Lucien Pagès on what it really takes to build a fashion brand now
From shows and celebrity dressing to timing, budgets, and creative force – a candid conversation about survival and scale.
By Olya Kuryshchuk
Lucien Pagès has spent nearly two decades working at the junction of fashion, media, and business. He founded his Paris-based communications agency in 2006, after starting out in press and PR in the early 2000s, and has since built a practice that extends well beyond traditional publicity. His roster has included names such as Coperni, Dilara Findikoglu, Ludovic de Saint Sernin and Duran Lantink – designers who have shaped recent conversations around shows, celebrity dressing, and independent growth. What distinguishes Pagès’ position is not proximity to visibility, but proximity to consequence: he is involved in decisions about when to show, how to spend limited budgets, how to build relationships, and when not to scale too quickly. For emerging designers, his perspective is useful precisely because it is unsentimental. Pagès understands how fragile the current system is – from wholesale and distribution to media saturation – and speaks candidly about what still matters: creative force, personality, timing, and the slow work of building trust.
From your vantage point, what has changed most for independent designers over the past few years?
For independent designers, what has changed a lot is distribution and the struggles of the big department stores. When retailers have issues with payment or delay orders, it affects these brands directly. Most independent designers cannot afford their own boutiques, so wholesale is the main pillar of their business model. When wholesale partners struggle, the brands struggle. There are still very good partners. Dover Street Market, for example, is a serious and supportive partner. They help with distribution and production, which are key for success.
The biggest problem is the cost of the fashion show. To exist in fashion, you have to do a show. In this designer bubble, you have to be part of Fashion Week. But it’s interesting, if you show in Paris, even as a small emerging brand, people compare you to the big brands. They say they liked one show and not another, even though the budgets are not comparable. We work on many young designer shows where the impact is real. The beauty of fashion is that when a show is good, it can change your life.
Yes, I think Duran Lantink’s February show was that kind of show.
Yes, he was number one in the BoF show rankings. The show was in the new office of The Independents, so there was no cost for a location. You have to be so pragmatic. If you can remove a line from the show budget, you can save the entire show. We reduced the costs as much as possible, and it still cost too much for a young designer. You have to sell so many clothes to reach the margins you need. A show is usually the biggest expense of the year, and there are costs you cannot reduce. For example, in France it is forbidden to ask models to do a show for free. It is considered a job and you have to pay a minimum. You cannot take friends or do only street casting.
For some clients, one solution is to do only one strong show a year, and then fill the rest of the year with capsules, collaborations or celebrity dressing. Celebrity dressing is very important and very visible for young brands.
You have to pay for models, but you also have all of these expenses to use their image if you publish the photos or anything like that, right?
Yes, it has totally changed. Now there are regulations for models, which I understand because it is their face and image. But it is much more complicated. Even when you reduce costs, the overall amount for a show is still very high for what you can produce and allocate within your budget.