As part of our course half of our class goes on a field trip to New york and the other half goes to Hong Kong. I would’ve been happy to go to either destination but I was lucky enough to get to go to New York - and it was fashion week!
The purpose of the trip is to get to meet with some companies in our industry, to network and to find out what is happening in the local market.
We visited 11 Companies: Moet & Hennessey, Van Cleef & Arpels, Coach, Calvin Klein, Polo Ralph Lauren, Tods, Rent the Runway, Elizabeth Arden and Saks 5th Avenue, Bond Creative Search and Fahrenheit 212. All of the visits were really interesting and were all quite different from one another so we learnt a lot.
We stayed at The Standard Hotel in the Meat Packing District. http://www.standardhotels.com/new-york-city/ It is a really funky hotel but during fashion week the service was notably worse than after it was over. There were lots of really fun restaurants and shops nearby and seemed like it was only 5 mins from anywhere we wanted to go. The Standard runs above the Highline – the old disused train track which has been turned into a park but it was still too cold for us to really want to sit there for any period of time.
We were there for one week, which seemed hardly long enough but any longer and it would’ve probably killed me due to the running around to appointments and trying to sample some of New York’s best restaurants and bars.
Some of my favourite places for the week:
Pastis http://www.pastisny.com
Lavo http://lavony.com/
Morimoto www.morimotonyc.com
Buddahkan http://www.buddakannyc.com/
Bagatelle http://www.bistrobagatelle.com/ for Brunch
Butter http://www.butterrestaurant.com/ Restaurant with good Club Downstairs good on Monday Nights
Whilst we didn’t get the impression many of the companies were hiring it was still a really great trip and worthwhile for us to learn more about the U.S Market.
