The Lure Of The Little Label

By Kate Betts

Ask any fashionista to name her favorite brand, and chances are you never heard of it before. Does Bella Dahl ring a bell? Or Ballroom? The Reeds or the Wrights? You may have a closet crammed with Gucci stilettos and Prada backpacks, and you may even know how to pronounce Nicholas Ghesquiere's last name, but these days if you really want to hug the trends, you need to have some hot little label that nobody's heard of. In the new millennium, it's the small, unknown fashion brands that are wielding power and influence over both the consumer and the bigger global brands.

This season the buzz is all about a new line of jeans called Habitual, the brainchild of Nicole Garrett, a former fashion editor, and her fiance Michael Colovos. Habitual jeans' subtle washes and tailored details such as welt pockets and bound buttonholes have become the overnight favorites of models like Gisele Bundchen and Carolyn Murphy. The jeans are so hot that Barney's and Fred Segal can't keep them on the shelf, and they are rumored to have Levi's creative team in a tizzy. Of course, Levi's is a 130-year-old multibillion-dollar global brand, and Habitual is a shoestring outfit based in a studio in New York City's Hell's Kitchen. "A lot of innovation credit is being given to the small brands," says Robert Hanson, Levi's brand president. "We compete with them collectively. But we're seeing these brands take Levi's vintage styles and modernize them." Nevertheless, Levi's has taken some lumps from tiny jeans operations like Earl. And in a depressed retail market, the smaller fashion brands and boutiques are posting gains as bigger brands languish on shelves.

Call it the revenge of fashion's little guys.

"The '90s were about uniform dressing, and the decisions the consumer was making were very much brand oriented," says Jaqui Lividini, senior vice president for fashion at Saks Fifth Avenue. "When we turned the millennium, the whole fashion vocabulary changed so radically. Consumers wanted to look different; it became all about individuality. Now she wants to be the first one on the block to discover a new label."

Perhaps the small-brand upsurge reflects a backlash against the homogeny of the Gap-Starbucks culture. Or maybe big brands are the victim of their own excess, their flamboyantly advertised labels signifying not a sense of style so much as a slavishness to trends. Hip consumers seem to have caught a new scent and are turning to smaller boutiques like Scoop in New York City and Colette in Paris.

When Christiane Celle, the French owner of a boutique called Calypso on St. Bart's in the French West Indies, migrated north to New York's Nolita neighborhood in 1994, her bright and breezy peasant blouses ushered in a casual new uniform for skinny models, stylists, socialites and starlets. Paired with low-slung jeans and crocheted hip belts, the bohemian look seemed to symbolize liberation from the tyranny of all Gucci or Prada all the time. Soon designers like Tom Ford caught the bohemian bug, and a striking facsimile of the Calypso peasant blouse turned up on Vogue's September 2001 cover with a label that read Yves Saint Laurent.

It didn't hurt that lines like Calypso's were selling for a lot less than designer labels. "Because of the weak economy, people don't want to spend a lot on trend items now," says Nicole Garrett of Habitual. "They want something they can wear for more than one season." Brands like Three Dots and Juicy Couture allowed consumers to assert their individuality discreetly with affordable yet designed products such as jeans and T shirts.

The small brands also have more elastic production and manufacturing schedules that allow stores more flexibility when ordering and displaying merchandise. Denim brands like Habitual and Paper, Denim & Cloth can turn around a new product in a matter of weeks. And an up-and-comer from London like Alice Temperley will happily put together a little table display on the ground floor of Bendel's on any given Saturday.

"There's an emotional connection to spending when times are uncertain, and these smaller brands have an emotional reach to the customer," says Ed Burstell, vice president of Bendel's, a store that in the past five years has committed itself to little labels. "Consumers want something distinctive, but they are also very loyal to these small designers. They want to grow up with them."

Unknown brands are something of a paradox because the oil in the engine of fashion is the brand. How can fashions become fashion when people don't know what it is that they should be lusting after? And where does that leave the big brands and their multimillion-dollar ad campaigns, boutiques and celebrity designers? Many have responded by acquiring the smaller brands, a trick they learned from the beauty business, in which the conglomerate Estee Lauder, for example, bought out M.A.C. and Bobbi Brown in the mid-'90s. Between December 2000 and July 2001, the Gucci Group snapped up Stella McCartney, Balenciaga and Alexander McQueen. Then there are individual specialty lines: Gucci has issued a series of made-to-measure handbags, and Bottega Veneta designer Thomas Maier offers custom-order services.

Department stores are also paying more attention to tiny brands. For fall, Saks is planning to create a special corner in its flagship store devoted to one-of-a-kind designer items--a kind of launchpad, perhaps, for the next Habitual.

Kate Betts is the former editor of Harper's Bazaar