Fast fashion

January 1, 2009

Whether it's the spring catwalk look, Eva Longoria's Golden Globe dress, or your best friend's cool T-shirt, fashion is all about instant gratification

Eva Friede, Canwest News Service Published: Wednesday, December 31, 2008

FashionBrett Gundlock / National Post

Whether it's the spring catwalk look from last fall, Eva Longoria's Golden Globe dress we saw last week, or your best friend's cool new T-shirt, fashion today is all about instant gratification.

"Yes, everything is getting faster,'' said Peter Simons, president of La Maison Simons. "They want the right product at the right time.''

Simons, with seven department stores in Quebec, seems to be working the system successfully, with the Montreal downtown store looking like Boxing Day every day as shoppers snap up everything from $10 T-shirts from the in-house Twik label to European brands such as Paul Smith with prices in the thousands.

Still, determining that product is not simple in the information age, in which a swirling mass of news is available to the industry -- and to the public -- through the internet, magazines, television, forecasting services, cool-hunting sites, and high-tech programs to track consumer desires.

In the latest twist on cool-hunting, websites have become virtually interactive, feeding trend bytes from an army of volunteers and professionals to anybody who's interested. Check out trendwatching.com or trendhunter.com for more information than you can shake a stick at.

The real speed in fashion today is information, suggests Franco Rocchi, Le Chateau's senior vice-president for marketing and sales. It's about the consumer pulse -- "how quickly you can get to it. Within 24 hours, you can sense the consumer pulse and then respond accordingly."

Lea Katsanis, chair of the marketing department at Concordia University's John Molson School of Business, points to the constant change to which the younger generations -- raised with the information age and comfortable with technology -- are accustomed.

"We've built a society of boredom," she said. "I like it today, but I don't like it tomorrow.

"But it was so cheap anyway. So you throw it away."

And in this disposable consumer society, knockoffs -- the fruit of the fast-fashion industry - are often poorly made, she said.

The real fashionistas want the real thing in any case, she said. Now they can get it, for a short time anyway. The "transumer" (mix transient and consumer) can rent the designer bag of the moment at shouldercandy.com, a Toronto-based website, according to LouLou magazine.

But forget the Balenciaga Weekender, fashion fans - there's a waiting list, just like at Holt Renfrew.

The attention-deficit phenomenon goes way beyond fashion, Katsanis said: "Fashion is the obvious one we see."

Through technology, she said, we've conditioned younger generations to the "quick, quick, quick, quick."

"They don't know any other speed."

Just look at video games, computers, text messaging, she said. "You're conditioned to instant gratification. You press the button, you kill your target.

"It builds a certain kind of mindset."

Meanwhile, retailers are not only checking out what's out there on the catwalks, the streets and from the trend-watchers -- they have technology to track who's buying what, where and when in their own stores.

Herschel Segal, founder and chairman of Le Chateau, remembers a time when the owners of Dalmy's would put in a call to their manufacturer after seeing what sold on Saturday afternoon. Now, the major executives of Montreal's ground-breaking fast-fashion chain get detailed reports from their 180 stores delivered to their homes every Sunday afternoon to get a jump on the next week's plan of action. "It's using your retail numbers as soon as possible,'' Segal said.

With current technology we're much more intimate with what the consumer wants, Rocchi said.

And the consumer wants it sooner, not later.

Photos from the spring catwalk shows, held last fall, are available to one and all at Style.com.

(You can view the white tulle Valentino confection Cameron Diaz wore to the Golden Globes last week on line, but you can't find Eva Longoria's Ungaro gown, or J. Lo's Marchesa, or Angelina Jolie's St. John. Many stars opt for custom designs or the new collections that haven't been shown yet.)

"That information creates a demand for the product immediately,'' Rocchi said. "Consumers have taken a quantum leap forward."

Le Chateau and the major international players like H&M and Zara put the "fast'' in fashion years ago, by replenishing stock weekly, even daily, with catwalk knockoffs.

"Frankly," Rocchi said, "the consumer deserves it. And the onus is on the industry to satisfy that."

But with all that information out there, it is increasingly difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff, the trend that will take hold from the stillborn fad.

Studying the trend reports in fall, Katsanis was delighted to learn that red would be hot for Christmas and went shopping for that perfect red dress. Retailers, however, had not picked up on the runway and magazine predictions. "I couldn't find one to save my life," she said.

By Christmas, the news was all about blush, not red, she lamented.

"We used to get at least a full season.

"It's almost as if there is no trend,'' Katsanis said. "It's beyond anything goes. It's hyper-trending. Does it matter what we wear any more?''

Not all trends are adopted, Rocchi acknowledged.

The key to a successful retailer is finding those five trends out of 50 that consumers will rally around, he said.

So what trends will take hold for spring?

"Proprietary," Rocchi joked, before predicting that the mod-Andy-Warhol-factory-girl feeling will be key.

There could be a backlash brewing against the reign of fast fashion. In any event, change is inevitable.

One Montreal line bucking the "fashion rat race,'' to a point, is La Va de Soi, which makes luxurious knits and Ts. After 25 years in business, the firm just opened its first store.

"We're more into slow fashion, authenticity and good quality,'' said Odile Bougain-Nasri, owner of the company with her husband.

But they absolutely must keep an eye on the trends, and especially the colour forecasts. "Trends are long. We pick a trend and we live with it for a while,'' she said.

At some point, people are going to stop buying, Katsanis predicted. "They're going to say, 'Enough is enough.'''

And when the economy crashes, there's going to be a lot less money around, she said.

At that point, as in the '90s, there is likely to be a move back to basics, simpler, more minimalist fashion as a reaction to today's excess.

"Maybe it will tie in with the whole environmental, greening thing that is going on," Katsanis said.

So is this the end of fashion, the term used by Wall Street Journal Book Teri Agins in The End of Fashion? In her 2000 book, Agins suggested we had reached a watershed moment in fashion history, with marketing to mass consumption driving the industry rather than the creativity of designers.

Not according to Peter Simons. "There's always creativity,'' he said.

What drives fashion, he says, is the desire to be different while still following the rules of the style tribe.

But he said he hopes people will come to realize there's a price to pay for creativity.

"I hope maybe we'll come back to more responsible, quality-oriented consumption,'' he said.

And he sees change in the future, too, pointing to Japan, where kids are becoming more eclectic in their fashion choices and less brand-oriented, he said.

"The next generation will find new ways to define themselves,'' Simons said.

 

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