Fresh fashion for Spring-Summer 2009 - finally you can dump those tunics and leggings, makes-me-bloom-into-a-mushroom trend, and look forward to the hourglass silhouette, a flow of watery colours, tailored-to-fit jumpsuits, peek-a-boo and transparent fabrics. Allow your creativity to take centre stage by mixing-and-matching clothes.
Read on to be Fashion forward 2009
Romance of spring
No, no don't think floral prints yet as the limelight is on geometric prints. At Wills Lifestyle Fashion Week (WLFW) Spring-Summer 2009, JJ Valaya unleashed a refreshing collection of dresses and tops in checks and geometric prints. Designers also veered towards Japanese motifs and seemed inspired by the east. Have a dekko at Siddharth Tytler's collection of sequins and bling.
Jump with joy for the 70's jumpsuit is here! However, avoid the body-fitting lycra and nylon variety (a la 70s rock icons) and opt for cottons, linens and silk. You can dress up this versatile garment with long chains and sexy heels for a night out and tone it down with flats and a cotton jacket for a day at work. Did we mention layering is very much in vogue? Don't forget the essentials - a belt and a stylish bag.
And honey, please end that love affair with your jeans and give in to the comfort of high-waisted trousers and drape pants. Pair your drape pants, or dhoti pants, with a stylish top or kurti and you are good to go.
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Summer bubbles
The colours for summer are serene yet bubbly - coral reds, flaming orange, shades of white and ecru, yolk and ochre yellows, mint green, peaches and blues. There is a focus on neutral colours and transparent fabrics for those sauntering-by-the-pool-sipping-Mojito evenings.
What's summer without shorts? Stock up your wardrobe with high-waisted shorts in fabrics that breathe - linen and cotton. And for an in-vogue look for those parties pick a few in silks and satin.
Dresses, dresses and can't get enough of more dresses! Every designer worth his salt (read creativity) had a dress to show off in the Wills and Lakme Fashion Weeks for spring summer 09. Your dresses should be tailored to fit-and-flow for an hourglass silhouette and clean lines.
The necklines are asymmetrical, and off-shoulders are ruling the roost this season. Pretty knee length frocks cinched with a belt or long sultry maxi dresses - feminity rules!
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Global Luxury Market Foresees Recovery New!
''Luxury' is a broader segment than what anyone can define. It includes various products ranging from clothes, footwear, jewellery, watches, leather goods, and many others. Global luxury market is now undergoing rapid transformation. Industry analysts predict the market to grow and reach $2 trillion USD by 2010, of which US alone will constitute 50% of the worldwide market....
Global Luxury Market Foresees Recovery New!
''Luxury' is a broader segment than what anyone can define. It includes various products ranging from clothes, footwear, jewellery, watches, leather goods, and many others. Global luxury market is now undergoing rapid transformation. Industry analysts predict the market to grow and reach $2 trillion USD by 2010, of which US alone will constitute 50% of the worldwide market....
Fashion Forecast
changing world, the marketing segmentation and targeting techniques are rapidly evolving from traditional, static, demographic-based criteria towards dynamic, mood, lifestyle and psycho graphic influences. Fashion forecasting is the prediction of mood, behavior and buying habits of the consumer. It is no longer a question of identifying your customers by age, geography or income, but looking into how and why they buy, based on their mood, beliefs and the occasion.
Fashion is a style that is popular in the present or a set of trends that have been accepted by a wide audience. But fashion itself is far from simple. Fashion is a complex phenomenon from psychological, sociological, cultural or commercial point of view. Fashion trends are the styling ideas that major collections have in common. They indicate the direction in which the fashion is moving. Fashion forecasters look for styles they think are prophetic, ideas that capture the mood of the times and signal a new fashion trend.
The fashion system has spread across all other sectors, from cosmetics to cars via politics and sports. All sectors observe fashion as an endless source of inspiration. Gilles Lipovetsky points out that the more the fashion society develops, the less importance will be given to the affordability of clothes! To hold on to its role as a pioneer and enhance its brand image, fashion has to continue to innovate.
