Should You Follow Fashion Trends?
The Fine Line in Women's Fashion Between Imitation and Inspiration
May 24, 2008
Whether you are a high-end designer, producer of commercial brands, or an aspiring fashionista, fashion is all about buying into a lifestyle; the glamour and prestige of owning the latest IT dress, shoe or bag.
Fashion Cycles
Fashion trends tend to go in 20-year cycles. Styles favored in the 80s are likely to re-emerge again 2 decades later, with a new twist. Just sufficiently different enough to stop you from recycling that old inverted triangle-shaped power-suit with the shoulder pads, lurking at the back or your closet. The 80s inspired, newly updated styles will be in the “new” colors of the season or “new” lengths! The word retro covers a multitude of sins and beware of the word vintage, which these days can be just another way of making you pay more for someone else’s cast offs.
When you buy mainline designer you are paying for genuinely innovative designs, according to Karen Homer in her book, Things a Woman Should Know about Style. “It is more expensive to buy Giorgio Armani than Emorio……Designer diffusion lines are a marketer’s dream: a way of cashing in on a brand without laying out the overheads.”
Designer Secrets
In her fashion exposé, Fashion Babylon, author Imogen Edwards-Jones says that designers will often get their inspiration from vintage pieces, copy the basic design, and then work on it to give it a new twist. She also reveals stories of how a few designers cut out the label, add their own, and showcase it down their runways.
A Celebrity Culture
Currently the wheels of the fashion machine are kept turning, not only by the socialite set and red-carpet brigade, but by those teens and 20-somethings which hanker after the latest look, wanting to emulate their favorite celebrities. When young fashionistas cannot afford high-end ready-to-wear or couture, designer inspired fast-fashion and cheap chic comes into play.
Enter the commercial brands which rely on inspiration from existing trends –from runways to trade shows, to fashion magazines and movies. Nowadays a chain store like H & M can offer an “inspired” copy of a designer outfit, which is snapped up by celebrity hungry teens. The May 5th, 2008 copy of Look magazine has 2 pages dedicated to designer look-a-likes for a fraction of the price. From Gwyneth Paltrow’s ferocious Givenchy gladiators to Kyle Minogue’s Chloé dress. Entitled “Designer to High Street IT Buys," the article showcases outfits which are inspired by the various designers but are just different enough in design to pass the test!
Go one step further and in places like the Far East, there exists a counterfeit culture, with copies of well-known designer brands adorning bags, sunglasses, polo-shirts, watches and jeans. Whilst both designers and the relevant authorities try hard to clamp down on this, all the time there is a demand, counterfeiters the world over will find a way to ply their wares.
Fashion Trends – Imitation of Inspiration?
Whilst there is nothing wrong in the desire of high-street stores to give access to current styles and trends to customers on a low-budget, there is a fine line between designer or celebrity inspired, and blatant copying.
High-street stores, such as Tesco, have come under fire from mainline designers in the past. According to Mark Tungate in his article "When Does Inspiration Become Imitation, " (Telegraph, 27 July 2005), Chloé accused Tesco’s Florence and Fred line of copying one of their dresses. However, such stores will argue that the source of inspiration not only comes from designers but from influences such as exhibitions, media and the arts.
Zara, the highly successful Spanish retail chain, is well-known in fashion circles for making runway styles commercially available to the masses. The Telegraph quotes Carmen Fernandez from Zara as saying “we don’t invent trends, we follow them. We track them from magazines, fashion shows, movies and city streets.”
The Effect on High-End Designers
However, on the positive side, Tungate, the author of Fashion Brands:Branding Style from Armani to Zara is at pains to point out that so called fast fashion “may have pushed up the quality at the higher end of the market.” There is now more emphasis on quality, with the use of rich fabrics and hand-crafted detailing. Also, with the current society pressure on ethical fashion, many manufacturers are switching to improved practices in terms of production and fair trade policies.
For those who can afford it, a high-end designer label will always be just that. Knowing that you a wearing something worth thousands of dollars will give you a buzz that touting a poor quality imitation cannot hope to emulate.
 |
