Fashion Cents

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Just as Los Angeles is a company town — its economy driven, to a large extent, by television production and movie-making — so too is New York, with the fashion, art, and music businesses playing an important role in fueling the city’s economic engine, a new book says.

New York’s creative industries are inextricably linked, as are the people who, say, design a fashion collection, market that collection, and the consumers who pine for or purchase from it, the author of “The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art and Music Drive New York City” (Princeton University Press), Elizabeth Currid, writes. These players are bound by informal networks, whose approval can launch the career of a fledgling designer, or turn a pair of wide-leg jeans into a fashion sensation.

Success in fashion, or any of the creative arts for that matter, is no longer seen in terms of the starving artist who made it. Instead, the golden boys and girls of fashion tend to be charismatic and, often good-looking , designers who went to the right schools and knew the right people.

Take Marc Jacobs, for instance. According to Ms. Currid, his amusing personality and ability to shmooze has made him a favorite of fashion editors. That notion is not to say his designs do not merit the attention, but rather that without the opportunity to socialize in his particular scene, his talent might never have been noticed, the author writes.

Ms. Currid, an assistant professor of urban planning at the University of Southern California, discusses not just the power of such social networks, but also the fusion of fashion and art. One result: hybrid products, such as garments, evidently “inspired by the colors, graphics, and shapes in the art world,” or designed by artists who specialize in media other than fashion, she told The New York Sun. And then there is the now-cemented relationship between music and fashion. Not only does Sean “Diddy” Combs’s or Gwen Stefani’s name on a label give it instant cachet, but it is also as likely that the fans of a particular musical genre will impact next season’s style as well.

But the economic impact of the fashion industry, and its creative marriages with art and music, is underestimated, Ms. Currid said in an interview. “Without it, you’d see a huge absence of revenue, jobs, and taxes to the city,” she explained. “People come to New York City — from Kansas or from parts of Europe — because it is the fashion capital, and they buy products, specifically, because those products are from New York.”


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