SS1011: Design by Harmonized Tariffs?

Les Douaniers

One reason, I think I'm a menswear designer rather than a womenswear designer is because the tighter the parameters, the more creative I am forced to be.  In menswear there is very little wiggle room and an interesting, attractive, feasible design must fit the rather stringent criteria. Sometimes, especially here in London,  I end up thinking of 'creative' womenswear as ghastly concoction of polka dotted ruffles onto more ruffles in a silhouette that can only be described as 'challenging'.  I work for a small company, so I don't get to hand off a tech pack to another department and then, as if by magic, 6 months later my designs are in the stores. Instead I'm involved in all steps of the process, so I move designs along from initial idea all the way to a piece of clothing that you pick up, buy and take home.  Today, I spent several hours working on calculating the entry duties for designs that will be exported into the USA.  So, for instance, men's water resistant cotton anoraks are charged at different duty rate than, say, quilted silk overalls with 45% down/55% quilting. I'm sure there was a West Wing episode about protectionism, but I was probably concentrating on the Toby's love life subplot. This stuff is complicated and I don't really understand at all why it works the way it does.   But these are the rules and they can explain why your coat costs 25% more (or less) elsewhere in the world without counting for recent currency wobbles.

Henry Morton Stanley

One reason I love knowing about this nitty gritty (knitty fact: cashmere sweaters have a significantly lower duty rate than wool sweaters, probably because there are no serious cashmere herds stateside. But one day! ) part of the process is because it throws a very interesting variable into the design equation. When I start looking at fabrics for SS201l,  there will be a certain amount of jiggling that will happen because of these harmonized tariffs. Synthetic fabrics will probably get waterproof finishes, and I'm going to try to pick linen blends for unstructured jackets that have just the right amount of rumpled, professorial "Dr. Livingstone, I presume" in part because these fabrics will have lower duties and will therefore reach the consumer with more value built into the price.  My copy of  Teri Agins's book The End of Fashion: How Marketing Changed the Clothing Business Forever is on the other side of the ocean. Doesn't she make this argument -- a certain fabric or suede was cheaper to import-- and a high street brand, Gap or Banana Republic maybe, so they made it look half way cute, it seemed good value, and it became stylish everywhere? I need to reread that book. You may unknowingly see that with SS2011.

Should you have a lot of spare time, and love incomprehensible government resources. Check out this one. I like Section XI, Chapters 61 and 62.