California Apparel News

For the first time in five seasons, San Francisco Fashion Week won’t be taking place this year.

The show’s organizers, who launched the event in August 2004, said financial problems were forcing them to step back and reconsider the structure of the show.

“Although SFFW has continued to grow in popularity, the costs associated with the multiple-day event have also grown exponentially, both in terms of production and for the participating designers. As a result, San Francisco Fashion Week LLC has made the tough decision to postpone the event until it can become more financially stable and also affordable for the area’s best design talent,” the organizers said in a statement.

Producing a three-day runway show every August grew costlier after the event moved to a new location two years ago. Initially, San Francisco Fashion Week was held inside the 1,000-seat Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, an architectural gem in the city’s Marina District. But it wasn’t the ideal place to host a runway show.

In 2006, the show moved to the Galleria at the San Francisco Design Center, located in the trendier South of Market (SoMa) section of San Francisco. The Galleria’s four-story atrium, surrounded by walkways that overlooked the runway, was a better fit for a fashion show. However, it was much more expensive than the Palace of Fine Arts, a domed structure built for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition.

“We’ve decided to take a break this year and look at other ways to resolve the financial issues on this,” said Donna Berry, a spokesperson for San Francisco Fashion Week.

The fashion event was started by Erika Gessin of Mystery Girl Productions, which has since changed its name to San Francisco Fashion Week LLC. Many were hoping that the three-day annual event would bring more exposure to the Bay Area’s design scene, which has never gotten the same media attention as Los Angeles with its twice-a-year Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week at Smashbox Studios.

“I’m very sad about it not taking place because it would have been something important for San Francisco,” said well-known San Francisco designer Lily Samii, whose couture gowns graced San Francisco Fashion Week runways when the event launched in 2004. “In Los Angeles, they have the support of IMG [which produces Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week at Smashbox Studios]. Unless you have the support from a larger company, where are you going to get the money to support a fashion week?”

Samii, who also took part in San Francisco Fashion Week in 2006, opted out of participating last year, although she did have a display of her collection at the Galleria. Now she is doing her own fashion shows in high-end local hotels, where as many as 700 people have shown up to see her elegant gowns, which sell from $3,800 to $20,000. Her pieces are often seen at opening-night events for the San Francisco Opera and San Francisco Ballet.

Designer Kaushie Adiseshan, whose Pink Elf label is created for a woman looking for simple elegance, participated in the last three San Francisco Fashion Weeks. But she found the return on her money wasn’t as great as the Lakme Fashion Week in Mumbai, India, where she has been debuting her collection for the past two years. “It was great participating and supporting the local scene, but from a commercial point of view, I didn’t leverage much out of it,” said the designer, who was born in India. “Lakme Fashion Week is on a different level. It is run by IMG. Lakme Fashion Week is much bigger. A lot of press was generated and business.”

Adiseshan noted that many of San Francisco’s big-name designers—such as Samii, Colleen Quen and Cari Borja—didn’t take part in San Francisco Fashion Week last year. “I thought San Francisco Fashion Week should be getting better and scaling up, and I didn’t see much of that happening.”

Cari Borja said she spent as much as $10,000 to participate in San Francisco Fashion Week two years ago. But she barely made her money back. “They never figured out how to get the buyers there,” said Borja, who runs her own retail store in Berkeley, Calif., which also has a design studio and production area in the back for her one-of-a-kind designs and ready-to-wear collection. She said she only sold four jackets after her try at San Francisco Fashion Week. Now she is being more particular about what fashion events she engages in. Instead, she is showing her collection on 12 mannequins in her store, which has helped sales.

For designer Mary-Elizabeth Primavera, who showed her Genevieve Primavera collection for two San Francisco Fashion Week seasons, the event generated some media attention but not many sales. She recently closed her company and moved from San Jose, Calif., to Seattle. “It is definitely an opportunity to get your name out there,” Primavera said. “Many media contacted me, like the California Apparel News and WWD. It was definitely an excellent PR event, especially for someone in San Francisco.”

Gen Art San Francisco, which traditionally has timed its Fresh Faces in Fashion show to precede San Francisco Fashion Week, will now hold its annual runway show in mid-October, following Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week at Smashbox Studios, scheduled for Oct. 12–16 in Los Angeles.

“We are hoping to hold it at the Concourse in SoMa,” said Charm Bitanga, Gen Art’s regional event manager.

The show highlights the collections of eight emerging designers who have sold their lines for at least one season and have launched within the last five years.

Designer Lily Samii believes fashion week could be saved if a large commercial concern came in and threw its financial support behind the annual event. “I would love to see San Francisco get back up on its feet and have a nice company back us up,” she said.

However, IMG has no immediate plans to come to San Francisco and launch a fashion week.

“San Francisco is a very fashionable, fashion savvy city, and we are saddened to hear that the fashion week there is hitting some tough times. ... We are all too aware of the challenges that are faced in producing these events. While we have no immediate plans to produce an event there, we successfully produced an event called FashionWeekLive in the city a little over a year ago and are always willing to meet with local fashion industry and civic leaders anywhere in the country about the services and resources IMG Fashion has to offer,” said Fern Mallis, senior vice president of IMG Fashion.