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ginnyzero · 5 years

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Fashion is a Business (A Harsh Truth of the Industry Pt 1)

Fashion is a business. I’ve harped on this in a long 8 part series about what it takes to merely design a fashion collection. Fashion is a huge business and a strange world where everyone in the business that has any fashion education will tell you with a complete straight face that all of history can be related back to fashion and textiles one way or another. The fall of Adam and Eve, fashion. The Vikings, sails, textiles, fashion. Sumptuary laws, fashion. Wars, fought over fashion. The rise of unions in the industrial age, fashion.

Back when I was studying fashion, it was a 3.5 trillion dollar industry catering from the top 300 richest in the world to the lowest of budget stores, aka Wal-Mart, Family Dollar and Dollar General. It’s big money, big names and it’s cutthroat. It’s a harsh place to be where you’re only as good as your last collection, 30% of all stores fail and you can work 10 years in the Calvin Klein underwear design department and not actually be able to move forward and in those same ten years, if you start a fashion house and are successful, you most likely won’t start making a profit until those ten years are done.

Think about that, a business where it is expected that you’re going to run in the negative or the red for a decade before seeing even a nickel of profit. It’s almost as ridiculous as farming when you realize farmers but at retail and sell at wholesale.

Those are the harsh truths of the Fashion Industry.

When I say fashion is a business and an industry, it’s like saying that manufacturing cars is an industry. Fashion has their own periodicals. (No. Not Vogue. Vogue is for you. I’m talking industry and business specific periodicals.) Women’s Wear Daily is the largest newspaper that the fashion industry has. There is a magazine for menswear. And there are magazines specifically for trend forecasting. These are the periodicals that have the want ads and the industry manufacturing advertisements.

We have our own member associations, in the United States the biggest being the CFDA, the Council of Fashion Designers of America. And we have our own conventions, half of these conventions are for buying fabrics and notions and finding out the latest trends. The other half of these conventions happen to include models strutting down catwalks and showrooms of samples for buyers to browse. There are two huge corporations that own most of the companies that do ready to wear, LVMH and Fendi. LVMH is French and Fendi started out as an Italian leather goods manufacturer. There are other corporations that operate at lower price points, Gap Inc. is one of them. We have unions.

The largest union in the Fashion Industry is the Ladies Garment Union. They’re big and they’re powerful and they have a lot of clout. And they’re the reason most of your garments are now made overseas. I grew up roughly an hour away from the town of Triangle, where the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory caught fire and the girls died because they’d been locked inside by chains on the doors and sparked the unionization movement.

It’s a tiny sleepy town about 4 miles away from a town called Kilawog nestled in the tree covered hills of upstate New York and to go through it today you wouldn’t know it was the birthplace of a worker’s rights movement. There’s a sign and that’s about it. You quickly go through it onto Greene and Whitney Point and it’s not on a huge highway either. (Route 206 is a two lane thing that meanders at times.) In fact, I never heard of the Triangle fire until I had a fashion business class that covered it and the reasons why there were unions and specific labor laws. (Go figure.)

And like a lot of industries that you probably don’t even think about, metal manufacturing for instance, the fashion industry is segmented into different groups. Womenswear is the largest group and is considered the entry group for most fashion designers. And inside of womenswear things are even more broken down not only by price point, but by sizes and even functions. Plus size, petite, swimwear, lingerie, bridal, eveningwear, denim and leather are all considered separate specializations inside of womenswear. Menswear is its own group.

Then there is also accessories. Accessories are broken down in to handbags, hats, shoes and jewelry. Makeup and perfumes are also considered part of the fashion industry and are again, their own group. Textiles and notions are also a separate group in the Fashion Industry and they also cater to the automotive and the furniture industries. Household goods like pillows and curtains and blankets are also a separate part of the fashion industry. This isn’t even touching things like Costume design for Hollywood and Broadway. That’s another category all together!

There is a reason why there are brands that only make men’s clothing or only make women’s clothing and the brands that are high end and seem to do everything are established. The reason for this is simple. To make jewelry. To make shoes. To make handbags or hats. There is an entirely different supply and manufacturing chain that you have to use. This is more money not less.

So, unless your brand is successful in shoes first or in women’s clothing first, there is no money to expand the brand into other categories. (Unless you’re a celebrity that is bringing millions in from someplace else or are being sponsored by a shoe company.) You first have to prove that you can create a successful brand year after year in one category before you even can think about having any sort of investment into say, menswear or shoes or jewelry. And even then, a lot of times the name of the brand is licensed out to another company that already makes those items to “expand” the brand.

You can’t catch a trend once. You have to catch or set a trend year after year after year and satisfy your customer base year after year after year. That is the harsh reality.

And this industry is supported by a lot of small manufacturers and farms spread out over the states around them. So, if there is a large failure in the industry of a major brand or the Ladies’ Garment Union asks too much, there are a lot of small growers and small textile manufacturers and small garment manufacturers that end up closing their doors or having to change to a different industry and it’s a domino effect.

It’s like Detroit is in trouble because when the automobile industry took a hit, a lot of the small parts manufacturers that they relied on in Ohio and Indiana had to close their doors and those workers and those machines and that skill and support network is gone. It is going to take a lot of time and investment to get it back if it ever comes back at all. And that has been happening in the fashion industry in America by slow attrition for decades.

So, yes, a lot of the hard labor intensive manual work of the fashion industry, the manufacturing takes place overseas for cost reasons. And because it takes place overseas, designers have to deal with laws that govern how many things can be imported into the country and with trade agreements. This makes things even more difficult if you’re trying to start a fashion business because big names get their orders in first. But, Americans want cheap clothes and cheap clothes are made in China, South Africa and Mexico. That’s simply the way the motorcycle rumbles.

And the Fashion industry has favored schools, in the states these include Parsons, FIT, Otis, FIDM and to a very small extent the Academy of Art and RISD. There is a prestigious school in Britain, Central St. Martin’s and another school in France that caters directly to haute couture. While having a degree from any one of these schools isn’t essential, having the skills that these schools teach can be (and the name and piece of paper does help.)

Celebrities that get into fashion, most of them want to skip the step of actually being educated on what the fashion industry and business entails. In fact, the harsh reality, like when the Kardashians did a product line for Sears, is that the celebrity is really little more than a spokesperson for a line. They show up with a bunch of magazine pictures compiled together in what they want the line to look like and the design team at Sears designs the actual garments and a logo designer comes up with the “line” logo and the Kardashians maybe have approval of the final product, but mostly they do ads, say they designed it and that’s all.

They don’t do the hard work of actually conceptualizing the designs or even choosing the fabrics. If a celebrity ever tells you that they designed the buttons and the stitching, go ahead and laugh because no one designs stitching. Top stitch placement is part of design yes, but stitching is not.

The fashion industry is a long chain of suppliers, vendors, forecasters, product designers, buyers, merchandisers, advertisers and stores with sales representatives before the clothes make it onto the body of the customer. It’s global. And it’s a need that everyone has no matter where they are.

And that’s a harsh truth.

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