There was a launch party Tuesday evening for the CADD Art Fair. CADD is the Contemporary Art Dealers of Dallas, a group that broke off from the Dallas Art Dealers' Association (DADA) back in 2006. The fair is May 19 – 20, so this party, I suppose, was intended to get us worked up or softened up for the event itself. There was champagne, wine, and sushi, but for the hour or so I was there, no one made any kind of presentation or distributed any promotional material about the fair.
The real focus of the evening was the location. LFT, a new fashion emporium on Victory Park, hosted the event along with PaperCity Magazine. LFT I learned stands for Lifestyle Fashion Terminal, a pretty uninspired name for an ambitious shop. This is 30,000 very well-appointed square feet of luxury fashion retail. Supposedly furniture and “art” — I can't resist the quotation marks – will become part of the mix, but they have only been opened three weeks and for now clothes are about all that is on view. They must be cutting edge because I only recognized maybe three labels, and one of those was Lacoste. I also have to admit that since I started getting my second growth about ten years ago I have more or less removed myself from the world of designer fashion. I think the only thing that might have fit me in the men's department at LFT were the cuff links.
Boutique shopping is destination shopping – I doubt that LFT expects a lot of walk-ins from people on the way to Maverick games at the American Airlines Stadium down the street – but they have their work cut out for them getting the word out and getting people to actually find their way into what is still the uninviting sinkhole that is Victory Park. Of course so much is still under construction down there that you can't get a sense of what it might become, but I worry that a retailer like LFT is just too far ahead of the curve to do more than struggle for the next several years. I might buy those cuff links when they go on sale.
