Fashion industry: where does fashion come from, the characteristics of fashion
How does it happen that trends are repeated in the collections of different designers – do they agree in advance? And if there weren't all these fashion houses and numerous clothing manufacturers, then there wouldn’t be fashion either, and everyone would go the same way? How did fashion appear: did it exist in the old days or is it a new invention? The answers to these questions make us look at the frivolous fickle phenomenon with more respect.
In the era of the late Middle Ages in Western Europe, an unprecedented situation arose until then: there were a lot of all kinds of cuts and names of the costume. Representatives of the upper classes were no longer content with simple and uniform clothes that remained unchanged for a long time. In accordance with the new trend, every self-respecting person of noble birth tried to stand out and in every possible way emphasize his merits in accordance with the then standards of beauty.
The alleged reason for the emergence of such costume diversity is the weakening of the influence of church dogmas. In the spiritual culture, a place is found for earthly, worldly values, which means that the history of the development of fashion begins to go in a new direction. There is a cult of the Beautiful Lady, court etiquette, courtly literature. Bodily beauty is no longer considered a sinful phenomenon, and they seek to emphasize it with a variety of outfits.
The rules for combining different items of clothing in one suit began to be called "fashion" (from Latin modus – measure, image, method, rule, norm). These rules, the characteristics of fashion, were created by aristocrats for aristocrats, but wealthy citizens began to imitate them. Such a violation of class norms caused a wave of prohibitions. It got ridiculous: in state decrees regarding the fashion industry, the length of the train, the height of the headdress, the features of the cut and decor allowed for representatives of different classes were regulated. This was the birth of fashion in European civilization.
Since its inception, fashion has played the role of a social marker. For a long time it separated the aristocrats from the commoners. Inside the high society, their trendsetters gradually emerged, mostly with great political weight. So, in France, during the reign of the infant king Louis XIV, semi-children's clothing became popular, and the courtiers wore it with all seriousness, thereby expressing loyal feelings. The influence of fashion forced to show their belonging to a group and loyalty to it.
This function is still preserved. Many sociologists consider the need to express one's belonging to a certain social group to be the generator, the engine, the main characteristic of fashion. According to this theory, no one invents fashion. How did fashion come about? It arose on its own as a kind of social phenomenon.
In favor of this theory of the history of the development of fashion is the observation of groups of teenagers. It is extremely important for them to be accepted in the peer group. Teenagers are united in groups according to different criteria: fans of musical groups and trends, lovers of computer games or extreme sports, or just a group of friends living in the same yard. Each teenage group can have its own “dress code", its own fashion characteristic, reliably separating “us” from “them”.
Fashion as a social phenomenon is especially brightly represented in the clothes of youth subcultures. Currently, these are anime fans, goths, emo, parkour lovers. About twenty or thirty years ago it was rockers, metalheads. Even earlier hippies, dudes. In every generation there are similar associations of young people. They appear in any society where there is an opportunity to freely exercise their will, and are limited to one generation. Often a combination of clothing styles is used, and sometimes it becomes impossible to determine which particular subculture this or that young person belongs to.
As teenagers get older, it becomes more important for them to belong to different groups with different dress codes. And now former teenagers are dressing as students, then as young professionals, businessmen, leaders, as parents of the next generation of children. These children, in turn, will create their own groups and their own fashion. Fashion as a social phenomenon will continue to develop in a spiral, and after some time will return to the previous round again.
Designers and fashion influence
Designers and clothing manufacturers are just using trends that already exist in society. For example, there are clothing brands that specialize in teenage subcultures. The task of designers is to understand the philosophy and visual preferences of a relatively large group of teenagers and come up with clothes, shoes, accessories that will be in demand among this category of young people.
For manufacturers of clothing, footwear, accessories, fashion is the wind that fills the sails of the fashion industry. It cannot be said about a sailboat that it creates the wind, but it moves with the help of this wind, and thanks to the sailboat, the elements become visible and useful.
Fashion is an industry in which significant money rotates, and no one wants to risk it in vain. If what designers offer does not resonate with consumers, then the manufacturer will suffer losses up to ruin. So all designers try to minimize risks and make most of the collection in such a way as to guess the demand. And here we come close to the question, where do the expectations of the public come from?
There are various social factors that shape fashion trends. The influence of fashion in the most general terms can be described by the words "the way of life of people and their actual needs." In other words, it is you and I who form fashion without realizing it ourselves. We shape our life by where we go, where we work, with whom we communicate, how we have fun, whom we adore or hate, what we talk about, what films and programs we watch, what we read, what forums we sit on and what we discuss. In all this seething environment, one can catch popular important themes, and they form the basis of the new fashion. You just need to translate it from one language to another. This is where professional fashion forecasters come into play.
fashion forecasting
There are several approaches to fashion forecasting. One of them is formal, scientific. It is based on an understanding of fashion cycles. Observation of the change in fashion over the years has made it possible to collect extensive statistical material and identify large and small periods of return of certain silhouettes of a suit, colors, as well as separately the shape of a sleeve, collar, shoes, size and arrangement of details, etc. This allows you to form a certain base based on the so-called fashion forecasting. Of course, the return of fashionable forms is not a literal repetition of what was. Each time one must assume how the old trend should look in a changed world. And this requires a good flair from a fashion forecaster.
Another approach (which, however, perfectly complements the first one) is the observation of society. The sharpest trends are not born in the workshops of designers and not on the catwalks. So, Mary Quant somehow saw what girls from the working outskirts of London go to dances in, and “invented” a miniskirt.
Of course, not every trend is “theft” from the people. But this is a mandatory observation. Trend-catchers go to iconic clubs and restaurants; watch popular films and know which category A films are currently in production; they read best-selling books and popular bloggers; go on trips to fashionable countries.
And they are also trying to understand what will be interesting and important after society gets tired of the current fashion.
This is the highest class of fashion forecasting work – science on the verge of intuition or intuition on the verge of science. You don't have to be seven spans in your forehead to predict that the Sochi Olympics will give rise to a surge of interest in everything Russian in the world. Such predictions are obvious. But finding an antithesis to a popular topic and formulating it is a good task, which only a few can solve.
The results of the work of leading fashion forecasters are published in the form of booklets, which can only be purchased by representatives of the upper segment of the fashion industry. And the point here is not the high price, but the fact that this is classified information, which they try not to bring to the masses. There are simpler options, they are more affordable and massive, but the forecast level in them is a class lower. And some clothing manufacturers, without further ado, simply copy the collections of leading brands. That's the whole secret of the "conspiracy" of designers.