Fashion is synonymous with temporary, regular changes in a variety of products every season. To handle this diversity in fashion products, companies must follow specific trends.
Dealing With Trends and Products
The complex concept of fashion entails diverse trends and products that change every six months or more. To clarify this concept, we explain its underlying aggregation.
In particular, fashion exists as such, independent of any specific product or brand. As luxe, fashion transcends products and brands by involving a dynamic process, with frequent, regular changes, mainly characterized by trends.
Today, customers can find fashion apparel in supermarket. Fashion does not require a brand, a logo to exist. Fashion exists by itself. (Product Manager, Women’s Fashion Brand)
In a fashion context, a trend implies a unifying topic of interest, irrespective of the products to which it applies.1 A trend also is a temporary orientation based on a new design, a particular emphasis on a color, a distinct fabric, or a different pattern as Figure 3.1 details.
Figure 3.1 Fashion trends
A fashion trend can include one of these four elements or some combination. Figure 3.1 also details some examples of each component; a geometric design could be a major trend in fashion collections, as was the case for Courreges in the 1960s or Paco Rabanne in 2013, with dresses designed with triangular shapes and, tops with accentuated, long sleeves in oval shapes.
A fabric also can be the dominant element for a collection trend, such as velvet for Tom Ford’s, Alexander Wang’s, and Valentino’s Winter 2013 collections. The designers emphasized this fabric trend in designs of dresses, pants, suits, coats, shirts, and so on. Their fashion shows clearly exhibited the prevalence of this fabric in their collections.
A pattern can also guide the design of a collection and help characterize its trend. Tartan, for example, is an important pattern used in many fashion collections, such that it appears in different designs, fabrics, and colors for Yves Saint Laurent, Celine, and Versace. The different window displays for various brands suggest the sense that tartan is everywhere, which implies that it is a new trend for the season.
In terms of color, we note that navy blue and pink both have been called “the new black” in recent collections, such that they appear on different designs and with different fabrics. These colors were significantly present in Celine’s, Chloe’s, and Valentino’s Winter 2013 collections.
Thus, a trend can prioritize, for example, a design (geometric shapes) and a color (bright), or both (geometric shapes in bright colors). All the elements (design–color–fabric–pattern) are crucial to the success of a collection, but depending on the story told by the designer or brand, one element sometimes dominates. Thus, in Winter 2013, many women’s fashion collections featured tartan patterns and navy blue and pink colors. However, Emporio Armani and Donna Karan both used their 2013 women’s collections to emphasize colors (black, navy blue), fabrics (tweed), and patterns (stripes) that evoked masculine trends. Although fashion encompasses various trends and products every season, many trends appear similar across different designers’ collections. How do they all get the same idea of creating pants in a tartan pattern or pink outerwear?
The design of fashion collections begins 18 months before their production, which requires the designers to anticipate future trends. To help them in this process of inventing, discovering trend, forecasting agencies work to gather information about emergent trends. Well-known agencies such as Nelly Rodi, Peclers, and Trendstop share information with many designers, brands, and retailers about prevailing trends they have noticed throughout the world. Thus, they can announce that flashy yellow will be a must for the next collection or that high heels are no longer fashionable, so shoe collections should stake their reputations on flats.
Many fashion companies instead use their own, in-house trend departments. While creating books each season, they encompass and illustrate what they have noticed in social, cultural, artistic, and economic arenas worldwide. Wal-Mart also has its own trend office in New York forecasting future trends.2 Fashion weeks, held semi-annually in Paris, Milan, London, Madrid, New York, and Tokyo, provide additional sources of information and inspiration for fashion companies. Trend books and fashion shows help designers choose fabrics, designs, patterns, and colors that reflect the latest fashion trends. Because the information available to fashion managers generally comes from the same forecasting agencies and fashion shows, their collections often reflect similar trends. Thus, consumers see pastel colors and flower patterns introduced by multiple fashion brand collections during the same season.
I look everywhere for inspiration. I go to fashion shows, I have trend books and then I design my own collection following the trends created by haute couture designers. (Designer, Men’s Fashion Brand)
Beyond these trends, fashion ends with products. A fashion product belongs to the specific trend it displays, whether in terms of design, color, or other aspects that match the current trend. A product becomes fashionable because it matches the actual, temporary trend, causing many consumers to adopt it for some period of time. Each product follows trends and changes, so a fashionable pant might be oversized one season and slim for the next. The product’s design, color, fabric, or pattern will change to match fashionable trend.
In contrast, a classic or nonfashion product tends to maintain the same designs, colors, and patterns, which change only slightly with different collections. The main difference between a fashion product and a classic one is found in the time resistance these ones have. Rather than following fashion trends or regular, cyclic, ephemeral changes, classic products resist changes over time. People recognize these products by their longevity, season after season, such as a navy blue blazer for men or a beige trench coat for women.
Although fashion products and trends remain fashionable for only limited times, the concept of fashion persists over time. Thus, fashion, a brief, regular, and cyclic idea spans different trends, encompassing multiple products. Figure 3.2 illustrates this point.
