74906.pdf

The Fashion Business

Paris and New York carry his distinctive personal style and reflect his aim to
turn shopping into a social experience, and Terence Conran, whose stores in
London and Paris emphasize furniture, homewear and food as fashionable
products. These retailers, as do Selma Weisser of the, sadly defunct, Chiaravari
in New York, Joyce Ma of Hong Kong, Colette in Paris and Jeffrey in New
York, address the concept of what I would term ‘lifestyle retailing’. They
have a strong point of view, their selections of merchandise have an editorial
quality, which extends from clothes to food to furniture and is asserted
through the interior of the store itself. The secret of their success appears to
be in their refusal to attempt to be all things to all people. Maureen Doherty
and Asha Sarabhai’s London store, Egg, for example carries a distinctive
mix of clothes and objectswhich reflect the proprietors’ taste for high quality
artisanal products which stand outside the usual dictates of fashion. The
store is situated in a quiet Knightsbridge mews and is characterized by a
low-tech simplicity harmonious with the product. Shopping there is a leisurely
social event, with frequent special events and private views for the well-defined
intellectually and artistically inclined clientele.
Egg is clearly very different from Marks & Spencer but there is no doubt
in my mind that volume retailers will have to take their cue from the small-
scale specialists and department stores who have restored the pleasure of the
act of shopping, and have re-established it as a defining social activity. The
increasing ‘visual literacy’ which fuelled the mass demand for well-designed
or fashionable products in the first instance will, or has extended to the retail
environment itself. High-street retailers must pay as much attention to the
design of their stores and their visual merchandising as to the design of their
products, and it is no coincidence that so many have, over the last few years,
opened in-store coffee bars, crèches, delivery services and home shoppers.

Product

My career bears witness to the mass-market fashion explosion of the last
thirty or so years. The recent downturn in business reflects the resulting
worldwide over-capacity, which I believe will be a significant factor in the
industry’s future. This is especially true in the area we describe as ‘core casual’,
that is to say, the pivotal items which define generic leisure/weekend wear.
In the late 1980s the American retailer Gap built a huge business on the
demand, amongst all age groups and social classes, for a more relaxed and
practical approach to dressing. Their hugely successful advertising campaigns
offered us stylish black and white images of icons of all ages, and from all
fields, wearing anonymous casual basics. The trend systematically moved