What is fashion? Unlike the Adam and Eve days, fashion is no longer about covering your body for protection against environmental dangers; instead, it is about how you present yourself. It is merely how you dress to bring out the best in your body and character and the same time, impressing others with your good taste.
Do you know your fashion style? One quality of fashion that remains the same is that fashion never changes. Because it is wide, it consists of different market levels that people identify with. These levels house other brands, designers, price range, accessibility, and consumers.
Read on.
Haute Couture Fashion
Being at the very top of the group is Haute Couture, which originates from Paris in the nineteenth century. The label ‘Haute Couture’ is a legal term that means that it has to meet the French Ministry of Industry’s dire qualifications for a garment to qualify as being Haute Couture. Therefore it is never easy for fashion houses and designers to be part of Haute Couture and only a brief list of people in fashion qualify. For instance, Adeline André, Givenchy and Schiaparelli are some of the members of the production of Haute Couture.
Haute Couture involves creating a few custom-fitted outfits and accessories that are personal works of art designed and stitched for particular clients. These pieces are usually hand-sewed, taking uncountable working hours to be one of a kind. While many people wish to have these brands of works in their closet, the hard truth is that the real consumer market for Haute Couture is not broad at all. According to estimation, about 2,000 women worldwide buy Haute Couture pieces, mainly from China, Russia, and The Middle East. Read on.
The few clients are because only a select few can genuinely afford it since the admission price for an Haute Couture garment is about £10,000. However, this is entirely reliant on on the intricacy of the garment being made. Even with extreme prices like this, it is no surprise that Fashion houses get the least profit from Haute Couture. Most of their financial gain comes from clients who buy into the brand by their reasonably priced collections like their cosmetic lines and fragrance.
Ready-To-Wear Fashion
Contrary to the made-on-order nature of Haute Couture, ready-to-wear fashion (prêt-à-porter) is mass-produced in regular sizes. Ready-to-wear garments are more available for buying by the public in huge quantities, with differences in dimensions. This way, they will put up with various body sizes than Couture, which is typically sewed for a distinct person’s sizes.
Still, some Couture designers make ready-to-wear collections though they are much different from the original Haute Couture designs. Ready-to-wear designs consume less energy in producing, and others may have few details of an Haute Couture outfit incorporated into several different garments.
Ready-to-wear fashion has a target of producing beautiful clothes that charm the current market trends of the period. These garments usually have a shorter shelf life, and designers must persistently work to stay ahead of the present fashion trends to launch multiple collections per year.
High Street fashion is also a name that commonly refers to ready-to-wear clothing. This term denotes purchasing from shops on the leading street (or high street) in town. This means you can buy these high-quality fashion products from renowned online stores or ordinary shops, instead of being individually made by fashion designers.
Luxury Fashion
Luxury Fashion includes top quality designer brands, most of which belong to the three key designer conglomerates, Kering, LVMH, and Richemont. Different from Couture, the fashions in Luxury Fashion are manufactured instead of hand-made. Nonetheless, they are not mass-manufactured, so they also offer the prestige which comes with having limited availability and limited accessibility.
The item prices for Luxury fashion usually varies per item depending on what type the customer wishes to purchase. Unlike a Couture piece, a luxury garment doesn’t take much effort in making hence lesser value. However, the market still maintains most luxury fashion on the high end price to ensure you still enjoy the pleasure. The leading consumer group of luxury items comes from China, and it is commonly persons who have high revenue, such as those who are earning more than $100,000 annually. What’s more?
The Luxury market keeps growing significantly with a prediction of a continuous further on an uphill trend. The French Fashion House, Louis Vuitton is dominant in Luxury Fashion with others such as Hermes, Armani, Prada, Gucci, and Burberry.
Fast Fashion
Fast fashion is the home for familiar and inexpensive brand names. The leading conglomerates are H&M Group and Arcadia, and Inditex. The likes of Forever 21, Topshop, H&M, Zara, Primark, and River Island are famous for having rapid gross revenue in fashion and styles. This shows more of their identity as Fast Fashion labels.
Fast fashion focuses on speeding up in production in order to get the fresh trends quickly and inexpensively to the market. This is a term by fashion merchants to show how designs move from runway to stores very quickly to arrest the present fashion trends’ attention. These brands usually create clothing collections based on the most recent fashion trends. They come up with similar designs presented at the latest Fashion Weeks.
One of these Fast Fashion companies’ core attentions is not only to make quality clothing from an inspiration of the predicted up-and-coming trends but to provide similar pieces minus the designer price tag. All of which needs completion in the least time scale. Usually, a fast-fashion brand is well-known for its capacity to mature a new product and have it ready for sale in two weeks, while other retailers regularly take like six months.
As a consequence of this, the habit of launching fresh fashion styles seasonally is facing challenges. Today, it is not rare for fast-fashion stores to present new products several times in just a week. It shows that new designs and trends can become outdated in only a few weeks. The clients of fast fashion can differ for each specific store, with many fascinating the mass market. However, these labels would naturally appeal to those who have a profound desire to look fashionable and seem trendy but still do so in a budget-friendly way.
Economy Fashion
The Economy market level is the lowest level of the fashion order. This is the foundation of mass production, and it works well in getting pieces from factories to stores. Designers of economy fashion will carry regular critical trends with them and try to change them into inexpensive pieces. With these designs, they will have their customers looking stylish at a much lesser cost.
Remarkably, an item in economy fashion can cost so little either for a cloth or accessory like £2 and 50p respectively. Still, the prices do not tend to surpass the £40 mark. Economical fashion brands can maintain such low prices because of the bulk manufacturing of products. Even as the price margin is excellent, this procedure usually results in low quality and short lives of products hence the least eco-friendly fashion market.
A major con of the economy fashion shows that it delays to keep up with the significant and forthcoming trends. This shows that they unveil them at their full time, making them more unattractive than their fast fashion opponents.
Economy brands usually satisfy people’s basic needs. The low prices of the economy fashion tends to make their pieces appear cheap; hence it would really help if the brands focussed more on selling what most people love buying from this level. For instance, vests, leggings, tops, and jumpers will be the most beneficial to create as they sell best for the brand.
A few examples of Economy Fashion labels are Naz, Funky Kalakar and OhSevenDays. These are the ready and ideal fashion for women on the go especially mums. Such brands are excellent for people with limited time to spend on shopping for clothes, while they can also do it during their weekly grocery and food shopping.
Just like most industries, fashion also has its set of myths that have been going around. Luckily, people are growing to attest to their untrue nature gradually. Generally, personal style and fashion synchronize, and it is the buyers who determine the fashion. More like, that simple and ordinary girl from the street can emerge almost as classy and sharp as any high chic fashionista. Fashion bloggers and Instagram personalities are modifying fashion journals. Fashion is always on the move, especially in fast technology and social media improvements, and concise attention extents.
Conversely, if you are growing interest in becoming a part of the huge world of fashion design, it is important to acquaint yourself with the vocabulary of fashion. Also, being alert of the diverse types of fashion design can help you decide on career goals and clearly understand how the fashion world functions.
