and not wanting to get on anybodies back side as many are not professional enough to take criticism well.

My kind advise to organizers would be: why don't you retire some of your members, start from the education, organize workshops for these young creative people (designers, stylists etc.), invest in what you believe in, organize a local fashion cauncil, set some rules and guidelines and stick to them in order to create a local industry and strong fashion week - long term.

Quality over quantity please.

Bellow you can find my favorite pieces from this season shows darlings: