Oh wait — is that a typo? Doesn’t Cannes already have a fashion festival, albeit one called “Film Festival,” but which involves so many red carpets, daywear-on-the-Croisette photo calls and style sponsorships that it provides glossy mags with enough “Get the Look” fodder to fill entire issues?
Apparently not.
A group of entrepreneurs have announced that, as of next May, there actually will be a Cannes Fashion Festival, which will run from May 20 to 22, during the film festival, and will be held in the Hôtel Majestic Barrière, in the center of all the action.
It is being sponsored by Totalprestige, a British-based company that describes itself as “a private and closed circle of world executives at senior level, celebrities and HNWI,” or high net worth individuals, and produces a magazine and online networking site.
Last year, Totalprestige chartered a megayacht during the Monaco Grand Prix for its car-loving audience. I guess this is a logical next step.
Indeed, you can see the thinking pretty clearly here: Given the huge fashion interest in the concentration of celebrities that takes place in Cannes during the festival, why not leverage that explicitly? The plan is to create “an array of glittering runway shows and glamorous events to be attended by international designers, journalists, industry insiders and fashion forward consumers,” according to the announcement.
Sounds exciting! Why has no one thought of it before?
After all, there is a captive audience, declared fashion interest and international attention all already in place. It will give smaller brands, who may not have the celeb-attracting muscle (and money) of their larger counterparts, to get in on the action.
And yet officially the fashion festival has nothing whatsoever to do with the film festival, and I can’t help but wonder if maybe the fashion organizers have missed the point. (Note: We can’t use an acronym here for risk of confusion, as both festivals have exactly the same initials. Coincidence? I doubt it.)
Because what makes Cannes exciting from a fashion point of view is the constantly changing visual of enhanced “real people” (i.e. movie stars) modeling clothes during their “real life” — a.k.a. screenings. It’s the absence of the runway that makes it powerful, even if we all know it’s actually there in a virtual sense.
I mean, movie-making is all about fantasy, and the attraction of Cannes (and Venice, and Sundance, for that matter), from a style point of view anyway, is in part the fantasy that we are NOT seeing a catwalk. Do we really want that bubble popped?
You tell me.