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Forever 21 and Barneys New York have collaborated on a new collection, the ultimate high-low pairing that’s raised Barneys loyalists’ eyebrows.
The collaboration isn’t a one-off attempt for fashion week clout. It’s part of Forever 21 chief executive Winnie Park’s bigger plan to overhaul the brand, in part based on lessons learned during the decade she spent working at French luxury conglomerate LVMH. As she watched over New York Fashion Week’s most unlikely launch on Thursday, she detailed an aggressive behind-the-scenes effort to reset the famously inexpensive Los Angeles fast fashion brand with better clothes, decluttered stores and more original designs.
Atypical for a fast fashion collab, the target isn’t teens and early-20-somethings, but the millennials who may have grown out of the brand. It aims to reach generations of older, higher-spending consumers who don’t want to buy throw-away clothes.
“I’ve got Gen Alpha. I’ve got a lot of Zs,” Park said of the youthful leaning of the company’s consumer base. “But I want to reach up and say, don’t forget about Forever 21.”
The Forever 21 x Barneys collection is a surprisingly well-constructed grouping of monochromatic pieces that start at $29 and max out at $129 — pricey for many young fast-fashion shoppers but a bargain for more upscale consumers. A $99 overcoat of wool-blend, double-faced fabric has taped interior seams and an elegant drape.
The collection evokes quiet luxury and is also quietly non-gendered. Every piece — which includes skirts, tailored suiting, overcoats and chunky jackets — was fitted on both male and female models. Shoulders are slightly broader, sleeves longer, giving an oversized look that manages not to scream masculine or Barbie.
Today’s collaboration might appear at first glance to be an awkward dethroning for Barneys — and it’s questionable whether the company would have agreed to such a pairing before its own bankruptcy. However, it is putting the Barneys name back out there on products that marry the ethos of both companies — lasting timeless quality with compromises in fabrics that bring affordability.
This is the most public move by Park since she was hired as CEO a year and a half ago by Authentic Brands Group, the 12-year-old brand management company that has been gobbling up ailing fashion labels including Vince, Hunter, Quiksilver and a handful of surf brands. The New York company bought the intellectual property of Forever 21 in 2020, about a year after buying the Barneys IP. Authentic Brands’s raison d’être is to goose the values inherent in the brands it buys.
Forever 21 was once an American fashion success story, founded by Korean immigrants in 1984, it reported $4.4 billion in sales in 2015. Just four years later, after an over-aggressive store expansion and falling behind rivals including Zara and H&M, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, which led to its sale to Authentic Brands.
It was Park who approached Authentic Brands Group founder Jamie Salter to pursue a brand partnership. The idea started as an ungendered collection, Park says. While brainstorming, she says she recalled the company’s ownership of the Barneys brand.
Working out the deal took longer than making the collection, largely because Authentic Brands had sold rights to Saks Fifth Avenue to use the Barneys name. Saks ultimately gave permission for the collaboration with Forever 21. The rest took just six months from design to stores: a collection built on relationships with Chinese manufacturers of as many as 35 years, Park says. It’s being sold online and in 225 Forever 21 stores.
Park, who spent nine years as an executive at LVMH’s duty-free travel retailer DFS Group before leaving to serve as chief executive of Paper Source, quickly initiated an overhaul of Forever 21 stores and designs. She cut production and assembled a design team in Los Angeles focusing on independent creativity and original designs.
“I’m probably brainwashed from being at LVMH for so long: protect the designers,” Park said.
A decluttering effort at one store led comparable sales to go “through the roof” she says, so the company has been decluttering across the board. “I’d see one good black tank top and wonder why we had five or six versions,” she says, noting production is now down 30 per cent, which has improved margins.
Park’s initiatives involve walking away from many of the tenets that have made fast fashion. While she revered Barneys as a young woman, one of her most memorable fashion purchases was a Forever 21 blouse that was a look-a-like to a Chloé design at the time by Phoebe Philo. Parks’s version cost less than $30, which she was chagrined to tell her co-workers at the time.
Park says she no longer wants to discover look-a-likes in Forever 21 collections. Will that be more costly? “The customer will pay a dollar or two more,” Park says.
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