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Second City Fashion. "Chicago is the fashion capital of Middle America," says Jean-Marc Gallot, president and ceo of Lois Vuitton North America, a quoted by Ruth La Ferla in The New York Times. He adds: "We belong here." Ralph Hughes of Marshall Fields agrees: "Fashion in Chicago is coming on strong ... there is a tremendous amount of fashion here that hasn't been discovered yet." Adds Lance Lawson, who recently opened a boutique called Jake in the Southport neighborhood on Chicago's North Side: "So many people outside Chicago still think we're all eating deep-dish pizza and wearing sweat pants." What they should be thinking is that Chicago is where fashion-forward indie boutiques "are springing up like ragweed."
While no official figures are available, a number of shop owners estimated boutiques in the city have tripled in the last half-dozen years, to more than 150." With rents low but aspirations high, these boutiques are absolutely critical to the Second City's fashion cachet by making it "easier to spend on the aesthetics of the store and to take more risks with fashion," as noted by Jim Wetzel, also of the Jake boutique. Says Calvin Tran, owner of a boutique called Sac: "To succeed in Chicago, you have to have a storefront ... There is no big corporation here where you can apprentice yourself. You can take your line to the bigger stores but they just reject and reject you." Lucky for Calvin, and others like him, a not-for-profit group called Gen Art, www.genart.com, is offering local Chicago talent an embrace.
Gen Art actually started up in New York City, and "was one of the first to champion the New York designers Zac Posen and Rebecca Taylor." Having opened a Chicago outpost 2-1/2 years ago, Gen Art appears to have had a profound effect. "In the short time we have been here," says Gen Art founder and ceo Ian Gerard, "the office and audience has grown rapidly ... Its growth is equivalent to what took us five to six years to build in New York." Mary Gehlhar, Gen Art's fashion director adds: "We are surprised at the level of sophistication in this city ... There's a lot of savvy in terms of understanding how the fashion industry works, how you contact publicists to get your clothes on celebrities, how to speak to stores." Calvin Tran confirms her view: "I get more publicity in Chicago than anywhere else," he says. "There seems to be a hunger here for new design."
Accidental Media. All kinds of stuff falls out of the books sold at the Strand, a used book store on Broadway in Manhattan, reports Barry Newman in The Wall Street Journal. The clerks at the Strand have found letters, photos and postcards, sure. But they've also found, keys, sketches, birth certificates, even a spent bullet. One of them found Richard Ryan's 1985 rap sheet, complete with "a nice set of fingerprints." When told about it, Mr. Ryan explained: "I'd always have a book with me when I got arrested ... I'm sure I got my arrest ticket and filed it in the book ... Books," he observes, "end up as filing cabinets."
Sometimes they end up as much more -- as mystery vignettes in their own right, for example. Adam Davis, a clerk at the Strand, www.strandbooks.com, says he found a birth certificate listing the father as "unknown," a rider carrying the father's name, one photo of a woman posing nude in a motel room, and another "of what appeared to be the same woman as a child." Also in that book (A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman) "were some traveler's-check receipts, and the stub of a train ticket, issued shortly after the date on the rider, for a trip to the town where the birth certificate was issued."
Comments Adam: "It's as if the book picked up a new story ... I'm not sure I want to know the whole truth. The suppositions are so interesting." He says he's now working on a novel about "the previous owners of books, based on the traces they left in them." Novelist A.S. Byatt actually has done that already, with the book, Possession, "which begins with a letter left in an old tome." David Bowman, author of Let the Dog Drive, meanwhile put on his promotional hat when he "filled a first edition" of the novel "with letters from publishers rejecting it, and then sold it to the Strand." Hm. Used books as media -- he may be onto something there: "Americans bought 150 million old books last year, according to Ipsos BookTrends." And, according to the ever-cheerful Forrester Research, used book sales "could double and hit $2 billion by 2007."
Tim Manners, editor
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