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Tonight in Los Angeles, a star-studded body of famous actors, stylists and designers including Arianne Phillips, Janelle Monáe, Isabel Marant and Gabriella Karefa-Johnson will bestow awards on a selection of astonished and nearly anonymous young fashion designers in the second annual installment of the Fashion Trust US Awards.
I know what you’re thinking: the who awards?
Fashion has a chock-full awards calendar, what with the International Woolmark Prize, the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, the CFDA Awards, the LVMH Prize, the Neiman Marcus Awards, the Fashion Awards, which were formerly known as the British Fashion Awards, the Cooper Hewitt prizes and the Latin American Fashion Awards, among others.
“There’s an award every five seconds,” says Laura Brown, former editor of InStyle and a board member of Fashion Trust US. “But none for young fashion designers.”
That’s not precisely true — Cooper Hewitt, Woolmark, the British Fashion Council and the CFDA/Vogue Fashion all recognise emerging designers. But point taken. These awards are well intentioned to boost new talent.
Awards have created something akin to a venture capital system for fashion. Awards for emerging designers bestow cash prizes — the very rich LVMH Prize winner receives €400,000 — and mentorships with industry veterans who agree to serve as coaches for a year, helping keep a label afloat for a year or more. Awards for established designers generally involve less cash — the Cooper Hewitt offers $5,000 — but the renown leads to headlines, garners the attention of retailers and lasts a lifetime. That’s why they call the CFDA Awards the “Oscars of American fashion”.
The Latin American Fashion Awards, which also launched last year, offer a two-year development plan that includes showcasing at the Italian tradeshow White Milano in June and at the Camera Nazionale della Moda’s hub during Milan Fashion Week in September, as well as deals to get the labels into retailers.
It’s little wonder that a circuit is emerging for designers to travel. American designer Willy Chavarria has been racking them up, winning a Cooper Hewitt in 2022 and both a CFDA Menswear award and “Designer of the Year” at the Latin American Fashion Awards in 2023.
By focusing on emerging talent, a prize or fund avoids one of the embarrassing problems of so many fashion awards for achievement, which is that the same people keep winning them, over and over. Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen won the CFDA award for accessory design and womenswear five times in the 10 years between 2014 and 2023. Everyone loves Khaite, whose designer Catherine Holstein took CFDA Womenswear Designer of the Year the last two years running. Marc Jacobs has won nine CFDA awards, alongside 20 nominations. One imagines that Dior’s Maria Grazia Chiuri, who recently took home a Neiman Marcus award, has run out of shelf space for her French Légion d’honneur, CFDA, (British) Fashion, and other awards. I read that Caitlin Clark got tired of all the travel required to collect her basketball awards this year. Perhaps designers like Chiuri can relate.
Despite these designers’ prodigious talent, all their winning suggests that either the pool is too small, or awards focus too much on the headliners whose light will shine so brightly onto those who have bestowed them.
They thereby fail to recognise the myriad of behind-the-scenes talent that makes a label tick, though it may not attract celebrities to dole out statues. I’d be there for a Best Patternmaking Award, or how about a prize for Supply Chain Management, the importance of which we all learnt to respect in 2020? Even the Oscars recognise non-glam talents like film editing, sound mixing, cinematography and even engineering effects.
And where is hair and makeup? Someone should hand Pat McGrath an accolade for her ceramic doll beauty concept for Maison Margiela’s spring 2024 couture show.
Awards that focus on emerging talent, meanwhile, are inherently philanthropic, as the light is shining from the prize-givers onto the wildly hopeful, ambitious nobodies who win. But that comes with its own set of problems: lists of past winners can read like a where-are-they-now compilation because talent can’t overcome a lack of resources, business savvy, or luck. Thomas Tait, winner of the first LVMH Prize in 2014, has reportedly been freelancing since shuttering his eponymous label in 2016.
Winning the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund in 2009 and the Woolmark Prize in 2012 wasn’t enough to keep Sophie Theallet, a former assistant to Azzedine Alaïa, in business. She closed her namesake brand in 2016 and relocated with her husband Steve Francoeur to Montreal, where they launched Room 502 and applied the lessons they’d learnt from wholesaling to sell her limited-edition designs through their website. Francoeur calls Room 502 “a totally different animal, but so very satisfying to have a direct relationship with the customer”.
It’s not the job of an awards scheme or prize fund to fix all of the challenges facing young designers today, but it can make the process of applying and awarding feel like a dog and pony show. I was sceptical about the Fashion Trust Awards until I spoke with founder Tania Fares, a well-connected former fashion designer and Lebanese philanthropist who made it clear this is a charitable effort that she hopes to spread around the world.
“Bottom line, I’m trying to help as many as I can,” Fares says.
There are actually three Fashion Trusts: London, the Middle East and Los Angeles. The second annual LA awards this week could not be more Californian, sponsored by Google (the London awards are in partnership with the British Fashion Council, and in Qatar are done with the support of Her Royal Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser).
Fares says the US Trust received 600 applications this year, of which 400 were essentially qualified, proving, she says, the need.
It’s been a tough year for fashion award sponsors. Fares was forced to find a replacement for her UK retail sponsor, Matches, after its sudden shuttering this year. Harrods, she says, stepped in. Then ailing Farfetch, which had agreed to buy the US winners of the ready-to-wear and jewellery design winners last year, suddenly backed out a few months ago, Fares adds. She is currently looking for a retailer to replace Farfetch. For the moment, it isn’t clear where the winners’ collections will be sold, if at all.
One of last year’s winners, 32-year-old Papa Oppong Bediako, has just seen his Papa Oppong line go up on Farfetch — his first wholesale account. The New York-based Ghanaian designer’s graduate FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology) collection, built with locally crafted fabrics, wound up in the Brooklyn Museum. “I think it was successful because it was authentic,” he says. It’s very slow fashion — and very expensive. One dress is priced at $5,535. “I want African fashion to have a seat at the table,” Bediako says.
The awards circuit can signify growth markers as well as sustain brands for a time. To keep going, Bediako is eyeing the applications for a CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund Award and perhaps, one day, an LVMH Prize, when he feels “mature enough”.
In Los Angeles, Fashion Trust contestants will compete for awards totalling $500,000. They will present their collections to the trust’s cacophonous collection of stylists, actors and designers including Tan France, Karla Welch, Mike Amiri and Nina García. That’s a brilliant opportunity for the designers, Fashion Trust board member Brown says: “If you want to dress Sarah Paulson, go suck up to Karla Welch!”
Then, judges will retire to a room to hash it out in what Brown calls “a spirited debate”. Two hours later, they’ll vote. The awards ceremony will take place at a private Beverly Hills mansion, and when everyone wakes up the next day, the application period for the Woolmark awards will have just opened, this year, with the stakes at AU $300,000.
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