All About Fashion and Fashion Week

Fashion is the general style or custom of clothing worn at any given time. The word "fashion" comes from the years when people described a woman who was well dressed as a "fashion plate".

Whether or not it had a name, fashion has always been important to women. Now it seems to be almost as important to men. Beau Brummell is probably the most well known and talked about male fashion plate in history. His colorful clothing and accessories were copied by men all over Europe.

Couturiers with famous names such as Worth, Dior, Balenciaga, Chanel had famous fashion houses in Paris. These were the haute couture designers that every other fashion designer since has aspired to become. In spite of Prêt a Porter (French for ready made or off the rack) the world still looks to Paris first when fashion is concerned. Today, although fashion designers and models come from all over the world, fashion week in Paris is still the most exciting event of the year.

Fashion changes nearly instantly. Each season welcomes in a different style, color, hem length, and designer. Today the person who follows fashion like a slave is called a fashionista. Some fashionistas look ridiculous in the new styles but they wear them anyway.

The media is very important to fashion and can rightly take credit for the spread of each new style and trend over the world map. Fashion blogs are the newest manner of communicating the newest fashion. Prior to blogs there were fashion web sites, columns in newspapers and magazines, fashion magazines. One of the most famous fashion magazines is Vogue. It was founded in 1892 and it is the longest lasting fashion magazine in the world with versions being published in England, France, Italy, Germany and other countries. Vogue's influence grew after W.W. II. Ready to wear designers and perfume companies were their largest advertisers. In the 50', 60's 70's television was featured on television shows such as Today and other morning shows.

A few years ago, Project Runway became one of the most watched reality shows on television. Each season a new designer is launched with his/her own fashion line. The show is sponsored by a well known department store, hair care company, and make-up company. The judges are a model, a fashion magazine editor, a famous designer and a weekly guest. This program watches a group of people who want to become fashion designers go through each stage of the competition. At the end, the three remaining designers compete with a line they put together in a month or two. This is presented at Mercedes Benz fashion week in Bryant Park, N.Y. The winner gets a large check to work at producing his/her own line which will be carried at the major department store.

Fashion Week is a big industry event. There is one held in each of the large fashion capitals. This week the biggest fashion houses and designers display their newest designs and styles. There is a fashion week in Paris, Milan, London, and New York. These weeks occur twice a year for autumn/winter fashions and spring/summer fashions. They are held many months in advance so that the buyers and the magazine editors can see the designs prior to ordering them for their venue. The first week of women's wear is New York followed by London, Milan and Paris. The men's wear lines are shown in between in Milan.

Fashion weeks are also held in other places for specific types of clothing such as swim wear and cruise wear in Miami. In fact, there are fashion weeks in many U.S. cities for several different types of clothing. You can probably find an alphabetical listing online if you want to go to one.

Why a Job in Fashion?

Why look at the fashion industry and the fashion world these days? Well there is a good reason to look at fashion especially if you plan on getting a job in the fashion industry. There are different types of jobs in the fashion industry. If you decide to be a designer you have to be up on the latest trends of celebrities and political people alike. You also have to know your clients and what they want and most of them want to be fashionable and be presentable when they go to a job or when they go to a photo shoot.

You can get a job as a photographer in the fashion world and be happy in it but you still need to know what is fashionable in the time you are in and what is considered not to be fashionable. You can be an editor in a fashion magazine and be able to research fashion trends through out the United States and through out the world or you can be a fashion assistant where you go and do things for the photographer, editor or designer. The fashion world has all kinds of opportunities available for jobs if that is an area you are interested in.

A retail store has to be up on the latest trends in order for them to sell clothes. If they were not then they would not be able to sell the line of clothing. Many places carry a line of clothing and fashion from a certain celebrity. For example some stores like Wall-mart and K-mart and other superstores carry brands like Martha Stewart, Miley Cyrus or Just My Size and those are just some of the brands they carry.

Mom and pop shops in New York and other cities start trends as well because they have made a name for them selves with celebrities. Macy's is another place that carries a lot of fashionable and celebrity fashions as well. In fact Macy's is known not only for their Thanksgiving Day Parade, but they are known for making a bold statement in the fashion industry when it comes to showing off their clothing and other accessories.

