London Fashion Week | Missing shoppers, bad bears, and good frocks

LONDON, United Kingdom — Last night, at a cocktail party to celebrate the opening of the Azzaro pop-up store on London's Mount Street, I bumped into Robert Bensoussan, the highly-regarded former CEO of Jimmy Choo.

The place was rammed with guests. Economic armageddon was nowhere in sight. But, more often than not, came up talk of the economy. Bensoussan told me he had been in New York visiting stores and had never seen so many empty stores. Shop after shop, he said, was quiet. Dolce & Gabbana, Chanel, Dior. Only Gucci and Jimmy Choo, he said with a wink, had one shopper each. He thought it might be the worst market he had ever seen.

But, do the numbers back Bensoussan up?

According to innovative financial blog Dshort.com, he's right. The current bear market (typically defined as a 20 percent decline from a recent peak in a major stock index), has seen American stock indices drop by just over 50 percent, making this the second worst bear market on record. Market indicators using credit card transaction data in the United States say that the market for luxury goods, broadly speaking, is down about 30 percent from last year.

To put things into perspective, our current market crash is only just marginally worse than the third and fourth worst bear markets, those of the Oil Crisis from 1973-74 and the Tech Crash of 2000-2002. However, in these other contractions, the market bottoms were hit only after about twenty and thirty months, respectively. We are only into month 17 of this downturn. Stocks have only dropped by this much this fast once before, at the start of the Great Depression where in the 17th month the market was just under sixty percent down from its peak.

Nonetheless, I'd like to end on a positive note on a bit of a Fashion Week diversion. On Monday, I witnessed possibly the strongest day of London fashion that I have ever seen. It's a rare treat, resulting from this season's compressed schedule, to have so many of the city's top talents showing on the same day: Erdem, Marios Schwab, Roksanda Ilincic, Louise Goldin and Giles.

But it wasn't only on Monday. Designer after designer at this London Fashion Week sent out collections that showed they had stepped up their game, with polished collections of true vision and distinctiveness. Sarah Mower of Style.com called Erdem the "Christian Lacroix of London" and Suzy Menkes said Christopher Kane's collection "confirmed his wunderkind status."

It feels like London now has a genuine school of designers, who have each found their own aesthetic paths to allow their visions to come to life. What's more, it's a welcome escape from the economic reality.

Imran Amed is Editor of The Business of Fashion.