Thinking big

As a follow up to last year's Brandchameleon post Expanding Your Audience, check out the new issue of V magazine - The Size Issue. Well done to all the brands who produced non-sample sized items for the shoots.

V Magazine - The Size Issue

The models were shot by Terry Richardson and look great in the clothes featured. Added fuel to the argument that while conventionally thin models may be convenient for brands to use as they represent a standard size and image, there are alternatives.

At the Luxury Briefing Conference: Smart Ideas for Challenging Times held in London in November 2009, Dr Concetta Lanciaux, advisor to Bernard Arnault at LVMH, talked about how Mark Fast's London Fashion Week presentation which included different sizes of model (Luxury Briefing Conference Report). While Fast's show personally left me cold – use big models, fine, but nobody should trot down a catwalk in diaphanous or crochet dresses with badly-fitting underwear – Lanciaux pointed out that by innovating in this way, Fast had opened his brand up to scores of women who might otherwise have thought that the brand was for them, while while attracting global publicity.

Back in black = back in the black?

In recent interviews chiefs of specialty stores and fashion retailers across the US have indicated that sales for November and December were strong, with some ripples of optimism evident. However it would be wrong to assume that this heralds the arrival of a new, shining dawn for the retail industry. Instead, the heads bobbing above the water on the retail sea can mostly be attributed to reduced inventories, play-safe options and the perceived necessity of Christmas shopping bringing bearish consumers out of their caves to make a festive appearance.

New York stores including Brooks Brothers, Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdales, to name but a few, have publicly talked about keeping inventory tight and either sticking to safe classics – polo shirts, cashmere jumpers, silk ties et al – or trying to emulate the fast-fashion model that has worked so well for some of the high street stores, with quick turnaround of a limited number of each item in an attempt to generate a buy-it-now-or-lose-it-forever hysteria.

Across the pond in the UK a trip to a number of branches of Harvey Nichols indicates that this formerly interesting retailer is also playing it safe. While people may no longer be partying like it is 1999, or any other time of celebration come to that, there was a distinct lack of joie de vivre about the Harvey Nichols pre-Christmas offering, with black to the fore in many of its stores and play-safe shift dresses providing the colour options. In the Edinburgh store there was little eveningwear in evidence at all bar that from Amanda Wakeley – a brand that has been largely overlooked in the now-fading boom years as the popularity of young upstart designers overrode Wakeley's more classical approach.

For too long stores employed the approach of sticking a label and a high pricetag on an item and sitting back in a do-this-and-they-will-buy state of complacency. While consumers are no longer willing to buy into this, neither do they wish to be confined in their purchasing by what retail buyers and business-savvy designers feel to be safe options. At the FT Business of Luxury Conference in 2009 Joshua Shulman, CEO of Jimmy Choo observed that its best-sellers for Spring 2009 had been its lower-end items but that a high-ticket, beaded sandal design had also been flying out of the shops.

And it would seem that therein lies a story... yes, shoppers want beautiful basics that they feel are an investment and give a sense of quality that they just can't achieve by picking up a similar item in Topshop. But they need also need to be offered something exquisite, an item that they can't refuse on the grounds that it will make them feel happy, beautiful, and momentarily forget that they are supposed to be employing a life-mode of frugality and austerity.