Answer: A fashion cycle is the term used to describe the process that a type of fashion goes through. The fashion first gains mass acceptance and popularity from the consumers and then with time, the tastes and preferences of the consumers’ ebbs, which causes the fashion to lose that acceptance and popularity.
The fashion cycle is usually depicted as a bell shaped curve with 5 stages:
1. Introduction
2. Rise in popularity
3. Peak of popularity
4. Decline in popularity
5. Rejection
Introduce a Fashion:
• Most new styles are introduced in the high level.
• Designers create the designs with few limitations on creativity, quality of raw material or amount of fine workmanship.
• The create new apparel and accessory style by changing elements like line shape color ect…
• Product costs are high and only few can afford.
• Production in small quantity gives the designer more freedom, flexibility.
• New products are shown to retail buyers and press.
• At the first stage of cycle, fashion implies only style and newness.
• Celebrities, TV stars, models buy these clothes as they want to wear them in some events.
Increase in popularity:
• When new styles are seen worn by celebrities on TV or magazines they attract the attention of the general public.
• Viewers may wish to buy the new styles but perhaps cannot afford them.
• Manufactures use less expensive fabric and modify the designs to sell in low price.
• Some companies also do imitation of designer originals at low prices.
• High priced designers now have secondary sales line which sell at lower prices so they are able to sell adoptions of their original designs in great quantity.
Peak of popularity:
• When fashion is at height of popularity it may be in such demand that more manufactures copy it or produce adaptations of it at many price levels.
Decline in popularity:
• After so many designs copies are mass produced, people get tired of that style and begin to look for something new.
• Consumers still wear garments in style but they don’t buy them at regular prices.
• Retail stores put declining styles on the sale rack.
Rejection of a style:
• In the past fashion cycle some consumers must have already turned to new look.
• The rejection of a style just because it is out of fashion is called consumers obsolescence.
What is fashion theory? Discuss fashion theory with the graph.
What do you know about fashion movement? Evaluate your answer with graph.
What is fashion theory? Describe Trickle-up and Trickle-down theories.
Fashion Theory is a theory that explains the effect of Fashion to the Society. A Fashion theory also explain the origin of Fashion and how and why it keeps changing with time.
Trickle Down Theory:
Fashion begins at the top of the class structure & spreads downward, slowly, through the class structure. The people of the upper class display their wealth by participating in an extravagant lifestyle, including wearing apparel made of expensive modes of production and using costly materials. One person’s style is towards imitation; the other’s is towards differentiation.
Source of fashion ideas.
> designers catered to wealthy
Fashion leaders.
> highly visible elite served as models for lower class
Direction.
> down from elite class to working class
Simmel’s 3 Stages of Fashion:
1. The elite class differentiated itself through fashion.
2. The adjacent class imitated the look.
3. The elite class moved to adopt a new fashion in an attempt to maintain the differentiation.
The Source of fashion ideas:
Designers cater to wealthy clients with a task for conspicuous consumption & the leisure to pursue fashion. Couture designer fashion is expensive and it is affordable by only a few people.
Those designs are copied again and again at lower prices until they have been seen often by the conservative buyers.
The Fashion Leaders:
Their are the fashion leaders who creat a new fashion or style and everybody try to follow that fashion or style. Fashion leaders promote the fashion movement. A fashion leader refers to an individual or corporation that is taken as a trend setter in the fashion industry. Usually, such an organisation or products by such individuals attract high revenues and admiration from other industry players. Fashion innovativeness is a characteristic of fashion leaders who have the tendency to buy a new fashion earlier than other consumers. While anyone can be a fashion leader.
Confidence to start or accept new fashions
Small number who dare to be different
Trendsetters
Noticed and imitated
First to discover and display (wear) new styles
Trickle up Theory:
Trickle up Theory of fashion suggests that the flow of fashion moves upwards from the poor to the wealthy or from the lower class to the upper class. It is opposite to the trickle-down effect. Pertaining to the theory that change and information moves upward in a hierarchy.
Starts with young trendsetters.
May be lower income groups.
Fashion defined by street wear.
Examples may include:
Tattooing, body piercing, “grunge” looks
Trickle-across theory (mass dissemination)
Fashion is a social process, likely to occur in times of rapid change. Its the notion that the adoption of a particular fashion will spread horizontally within several socioeconomic classes at the same time. he theory of fashion adoption that states that fashions move horizontally between similar social classes rather than vertically from one level to another. Another term for this is mass-market theory. Horizontal Flow Theory Horizontal Flow Theory (cont.) Members of each social group look at the leaders of their own group for fashion trends. The social classes stick within their own people, and don’t branch out to look for fashion trends. A leader within a group of peers influences the others with their fashion decisions. Leaders and Followers.
- Modern communications bring fashion from around the world into our homes instantly.
- Many separate markets have developed to various age ranges, life style, tastes.
- Various designer and manufacturer labels appeal to various market segments at different price points.
- Mass production means that many different styles can be accepted at a same time.
