The search for truth
By Paul Blomfield,
[FASHION]
The fashion world is finding new ways to deliver speed and integrity
The uninitiated would be surprised that a conference on fashion can occur that doesn’t once talk about the ‘colours of the season’, whether ‘black is back’ and what the top models eat for breakfast (more than once, anyway) but at the Melbourne Fashion Festival Business Seminar, billed as “the largest professional development forum for the creative industries”, the discussion is firmly placed in the complex issues of global consumer trends, market segmentation and, frankly, how to profit from fashion.
Despite the outward frivolity, fashion is a serious business that is moving faster than ever before. Issues like sustainability, speed to market and how to create an engaging customer experience are at the forefront of people’s minds—and the speed of change is leaving many fashion businesses breathless in the chase.
“Globally, shopping is becoming an art,” announced Theo Theophanous, Victoria’s Minister for Industry and State Development, who opened the festival. “Browsing, selection and purchase of commodities is one of the defining activities of modern urban life,” he said—bold words from a politician who didn’t buy his own suit, which was on loan from retail giant Myer for the occasion.
Keynote speaker and fashion consultant Jean-Jacques Picart (who has worked with Christian Lacroix and luxury products giant LMVH) believes the fashion and broader creative industries are on the brink of a major shift, including the way fashion is produced, marketed and reported by the media.
After an era that he describes as “an orgy of consumerism”, people have started to get bored. On the one hand luxury brands have become more accessible than ever before while at the same time mass-market brands are offering more and more glamour.
“With so much to choose from,” says Picart, “consumers have become blasé and resistant and have started to look elsewhere for new products to be special and more original.”
He says the children of the first customers of Tom Ford, Galliano, Dolce Gabbana and Versace are now customers themselves, “and you can bet they won’t be dressed like their parents!”
Picart reckons that to counter this boredom, designer brands will have to rapidly reinvent themselves to be younger, more catchy, more imaginative, but also “more respectful”. “Consumers are happy to pay a high price as long as they can see the value,” he says. “But they expect more honesty and integrity from the brands they love.”
It used to be simpler—clothing was either expensive and fashionable or cheap and fast. But Jane Shepherdson, ex-brand director of Topshop and maven of discount fashion, says that in her business, the hunger for new ideas and new design is now the most important driver.
Topshop feeds the fashion speed-up, insisting on multiple daily deliveries, creating what Shepherdson calls a “dynamic of desperation” that has customers sometimes visiting a store more than once a day to see the latest looks.
Desperation indeed! Topshop’s Oxford Circus flagship is a four-level, 90,000-square-foot behemoth that draws an average of 28,000 people a day and generates sales approaching NZ$300 million a year. It ferries in goods by the truckload, with 30 deliveries of fresh merchandise a week and 7,000 distinct looks each season.
So in that kind of hothouse, how can you create that feeling of authenticity? Topshop’s answer is to devote areas of the store to the emerging designers Picart speaks of, as well as working with young, hip designers such as Stella McCartney to create lower-priced ‘diffusion’ versions of their designer brands—ironically making the discount department store an important profit centre for top-end designers and vice-versa.
So despite speaking at opposite ends of the fashion market, Picart and Shepherdson agree that the imperative for the future of fashion retailing, and in fact the entire creative sector, is to meld these two imperatives—to somehow inspire and seduce the customer with design, quality and value, while working at breakneck speed.
Picart sums up the challenge: “My strongly felt intuition for the fashion of tomorrow is that that the consumer will become much more demanding. It will not be enough that the product is beautiful, but it must also express brand identity in every extent and it must have legitimacy.
“It is easy in fashion to do a good ‘fake’ job. Truth is much harder and rare and valuable.”
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