In Fashion chapter 1

CHAPTER 1: The Nature of Fashion

Webster’s fashion definition: prevailing custom, esage, or style

Fashion industries: businesses engaged in manufacturing the material and finished products used in the production of apparel and accessories for men, women, and children

Fashion business: includes all industries and services connected with fashion: design manufacturing, distribution, marketing, retailing, advertising, and consulting

Marketing: includes many different activities that identify consumer needs; develop good products; and price, distribute, and prompt thos products effectively so that they will sell easily.

  • Understood as practice of identifying a target market and satisfying the product and service needs of consumers

Merchandising: sales promotion as a comprehensive function, including market research, development of new products, coordination of manufacture and marketing, and effection advertising and selling

  • Refer to planning requires for right fashion-oriented merchandise at right time, right quantities, right prices, and right sales
  • Five Rs of merchandising -^

Misconceptions:

  • Designers and retailers dictate what the fashion will be and force upon consumers
  • Fashion acts as an influence on only women
  • Fashion is a mysterious and unpredictable force

Style: a characteristic or distinctive artistic expression or presentation

  • Architecture, sculpture, painting, politics, music, popular heroes, games, hobbies, ect.
  • In fashion: characteristic or distinctive appearance of a garment
  • Some styles names after period when originated

Fashion: style accepted and used by majority of a group at one time, no matter how small

  • Result of social emulation and acceptance

High fashion: new style accepted by limited number of fashion leader who want to be first to adopt change and innovation in fashion

  • Generally copied, mass produced, and sold at lower price

Mass fashion/volume fashion: styles widely accepted

  • Produces and sold in large quantities at affordable pricing

Design: particular or individual interpretation, version, or treatment of style

Style number: number for product identifying for manufacturing, ordering, and selling

  • Style number used rather than design number even though the design is being identified

Taste: prevailing opinion of what is and what is not appropriate for given occasion

  • Sensitivity to what is artistically pleasing and what is appropriate for specific occasion
  • Fashion cycle has become shorter and repeated themselves in shorter space of time

Classic: style or design that satisfies a basic need and remains in general fashion acceptance for an extended period of time

Fad: fashion swept into popularity, affect limited part of population, the quickly disappears

Trend: general direction or movement

Components of Fashion Design

Silhouette: overall outline or contour (shape or form)

Details: individual elements that give a silhouette its form

  • Trimmings, skirt, pant length, width, shoulder, waist, sleeve

Texture: look/feel of material

Color key factor in apparel selection for both genders; important in advertising, packaging, and store decor

Fashion cycle: rise, wide popularity, and subsequent decline in acceptance of style

  • Represented by bell-shaped curve

Stages:

Introduction

  • Almost always higher-priced merchandise
  • Produced in small quantities

Rise

  • Design accepted by increasing number of customers
  • Knockoffs introduced
  • Adaptations: designs that have dominant feature of the style that inspired but claim to be not exact copies

Culmination

  • Height of popularity
  • Mass-produced, distribute and sold at lower prices
  • Can become classic here

Decline

  • All fashions end in excess
  • No longer willing to buy at original price
  • Production stops or slowly comes to a halt
  • markdowns

Obsolescence

  • Styles found only in thrift store, garage sale, flea markets

Fast fashion: keeping fashion fresh

  • Zara, H&M, Uniqlo

Breaks in the Cycle

  • Normal flow of fashion cycle can be broken or interrupted
  • Can be unpredictable weather or change in group acceptance
  • Can also be war, economic depression, or natural disaster
  • Broken cycle usually picks up where it stopped

Fashion has a consumer buying cycle and consumer use cycle

  • Consumer buying rises in direct correlation to consumer use
  • As fashion reaches peak, consumer buying tends to decline faster than use