The fashion world is full of surprises and you can do all kinds of modelling for fashion. Modelling is definitely another job in the fashion industry and includes people like Tyra Banks who does Victoria Secret swim wear and lingerie. She has also went gone from just walking the run way to hosting her own reality show in modelling and fashion to allow girls the opportunity to see if they have what it takes to be a model in the fashion industry these days. She also has had her own day time talk show and talks with women about issues that face not only black women in the fashion industry but women in all different industries. She discusses the troubles women face in society today and talks about fashion and modelling as a way of getting out of those struggles. She also talks about it as a way of getting into acting and into theatre as well.

Fashion is considered to be here one minute and gone the next. Trends tend to come and go from one century and follow another trend from another century down the road. Every time you look back at past fashion the designers put there own twist to it and make it there own. This is why the fashion industry changes so much and why the jobs available in it would be guaranteed to brighten your day.

Fashion Marketing - Fashion Stores Meet Niche Marketing, Pareto, and the Long Tail

Fashion Marketing news: A slew of studies, data, and articles seem to point out the growing success of niche sites, especially in the fashion industry. Hype or Fact? How can big online retailers and local fashion stores benefit from internet niches?

I like reading about pragmatic ideas to boost online sales of fashion goods, from apparel to accessories. I think that too much time is wasted in theorizing about internet marketing, and not acting about it.

Yet, I am going to talk about hard-core statisical studies and hype. Why?

Because I found in this month's INC. magazine an article about niche marketing that made me connect together a lot of issues facing local apparel stores as well as big online fashion retailers.

Make money online by not carrying best-sellers

First, the article titled "A world without bestsellers" dabbles with buying patterns specific to internet consumers.

These patterns make up the Long Tail. You may or you may not know about it. For a concise explanation, go the Long Tail page on Wikipedia. Let's just say that consumers can find and buy online products that a regular store could not carry. For instance, 40% of Amazon.com's book sales reportedly consist in unknown titles that your regular Barnes and Noble cannot afford to carry in the bookstore next door.

The same seem to apply to fashion goods. For instance, in the INC. article, Zappos' Tony Hsieh says that:

"Today the company sells more than three million products across 1,000 brands. The top 20 percent of products account for half of revenue, the bottom 80 percent, the other half."

So, at Zappos, the 20 best-selling items represent only 50% of the revenues. This is a far-cry from the usual 80/20 rule that usually applies offline, when the top 20 best-sellers make up 80% of the revenues. The 80/20 rule is drawn from the works of economist Pareto.

Online sales of fashion goods make Pareto Principle redundant

This is the gist of a February 2007 study called "Goodbye Pareto Principle, Hello Long Tail: The Effect of Search Costs on the Concentration of Product Sales." It was written by researchers at the Sloan School of Management at the MIT. Better, this study is based on "several years of sales data at a private-label women's clothing company that offered the same merchandise through its catalog and its Internet store."

Fashion goods are really at the forefront of this trend. Think about all the sites of the specialty sites that have sprung up, from sites selling discontinued lines of products to sites selling only to a sub-demographic. Buyers will turn to the web for hard-to-find glasses or for styles that regular retailers would deem too original to carry.

A company called Niche Retail is specialized in doing just that. The company says that they actually avoid carrying best-sellers, as big retailers can usually manage to kill the business by discounting the most sought-after items. By the way, Niche Retail's logo reprents the Long Tail graph.

Style is a personal matter. Fashion professionals did not wait for the Long Tail theory to launch niche product lines. But the internet does offer interesting further niche opportunities:

- established brands and big online retailers can find relevant niche sites for some of their product lines

- local fashion stores are indeed niches themselves; they can use the internet to get more exposure

Big brands and retailers going after niche consumers

This very site spends time presenting you new fashion blogs, new fashion sites, and new fashion communities (see Fashion 2.0). Because fashion can get very personal, it has always been a good conversation topic. Now, the internet allows you to become a fashion critique in a snap. Big fashion actors can go after these niche sites to get their attention.

