Fashion Merchandise Consists of Items That Are in Continuous Demand Over an Extended Time Period.

Style retailing, marketing, and merchandising

Once the wearing apparel accept been designed and manufactured, they need to be sold. But how are clothes to get from the manufacturer to the customer? The business of ownership clothes from manufacturers and selling them to customers is known as retail. Retailers make initial purchases for resale iii to six months earlier the customer is able to buy the clothes in-store.

fashion retail
Customers shopping for habiliment at a retail store.
Comstock—Jupiterimages/Thinkstock

Fashion marketing is the process of managing the flow of merchandise from the initial pick of designs to be produced to the presentation of products to retail customers, with the goal of maximizing a company's sales and profitability. Successful style marketing depends on understanding consumer desire and responding with advisable products. Marketers use sales tracking data, attention to media coverage, focus groups, and other ways of ascertaining consumer preferences to provide feedback to designers and manufacturers about the type and quantity of appurtenances to be produced. Marketers are thus responsible for identifying and defining a style producer's target customers and for responding to the preferences of those customers.

Marketing operates at both the wholesale and retail levels. Companies that do not sell their own products at retail must place those products at wholesale prices in the easily of retailers, such as boutiques, department stores, and online sales companies. They utilize fashion shows, catalogs, and a sales force armed with sample products to find a shut fit between the manufacturer's products and the retailer'due south customers. Marketers for companies that do sell their own products at retail are primarily concerned with matching products to their own client base. At both the wholesale and the retail level, marketing also involves promotional activities such as impress and other media ad aimed at establishing make recognition and brand reputation for various characteristics such equally quality, low toll, or trendiness.

Closely related to marketing is merchandising, which attempts to maximize sales and profitability past inducing consumers to buy a company'due south products. In the standard definition of the term, merchandising involves selling the correct product, at the right toll, at the right time and place, to the correct customers. Fashion merchandisers must thus use marketers' information about client preferences equally the ground for decisions about such things as stocking appropriate merchandise in adequate but not excessive quantities, offering items for auction at bonny but withal profitable prices, and discounting overstocked goods. Merchandising too involves presenting goods attractively and accessibly through the employ of store windows, in-store displays, and special promotional events. Merchandising specialists must be able to respond to surges in demand by rapidly acquiring new stocks of the favoured product. An inventory-tracking estimator program in a department store in London, for case, can trigger an automatic society to a production facility in Shanghai for a certain quantity of garments of a specified type and size to be delivered in a thing of days.

Past the early 21st century the Internet had get an increasingly important retail outlet, creating new challenges (e.grand., the inability for customers to try on clothes prior to buy, the need for facilities designed to handle clothing returns and exchanges) and opening upward new opportunities for merchandisers (e.thousand., the ability to provide customers with shopping opportunities 24 hours per day, affording access to rural customers). In an era of increasingly diverse shopping options for retail customers and of intense price contest amongst retailers, merchandising has emerged as ane of the cornerstones of the modern fashion manufacture.

Fashion shows

Fashion designers and manufacturers promote their clothes not simply to retailers (such as manner buyers) but too to the media (fashion journalists) and direct to customers. Already in the late 19th century, Paris couture houses began to offering their clients individual viewings of the latest fashions. By the early 20th century, not simply couture houses only also section stores regularly put on way shows with professional models. In false of Parisian couturiers, ready-to-clothing designers in other countries likewise began mounting mode shows for an audience that combined private clients, journalists, and buyers. In the belatedly 20th and early on 21st centuries, fashion shows became more elaborate and theatrical, were held in larger venues with specially synthetic elevated runways ("catwalks") for the models, and played an increasingly prominent role in the presentation of new fashions.

By the early 21st century, fashion shows were a regular role of the fashion calendar. The couture shows, held twice a year in Paris (in January and July) by the official syndicate of couture designers (comprising the most sectional and expensive fashion houses), present outfits that might exist ordered by potential clients just which often are intended more to showcase the designers' ideas well-nigh fashion trends and brand epitome. Ready-to-wear mode shows, separately presenting both women'due south and men'due south wear, are held during jump and autumn "Style Weeks," of which the most important take place in Paris, Milan, New York, and London. Even so, there are literally dozens of other Fashion Weeks internationally—from Tokyo to São Paolo. These shows, of much greater commercial importance than the couture shows, are aimed primarily at manner journalists and at buyers for department stores, wholesalers, and other major markets. Extensively covered in the media, fashion shows both reverberate and advance the direction of fashion change. Photographs and videos of fashion shows are instantaneously transmitted to mass-market producers who produce inexpensive habiliment copied from or inspired past the runway designs.