Figure 3.2 Fashion, products, and trends
Fashion refers to multiple trends and products in designers’ collections, usually characterized by novelty in each season, though this novelty aspect should not be confused with the concept of innovation.
Fashion Products Versus Innovative Products
Before establishing the difference between a fashion product and an innovation, we recall the specificities of a fashion product, which differ from any other product in two main ways. First, fashion companies dictate customers’ choices through their assortments and availability. A customer searching for a wide-legged, high-waist pant when the fashion is all about skinny, low-waist trousers is likely to be out of luck or he or she will have to visit specific stores or brands. Whereas firms in other sectors usually try to offer a wide, deep assortment of products to help customers find what they want, this is not the strategy adopted in fashion. Fashion assortments generally are not very deep, because fashion managers anticipate fading trends will be replaced quickly with new ones. By creating and designing new products, fashion companies establish a rhythm of change: They prompt the impulse and shoppers follow. In other industries, managers tend to offer what customers demand and adjust their offers over time to meet customers’ needs.
Second, fashion creates the expectation of change. Fashion shoppers are aware of and anticipate constant modifications in trends. Changes are expected several times a year in fashion. The need to update is part of the fashion shopping experience. Moreover, fashion companies generate new interest by renewing their assortments. In contrast, managers in other industries bet on long life cycles for their products and use strategies to make them last longer, for many years if possible. Oreo cookies have remained on the market constantly since their introduction in 1912, and loyal customers do not want to be surprised by any changes. When other sectors introduce changes to encourage customers to visit stores, it generally takes more time, though they might be following some fashion trends. For example, the colors and fabrics used in house decor, painting colors, curtains, and furniture follow changing fashion trends. Today, there are many interior design shows in Paris, New York, and Milan, where new trends are exposed. However, such changes take more time to implement than shifts in apparel and accessories, largely due to the prices of these items.
Although fashion implies new products and items that were not in customers’ wardrobes or in fashion collections previously, and that we did not have last season in our wardrobe. But the aspect of newness should not be confused with innovation. Four main reasons underlie this distinction between a fashion product and an innovation.
First, we consider the definition of these concepts. Innovation theories define it by the degree with which a person decides to innovate, independent of others’ experiments. In contrast, fashion requires others’ judgments, approbation, and adoption to exist. Fashion relies on the dependency that exists in decision and adoption processes, and to diffuse, fashion requires verbal and nonverbal communication and interactions with others. Others’ judgments are critical; for example, followers wait for a peak of acceptance to occur before they decide to adopt fashion products. The attention they pay to others differs greatly from the independence that marks innovation decision process. The search for conformity, through the lever of fashion products, does not apply to innovation. Moreover, people purchase fashion apparel and accessories for two main reasons:
• to approximate others’ choices, or
• to differentiate themselves from others.3
That is, shoppers try to conform to peers’ norms, but many fashion consumers also seek to express their need for uniqueness. They not only want to be fashionable, but also want to maintain their own identity and fashion look. Conformity with other fashion consumers is important, but so is the search for unique and original fashion products. Even while being recognized as fashionable and accepted by their group, people do not want to be indistinguishable from everyone else. By adding accessories to their collection, or mixing some trends, fashion companies can offer this uniqueness to their customers while allowing them to stay conform to their social environment. Fast-fashion retailers support this dual purpose effectively by providing vast color, pattern, and fashion product variety to match each season’s trends.
Fashion customers may have different goals, levels of conformity, differentiation, and uniqueness, but they all relate to the social environment, unlike the independence associated with innovation.
Second, an innovation implies a new product, an invention that did not exist in the past and was not available to customers before. In the case of fashion products though, we often find some similarities with previous collections. Fashion appears in cycles, and some products reappear, as aptly exemplified by the miniskirt. Truly fashionable in the 1960s, this fashion staple reappeared as a must wear in 2003 fashion collections. An innovation is invented and then adopted or not; it does not follow any adoption–readoption cycle, as fashion products do.
Third, visibility distinguishes fashion products from innovations. On the one hand, fashion products are public and visible, and on the other, an innovation might or might not be visible, and this criterion is not a specific characteristic of an innovation, as it is for fashion products. The microwave was a great innovation in the mid-1970s, but as a private product used in the home, its visibility was minimal. Other innovations, such as smartphones, are highly visible—though even in this case, technological features usually dominate these products’ visibility characteristics.
The last point that differentiates a fashion product from an innovation is their diffusion. Innovation does not always achieve wide commercial diffusion; this spread is a necessity for fashion products. Fashion requires adoption of its products by a large number of customers; innovation does not. Diffusion is part of the very existence of fashion. A product becomes fashionable only through its acceptance, adoption, and recognition by many people. This spread and recognition designate it as a fashion. On the contrary, an innovation can embody substantial technical progress without achieving vast commercial diffusion.
Therefore, a fashion product is not an innovation nor just a new product or a nonclassic one. Fashion refers to new, symbolic, visible, social products that allow people to communicate and express who they have decided to be.
Summary
• Fashion encompasses multiples trends created in collections, based on different colors, fabrics, designs, and patterns.
• For every trend, a variety of products are designed every season.
• Fashion products differ from any other products and should not be confused with innovations.