Fashion startups, boutiques planning pool party.

Magic, one of the largest trade shows in the world, is where established apparel suppliers go to curry favor with brand-name retailers.

The Pool Trade Show is the opposite. It's a trade show for fashion startups courting small, trend-setting boutiques. (Its name draws from the idea of "pooling efforts.")

Now, L.A.-based Pool will hold its first full-scale show this month since it was discovered by Magic owner, New York-based Advanstar Communications Inc., which purchased Pool last year. Pool continues to be run locally.

The show is being held July 17-19 at a big-time venue--New York's Jacob Javits Center--simultaneously with Project, another Advanstar-owned property that features menswear brands. That will allow retail store buyers to easily attend both events. And as buyer traffic flow increases, that should foster greater name recognition of Pool.

"We are looking to be something that is more advantageous to the buyers," said Mindy Wiener, the Pool Trade Show's director of operations. "There is a lot of trade shows in the apparel industry, but nobody is addressing the lifestyle issue, It is filling a void that the retailers and exhibitors tell us is there."

Without privately-held Advanstar's backing. Wiener said Pool would have had difficulty funding the East Coast show and might not have been able to secure space at Javits, where 200 exhibitors will show their stuff. (Pool normally conducts seasonal shows in Las Vegas with about 500 exhibitors.)

Wiener said Advanstar's acquisition hasn't otherwise spurred too many obvious changes to the Pool Trade Show. She said the Pool Trade Show staff, now at 10 in a 10,000square-foot warehouse in Los Angeles, still controls the artistic vision. And Pool remains focused on new designers creating lifestyle products. One big change though: the starting price for exhibitors has risen to $4,000 from $2,500.

Cody De Backer, head of in-house sales for GrnAppleTree Clothing in Los Angeles, which has been exhibiting at Pool since it began in 2001, doesn't anticipate a dramatic retooling of Pool. "All the people in charge are intelligent enough to see that what they had worked, and they are going to keep it," he said.

Advanstar's interest in the Pool Trade Show stemmed from its desire to focus more sharply on the company's fashion stronghold. Last year, the company dumped non-core assets in the travel, information technology, home entertainment and beauty fields, while picking up Pool and Project, as well as the Off-Road Expo.

Denyse Selesnick, president of International Trade Information Inc., a Woodland Hills-based trade show management company, said Advanstar has been careful to join forces with properties that bolster its core business.

"It would be a natural for them to look at where there is a vacant area in the marketplace and fill it," she said. "Obviously, they feel it (Pool) is a good complement to what they are already doing."

In the first quarter ended March 31, Advanstar saw its net income rise to $15.1 million from $6.1 million in the same period a year earlier. Its revenue was up 18 percent to $107 million, partially as a result of the acquisitions.