The Fashion industry could be described as the business of making clothes, but that would omit the important distinction between fashion and apparel. Apparel is one of humanity’s basic needs, but fashion incorporates its own prejudices of style, individual taste, and cultural evolution. When one speaks of fashion brands, what strikes your mind immediately is runways, models and unnecessarily expensive clothing. So, what exactly makes the clothing industry tick? How are some brands able to charge sky high prices for an item of clothing which, quite frankly, doesn’t look worth it? Even so, why do people purchase them?
Imagine if Chanel’s bags did not have a double “C” logo right at the center. Think of a Louis Vuitton bag without their 100-plus year old Monogram. Would the average consumer pay just as much for these logo-less bags? Probably not. These prominent source-identifying logos are what draw in consumers and get them to pay thousands of dollars for these bags. Fashion is not really in the business of selling clothes and bags. Instead, fashion brands – the big, well-established ones, at least – are more realistically in the business of selling their trademarks.
To protect their name and sell themselves as an upmarket, exclusive brand, companies like Burberry and Louis Vuitton have started burning off their excess inventory. Any goods that are not sold post sale and employee discount programmes, are burnt off as brands do not want their products to go off shelves at a rather low price, and yes they’d rather bear the brunt of it by disposing the goods altogether, and bear that additional expense.
One of the best marketing techniques that brands use is creating exclusivity with their clothing and so, they’ll produce 100 garments instead of 1000. This increases the price of the clothing as everyone desires to get their hands on something that’s “limited edition” but printing small runs of T-Shirts is more expensive than if you were to bulk print the T-Shirts in higher quantities. This has a big impact on the cost of production and this is reflected in the price they’ll charge us.
If you’re in the fashion industry you want your clothing to be seen, you must have a Fashion Show to showcase next season’s lineup. The issue here is that fashion shows are very expensive to host. They were originally organized so that buyers could attend the events, look at the latest creations and then order them for their retailers. In this age of YouTube and Instagram models charging huge figures just to have a photo taken with a particular product, the trusted Fashion Show no longer works.
Instead, Fashion Shows are now used for marketing. While seeing a fashion show you might think, “who in their right mind would wear that?!” but the truth is that no one does. Any item of clothing that’s appeared on a fashion runway is not worn on a regular basis. In fact, the majority of clothing that is featured on the runway doesn’t even make it to the production line!
Back in 2014, Burberry made an announcement that they would be increasing the pricing of their products to make the brand more exclusive. This indirectly meant that they were trying to move their products out of research of less desirable (or “less rich” if you prefer) customers. The idea behind this is if you could afford to buy Burberry clothing, you’re not only wearing a designer label – you’re also announcing to the world that you can afford to wear Burberry clothing.
We can look in depth at all of the different scenarios which could affect the pricing of clothing, especially when it comes to certain brands. In reality, one of the biggest reasons that high-end brands are able to charge so much for their clothing is because there is a market for it.
As long as people are willing to pay high prices for clothing, the cost of clothing will continue to increase – unfortunately, it’s just as simple as that.
- Dipti Rohra
The Endeavour Editorial Club 