Forecasting the future demand for particular styles, fabrics and colors is an important aspect of the fashion industry. Textile specialists work two years ahead to determine the general guidelines for each fashion season. Fashion forecasting is an important activity to ensure that the process of observation related to short and long term planning can be based on sound and rational decision making and not hype. Forecasting can bridge the gap between ambiguous, conflicting signs and the action taken by the design team. "Fashion forecasting combines theories of fashion changes with the process of organizing and analyzing the information and synthesizing the data into actionable forecasts." (Brannon 2000) Forecasting is a creative process that can be understood, practiced and applied. Forecasting provides a way for executives to expand their thinking about changes, through anticipating the future, and projecting the likely outcomes. (Lavenback and Cleary 1981)
Long term forecasting (over 2 years ahead) is used by executives for corporate planning purposes. It is also used for marketing managers to position products in the marketplace in relationship to competition.
Short term forecasting is used by product developers, merchandisers and production managers to give style direction and shape collections. For short term forecasting most apparel companies subscribe to one or more services, whose job is to scan the market and report on the developments in color, textiles and style directions.
Forecasters reflect the earliest views on trends some eighteen months in advance of the season. At this stage, color is a crucial consideration of yarn mills. It is also the focus of discussion among others who are interested in very early trend decision-making. Fashion forecasters combine the views emerging about color and fabric from the early yarn and fabric trade shows with their socio-economic and cultural analysis. Major trends in lifestyles, attitude and culture in particular music, sport, cinema and television are used to predict changing consumer demands.
Fashion forecasting involves the following activities such as studying market conditions, noting the life style of the people, researching sales statistics, evaluating popular designer collections, surveying fashion publications, observing street fashions etc.
Observation is not enough. If the trend watcher is to take advantage, he needs a framework for explaining how the trend began and its likely path within a social system. The directional theories of fashion change trickle down, trickle up and trickle across to make prediction easier by pointing to the likely starting points for a fashion trend, the expected direction that trend will take and how long the trend will last.
Fashion
Fashion is the style and custom prevalent at a given time. In its most common usage however, "fashion" describes the popular clothing style. Many fashions are popular in many cultures at any given time. Important is the idea that the course of design and fashion will change more rapidly than the culture as a whole. Fashion designers create and produce clothing articles.
The terms "fashionable" and "unfashionable" were employed to describe whether someone or something fits in with the current or even not so current, popular mode of expression. However, more so in the modern era items termed 'not so current' may indeed fit into the term 'Retro.' Retro fashion allows rule shifts, such as 'old is suddenly new,' thus fashionable. The term "fashion" is frequently used in a positive sense, as a synonym for glamour, beauty and style[citation needed]. In this sense, fashions are a sort of communal art, through which a culture examines its notions of beauty and goodness. The term "fashion" is also sometimes used in a negative sense, as a synonym for fads and trends, and materialism.
There exist a number of cities recognized as global fashion centers or fashion capitals. Fashion Weeks are held in these cities where designers exhibit their new clothing collections to audiences. The main five cities are Tokyo, London, Paris, Milan and New York - these five are renowned for their major influence on global fashion and are headquarters to the greatest fashion companies. Other cities, including Mumbai, Los Angeles, Seoul, Berlin, Rome, Osaka, Toronto, Hong Kong, Dubai, São Paulo, Sydney, Moscow,Madrid and Shanghai also hold fashion weeks and are better recognized every year.
Areas of fashion
Fashion as social phenomena is common. The rise and fall of fashion has been especially documented and examined in the following fields:
- Architecture, interior design, and landscape design
- Arts and crafts
- Body type, clothing or costume, cosmetics, personal grooming, hairstyle, and personal adornment
- Dance and music
- Forms of address, slang, and other forms of speech
- Economics and spending choices, as studied in behavioral finance
- Entertainment, games, hobbies, sports, and other pastimes
- Etiquette
- Fast fashion
- Management, management styles and different ways of organizing
- Politics and media, especially the topics of conversation encouraged by the media
- Philosophy and religion: although the doctrines of religions and philosophies change very slowly if at all, there can be rapid changes in what areas of a religion or a philosophy are seen as most important and most worth following or studying.
- Social networks and the diffusion of representations and practices
- Sociology and the meaning of clothing for identity-building
- Technology, such as the choice of computer programming techniques
- Hospitality industry, such as designer uniforms custom made for a hotel, restaurant, casino, resort or club, in order to reflect a property and brand.
