Fashion and Beauty
“With fashion, every six months you do things again. With other luxury goods, you create something and it’s there for 10 years,” he says.
Retailers enthuse about Lam’s talent.
“His first collection was so well edited. Everything had a place and was worthy of the runway. That doesn’t always happen with young designers,” says Jennifer Wheeler, vice president of designer apparel for Nordstrom. “He has a huge presence in London, the highest of all the young designers, and you wouldn’t necessarily think that he’d be the one with the highest profile. I think their business plan is incredibly smart, that’s one reason why they’re doing so well, I think. But also because of the quality of the collection.”
Without diminishing Wheeler’s praise, there’s a small error in her assessment. The collection she recalls as his first, that perfectly edited runway collection, was actually his second. The first collection wasn’t shown on the catwalk at all but in a showroom. And Lam has made no secret about its sad fate: It didn’t sell. At all. Nothing.
He debuted the line about a month before the United States invaded Iraq. The clothes were black and heavy. The collection was as wrong for the moment as anything could be.
“It was a disaster,” says Schlottmann, the company’s chief executive.
“It was the nadir,” Lam agrees. “People were not interested in what I was doing. It was dark and sober and stores were not interested in dealing with a dark collection from a new designer.”
Lam and Schlottmann didn’t even recoup the cost of producing the samples, which now sit in storage. Foolhardy or fearless, they tried again.
On their second attempt, they worked on stirring up buzz. And they got lucky.
Bloomingdale’s fashion director, Stephanie Solomon, “happened to be in our building. She said, ‘I recognized the name and thought I’d come in.’ She saw a few pieces. They weren’t dark and somber. It was like something you read about. She was so nice and friendly,” Lam says. “You work so long in the dark — ”
“To get that attention,” Schlottmann says.
Lam has been the beneficiary of enthusiastic support within a fashion industry that believes in him. There are no cynical murmurings that he is more bluster than substance. No gossipy tales of immaturity, of his dancing on tables into the wee hours.
But back to the big question. What makes your clothes special? The query is akin to asking a political candidate: Why should voters pick you?
Lam looks toward the ceiling; he sighs and starts again. “When I design,” he says, “I want to create clothes with a certain subtlety. It’s poetic. It’s sexy.”
He knows he still hasn’t quite nailed it. “People want more concrete terms,” he says, “and I struggle with that.”
Eventually, Lam will need to find an answer. Certainly before he opens that first store. And based on his business plan, he’ll need an answer that makes sense in as many languages as possible.
