In My View by Eric Musgrave: The show must go on – somewhere or other

I have the odd idea I have written about feelings of déjà vu before in this column but as this is the fourth anniversary of me putting finger to keyboard for TheIndustry.fashion I cannot be expected to remember everything I’ve done over the previous 47 months.

It’s been a time of anniversaries recently. On 28 January it was exactly 45 years since I started my first role in this fashion trade publications lark. My fear is one day I’ll have to get a  proper job but until then I’ll keep on keeping on (as Curtis Mayfield once advised us to do).

My latest bout of “I think I’ve been here before sometime” afflicted me on Sunday, 2 February when I found myself wandering about the halls of the National Exhibition Centre in Solihull on the opening morning of the long-standing Spring Fair event.

My wife (and one-time fashion editor) Jane Eastoe runs a small gift shop near where we live in north Northumberland, so she was racing about a few halls wearing her buyer’s hat, while I took the opportunity to investigate what the fashion offer was offering for autumn-winter 2025.

I was interested primarily in seeing how the Pure womenswear fair looked in this, the first season since current owner Hyve had relocated it from London to the West Midlands. When the show was launched in February 1997 by then-owner EMAP, journos like me were pressed to refer to it always as Pure London to stress its credentials as the womenswear trade fair in the capital.

Now it has become Moda x Pure, merely an adjunct to the Moda show that always operated at a lower price level and style level to Pure. This season’s inaugural event mustered only 53 exhibitors, with just a tiny handful of survivors from Pure’s London heyday.

I was told Hyve has a plan to return it to its former location “at some time” but that surely is unlikely. Pure London had a good run, lasting for more than 25 years, but someone will have to reinvent the concept spectacularly to get a large-scale womenswear exhibition working in London again.

Of course the Hyve-owned Scoop, which was formed in 2011 by fashion agent Karen Radley for exhibitors that did not find Pure exclusive enough, has remained at Olympia West (February 9-11 this season, with around 200 collections on show).

Not far away from Olympia, in Hammersmith, my former colleague and ex-Pure sales supremo Lucy Walsh of The Brand Ambassadors agency has for the fifth season brought together more than a dozen fashion agents in The Fashion Huddle, a sort of collective uber-showroom that runs from 20 January to 21 February, giving independent retailers plenty of time to drop in during the buying season.

And then, far away up the M1, there is the Harrogate Fashion Week, which despite its name runs for only three days. Launched by ex-Moda director Sarah Moody and Wendy Adams in July 2018, its 12th edition coincided (or clashed, depending on your point of view) with Pure x Moda on February 2-4. By all accounts this event goes from strength to strength, reminding oldies like me of the great pull fashion events had in the Yorkshire spa town in the 1980s.

(Fun fact: I first met my future wife Jane at a Harrogate Fashion Fair).

And we must not forget that the AIS buying group held its INDX Woman event at its showroom venue near the NEC on January 29-30.

With all this hectic trade show activity, with dates clashing and three-way regional rivalry between Harrogate, the NEC and London, plus the AIS event, it’s no wonder I am feeling déjà vu-ish. I – and many others – have seen it all before. Fashion might pretend to be all about change, but so much of it stays the same. Always.

Moda X Pure at Spring Fair

Back at the NEC on that recent Sunday, I soon realised that it was inappropriate to compare Moda x Pure to Pure London at its punchiest best. Under the Spring Fair banner, the new incarnation sits alongside a large accessory section and an even larger jewellery area. (Who knew so many people could make a living selling relatively inexpensive jewellery? Not me).

For retailers who have embraced more of a lifestyle approach, at Spring Fair there are acres of stands offering homewares, wellness products, scented candles, gifts, stationery, greetings cards and the like, so there is much to peruse.

The fashion exhibitors I spoke to after the four-day NEC event (February 2-5) reported a worthwhile attendance, seeing the sort of buyers they might not have seen at Pure London or Harrogate. Fashion is truly a many-layered cake and, to mix metaphors, different shows represent different horses for courses.

I can see Moda x Pure developing its own niche, certainly not at the most inspirational or stylish part of the sector but serving a significant number of businesses. I have sympathy for buyers who have to get around several venues, but it should be possible as all these events give them six months’ notice of the dates.

I have even more sympathy for exhibitors who need to be at different venues at the same time to catch different groups of buyers, but things have been like that since I started reporting on the industry in 1980, so I have no expectation it will change now.

One final observation from my admittedly few hours at Spring Fair’s Moda x Pure section: I was struck how few attendees seemed to have made any effort with their outfits. It has been suggested by plenty of others that as a nation we have lost the will to dress to impress. If fashion retailers cannot be bothered, why should their customers?

As always, I’d welcome the thoughts of others on this.