FASHION: TRIUMPH IN A TREACHEROUS FIELD

Fifty years before the founding of Neiman-Marcus (1907) put Dallas on the style map, the city was famed as the world’s greatest market for buffalo hides. Styles keep changing, but the city’s status as a fashion marketing center remains commanding. Today the apparel business in Dallas employs 20,000 people, from fiber reps to fashion photographers, and grosses revenues of very close to a billion dollars.

The system orbits around the Apparel Mart, the world’s largest fashion wholesaling complex, which is undergoing its third expansion since opening in 1964. Thanks to the mart, Dallas’ wholesale dollar volume is second nationwide only to New York’s Seventh Avenue. Less well-known is the fact that Dallas ranks third in U.S. ready-to-wear garment manufacturing.

On the retail front, too, the outlook for 1979 is bullish, as retailers bet on Dallas’ rising affluence and fashion consciousness to outweigh inflation and energy woes. Following closely upon its debut in Beverly Hills, Neiman-Marcus will soon open its third Dallas store (for a total of 12 in the nation) at Prestonwood, where it will be joined by such heavies as Joske’s and, at last, Sakowitz. Chicago’s Marshall Field tentatively plans to move in next year with stores in NorthPark and Prestonwood. A popular trend among area retailers continues to be the Merger Game, as Margo’s La Mode follows the footsteps of Neiman’s, Titche’s, and Sanger Harris to the corporate altar. The Dallas-based chain, largest in the region with 72 stores, will merge with Alexander’s Inc. of New York in May.

If any branch of the clothing business in this region may be called stunted, it would have to be textiles. Only four knitting mills, none large, operate in Dallas. In spite of the fact that Texas leads the nation in the production of cotton, wool, mohair, and the petroleum feedstocks of synthetic fibers, and notwithstanding recent efforts of a legislative committee and a research project at Texas Tech, the vast majority of U.S. textile mills remain firmly in the Carolinas, where they are expected to stay.

Ready-to-wear manufacturing is a different story: a story of triumph in a treacherous field. There are now close to 200 apparel companies in Dallas (although the actual sewing is mostly done elsewhere). Regardless of Dallas’ well-dressed, increasingly sophisticated image, the idea of a world-class fashion industry here still strikes some people as an anomaly. But such skepticism owes more to the popular image of fashion as a volatile, eccentric industry (which it certainly can be) and reflects less the tradition in Dallas – a tradition of extraordinary stability and longevity. For example, Dallas is headquarters for America’s largest privately held manufacturers of women’s wear (Jerell) and men’s wear (Haggar), and for the oldest privately owned U.S. manufacturer (the 70-year-old Lorch Company).

The largest number of local “cutters” belong to the women’s wear field, which can be divided into four types: better designer houses, budget sportswear houses, upstarts, and houses long associated with such retail chains as Sears and J. C. Penney. The first type, while modest in size, is most profitable; the second is holding its own; the third, as always, is struggling to survive. The firms in the last group have suffered most lately, as their formerly cozy, almost contractor-like relationship with the chains has given way to more competitive conditions. The newly style-conscious chains, having pulled their purchasing decisions back to corporate headquarters, can no longer be depended on to place huge yearly orders with such firms as Royal Park and Fame Fashions. For these vulnerable companies, improved accounts with regional chains seem to be taking up the slack.

Men’s wear production is dominated locally by the Haggar Company, which transcends the usual categories. Successfully exploiting a void in moderately priced slacks, Haggar’s mass market formula has produced sales estimated at over $200 million yearly. In 1979, Haggar will be the top sports coat manufacturer in the U.S.

The Dallas garment industry as a whole has taken a mainstream route to its ranking of third nationally. Neither as mili-tantly trendy as New York nor as freewheeling and garish as Los Angeles, the “Dallas look” is sporty yet tasteful, appealing to value-minded middle America. Characteristic of the Sunbelt fashion world generally, the local industry enjoys a steady business, avoiding the erratic ups and downs of its counterpart up East. “New York is so full of rumors,” says one local exec. “As soon as two guys start muttering about their problems, it triggers a panic all over town.”

The reasons cited for the impressive growth of the industry here are familiar: a healthy, low-tax business environment, motivated work force, central location, good transportation, available real estate, and that old favorite, “quality of life.” One of the most pleasing aspects of this region, from a manufacturer’s viewpoint, is the absence of labor unions. According to Marvin Segal, Executive Director of the Southwest Apparel Manufacturers Association, the reason only one Dallas firm (Nardis) is unionized is that owners have provided comfortable working conditions and the benefits won by unions elsewhere. Although they are low-paying, sewing plants hire 85 percent women and minorities and have brought major employment to 150 small-to-medium Texas towns. Virtually all Dallas firms have refrained from producing abroad, a practice which has caused quality-control problems for coast outfits. The problem of imports is another matter, one in which the industry is not getting much help from the Carter administration, says Segal.

While Dallas cutters may not have reached the couture stage quite yet, the scene is heating up and an era of big-name glamour may be just around the corner. No longer must home-grown designers be “victims of locale,” in the words of Les Wilk, a Texas native and president of one of the city’s best-known designer labels, who had to sell encyclopedias during a decade of slow recognition. Although there is still a shortage of trained talent, local companies are finding it easier to attract designers and other key personnel. A striking case in point is the recent relocation to Dallas of two firms, the Unlimited Corp. and Kovac Corp., from politically troubled Quebec. The Unlimited’s president, Carlos Montero, says the move “is working out so magnificently, I’m sorry I didn’t do it five years ago. Our business has exploded. And we feel so at home, we’ve forgotten we were ever in Quebec.”

Perhaps the most dramatic event of 1979 is the birth of the Dallas Center for Marketing and Design. The joint creation of the Dallas chapter of the Fashion Group, NTSU’s Industrial Training Laboratory, and a citizen’s advisory committee, the center is envisaged as a degree-granting institution along the lines of New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, but with greater emphasis on industrial internships. Built around the Carrie Marcus Neiman collection of 20th-century fashions and supported by some of Dallas’ most prominent names, the center squarely addresses the demand for expertise posed by the formidable rise and dazzling future of the fashion industry here.