Bloomberg, von Furstenberg meet over industry efforts
Fashion week is gearing up and so are Diane von Furstenberg, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D., N.Y.). The three sat down in the center of the Garment Center Monday to examine the fashion community’s influence on the Big Apple and consider new efforts to nurture emerging talents, reported WWD.
The industry is a huge cash cow for the city. The two annual runway shows are predicted to bring in a record-breaking $865 million this year, and the 500 odd catwalk shows draw 232,000 visitors yearly. City officials hope New York’s retail sales, the highest across the country, will rise 17 percent by 2025.
Out of the meeting, five key strategies emerged to grow the industry through the Fashion NYC 2020 program.
• Create a no-cost mini M.B.A.-style program for 35 students in collaboration with the Fashion Institute of Technology.
• Head a hunt for the city’s top innovative retailer to generate free temporary retail space, marketing and public relations.
• Produce a fund to grant loans to up-and-coming designers as long as they source their materials from local manufacturers.
• Set up a fellowship program for fashion management and assist interns and college students through a partnership with Parsons The New School for Design.
• Establish a career placement service for college students.
New York City’s Economic Development Corporation president Seth Pinsky, Andrew Rosen from Theory, Parsons’ Joel Towers and Barbara Randall of the Fashion Center Business Improvement District also attended the gathering.
The fashion industry provides 173,000 jobs in New York City, comprising 5.7 percent of the city’s total employment, and pulls in almost $2 billion in taxes each year. Across the United States, the industry represents a $350-billion business. Maloney and Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D., N.Y.) co-created the fashion meeting to promote copyright protection for designers and also to collaborate with Bloomberg and the city council to protect New York’s Garment Center.
Prabal Gurung, Maxwell Osborne, Bibhu Mohapatra, Yuvi Alpert and Alice Ritter also were in attendance as inaugural members.
Remarking on how about half of the attendees were born outside of the city, Bloomberg again called for immigration reform to facilitate immigrants’ ability to found businesses, noting how the dramatically low pricing of production abroad as harmed domestic manufacturing.
“The bottom line is America can compete, but we need to work harder and look at how we design things to make them more effective and of better quality,” Bloomberg said to WWD. “If all that we do is to try to blast what everyone else is doing, it’s a spiraling down of our efforts.”
In a Q&A, Bloomberg declared that New York City’s “intellectual capital” should be the focus rather than domestic production, which he believes cannot match the prices of internationally manufactured goods, particularly “if you’re going to make a million white T-shirts.”
CFDA president von Furstenberg maintained that rising production costs in China have caused some designers to transfer their production back to the city. “Things are changing. It’s not all one way,” she asserted.
“China is the marketplace of the future. That’s where America is going to sell its goods to,” the mayor noted.
Pinksy reported that 20 percent of New York City jobs are in wholesale and one in 10 is in manufacturing. Questioned concerning the possibility of a “Made in New York” label for fashion items, the mayor cited the existing Made in New York label for entertainment and television. While city officials are considering creating a label, nothing has been set in stone, Pinksy said.
“For someone like me, who makes 95 percent of the collection in New York, it’s great to see this initiative and effort,” Gurung said. “It gives me hope that perhaps there will be some benefits for the Made in New York label to get down the line — such as a tax cut or something that will help us be more competitive pricewise with goods made in Europe and Asia.”
Bloomberg maintained that ensuring people want to work in New York is critical, asserting that corporate taxes are far too high for U.S. manufacturers to be competitive with their international peers. The mayor reiterated that all tax cuts from the Bush administration should be abolished in order to close the budget deficit.
Von Furstenberg, questioned about the CFDA’s move from the Garment Center to downtown, declared, “We looked very hard to find what we needed. We at the CFDA, we represent downtown. We represent midtown. We are New York. We are fashion. We promote staying here. We promote manufacturing here. Clearly, we are doing our jobs. I should be a politician.”
As a number of the more than 800 New York-based fashion firms are in scattered locations around the city, rezoning would be not just tricky but also controversial. The findings of the second component of the CFDA-backed Design for Public Space’s Made in Midtown survey will soon be available, which should generate new directions.
“Anyone who says they know what’s going on with the redistricting is lying,” Maloney declared.
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