I was in New York City last week and met with a lot of buyers, showrooms, buying services, and designers and was quite enlighten about the trends coming up for the season. Pretty much all of it is affected by the recession.
1. Lower price points. From online shops to brick and mortar stores everyone is lowering their price point. $100 tees or even $60 tees aren’t doing so good. I was told by a couple of big online stores that their lower priced tees are flying out but having difficulties pushing the higher price tag ones. This sentiment was also given to me from a big department store in the US. They are lowering the price points on tees but they are still carrying the big names like Affliction and Ed Hardy but just lower price point.
2. Out with the bling bling. “No one wants to look like they have money,” I was told. People feel guilty when they shop and buy flashy clothing. So the trend is for more subdue and subtle aesthetics. This is not good for Juzd as we are all about the heavy graphics and bling bling. It’s funny, last year before the recession hit I showed the Juzd original to Holt Renfrew and they loved it and it turned out to be their best selling Juzd shirts. Now I design more of those pieces and they are like, “we are moving away from that now.”
3. Cleaner aesthetics. There will always be a demand for graphic shirts, buyers are going for a cleaner aesthetics. Compare to other lines Juzd is is not as busy but buyers still put it in that category. As I have been trying to move to more of a busier all over prints, I am not moving back to the clean stuff.
4. People still want to go shopping. Shopping is like a drug for most women and in our capitalist society there is a sense of gratification when we own something new. Ever notice how complete you feel when you go out shopping and come back with something, anything! It makes you feel like your time wasn’t wasted. Well people are still shopping and still want to shop, that’s one of the reasons American Apparel is so successful in recent years. Their items are inexpensive and you can easily buy several of the same items in different colours. This makes shopping easy so you’ll feel more productive.
5. Mix of high end and low end. People are piecing high and low end pieces together. People are pairing up thousand dollar leather jackets with $300 dollar jeans and $18 American Apparel tee. This may not be caused by the recession and have been happening before the recession but with what is happening, it is surely accelerating the trend.
Inexpensive American Apparel black t-shirt and tie-die tights
combined with leather jacket and boots
On my trip to New York I’ve learned about several of these trends. But the buyers tell me that they don’t know for sure but that’s what they think and they can be wrong. All of us in the fashion industry have been screaming and yelling that the busy gothic and graphic heavy shirts of Ed Hardy and Affliction are going out for as long as they’ve been in yet their sales are still expanding. I guess the diplomatic answer is that it’s a combination of both and like anything in culture it’s interdependent and organic.
See 6th trend and our latest updates on Fall Winter 2009 2010 trend forecast
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