He just sat down and wrote it. Despite the recent good sales, Sternberg has still had to scale back. He’d been laying down this groundwork since Band of Outsiders imploded. In 2008, Sternberg used to sneak into Jacobs’s shows at the Lexington Avenue Armory, as everyone did then. But this was still a promotion: for a sweatsuit, the brand’s top seller, a “hero item” in industry speak. “I don’t think you can blame one person, or one part of the industry,” Wintour said. If you had a men’s line, maybe it was actually six, and if you were Dior or Givenchy, you were also doing couture. One investor suggested that maybe Sternberg should turn Entireworld into a TV show that would advertise the clothes. As fashion shows had grown into huge marketing events because I’m not coming out of a PowerPoint deck.” The same week that the sweatsuits were selling out, he laid off three of his nine employees and cut styles he planned to add in the fall. “But for a small business this is enough to take all of us out” — he snapped his fingers — “in one shot.” Fashion is really different. “But we’re design-driven. In addition to a presented collection, buyers requested slightly altered looks — lengthen a hem here, add a sleeve there, take the print from that dress and make it into pants — that could then be exclusive to their customers. “But ordering online, in a pair of grubby sweats, is not my idea of living life.” This is still going on. I think brands that are in it now, it’s much harder to make that change.” Even before the pandemic, the whole fashion industry Whatever tensions there may be, everyone I spoke to praised Sternberg’s reinvention, in the way that fashion people praise things, which is to say with a tiny bit of shade. “It’s a slog,” Sternberg said. He loves them, he really does, but the excess of it weighs on him — all those ideas that never became anything, all those materials, all that waste. It was also Sternberg’s rejection of the traditional fashion system, the one that once vaulted him to success. Fashion is, by definition, unpredictable. Sternberg wouldn’t remember this, but we met briefly a long time ago, when I covered his spring show in September 2008, mere weeks before the financial crash. Once normal people could view collections online — which, confusingly, they couldn’t buy until six months later — everything began to accelerate. No.” “I was truly saddened by the number,” Wintour said, adding: “I think it really is a time where we need to learn from what’s happened, almost about how fragile and on the edge we were all living. But in its second year, Sternberg says its revenue is already eight times that of Band of Outsiders by the same point, and that’s while selling much more product ($15 underwear and socks, $32 tees, $88 sweatshirts). To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, ‘This has been a very difficult business to be in for a long time, I think.’‘I was basically making stuff I didn’t like because I thought a buyer wanted it, not even the customer.’‘I was just a kid in a candy store, waiting for an adult to step into the room and rein it all in.’ ‘Certainly the media had something to do with it as everything went so instant through digital and the emphasis on what’s new.’‘There will definitely be something, but nothing resembling fashion week as we knew it,’ Wintour told me.‘Is there a place for a $30 million brand that can self-sustain and be around year after year?’
It was just this vicious cycle.” “Am I sick already? “And it’s season after season,” he said. In some cases, stores asked designers to sell on consignment or to share costs if a certain percentage of the collection didn’t sell at full price.