THE FASHION CYCLE

All fashion products have a finite life cycle. New styles are introduced into the market, last for a certain period of time, decline, and finally disappear. The diffusion of a specific fashion follows a predictable cycle, called a fashion cycle.

The fashion cycle includes four main stages: introduction, growth, maturity and decline. The fashion cycle allows retailers to better predict sales and profitability of specific trends.

The introduction stage is when a new trend is introduced to the market and gains acceptance however, the supply of the new style is limited.

In the growth stage, competition begins to emerge as the trend is exposed to more consumers, gaining popularity. Thus, the original style of the trend will be modified for mass fashion, making it available at a lower price point.

The maturity stage is the longest period of the cycle. Competition becomes more intense making prices fall to appeal to the mass market. The original style is further modified as manufacturers use cheaper materials and labour, so products can be sold at an even lower price point.

In the decline stage, the trend will begin to go out of fashion, losing its popularity. Sales and profits will rapidly decrease, and retailers will but this style on sale to eliminate the obsolete stock (Kim, E., Fiore, A, M., Kim, H., 2011).

Role Of The Media

Ruth Staiman, former fashion director and current CEO of The Fashion Office, has stated that technology is the new fashion.

“Trend forecasting is a process that begins with colour and fabric predictions, trend selections and comes full circle with trade show and fashion show attendance. Before the internet, Fashion Direction was based on instinct.”

Sites such as Stylesight, Stylelist, My Pantone and Polyvore only add more information and data to the process. Information that was only available to Retail executives is now in the public domain and has pushed trend forecasting to a new level.”

Furthermore, Wendy Bendoni a Professor of Fashion Marketing has said that “tracking fashion trends used to mean traveling abroad about five times a year to review runway, retail and street fashion and the total process would take over a month.”

However, today with the support of media outlets and social media it can take up to only a few minutes to send footage of what people are currently wearing and what trends retailers are distributing changing the face of trend forecasting forever (Wright, M., 2010).

Social media is an ever-growing platform with an extremely competitive online environment. Social media has a large role to play in the modern-day market when it comes to trends and trend forecasting this is because, certain fashion statements often manage to attract an inordinate amount of attention, thus becoming a trend.

Much of the time, trends occur over social media because of the influence of popular members of the network when they project content which resonates with their following thus causing the content to propagate and gain popularity with a wider majority (Asur, S., Huberman, B, A., Szabo, G., Wang, C., 2011).

The modern-day consumer has more influence over the fashion industry than ever before through the power of social media; from the average person inspiring and influencing fashion designers to fashion bloggers influencing not only their followers but designers because they essentially have the same power as editors therefore, creating and developing new trends (Sellors, A,B., 2014).

The digital revolution has empowered people from all ends of the spectrum to take trend research into their own hands. Therefore, instead of a few trends emerging at the one time there is now a magnitude of trends surfacing simultaneously infiltrating one another (Illingworth, G., 2016).

Today’s trend forecasting is no longer demographic based but more dynamic, embedded within social and cultural frameworks as in recent years, communities have diversified, and consumer patterns have become more complex therefore, making trend forecasting more complex than ever before (Illingworth, G., 2016).