Clothing
Main article: History of Western fashion
Some historians observe the frequently changing clothing styles as a distinctively Western habit among urban populations.[dubious ] Changes in costume often took place at times of economic or social change (such as in ancient Rome), but then a long period without large changes followed. In 8th century Cordoba, Spain, Ziryab (a famous musician of that time) is said to have introduced sophisticated clothing styles based on seasonal and daily timings from his native Baghdad and his own inspiration.
The beginnings of the habit in Europe of continual and increasingly rapid change in styles can be fairly reliably dated to the middle of the 14th century, to which historians including James Laver and Fernand Braudel date the start of Western fashion in clothing.[2][3] The most dramatic manifestation was a sudden drastic shortening and tightening of the male over-garment, from calf-length to barely covering the buttocks, sometimes accompanied with stuffing on the chest to look bigger. This created the distinctive Western male outline of a tailored top worn over leggings or trousers.
The pace of change accelerated considerably in the following century, and women and men's fashion, especially in the dressing and adorning of the hair, became equally complex and changing. Art historians are therefore able to use fashion in dating images with increasing confidence and precision, often within five years in the case of 15th century images. Initially changes in fashion led to a fragmentation of what had previously been very similar styles of dressing across the upper classes of Europe, and the development of distinctive national styles, which remained very different until a counter-movement in the 17th to 18th centuries imposed similar styles once again, finally those from Ancien Régime in France.[3]:317-24 Though the rich usually led fashion, the increasing affluence of early modern Europe led to the bourgeoisie and even peasants following trends at a distance sometimes uncomfortably close for the elites - a factor Braudel regards as one of the main motors of changing fashion.[3]:313-15 The fashions of the West are generally unparalleled either in antiquity or in the other great civilizations of the world. Early Western travellers, whether to Persia, Turkey, Japan or China frequently remark on the absence of changes in fashion there, and observers from these other cultures comment on the unseemly pace of Western fashion, which many felt suggested an instability and lack of order in Western culture. The Japanese Shogun's secretary boasted (not completely accurately) to a Spanish visitor in 1609 that Japanese clothing had not changed in over a thousand years.[3]:312-3:323 However in Ming China, for example, there is considerable evidence for rapidly changing fashions in Chinese clothing.[4]
Ten 16th century portraits of German or Italian gentlemen may show ten entirely different hats, and at this period national differences were at their most pronounced, as Albrecht Dürer recorded in his actual or composite contrast of Nuremberg and Venetian fashions at the close of the 15th century (illustration, right). The "Spanish style" of the end of the century began the move back to synchronicity among upper-class Europeans, and after a struggle in the mid 17th century, French styles decisively took over leadership, a process completed in the 18th century.[3]:317-21
Though colors and patterns of textiles changed from year to year,[5] the cut of a gentleman's coat and the length of his waistcoat, or the pattern to which a lady's dress was cut changed more slowly. Men's fashions largely derived from military models, and changes in a European male silhouette are galvanized in theatres of European war, where gentleman officers had opportunities to make notes of foreign styles: an example is the "Steinkirk" cravat or necktie.
The pace of change picked up in the 1780s with the increased publication of French engravings that showed the latest Paris styles; though there had been distribution of dressed dolls from France as patterns since the 16th century, and Abraham Bosse had produced engravings of fashion from the 1620s. By 1800, all Western Europeans were dressing alike (or thought they were): local variation became first a sign of provincial culture, and then a badge of the conservative peasant.[6]
Although tailors and dressmakers were no doubt responsible for many innovations before, and the textile industry certainly led many trends, the history of fashion design is normally taken to date from 1858, when the English-born Charles Frederick Worth opened the first true haute couture house in Paris. Since then the professional designer has become a progressively more dominant figure, despite the origins of many fashions in street fashion.
Modern Westerners have a wide choice available in the selection of their clothes. What a person chooses to wear can reflect that person's personality or likes. When people who have cultural status start to wear new or different clothes a fashion trend may start. People who like or respect them may start to wear clothes of a similar style.
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Fashions may vary considerably within a society according to age, social class, generation, occupation, and geography as well as over time. If, for example, an older person dresses according to the fashion of young people, he or she may look ridiculous in the eyes of both young and older people. The terms fashionista or fashion victim refer to someone who slavishly follows the current fashions.
One can regard the system of sporting various fashions as a fashion language incorporating various fashion statements using a grammar of fashion. (Compare some of the work of Roland Barthes.)
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