Lecture-Changing Fashion Landscapes

Lecture-Changing Fashion Landscapes

Ethics

What is Ethics in Fashion?
- Exploitive Labour
- Environmental Damage
- Chemicals
- Waste
- Animal Cruelty

Circular economy
- A circular economy is an alternative linear economy (make, use, dispose) in which we keep resources in use for as long as possible, extract the maximum value from them whilst in use, then recover and regenerate products  and materials at the end of each service life. (Wrap 2018)

Sustainability

Closed loop system;

Examples of closed loop company strategies:

- Levis and H&M

Fashion Brands slower to adopt to closed loop
- Primark
- Luxury Brands;
- Farming animals for fur
- Difficult to trace some supply trains/accountability for production

Impacts
- Sustainability
- Climate
- Depletion of natural resources (animals, habitat, water)

Eco Fashion
- Fashion Sustainability
- People tree
- Patagonia
- UNMADE: niche knitwear-consumer can produce their own product
- Traid
- Oxfam hub batley; online vintage

Counterfeit Goods
- Luxury Market
- Countries and counterfeiting
- Creates problems with sales
- Further promotes unethical practice? (hidden manufacture of goods)

Social responsibility
- What we consume
- Why we consume
- What forms our consumer patterns
- Who is responsible for increased consumption
- Our understanding of product use and where product goes
- How our actions impact on others

Generational shifts
- Different consumers, consume in different ways
- Generation X; largely Bricks and Mortar, (highstreet)  with some online consumption
- Generation Y; largely online, with some Bricks and Mortar consumption
- Generation Z; born into the digital age
- Methods of marketing to consumers are continually shifting, due to the complex nature of the cross generational experience of interacting with and identifying product

Marketing Methodologies
- Bricks and Mortar type instituions; for example, John Lewis
- TV
- Loyalty cards/data collection
- Long routes to identifying and engaging their customer

Marketing Methodologies Online
- Uses cross sectional marketing/advertising
- Social Media
- Some terrestrial TV advertising
- Posters/digital bill boards
- Fast fashion social media cascade

High street retailer engaging the consumer
- Both digitally and physically
- Top Shop: online offers, as well as high street 'lock ins' for students

Generation X
- Brought up through physical shopping era
- Department stores
- High street brands
- Have tendency to be loyal to a brand and go off value
- Tend to reflect personal status through conspicuous consumption
- Focused on 'aspiration' product
- Some understanding and connection to online

Generation Y
- Cross over generation
- Technology occurred through their lifetime
- Much more connected to digital forums
- Primarily focused on online resources
- Not as brand loyal

Generation Z
- Born through the age of digital technology
- Immersed in digital as a way of life

Consumer shifts

Shift to online shopping;
- Comparing and contrasting product online
- Sourcing the best price from online comparison
- Social media; provides a platform to display product choice
- Online shopping has seen the shift of consuming fast fashion through faster cycles; see the product, buy the product, move onto the next look
Historically collections are bi annual, moved through to quarterly drops; fast fashion cycle has developed a 52 week a year scenario

Impact of on online versus highstreet

High street
- Same products different stores
- Increasingly less differentiation in product
- Product prices higher; retailers have to pay for space and so this is embedded in the retail price
- Physical act of going shopping; paying for transportation and parking
- Busier lives mean less time to spend seeking out the product on the high street

Can the high street fight back?

High street strategies to revive footfall
E.G
- Burberry; physical meets digital
- Adidas; working on interactive experiences in store

Now

Globilisation
- Materials
- Labour
- Sourced at low cost
- Industrialised methods of growing crops
- Habitat and environmental destruction

Futures
- Further digitisation
- Niche product
- Embedding of technologies
- Digitisation in fashion print/textiles
- 3D printed product
- Biometrics
- Textile grown from organisms