Depending on the source, a sobering 50 to a stunning 95 percent of new businesses are said to fail within their first five years. Presumably, the type of service or product weighs heavy into that balance (dehumidifiers have probably never found a sales niche on Mercury, for example) – in any event, there’s lots and lots of room for failure, even as the nation’s economy sustains at least a pretense of improvement.
Then again, everything comes together once in a while, with one La Jolla enterprise licking its chops over the spit-shined Village infrastructure that may soon mark it. You know it as the La Jolla International Fashion Film Festival. And as its staff gears up for year six, its founder knows it as a perfect merger of aesthetic and technology. Year five, he might argue, is already consigned to somebody else’s place in time and space.
“In the early days,” founder and producer Fred Sweet told Village News (as if inaugural year 2010 was a century ago), “people were really, really skeptical. All my friends thought I was crazy: ‘Whaddya talkin’ about? Fashion films? Doesn’t make any sense!’ But it was just a simple vision. I saw something in technology that I thought would resonate in the film industry and its visual culture.”
This year’s event is set for Friday and Saturday, July 24 and 25, with most of the activity taking place in and around the 500-seat Sherwood Auditorium, 700 Prospect St. Hundreds of fashion filmmakers from around the world are expected to attend, taking in the best of more than 11,000 entries and the awards ceremony to follow. Festival literature touts such films as “The Beautiful Mind,” German director Esther Löwe’s first foray into fashion work, in which a prima ballerina is guided on a mysterious journey to discover the secret to dance; Spanish director Albert Moya’s “High Tide,” an homage to fashion as an art form and a way to bring about social and cultural reflection; and “How to Fight in Six-Inch Heels,” Vietnamese-American director Ham Tran’s look at a neurotic fashion designer who learns her fiancé is having an affair with a model and infiltrates the modeling world to catch him in the act.
Invitees will also be treated to a pre-opening reception Thursday, July 23 at the Mangelsen Images of Nature Gallery.
San Diego Community Newspaper Group, publisher of La Jolla Village News, is the sole local print-media sponsor of the event. Fashion is a nearly $300 billion commodity in the U.S., and that figure speaks to the lofty mentalities that drive many of today’s niche industries. Still, the term “fashion film” may raise an eyebrow as people seek to connect two colossally important enterprises. Sweet thinks the link is more easily mastered amid a feel for the role the Internet, now a household staple, has played in the festival’s evolution.
“I’d make a video [inspired] by a designer ad,” Sweet explained, “and I’d show them around to friends, without thinking about a festival or event.” What eventually followed was an inventory of films that ideally give life to clothing and its wearers. The concept has propelled the La Jolla festival to its place as the world’s largest event of its kind.
Sweet, San Diego Model Management CEO, said that fashion film has quickly become a core means for designers to enter the public dialogue – still, ritzy La Jolla, and the household fashion names that soon will descend on it, might set a tone of exclusivity with a public otherwise inclined to attend.
Sweet said the concern is legitimate – but he added that the neighborhood’s forward thinking, not its riches, is the prime mover in the festival’s growth.
“We call ourselves the Cannes of fashion film (referring to the southern French town whose legendary cinema festival was founded in 1946),” Sweet said – “but what’s Cannes? It’s a city by a bay. A festival of that magnitude had to start somewhere, and Cannes was the place. I think of La Jolla the same way.”
But certain business developments on Fay Avenue couldn’t be unfolding at a better time, Sweet said. La Jolla Music Society’s Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center, at 7600 Fay, hopes to open in January of 2018, with Boffo Cinemas’ seven-screen boutique movie house set to open perhaps later this year. The prospects for some kind of festival tenancy, Sweet said, would fuel an unbelievable future.
He noted that the Sherwood, part of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego’s La Jolla campus,”is really, really going to wind down” as the museum reportedly retools the space. “Those two new venues and the festival – the stars would align.”
There’s a lot of that going around as the world redefines itself and its aesthete. Locally, that translates to an era wherein fashion takes on a character’s role in motion pictures. Stranger things have happened, Sweet might say. And La Jolla, he’d add, is wonderfully poised to let the strangeness in.
For more information, see ljfff.com.