IT’S AN A-LIST, B-LIST, ZEE-LIST WORLD. BUT, NOT SO LONG AGO DEAR VOXFROCKERS – IT WASN’T. IN AUSTRALIAN FASHION CIRCLES, ONE MAN TRIPPED THE CULTURAL SWITCH FROM “EGALITARIAN” TO “HIERAR-CHIC”. HIS NAME IS JOHN FLOWER. THESE DAYS, THE POPULAR AND LIKEABLE CO-DIRECTOR OF MELBOURNE’S TOP EVENTS AND PR AGENCY HOTHOUSE MEDIA IS A PLAYER IN THE DON’T-YOU-KNOW-WHO-I-AM? GAME THAT BLOOMED SO SPECTACULARLY UNDER HIS GUIDANCE. BUT, ONCE UPON A FROCKY TIME, MR. FLOWER WAS THE REVERED AND FEARED KEEPER OF THE A-LIST. TODAY, AS THE VOXFROCK TEAM IS OTHERWISE ENGAGED (TOTING UP TRENDS FROM NEW YORK MILAN PARIS, FROCKSHOPPING FOR OUR OSCARS PARTY ON MONDAY, HAVING A NICE LIE-DOWN AHEAD OF OUR JIMMINY-CRICKETS-YOU’VE-GOT-ME-DOWN-FOR-HOW-MANY-SHOWS!? WORKLOAD AT THE MELBOURNE FASHION FESTIVAL, MARCH 17 – 23), WE OFFER THIS INSIGHT INTO FASHION SHOW HEIRARCHY – CIRCA 2010 – RETRIEVED FROM THE DARKEST REACHES OF OUR VOX VAULT. (Longform post: allow 8 minutes read time.)
PHOTOGRAPHS: MONTY COLES, THE LOUPE
WORDS: JANICE BREEN BURNS, editor, Voxfrock
AUSTRALIA’S fashion industry was a comparatively dull little pond once; a loose hierarchy of factory owners, buyers, shopkeepers, reporters. The odd flashy entrepreneur. The odd pop of glamour on award nights and at catwalk shows. Interesting at times, yes, but hardly the mesmerising, uber-glamorous, diva-driven, head-cracking, celebrity-charged ego-‘n’-frock-o-rama it is today.
In 1995, months before the first Australian Fashion Week in early 1996, John Flower was also your more-avid-than-average, garden-variety fashion consumer. He read all the glossies, shopped in the swankest stores, but, like most consumers at the time, wasn’t much more involved in the industry’s innards than that. He’d abandoned a career as a restaurateur (albeit, a successful one: Bendigo’s Copperpot and the Great Aussie Fish Cafs in Melbourne and Sydney were his), and was getting stuck into another as a publicist on the staff of one Simon Lock when his “sliding doors” moment arrived.
“Simon asked me to do a database; to try and work out all the people who could be invited to an Australian Fashion Week,” Flower recalls. “We had nothing to go on. There were no rules, no guide. We didn’t even know who was out there. When we did work out who everyone was, we had to seat them.”
Seat them? He remembers designers, proposing to spend $20,000 or more on their first fashion week show (a lot before the modern budgets of $200,000 and more became common), cheerfully suggesting their mum, dad, brothers, cousins and aunty Bonnie be seated front row.
Suddenly, the idea of a “seating plan” based on an audience carefully vetted for use-value, prestige, industry power, political connections and publicity potential didn’t seem such a bad idea. “Years before, I’d been to a Hardy Amies fashion show in London and had got the sense of the process from that,” Flower says. “Princess Michael of Kent and some other famous faces were in the front row, but all these other faces I didn’t know were further back; so there was some kind of pecking order going on.”
But, how to evaluate an Australian audience and rank its individuals according to worth? Flower began with the basics: a form, meticulous as a medical, filled out by potential delegates (audience members) in the registration process. Add to that; anecdote, scuttlebutt, the kind of who’s-who-done-what news that’s always swirled in fashion circles. Flower also personally visited the showrooms and eyeballed the work of every single designer invited on to the early schedules, then nutted out their needs. Next came the complicated match-up process: the right type and numbers of buyers, reporters, internationals, celebrities, even the right hangers-on, in a love match with the right designer that was understood by the whole industry.
“We had to be ruthless, and very judgmental,” Flower says. In the run-up to fashion week, a typical seating plan for Wayne Cooper, or Peter Morrissey, or Bettina Liano took days of research, and at least six hours of knock-down drag-out negotiations over a template of 200 or 900 tiny, blank squares, each representing a person. Flower and his assistant, Lucia Labbate, tackled up to 50 plans and their thousands of tiny judgments similtaneously in the weeks before the shows. The pressure was intense. “One year Lucia tripped on a step in the office and broke her leg,” Flower remembers with a guilty giggle. “I was coming from the other direction, stepped right over her and kept on going! We both laugh about that now, thank God.”
“Next came the complicated match-up process: the right type and numbers of buyers, reporters, internationals, celebrities, even the right hangers-on, in a love match with the right designer that was understood by the whole industry…”
In the final two days before the shows, Flower usually didn’t sleep at all, poring over the tiny squares. “I had to ask, ‘Is this person gonna work for us? Is this a front row person?’ and, if they weren’t, toss them into B row or C row or up the back in standing.” Or worse - and this seeded a new Richter scale of power and misery in fashion – neglect to invite them at all.
