LECTURE ON CHANGING FASHION LANDSCAPES

CHANGING FASHION LANDSCAPES: ETHICS:o  Who made it
o  Where it came from
o  Impacts on these people
o  Exploitative labour
o  Environmental damage
o  Chemicals
o  Waste
o  Animal cruelty 
 A CIRCULAR ECONOMY:o  A circular economy is an alternative to a traditional 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. 
 SUSTAINABILITY:Close looped system:Examples of ‘closed loop’ company strategies:o  Levi’s
o  H&M
Fashion brands slower to adapt ‘closed loop’:o  Primark
Luxury brands:o  Farming animals for fur
o  Difficult to trace some supply chains/accountability for production
Impacts:o  Sustainability
o  Climate
o  Depletion of natural resources (animals, habitat, water and so on)
 ECO-FASHION:o  Fashion sustainability
o  People tree
o  Patagonia
o  UNMADE: niche knitwear – consumer can produce their own product
o  Traid
o  Oxfam hub Batley; Online vintage
 COUNTERFEIT GOODS:o  Luxury market
o  Countries and counterfeiting
o  Creates problems with sales, profit and the kudos of brands in question
o  Further promotes unethical practice? (‘hidden’ manufacture goods)
 SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY:o  What we consumer
o  Why we consume
o  What forms our consumer patterns
o  Who is responsible for increased consumption
o  Our understanding of product use and where product goes
o  How our actions impact on others, (links back to ethics)
 GENERATION SHIFTS:o  Different consumers, consume in different ways
o  Generation X; largely bricks and mortar, (high street) with some online consumption
o  Generation Y; largely online, with some bricks and mortar consumption
o  Generation Z; born into the digital age
o  Methods of marketing to consumer are continually shifting, due to the complex nature of the cross generational experience of interacting with and identifying product 
 MARKETING METHODOLOGIES:o  Bricks and mortar type institutions; for example, John Lewis
o  Television
o  Loyalty cards
o  Long routes to identifying and engaging their consumer
Online:o  Uses cross sectional marketing/advertising
o  Social media
o  Some terrestrial TV advertising, (example: BooHoo.com)
o  Posters/digital bill boards/taxi’s (again in the case of BooHoo.com)
o  Fast fashion social media cascade
High street retailers engaging the consumer:o  Both digitally and physically
o  Topshop: online offers, as well as high street ‘lock ins’ for students for example

CONSUMER SHIFTS:o  Comparing and contrasting product online
o  Sourcing the best price from online comparison
o  social media; provides a platform to ‘display’ product choice
o  Online shopping has seen the shift of consuming fast fashion  through faster cycles; see the product, buy the product, dispose of the product 
 IMPACT OF ONLINE VS HIGHSTREET:o  Same products different stores
o  Increasingly less differentiation from product
Online:o  More convenience
o  Diverse choice
o  Drill down on product and find the cheapest price
 CAN THE HIGH STREET FIGHT BACK:High street strategies to revive football:o  E.g. Burberry – physical meets digital
o  E.g. Adidas – working on interactive experiences in store
 NOW:Globalisation:o  Materials
o  Labour
o  Sources at low cost
o  Industrialised growing of crops
 FUTURES:o  Further digitization (autonomous design)
o  Niche product (emotional connectivity)
o  Embedding of technologies
o  Digitization in fashion print/textiles
o  3D printed product
o  Biometrics
o  Textiles grown from organisms