For instance, niche TV channels are popping up on the internet, due to the low barrier of entry, as reported in this article of the Wall Street Journal. The newspaper gives the example of clothing chain Express sponsoring the Ford Models web tv. I would add the example of "Ask a Gay Man", the colorful and popular fashion critique show on YouTube (see my previous note on the subject), which has gotten founder William Sledd a TV deal with Bravo.

But you not have to be big to go after these niche sites. For instance, Ujeans, a made-to-order jeans company sponsors competitions on social network site StyleMob ("a new community for street fashion inspiration").

Local fashion stores are so niche

I see here a chance for local apparel stores as well: a niche can be geographic.

A local store owner may be the best person to know what senior citizens like wearing in the Boca Raton area. Why not put up a website, where you can share your expertise? When local people use Google to find information about clothes they like, they will find your website, enjoy your expertise, and visit your shop.

Marketers are encouraging local stores to go online and advertise. A book called Marketing your retail store in the internet age does a great job of giving pragmatic and inexpensive tips to local store owners. Meanwhile, Google is pushing local ads heavily. Its AdWords system allows you to display your ad only to people searching from your zip code. Moreover, Google Maps allows you to mention your store in the popular map system, so that when people search for "women's fashion, 97108", your store shows up.

No wonder that local advertising on the internet is booming. According to eMarketer, local online advertising spending in the US will reach $2.9 billion in 2007. Local search is great for a local fashion store or a geographical niche site. One of the best resources about the subject, with how-to-s and advice, is Clickz's Local Search column.

Fashion sales are booming online and online fashion marketing may be one of the hottest topics right now.

Fashionable and Stylish

Fashion and style. What are they? Do they always go together? Do they mean one and the same thing? It's hard to say. According to specialists in the field, fashion is actually a synonym for style or glamour. It has been agreed on the fact that fashion is a way of personal expression, and according to this criteria, one can be fashionable when he/she fits in this expression mode, or unfashionable, which would be the opposite. Fashion has manifestations in all the fields of human activity, that is when can speak about fashion when we refer to topics such as architecture, clothing, music, cosmetics, entertainment, forms of speech or even politics or technology. Anything in these fields can be described as being fashionable or not. When one speaks about materialism or trend s using the term 'fashion', it can be associated with a negative meaning.

Most people today perceive fashion as a term referring mostly to clothes. The beginnings of what we call fashion today did actually refer to clothes and they go back as far as the sixteenth century. However, it was only two centuries later that the real manifestations of fashion took place and it happened in Europe, among the wealthy upper classes. Fashion, just like any other manifestation of human activity, underwent major and continual changes, to the point where it is today, that is, being related to many fields of activities.
Of course, it would be unjustified to assume that fashion is the same all over the world. First of all, fashion differs from one society to another. Then, within a certain society, there are a lot of factors which may influence fashion such as age or generation, social class, profession or occupation. Even the geography of certain regions may bring about differences in fashion among the people of the same society.

But how does fashion change? Because we all know that constant change is what fashion is actually about. Everyone will agree that what is new now will soon become old, and the process goes both ways, that I what was once into fashion but is now considered to be old and obsolete will soon turn into something new again. Capitalism has brought along with its numerous good aspects some less appealing ones, such as waste. People buy things which are not necessary to them and consequently speed up the process of change as far as fashion is concerned. Young generations have much to do with this change in fashion as well, because they are always eager and willing to try interesting things, things that they haven't experienced before, something new to be more precise.

What made fashion so popular among people was actually the television. The moment fashion hit television, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was the moment when the general population became interested in this aspect. And fashion magazines, websites or even fashion blogs were only one step away.

Pretty much in the same way as fashion, style can refer to may things, from painting, music, literature, web design to linguistics or manners of addressing people. The very definition of style describes the term as a fashionable manner of doing things, which points out that style and fashion are very closely related. Not everything that is considered fashionable will also be regarded as stylish, which is why people should avoid turning into a fashion victim, one of those persons who will wear just about anything that's seen as fashionable, no matter if it suits them or not, from hairstyles and piercing to clothes. It is true that today's world and the society we live in have set some rules in what fashion and style are concerned, but these don't always have to be strictly followed. Being a fashion victim will only turn you into one of the rest. If you want to be ahead at all times, what you must try is to define your own style and that will make you look your best.