Kathy Taslitz, a Chicago decorator, is wired with a fashion instinct that functions as efficiently as a satellite homing device. In late January, only days after Azzedine Alaia had presented samples from his fall collection in Paris, Taslitz zeroed in on a sumptuous black suede peplum coat, which she had seen in a photograph. She called her favorite boutique and placed an order, even though the US$7,345 coat would not be available for more than six months.
"When I see something I love, I don't have to think about it," Taslitz explained. "I go to work on it right away. If not, it's lost."
Dr Lisa Airan, a dermatologist in Manhattan, has likewise learned to trust her eye. "I have a good sense of line, proportion and texture," she said. That and a sense of urgency prompted her to pop into the Marc Jacobs boutique on Bleecker Street last month and put her money, US$1,700, on an abbreviated peacoat weeks before it was due to arrive in the store. "When you work the hours that I do," Airan said, "you don't have a lot of time to shop, so you move in fast."
Taslitz and Airan are members of a steely cohort of like-minded shoppers: hyper-informed about what's coming next in fashion, largely affluent, driven by the same competitive fever that makes Broadway fans spring for hot tickets even before the actors have learned their lines. Adept in the rituals of getting and spending, they close in on -- and pay for -- the season's most coveted runway items at a time when other less zealous shoppers have registered them only as a speck on the fashion horizon. Their numbers are small, representing no more than 2 percent of the shopping population, according to Pamela Danziger, an authority on the spending habits of affluent consumers, but their choices are often reliable indicators of fashion's direction in the months ahead.
"It's all about reserves today -- placing orders ahead of the selling season on items that we might have asked for in limited quantities and sizes," said Wayne Mahler, the fashion coordinator of Linda Dresner, a specialty boutique in Manhattan and Birmingham, Mich. "They see those items on the Internet or in magazines, and what they see is what they want."
Topping the most-wanted lists of early shoppers this season are catwalk hits like a slim, sashed trench coat from Lanvin, a military-detailed jacket and vented chiffon skirt at Balenciaga and a cropped red leather jacket by Dsquared: each item an expression of a trend to refined tailoring beginning to filter into the wider marketplace. Fur-collared, embroidered pieces from Dries van Noten; a wildly zigzagging knit dress and striped beret at Missoni; crystal and paste necklaces entwined with ribbon at Lanvin; and even oddities like copper-tinted python boots by Devi Kroell -- flat boots are in high demand this fall -- and high-heeled platform loafers from Yves Saint Laurent attest to an increasingly popular taste for opulent or idiosyncratic designs.
Retailers like Mahler say the tendency to close in swiftly on such items has escalated in the last 18 months. "Nowadays customers start placing their orders so quickly that the clothes may never reach the selling floor," he said. That practice, known in retail parlance as the pre-buy, in which consumers pay full retail price for the coming season's wares, is
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