Cotton On Creates A Custom Gown In A Month
Reasons it can be great to work in fashion: lots of friends, copious gossip, and an employer that will make you a custom couture gown at a moment’s notice.
Well, perhaps the last one isn’t all that common – but Australian retailer Cotton On pulled out all the stops for their general manager Pippa Grange, when she was invited to the Brownlow Awards this year.
Cotton On isn’t a couture company by any stretch. They focus on the practical and relaxed: look for dresses in a Cotton On shop and you’ll come up with easy, breezy casuals in funky prints. Very cute, but not so red carpet appropriate.
But Cotton On also clearly like a challenge, and with Australian fashion news site Ragtrader documenting the process, they went to work to make Grange the belle of the ball.
Dress construction, it turns out, is actually a fairly tricky business, even for a relatively restrained, simple number like Grange’s. The process involved collaboration with two of Cotton On’s designers, sorting through swathes of catwalk pictures, and then narrowing down the design to a top two – and that’s before cutting, fitting, selecting fabric, fiddling with length and sorting out accessories.
All in all, the whole process – from beginning to end – took a month.
“I feel very lucky to be wearing the custom gown,” Grange told Ragtrader. “We’re excited for the opportunity to have Cotton On, an Australian fast-fashion retailer, featured at a red carpet event.”
But is it so surprising? The lines between fast fashion and high fashion are increasingly blurring. The biggest fast-fashion names, from H&M to Gap to Zara, have started the biggest trend of the decade: high-end designer collaborations, so that you can get expensive design and very high quality construction for less money.
For example, Jil Sander collaborated with Japanese high street retailer UNIQLO on a line of shirts that sold out globally, and are now going to be reproduced for the Australian market – because they’re guaranteed to fly off the shelves. The +J collection is just one of a horde of other high-end collaborations, from Alexander Wang for H&M to Liberty for Nike, that aim to give that Fashion Week edge to lower priced brands.
And brands who’d previously refuse to blink at $10,000 price tags for a single item are increasingly producing lower-priced ranges – Victoria Beckham’s VVB, for example, which is still hefty but costs a month’s rent as opposed to a year’s.
Partially it’s because of the internet. We have more access to images of fashion than ever before – Style.com live streams many shows from Fashion Weeks around the globe, and images from every show and front row are available immediately. With that access comes desire to be part of the scene, even if an actual Oscar De La Renta gown is far out of reach.
So Cotton On, by dipping its toes into more formal fashion, is taking part in a bigger trend. We want couture-level beauty on a shopping-mall budget – but will luxury brands be able to maintain their exclusivity if they ?
So far some, like Chanel and Dior, have resisted any collaborations or lower-priced lines – but we look forward to seeing if other casually-focussed Aussie brands follow Cotton On’s lead and dip their toes into couture gown-making. Who would you like to see try to make a gown?
Image: Cotton On’s couture gown.
