House of Target?

While window-shopping at Downtown Crossing, Colin L. Shepherd ’06 decided to check out the latest Lagerfeld fashions. But he didn’t walk into Bergdorf Goodman or the nearest boutique—he just strolled into H&M.

The couture-crazy are leaving the runways for retail stores and high-volume sales. For the latest Mizrahi, Lagerfeld, Kors and De La Renta, turn to your nearest suburban shopping mall, where Target, Lord and Taylor’s, Macy’s and Bloomingdales should have you covered.

Fancy-pants fashionistas going populist may help Shepherd and his fellow starving students save a few bucks, but it’s not yet clear what’s in it for the designers. Creating an affordable clothing line is a difficult task; a designer must appeal to the masses while maintaining the reputation he has cultivated on the catwalk.

When Roy Frowick Halston signed a deal with J.C. Penney in 1982, the once-worshipped designer’s business crumbled as J.C. Penney sales disappointed. Wary of the bad rep, Goodman and Giorgio quickly dropped Halston’s designer line. When Pierre Cardin licensed his name to a line of ready-to-wear clothes, he diluted his brand and his value plummeted. And few know that Isaac Mizrahi only launched his Target line after he had to close his own couture line after a few bad seasons, as reported by The Advocate’s Sept. 2003 issue.

So when Karl Lagerfeld, the prosperous designer of Chanel, Fendi and his own Lagerfeld Gallery fame, decided to create a line for H&M, he was certainly rolling the dice—which may explain why he played it safe with the clothes. Lagerfeld has always been lauded for his creativity on the runway, but his pieces for H&M took no risks.

“I was a little disappointed in Karl,” Shepherd says. “I figured he’d bring a bit more wit, and less homogeneity, to the world of consumer fashion.”

The Lagerfeld line is mostly black—a color that makes up 60 percent of H&M sales, according to the Sept. 2004 issue of Harper’s Bazaar—including standard black pants, a $100 black silk slip dress (the most expensive item) and a t-shirt with the designer’s face screened on the front.

Marissa C. Carrio ’06 was not wooed by the self-promotion. She left H&M without purchasing a single Lagerfeld item, even though she tried on many. “The pants were cut to accent long and narrow figures, but the one thing that most women have to feel good about their bodies is curves,” she says. “These pants were not cut to flatter that.”

While the transition from runway to rack is risky, the right designer can make it work. As reported by MSNBC and various news sources, Mizrahi personally made over women at the 2003 Iowa State Fair with his designs and has since featured some of his Target clothes on the runway. Mizrahi shows the world that chic can be cheap even as he unveils a made-to-order line for Bergdorf Goodman.