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Lifestyle

Texstyle

If there’s a candy store for the North American fashion industry, it’s Premiere Vision Preview in New York City.

The Paris-based textile tradeshow gives state-side designers and manufacturers a sneak peak of its tweeds, twills and tartans each season with a two day exhibition at the Altman Building in midtown Manhattan. Style’s big players and emerging stars walk the aisles feeling up as much silk and satin as possible.

Spotted at the Fall 2010 show in July was Ashley Olsen wearing sunglasses under fluorescent lights and flipping through fabric swatches in a back corner booth. In another cubicle, two Thom Browne assistants dressed in identical shrunken suits were hoarding cards of vintage-looking buttons. Band of Outsiders’ Scott Sternberg talked shirting with dapper Italian fabric agents. And Toronto’s own Linda Lundstrom made a beeline for the trend forecasting seminars in the basement.

Before collections are conceptualized, sketched, mocked-up, sampled, shown, produced, publicized and consumed, there’s cloth. Style pundits will tell you that designers dress us in black because of a climate of conspicuous penny pinching, plaid because the world is yearning for the slow life and wool because we’re throwing our global warming worries to the wind. The truth is that the fabric mill is ground zero for trends and most of them are in business to simply make beautiful textiles.

There are a few designers who create their own prints and weaves to guarantee exclusivity or to satisfy a unique creative impulse. Jeremy Laing, for instance, developed a NASCAR-inspired flame print for a sheer dress in his fall collection.

Most work with what mills offer though new technologies, especially from Asian textile manufacturers, are enabling smaller labels to customize more.

This year’s Premiere Vision Preview and the parallel TexWorld show were both about half the size of last year’s events but that doesn’t mean fashion is working with fewer options. More designers are skipping the trade show trip and sending their wish lists directly to the mills.

So how does this affect you? As anyone who’s memorized Meryl Streep-as-Miranda Priestly’s cerulean blue sweater monologue in The Devil Wears Prada knows, fashion from designer to discount depends on a trickle down effect. Influence just starts a step higher up the fashion ladder than most shoppers realize.

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