Is Dubai the next Milan?

Paris HAS ‘IT’, as does Milan, New York and London. And now Dubai – that upstart, never to be outdone – is to launch its very own fashion week.

It was announced last week that the first Dubai International Fashion Week (DIFW) is to be held in March 2007 – with the aim, say organisers Concept Events, to establish the emirate as a leading fashion city and to ‘bring together celebrated and upcoming designers’. Cosmetics and fragrance brand Lancôme is on board as a sponsor, and Arabian Business has learnt that promotions staff are being flown in from abroad to join the Dubai-based team that is working on the project.

Not before time, you’d think, given the presence of top brands in the UAE.

Hundreds of names – from Armani to Yves Saint Laurent – jostle for prominence in the UAE’s ever-expanding malls; there are rumours of Harrods moving into the region; and Armani is even opening a branded hotel here.

Forget the ‘City of Gold’, and bring on the ‘City of Couture’: Dubai is establishing itself as the fashion capital of the Middle East, and beyond. Not that the gold doesn’t figure: Where the money flows, the big names will follow.

Take the Merrill Lynch 2006 World Wealth Report, which found that the Middle East is home to 300,000 individuals with more than US$1m in assets, and whom share a tidy US$1.2 trillion between them. The number of millionaires is expected to grow more quickly in the Middle East than anywhere else in the world.

And the UAE looks set to topple Saudi Arabia as the driving force behind the Middle Eastern luxury fashion market. According to Retail International, a UK-based research firm, Dubai’s total retail spending bill will soon overtake Saudi Arabia’s, reaching an estimated US$7.6bn by 2009 – the highest in the GCC.By 2009, Dubai should have three times its current retail space – 20 million sq. ft. – and almost 15 million tourists each year. And given that the total ‘luxury’ market is set to be worth an estimated US$2trillion worldwide by 2010 – of which apparel goods will account for US$100bn – then the presence of high-end brands starts to look very important to the UAE’s economy indeed.

And so the impetus for the DIFW goes right to the top of Dubai’s government, as Shireen El Khatib, general manager of the fashion and jewellery division at Al Tayer Group, suggests.

“When a fashion week is being talked about in Dubai, it means there is a driving force behind it, just like when people started talking about Media City a few years ago, and now the Medical City," says Khatib. “There are, I’m sure, directives from a higher authority telling a certain committee ‘let’s do this for Dubai”.’

And El Khatib should know: She is a major player in Dubai’s fashion retail world, and Al Tayer is the leading representative of high-end brands in the Middle East. If you have shopped locally for anything by Armani, Gucci, or Jimmy Choo – assuming that you weren’t buying fakes, as many do – then you did so through Al Tayer.

El Khatib is also one of the DIFW advisory board, which also includes fashion designer Walid Atallah and Ingie Chalhoub, CEO of the Etoile Group.

There is no doubting that Dubai has the money to pull off an event like the DIFW. But the question is whether its fashion industry is ready for such international scrutiny. Is the ‘upstart’ ready to compete with Paris and Milan? Is it plain cool enough?

Well, yes and no. The money is here and the brands are here – but the designers aren’t. And this lack of local talent is a major stumbling block to an official fashion week, because designers usually aunch collections on their home turf.

“DIFW will not be the fashion week that this industry has known," says El Khatib. “Giorgio Armani and all of these designers are not going to relocate their offices and their studios and their factories and work out of Dubai. Armani doesn’t even do shows in New York or Paris – his show is in Milan because he is a Milan-based designer."

The DIFW that El Khatib expects is a ‘replica’ of similar events in Europe or the US. “If five or ten or fifteen designers are willing to replicate their shows in Dubai, it can happen. But it’d be a second-time fashion show for each designer," she told Arabian Business in an interview that took place before the DIFW was officially announced.

“It’s going to be an extremely costly exercise, because these designers will not use local models, as if they do it will not be the same show that they have in their home country. Most of them use international models and some of these models are celebrities," added El Khatib.

Michael Panagiotakis, events director behind the DIFW, confirms that the show will include something in the way of local talent. “Over the last few years it has become increasingly evident that designers from the region and beyond are choosing Dubai as a base, holding fashion shows routinely to showcase their new collections," he said.

“With the mix of nationalities in Dubai, the city has the potential to become a meeting point for new and interesting fashion ideas. Now, for the first time, designers operating out of the region will have an open platform to share their ideas for the upcoming season with their main audiences.”

El Khatib and Panagiotakis may be enthusiastic, but other industry experts believe that the idea behind DIFW is flawed.