Flower is flippant now, but that formula, the one still used like the spinal column of fashion’s hierarchy and which became a benchmark for this diva-driven, head-cracking frock-o-rama of an industry we have now, emerged like a difficult birth. With all the insight and panache of a back-room bookkeeper, Flower and his team thrashed out the plans. Vogue, Harper’s, Marie Claire, metro newspaper fashion editors, all front row with celebrities, internationals and local buyers with the fattest budgets, then B-list magazines, sponsors’ clans, regional papers, small-fry buyers, everyone else banked back from row B, and finally, randoms and ring-ins standing at the back. How hard could it be? In fact, it demanded a new kind of psycho-mathematics and intuitive knowledge of industry mechanics and politics. More than that, it required the charm and skills of a diplomat to implement.
This is where Flower’s power really kicked in. As seating director he was traffic controller of his own plans, gatekeeper of his own quasi class system. With up to 900 people surging into a show venue and a 30-minute window to seat them all without so much as a hurt feeling, let alone a tantrum, his plans needed to be flawless or, at worst, require the merest last-minute adjustments. “One year, [fashion designer] Akira decided to pull out his front row to make more room,” Flower says, recalling one of the legendary anecdotes of early fashion week history. “That meant every row had to be moved back so ‘A’ row became ‘B’ row, ‘B’ became ‘C’ . . . The [fashion editor and reporters] from Elle magazine boycotted the show because they thought they’d been put in ‘B’ row, which was actually ‘A’ row, but Karin Upton-Baker, who was Harper’s in those days, came to me and asked, “What’s going on, John?” and when I explained what had happened, that she was actually still in ‘A’ row but it was ‘B’ on her ticket, she said, ‘So, you mean I can go [to the show?], John?’ And I said, ‘Yes, Karin, it’s OK; you can go.’ ”
Within two or three years, Flower’s seating plans were already working that well; everybody knew their place, or thought they did, and fashion had its arrogant royalty, its snobbish aristocracy, its wannabe scouts and patient workers. “The politics was so complicated, like a mathematical thing,” Flower says. Rival royals and aristocrats, for example, in retail, media, entertainment or social circles had to be allocated a comparable number and position of seats. The publisher, editor, fashion director and fashion editors of Vogue and Harper’s, for example, in the front row, with deputies and reporters in “B” row, assistants in “C” and so on. Each also had to be located somehow in the most prestigious block of seats, in the back half of the catwalk, between the middle and photographers’ rise. To complicate matters even more, rival publishers, store buyers and other people known to loathe each other or, at best, have uncomfortably competitive relationships, had to be seated diagonally opposite each other to avoid eye contact. “It was nightmare maths!” Flower hoots.
Along a typical row, Flower also seated “buffer people”, friendly neutrals, often overseas buyers and media, or non-competitive contemporaries to diffuse any discomfort between rivals and trigger productive chats for the designer. Every possible outcome was intuitively forecast. When global luminaries such as Mrs Joan Burstein of Browns, Anna Piaggi of Italian Vogue, Elle Macpherson, Cate Blanchett or British fashion guru Colin McDowell were in town, for example, he’d seat them with chums as well as people most likely to benefit from their acquaintance. It was a gentle dinner-party ploy, appreciated by the veterans of Paris and Milan fashion weeks who knew their relationship with Flower was two-way. Burstein, for example, sent a bottle of French champagne over to Flower’s table the night after one little favour. “I did have my favourites,” Flower says now. “And, really, if you wanted a front-row seat, and you were the right sort of person, then I’d do what I could. I know what it means to be seen sitting in the front row. But if you were rude to me, or were nasty, or nagged . . .”
Flower has had a remarkably small share of rudeness. Tales of diva tantrums and bribes are largely myth, or beaten up by an enthusiastic media in love with fashion’s cliches, but the culture of insistent, ad nauseam requests, and sheer cunning to claim a “better” seat in the frantic half-hour before a catwalk’s lights go up, is a definite, vivid reality. Flower calls them “eels”. “They slither down from the back rows, into the front.” Flower schoolmarmishly ordered them back, but some were particularly slippery. Some still are. A Melbourne model agent is a well-known veteran “eel” whom Flower has observed slithering from back to front for years. “Sometimes I just say, OK, XXXXXXX, if you want it that much, stay!”
But, not often. Since his retirement from Australian Fashion Week in 2006, Flower started his own event and public relations company, Hot House media and events, and among other projects, devises seating plans for major fashion shows and the Logies. The eels still slither, the class system still in place. In fact, scan the seats banking up and away either side of any typical catwalk, and there is Flower’s graphic plan of industry itself still operating: who’s got the power, who’s within pecking distance behind them, who are their chums, their enemies, their business prospects…
“…The culture of insistent, ad nauseam requests, and sheer cunning to claim a “better” seat in the frantic half-hour before a catwalk’s lights go up, is a definite, vivid reality..”
In effect, Flower “mapped” every industry player who qualified for a seat at fashion week; vetted, judged, rated them and, like a cartographer, marked their longitude and latitude, their seat on Planet Fashion. It had never been done before 1996 and, outside Parliament, in no other industry since, has there been a compar,able need for such graphic protocols. As Australian Fashion Week’s first seating director, Flower crystallised the industry’s vast and vague network of movers, shakers, also-rans and rabble. His “templates” for who sits where still operate, though, the players have changed, and the system is thinning under the weight of new power brokers including bloggers, online reporters and a tsunami of A-list celebrities and their entourage. But, the bones are still Mr. John Flower’s amazing invention.
