California Apparel News

After helping to launch London Fashion Week in the 1980s and nurturing the careers of several well-known designers, British fashion-industry icon Mikel Rosen is setting his sights on Los Angeles for his next fashion projects, which could include his own version of a Los Angeles–style fashion week.

In the last two years, Rosen, who helped mentor John Galliano, Stella McCartney and the late Alexander McQueen, has seen a bubbling up of fashion importance in the city where fashion designers have always been abundant but often not recognized beyond the world of casual creations.

Finally, Los Angeles is being recognized as one of the top spots in the world for culture, art, technology, design and innovation. “There is something going on here, and I want to pick up on it,” said Rosen, who graduated from the St. Martins School of Art in London with a degree in fashion and textile design.

The city’s fashion importance recently got a boost when the international retail style haven Dover Street Market opened in the Arts District in downtown Los Angeles. Started by Comme des Garçons designer Rei Kawakubo and her husband, Adrian Joffe, this is the international store’s first West Coast outpost, and news of its arrival ricocheted through the fashion world. Stories about its opening appeared in national magazines including GQ, Architectural Digest and Flaunt as well as The New York Times. Its other locations are in London, New York, Tokyo, Singapore and Beijing.

“The fact that Dover Street Market has chosen here as a destination says something,” said the bespectacled Rosen, who eight years ago moved from London to San Francisco. He has been keeping his eye on Los Angeles, where he has set up an office.

He has seen Tom Ford doing his women’s collection from Los Angeles and Hedi Slimane, the artistic director for Celine and formerly the creative director of Saint Laurent, establishing a base in Los Angeles. Designer Jeremy Scott opted to show the Moschino men’s and women’s collection he designs in Los Angeles during the past three seasons.

By contrast, Rosen maintains San Francisco, where he worked with the soon-to-close Art Institute of California—San Francisco, has gotten too tech oriented and fashion and creativity have taken a back seat to Silicon Valley.

But Los Angeles is a different story. Rosen was in Los Angeles recently to visit two venues that could be spots for some kind of fashion event or fashion week showcasing emerging designers or designers that need help advancing to the next level. “In the 1980s, a lot of the companies I was behind or instigated had an explosion of success, but they wouldn’t keep it going,” he said. “Now, if something is set right from day one, it can go very quickly.”

He also was meeting with Katherine Ross at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2012, Ross launched the art-meets-fashion Wear LACMA program, which is an art and fashion project featuring unique pieces created by L.A. designers and inspired by the museum’s exhibitions and permanent collection. She is married to LACMA Director Michael Govan.

The Academy of Fashion Arts and Sciences, a digital awards ceremony started two years ago, contacted Rosen about four months ago, he said, to talk about a potential project.

But his main goal is to assess the Los Angeles fashion scene and identify those emerging designers he feels have potential but not a lot of money or know-how in running a business. “My interest at the moment is to find more of those people who are doing something critical in the way of thinking and can emerge into what I feel is a good designer,” he said.

Emerging designers were the people who made up the “Antwerp Six,” a group of young designers, including Dries Van Noten, who had studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Belgium and arrived by bus in the 1980s to show at London Fashion Week. “I was on the committee of the London Fashion Week Council to interview people who wanted to come from outside of England to show,” Rosen recalled. “Six young people came in with their clothes and said they wanted to be in the exhibition and show together. Each had a different collection, but they had a synergy.”

He believes that same kind of synergy is in Los Angeles, where emerging designers as well as other creatives including artists or ceramists could band together and have a show or some sort of event. “The goal would be to promote new brands that deserve to be promoted,” he said. “It doesn’t take a lot of people. About 10 to 15 to 20 good brands would help get this started.”

Los Angeles does have its share of fashion-week events already, but it has been more scattered ever since New York events producer IMG stopped organizing a cohesive Los Angeles Fashion Week in coordination with Smashbox Studios in Culver City. Since that event ceased operations in 2008 after 10 seasons, three other organizers have stepped in to present their own fashion-week events: LA Fashion Week, Art Hearts Fashion and Style Fashion Week.

Rosen is considering other fashion-week formats besides runway shows that start at an appointed time. “The way things operate in fashion weeks has not changed since I started London Fashion Week in 1982,” he explained. “If you have a good product and a good concept, why does it have to start at 7 at night and finish at 7:45?”

He won’t say exactly how he would organize a future event, but it would be more like performance art and would be continuous. “Changing the procedure and the visual formatting of it is important,” he explained.

He also believes there needs to be some central organization in Los Angeles to help emerging designers, much like there is a British Fashion Council in London and the Council of Fashion Designers of America in New York with its scholarship program established in 1996, which gives two scholarships a year worth $25,000 each to undergraduate talent. “Who is doing that in L.A.?” he asked.

While there is no central organization helping young designers, the Textile Association of Los Angeles with the California Fashion Foundation award annual scholarships to local design students, and the local design schools have scholarship programs in place.