Alysa Hantgan knew the party was a success because there were gold American Express cards all over her dining room table.
With a spread of grilled vegetable and pesto sandwiches waiting in her kitchen on the Upper West Side, more than a dozen friends and acquaintances, many in the entertainment business, chattered happily as they fingered Fair Isle cashmere sweaters and rifled four rolling racks of floral print T-shirts, denim jumpers and tiny pairs of striped tights. "Your apartment makes a really good showroom," one guest said as she came through the door, seven months pregnant.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
Contentedly stacking sales slips and minding the credit cards was Lisa Berke, a stylishly dressed representative from the Petit Patapon design house. "The layette is in the bedroom, and 18 months to 4 years is here in the living room," she said.
Welcome to the newest twist in that venerable fashion institution known as the trunk show. Now that investment clubs have been wrecked by the bear market and Tupperware parties have gone cyber, these shows are the latest excuse to get together.
Not the traditional fashion-forward department store pageants where fancy designers open fancy trunks full of ball gowns for fancy women, these are more democratic affairs, held in private homes or hotel suites from Charlotte, North Carolina, to San Diego, and catering to working mothers and society mavens with pressing toddler wardrobe needs.
Most of the niche lines sold at the shows are responding to a void in the children's market for traditional clean-cut clothes like smocked dresses with rickrack trim and miniature quilted corduroy barn jackets. They are an alternative to generic Gap styles or the Britney-inspired bellybutton look. Brands like Petit Patapon, Emma T., Papo d'Anjo and Kule -- sold at invitation-only trunk shows, sometimes supplemented by Web sites and catalogs -- have answered a desire for logo-free clothes.
"Trunk shows for kids are just another indicator that consumers are frustrated with stores because the merchandise all looks the same," said Marshal Cohen, a co-president of NPDFashionworld, which tracks retail trends.
While trunk shows represent too tiny a share of the US$9.6 billion-a-year children's apparel market to measure, they seem poised for growth. Even as the adult clothing market is contracting, squeezed by consumers' financial worries, children's wear seems to be holding its own, with unit sales up 7 percent last year, according to NPDFashionworld.
Some trunk-show guest lists include a roster of Park Avenue society -- the Aerin Lauder, Marina Rust, Sloan Barnett crowd -- but no matter who shows up, the agenda is always equal parts practical shopping, social networking and old-fashioned mommy-and-me style advice.
"This is a great way for working mothers to connect and feel like they're still doing the mommy thing," Hantgan said. "So many of them have kids under 3."
In recent years, many new lines have joined the field, some with ambitious growth plans. Emma T., which was started four years ago by Nancy Tobin, a former merchandiser for Ralph Lauren Sport, when she couldn't find clothes for her two toddler sons, has scheduled 30 trunk shows for the fall season in private homes or country clubs in places including Charlotte; Dallas; Houston; Rumson, New Jersey; Wellesley, Massachusetts; San Diego; and the Los Angeles area. And Papo d'Anjo is offering 44 trunk shows around the country this fall.
Growing competition
"Once you're in this business, you find out how many people do this," said Jane Schelling, a former fashion editor at Town & Country who is now a partner in Emma T. "We have definitely not maxed out the South yet. My friend in Charlotte said that this is pretty much the way people buy their children's clothes."
Although Emma T. projects only about US$200,000 in sales this year -- small potatoes -- other lines are well established in the South and Midwest, among them Orient Expressed, based in New Orleans, and Kelly's Kids, which calls itself the nation's largest home party company selling children's wear.
Jamie Tisch, the wife of the film producer Steve Tisch, discovered Emma T. at a trunk show in Liz Lange's maternity boutique in Beverly Hills last year and immediately offered to hold a show in her West Hollywood home-furnishings shop, Better Things. She gave 10 percent of the gross to the charity Operation Smile.
The show was so successful -- with Hollywood A-listers like Cecilia Peck and Elizabeth Wiatt scooping up three and four Emma T. roll-neck cotton sweaters at a time -- that Tisch is planning another one in September.
Prices for Emma T.'s basic pull-on corduroy pants, cotton stretch shirts and popular sweaters emblazoned with footballs or Labradors are about US$10 more than similar items from the Gap. More elaborate pieces compare in price to styles from Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue.
"We've tripled the number of people who attend our shows," Tobin said. "We have over 1,000 names just of friends of friends who saw someone at a party wearing one of our dresses, and they e-mail us for an invitation."
Then there are the women Tobin doesn't know, the ones who send her messages from across the country asking if they can run a trunk show themselves.
"It's crazy how the Internet has spawned that interest," she said.
At a recent lunch given in New York by Marie-Chantal, the wife of Crown Prince Pavlos of Greece, to introduce 40 of her friends to her line of children's clothing, pampering parents like Gigi Mortimer, Jennifer Creel and Lillian von Stauffenberg stocked up on fall staples like miniature wide-wale cords and Size 6X cashmere cable-knit turtlenecks while discussing summer vacation plans and sipping iced tea -- all under the gaze of a photographer from Women's Wear Daily.
This was a different feeding frenzy from the kind that occurs at a red-carpet society benefit: In 40 minutes of "hard shopping," according to Michael Capoferri, Marie-Chantal's chief operating officer, the women spent a total of US$60,000 on clothes.
Most children's trunk shows draw 75 guests or more and sell US$20,000 to US$45,000 worth of clothes. In some cases, the host takes a 10 percent to 15 percent cut. But many women aren't trying to make money so much as to entertain and maybe pick up a few free sweaters for Junior.
Department stores say the trunk-show business is still too small to pose a threat to them. "We're aware of the phenomenon, and we'll watch the trend," said LaVelle Olexa, senior vice president for fashion merchandising at Lord & Taylor. "Should this continue, we will certainly consider exploring it further."
"But at this point," she added, "it has little relevance to our children's business."
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