Pushed aside for a younger, trendier and more lucrative shopper

All my favorite designers are being scrapped – what an insult to older women.  Dana Buchanan at Kohl’s – puhleeezzzz!

The demise of Sigrid Olsen’s stores – excerpt from the NYTimes.

It is a curious development in the fickle business of fashion that clothing labels like Ms. Olsen’s, made by and for the baby boomer generation, are among those being hardest hit by the current economic turmoil and retail retrenchment. The restructuring of Liz Claiborne early this year also resulted in upheavals at more expensive labels: Ellen Tracy, which was sold; and Dana Buchman, which was pulled from department stores and will be remade more moderately for Kohl’s. At the same time, retailers like Ann Taylor, Talbots and J. Jill have been closing hundreds of stores around the country, and the consolidation of department stores over the last decade has left many malls with more vacancies than options for the enormous demographic of women in their 40s to 60s.

Her tale is in many ways emblematic of how those customers and the designers they favor are being pushed aside for a younger, trendier and more lucrative shopper. A vibrant 55-year-old, Ms. Olsen is coming to terms with the unceremonious end of her fashion career — as the windows of the last remaining stores were papered over last month and the stock sold at discounts of 70 percent, including the hangers — at the same time she is starting over as an artist and entrepreneur.

Now having once escaped the corporate world, Ms. Olsen still seems to be caught in a struggle between a part of her that also wants to optimize the value of her name by pushing ahead with another lifestyle concept — arranging women’s retreats to encourage creative discussion or teaming up with a hotel to create a Sigrid Olsen resort experience — and a part that wants to relax and let things happen as they may.

“Being a child of the ’60s, I still have that idealist in me that I think I can pull it all together and give people an uplifting, positive message,” she said, “and still be an entrepreneur and a capitalist at the same time.”

~ by mentalimaging on August 15, 2008.