AP Interview: French Fashion House Ungaro Rings in Change With New Team

PARIS (AP) -- Emanuel Ungaro is a label in transition, the new president of the French fashion house says, with a new owner, new designer and new management after the departure of its founder and closure of its loss-making haute couture business.

President and CEO Mounir Moufarrige has made a specialty out of reviving semi-dormant brands, and said he was treating his new role at the fashion house as business as usual.
"It's a phase that you go through," he told The Associated Press in an interview Thursday before Paris fashion week. "The main objective is to talk a different language to our target consumer, which we think can be younger."

The Lebanese-born businessman's achievements have been notable, including turning the Montblanc pen into a cult object and hiring then-unknown designer Stella McCartney at Chloe, which has since become the must-have label for the under-40 set.

Moufarrige hopes he can work the same magic at Ungaro, which was sold by Italy's Ferragamo Group last year to San Francisco-based high-tech entrepreneur Asim Abdullah.
One of the new owner's first moves was to dump designer Vincent Darre, who had been in place for just one year, and replace him with Peter Dundas, previously with Roberto Cavalli in Milan.
Famed for its bold prints and Grecian draping, Ungaro dresses Hollywood stars including Halle Berry and Cameron Diaz, but has had little impact on street styles.

"What happened to this house in my eyes is that it just slowly aged, and in slowly aging you lose part of the electricity that you had before," said Moufarrige, who joined Ungaro six months ago.
Dundas garnered generally positive reviews for his first catwalk show in March, but buyers are waiting for confirmation of his talent when the spring-summer ready-to-wear collection is unveiled in Paris next week.

Moufarrige, who half-jokingly described his target customer as "the mistress," said he wanted the clothes to sizzle.
"The ingredients which should not be there are the words elegant and sophisticated, those are passe words. The key word is humor," he said.
"In the luxury business, it's not by choice that you have to be elegant, sophisticated and modern. That is an obligation. It goes without saying that you have to be that, but that's not enough," he said.
The brand has only a short time to convince its audience, he said. "People lose interest, and you've got to finance it as well."
But while fashion is a risky venture, the rewards can be huge. The customer base for luxury goods is expanding as the developing world's new rich swell the ranks of potential clients, joined in the West by fashion-savvy baby boomers and teens.

Moufarrige said he saw plenty of potential for Ungaro to expand not only in Russia, China and India, but also in traditional markets.
"There's still a lot of expansion to be done in Europe, Japan and the U.S. for us because you only need to look at the sales records of luxury companies over the past five years and the growth rates they've been getting," he said.
Moufarrige said that, to stay ahead of the pack, his preferred market research consisted of eavesdropping on shoppers in the street. He dismissed research about consumer trends in 2007 and 2008 as "history."
"You've got to think about 2009, because what's going to happen in 2009 is already happening now, the undercurrent is already there," he said. "You have to reinvent yourself faster than the consumer is reinventing himself. That is the key."