Take Sheikh Majed Al-Sabah, founder of the upmarket Villa Moda chain, which has outlets in Kuwait, Dubai, Qatar and Damascus. Self-styled as the ‘Sheikh of Chic’ (he is the nephew of the Emir of Kuwait), Al-Sabah’s Villa Moda stores stock products by names such as Prada, Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana.

“Would a Dubai fashion week work? Personally I think it wouldn’t," says Al-Sabah. “None of the Middle East fashion brands – with the exception of [the Beirut-based designer] Elie Saab –have the infrastructure of proper fashion houses. And who would want to go to Dubai to see the same show as London, Paris or Milan?"

The difference in El Khatib and Al-Sabah’s viewpoints – whether it is adequate to simply replicate, or whether to foster a local take on western trends – goes to the very heart of how fashion retail in the UAE works, and could be key to the success of the DIFW.

Al Tayer’s fashion arm – run by El Khatib – relies on importing luxury brands from the West. Although Al Tayer owns the Harvey Nicols chain in the UAE which stocks multiple brands, many of Al Tayer’s outlets are ‘mono-brand’ fashion stores that sell a single label.

Over 400 international retail brands are represented in the GCC by companies such as Al Tayer (the biggest, with sales of US$230m across its luxury division), Alshaya (which looks after mainly middle-market brands such as River Island and H&M) and the Chalhoub Group (the local partner for Saks Fifth Avenue and most of the LVMH brands, as well as the multi-brand Etoile stores).

However, commentators such as Reinhard Döpfer of the European Fashion and Textile Export Council have criticised the mono-brand model encouraged by such franchise agreements. Arguing for more multi-brand department stores in Dubai’s malls, Döpfer claims that the present situation restricts choice for the consumer and excludes the middle-range brands in favour of luxury names.

The argument suggests that exclusive distribution deals held by Al Tayer and similar companies have too firm a grip on principal brands, which could encourage the presence of monotonous single-brand stores rather than varied shopping emporiums such as London’s Selfridges.

Other criticism levelled at Al Tayer’s grip on the UAE’s fashion market includes its perception as being run like a ‘strict boarding school’, with an overtly corporate nature and little apparent ‘passion for fashion’.

El Khatib disputes this: “[The fashion] business has a lot to do with the emotions of the consumer. And when you work in this business you have to be involved personally – you have to believe in the product. To the contrary, I think one of the main reasons for the success [of Al Tayer] is the passion."

El Khatib claims that the franchise model allows big brands to maintain high standards abroad, while benefiting from (often, otherwise impenetrable) local knowledge and – in the UAE – getting around certain legal restrictions.

She says that the trend in the Far East of fashion brands buying back their own stores from franchisees, or setting up joint ventures locally, is not the norm in the UAE. “However, there are a few brands that have set up Middle East offices now – I cannot name them, but none of the Al Tayer brands. They have realised that this is an emerging market and that they need to be close to the stores and keep an eye on the way the stores are managed."

Sheikh Majed Al-Sabah’s vision is different from the mono-brand franchise model: Villa Moda, a department store that stocks multiple big names in fashion, but with a regional twist. An example of this is the Prada-branded designer kaftan that Al-Sabah developed specifically for his Villa Moda customers in Kuwait.

“I believe in the retailer who is on the shop floor. Fashion retail is a specific kind of business that needs the involvement of the owner," says Al-Sabah.

“People should stop taking franchises from the West and develop something themselves. I don’t see the need for a Louis Vuitton store on every corner."

Al-Sabah deplores what he calls the ‘cookie-cutter’ approach to fashion in the Middle East – the casual replication of Western brands, rather than inventing something new.

So the question, when the DIFW launches, is: Who will be the Middle East’s Gucci? Will it be Elie Saab – the Lebanese designer described as a ‘precocious genius’ who established a fashion house in 1982, and who currently exhibits his collections in Rome?

Or, alternatively, will the Middle East’s Gucci be just that: Gucci? A product imported, wholesale, from the West?

Time will tell. The future of fashion in the UAE depends on a number of factors, such as WTO regulation and new competition laws in the UAE, rents at the big malls (some of the most expensive in the Middle East and world, according to Andrew Jeffreys of the Oxford Business Group), and the extent to which big brands retain control over their products and marketing in the region.

But one thing is for certain: Wherever the designers are from, March’s inaugural DIFW will be a lavish affair, guaranteed to focus the world's attention upon Dubai once more.

After all, Dubai – like the fashionistas it hopes to attract – does not do things by halves.

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