Agenda-setting intelligence, analysis and advice for the global fashion community.
PARIS — Designer Lutz Huelle has just signed a long-term licensing agreement with DAL Trading, a family-owned manufacturing company based in Italy’s Marche region, and its promise is a new model for independent designers. No, maybe not new exactly, but at least a renaissance of a golden moment thirty years ago when the likes of Helmut Lang, Hussein Chalayan and Alexander McQueen all launched with licensing deals in Italy.
Huelle’s career is an unwitting paradigm for how all the small miracles of fashion were crushed by the wheels of industry. “Felipe Oliveira Baptista, AF Vandervorst, Anne Valérie Hash, Gaspard Yurkievich, Jeremy Scott, that was my generation,” he muses. “The only person who kind of managed to come back now is Haider Ackermann. Otherwise, from my generation, there’s no one left, and it makes me really sad to be honest.”
The way he tells it, his lost generation sat between icons of independence such as the Antwerp Six and designers like Nicolas Ghesquière and McQueen who were happy to sign on with big houses. That situation has prevailed ever since. Huelle says, “We weren’t really interested in Dior or Balenciaga so we fell by the wayside, and the idea of being independent didn’t appeal so much to those people.” Or to Glenn Martens, Nicolas de Felice, Casey Cadwallader and any number of young design geniuses who didn’t fancy the financial and emotional stress of running their own businesses.
Huelle would most likely be the kind of designer they look at as a salutary experience. He’s always been on the cusp of pop culture — Martin Margiela’s right hand at one point, Wolfgang Tillmans’s male muse at another — and he launched his own business with the new century when the world was full of promise. But he’s since been confronted by every knock that an independent designer can take. “I never started with any kind of capital,” he says. “We had a licence deal in Italy for four years at the beginning, and then it became very complicated. We almost had to close our company.” That experience confirmed him in his conviction that he had to go his own way, but it also exposed him to the endless bitter ironies of self-financing.
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“We have to be able to finance fabrics, production, everything, and from the moment you sell a collection to the moment when clients pay, it takes eighteen months. So whenever we have really good seasons, we get into cash flow problems, because the moment you have to pay for more production, you need more money. And if you take more time to pay, you deliver later, then clients are not happy, and they won’t order for next season.”
In other words, success for an independent designer is a vicious circle. It’s happened to Huelle three times in the last 15 years. “It’s stupid,” he sighs, “because our sell-through has always been really good in the stores. We always had a commercial reality.”
Still, eternal optimist that he is, he’s convinced change is gonna come. Huelle currently sells in 50 stores around the world and when he talks to his retailers, they tell him how tired they are of corporate brands. “Their customers don’t want them anymore. And also, the prices have gone up so much that you really need the thousand richest people as clients to support them. And a lot of stores in maybe small to medium towns don’t necessarily have that clientele. It’s just become too much. So I think there is kind of a movement back to independent designers. Retailers want a different price point, they want collections that might be less merchandised, less marketed, maybe more soulful.”
“There’s a big space between high luxury and what comes underneath,” Huelle adds. “We’ve started to speak about luxury now every time we speak about fashion, but fashion is not all just the luxury products. It’s fashion in the sense that Helmut Lang was a fashion designer, Martin Margiela was a fashion designer, Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester were fashion designers. But they never talked about themselves as high luxury. I think there is a huge gap in the market now.” That notion is heaven to anyone who remembers the joy of shopping in inspiring stores stocked with dozens of inspiring designers. Fashion was an adventure.
“I really feel there is change in the air,” Huelle confirms. “There will be a whole new generation of stores with charismatic owners who know their clients personally and who will sell clothes in a different way. More personal, more intimate…” His deal with DAL Trading provides him with the foundation to build on what he hopes is a new reality. Given his bone-deep reluctance to ever hitch his wagon to another star, his immediate connection to the Speranzas, the family behind DAL, was obviously a new sensation for him. Vibes. Don’t knock ‘em.
They’ll be producing his pre-collection and resort, tentatively called White Label at this point. “It’s the easier part of the collection that will be delivered earlier. What it means for us is that I’ll do the designs, the fabrics, the fittings and they are going to take everything about the production in hand and they will deliver really well. I will continue to design and produce my main collection, the Black Label, in Paris. But for us it really changes everything because I won’t have those cash flow problems anymore.”
Pricewise, Huelle sits in that very appealing range where a pair of pants goes from €300 ($343) to €500, a jacket runs from €700 to €900 and his signature bombers are €850. “And we are adamant about quality,” he insists. But value for money isn’t enough to convey the unique spark of Huelle’s designs. Amidst the bombast of fashion, there are all these quiet voices that actually have something deep and meaningful to say and Lutz Huelle’s is perhaps one of the most inspirational. “I still have the same enthusiasm that I had years ago, which is not necessarily always the case,” he says. “I still feel that I haven’t actually said everything I have to say, and now to have this opportunity to be able to. … It’s incredible.”
