They don’t make sample sales like they used to

The world of fashion insiders is vast: there are students and talents, PR professionals and editors, big and small managers, university teachers, models, socialites – and they usually meet at sample sales. This practice has become so familiar that it’s now talked about as casually as visiting friends: Did you go to Yohji? Did you go to Tom Ford? Did you go to Magliano? To Alaïa? These aren't random names but brands that hosted sales in Milan just this past weekend – and that’s not even all of them. For multi-day sales, people even exchange opinions: Were the prices high or low? What could you find? And how were the shoes? Invitations to these sales are still rare and exclusive for the hottest brands (sales by Prada Group or Kering are among the most inaccessible), but the sample sale culture has now become so widespread that there are websites where anyone can sign up for a regularly updated calendar. The best ones, of course, require an invitation that any fashion insider can obtain with ease – sometimes, just showing up and persuading the PR at the door is enough to get in. Another type of sale is the mixed one, which tends to be the most chaotic, where (and this is our suspicion) unsold items from multi-brand boutiques of all levels end up, and where you can still find an amazing piece in a sea of mediocre or unknown brands. In any case, in recent months, these sales have become increasingly frequent and increasingly expensive. And something tells us they're transitioning from clear-outs to real sales.

The world of sales is also fairly mysterious since, especially for mixed sales, there is not always a clear understanding of the merchandise’s origin. As mentioned, in these mixed sales, it often happens that about 15% of the brands are genuinely “fashion,” sometimes dating back years or consisting of leftover stock from some anonymous multi-brand store. For certain brands too famous to mention, products can sometimes be found at a third of the original price. The only certainty is that these sales serve to clear out unsold stock. This means that if we see their number increasing, it’s because the amount of merchandise not sold through direct channels is also increasing. However, this increase in sales, paired with increased marketing and higher product prices, suggests that what was once a way to clear out surplus prototypes (hence the term sample sale), old stock (hence archive sale), or to discount products internally within the company (private sales) is increasingly becoming a real business. A sort of second, parallel market, an alternative to what multi-brand boutiques and brands themselves do through unauthorized foreign wholesalers, now operates in broad daylight and, lacking any central organization, has evolved from single, recurring initiatives into a continuous sales system.

And it’s for this reason that both brands and “external” sample sale organizers have started raising prices: at The Row’s sale a few weeks ago in Milan, the cheapest item was a white hat priced at €125, while no clothing tag was below €400, and there was even a padded coat for €1200 – clearly not prices for the general public. Behind these often very high prices (also often excessive in outlets), there is, beyond the natural and predictable profit motive, a trickle-down effect from price increases in boutiques, which, however, pass on the difficulties that primary channels have in selling to those that were once discreetly used to clear out stock. In other words, even sale organizers are getting greedy. The price increase may also coincide with the growing popularity of these sales: with a clear rise in customers, to the extent of staggering arrivals by time slots and days, it’s evident that offering excessively drastic discounts could spread the (accurate) perception that boutique fashion is overpriced and that the reduced price better reflects the product’s true value. When a sale goes from annual to semiannual, then from semiannual to bimonthly, things have gotten serious: the brand needs to clear its warehouses of unsold stock and raise funds. But a collateral truth revealed by the wave of sample sales in recent months is that sales may be struggling, but not because people don’t want to buy. What is, for fashion, the real cost of not lowering prices?