Zac Posen fashion show — Zac Posen fashion testify
A model on the runway at Zac Posen's manner bear witness during Manner Calendar week in New York City, September 2010.
© K2 images/Shutterstock.com

Media and marketing

Media of all kinds are essential to the marketing of fashion. The first dedicated fashion magazines appeared in England and French republic in the belatedly 18th century. In the 19th century, fashion magazines—such as the French La Mode Illustrée, the British Lady's Realm, and the American Godey's Lady'southward Book—proliferated and flourished. Featuring manufactures, hand-coloured illustrations (known every bit fashion plates), and advertisements, style magazines—together with other developments such as the sewing auto, section stores, and set-to-clothing habiliment produced in standard sizes—played a pregnant function in promoting the democratization of manner in the modernistic era. The development of constructive and cheap methods of reproducing photographs in print media in the early on 20th century led to the rise of style photography and of heavily illustrated fashion magazines such equally Vogue. Magazine advertising rapidly became a primary marketing tool for the way industry.

The creation of movie theatre newsreels—short motion pictures of current events—and the ascension of goggle box made it possible for people all over the world to see fashion shows and to imitate the fashionable habiliment worn by celebrities. The authorization of visual media connected in the Net age, with fashion blogs emerging as an increasingly of import ways of disseminating mode information. Cherry-carpet events such equally awards ceremonies provide an opportunity for celebrities to be photographed wearing designer fashions, thus providing valuable publicity to the designers.

World fashion

About people in the world today wear what can be described as "world fashion," a simplified and very low-cost version of Western clothing, often a T-shirt with pants or a skirt, manufactured on a mass scale. However, there are as well numerous smaller and specialized fashion industries in various parts of the globe that cater to specific national, regional, ethnic, or religious markets. Examples include the design, production, and marketing of saris in India and of boubous in Senegal. These industries operate in parallel with the global fashion industry on a minor and localized scale.

One pregnant development in the field of ethno-religious dress was widespread adoption of the hijab (religiously appropriate attire) among Muslim women not only in the Middle East simply throughout the Islamic earth in the early 21st century. With millions of Muslim women living in numerous countries worldwide, veiling norms and styles are myriad. For some, veiling can mean a withdrawal from the vicissitudes of way altogether. Other women, including those for whom small garments are obligatory in public, may wear fashionable European styles underneath their more bourgeois street attire. Still others have sought looks that are themselves both chichi and modest. At the offset of the 21st century the international market for modest fashions was growing. Muslim and non-Muslim designers produced a widening option of appropriate and fashionable looks, and numerous fashion blogs and magazines targeting Muslim women became bachelor. Some designers and manufacturers confronted not simply the aesthetics of small-scale attire but also the practical challenges associated with bourgeois wearing apparel, as seen in efforts to produce modest however effective swimwear and sportswear for Muslims.

Halima Aden wearing a "burkini"
American model Halima Aden wearing a "burkini" while competing in the preliminary bathing suit round of the Miss Minnesota United states of america pageant in Burnsville, Minnesota, 2016.
Leila Navidi—Minneapolis Star Tribune/TNS/Newscom

The fashion system

The fashion manufacture forms function of a larger social and cultural phenomenon known as the "manner system," a concept that embraces not only the business organisation of style but also the art and arts and crafts of fashion, and not only production simply also consumption. The fashion designer is an of import cistron, but and so also is the individual consumer who chooses, buys, and wears wearing apparel, besides every bit the language and imagery that contribute to how consumers think about style. The fashion system involves all the factors that are involved in the unabridged process of style change. Some factors are intrinsic to fashion, which involves variation for the sake of novelty (e.1000., when hemlines have been low for a while, they volition ascension). Other factors are external (e.g., major historical events such as wars, revolutions, economic booms or busts, and the feminist movement). Individual trendsetters (e.g., Madonna and Diana, princess of Wales) as well play a role, as do changes in lifestyle (due east.g., new sports, every bit when skateboarding was introduced in the 1960s) and music (due east.m., rock and roll, hip-hop). Way is a circuitous social phenomenon, involving sometimes conflicting motives, such equally creating an private identity and existence role of a group, emulating way leaders and rebelling confronting conformity. The manner industry thrives by beingness various and flexible enough to gratify any consumer's desire to embrace or fifty-fifty to reject fashionability, however that term might be defined.

Valerie Steele John S. Major The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica