Conspicuous Consumption and Conspicuous Silly Marketing: Fashion

[cimorene]

One of the things I've been thinking about on and off in the last year or so is the fundamental disconnect between what the fashion industry presents to us and what we wear. I'm not talking about fashion runways, or even media images. I want to focus on the much more direct and mundane example of the clothing store display window. A run-of-the-mall store catering to the middle class, aiming at ordinary working adult women (or in the case of the Chav H&M, ordinary schoolgoing teenie boppers who are colourblind), these are what I am most frequently exposed to and what I want to tackle.

I mean, even though I'm aware that stores send instructions to their branches, it's local employees who dress the mannequins. I'd estimate that about 10% of window mannequins, excluding at jeans boutiques, wear pants instead of skirts. Meanwhile, in Finland, about 10% of women you pass by walking downtown wear skirts instead of pants (of course this changes with setting, particularly by workplace; women who drive cars instead of walking are likely to display a different pattern of dress somewhat, etc disclaim etc, BUT I think the overall point is still valid).

I'd say the same pattern is even more overwhelming in shoes, where, in the winter (though not the summer), tall, flat-soled boots are overwhelmingly popular, but displays are nonetheless mostly full of impractical high heels.

So... WHY?

Come on. You're working in a clothing store. You're looking at your sales records or possibly consulting just your memory. You're deciding what to put in the window. If red is your #1 most-popular colour at this time of year, and you've got a good range of colours including some nice new red items, are you going to

1. Make sure to display a range of red items in the window, or



2. Fill the window up with purple and green; after all, purple and green was all over in your fashion magazine! And then throw a red outfit onto ONE mannequin, as an after thought. Just in case.

Even in Finland, which I find to be an exceedingly practical culture which most highly values practicality among women as well as men, a culture where plain speaking is valued above politeness, endurance is valued above exceptional performance - even in Finland, the overwhelmingly popular answer seems to be (2).

I don't get it.

My favoured hypothesis is that the people in charge of dressing mannequins are actually so inundated in media images that they don't notice the incongruity between the mannequins and the populace - or that it doesn't occur to them that displayed clothes should reflect what they expect to sell - or even, possibly, if they don't have computer printouts of statistics (maybe they don't), they don't notice that real women wear more pants than skirts/flats than heels even though they look at them, day in and day out, all the time.

Comments

[buddleia.livejournal.com]

I'm sure I remember reading somewhere that marketing aimed at women is most effective when it is done in such a way as to make women feel off-balance and wrong for not already wanting what was being sold. If you sell women what they already want, you make less money. This is especially true of clothing.

Also, in my experience, in Monsoon/Accessorize in London, window-dressing is not done or arranged by the shop employees but by marketing specialists who are very much part of a larger, even international, corporate picture.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

I know that Lindex, one of the biggest clothing chains throughout north and eastern Europe, the directions are things like "dress the mannequins in lingerie using key items" (but there are more key items than mannequins) and such. There's guidance but the employees have latitude - and they do do it themselves. I don't know what the policy's like for H&M but, given that the two branches across the street from each other are always wildly different, it can't be set in stone, either.

[annlarimer.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's easier to get skirts on the mannequins.

[aeslis]

I always wonder that kind of thing. I always wonder why display windows are so high fashion, or colourful, and yet my hometown inevitably is full of people that wear hoodies and jeans. There's nothing wrong with hoodies and jeans, not in the slightest! But there's a big fashion disconnect.

Interesting that it's the same in Finland.

Stranger still, perhaps, Japan is NOT like that--people really do wear what's in the windows. The range of fashion that women in Japan wear, and hell, even men, is so broad it's amazing to me. That influence all around me is why I wear skirts now, and tights, and heeled boots. In America, I'd feel ridiculously out of place.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Well, people DO wear skirts here - not so much in the winter, of course, but in the summer it's more than 10%. I'd say that was also true of Alabama (far more than the Midwest where I spent a great deal of time). I kinda figured it was the weather in Alabama, but IDK. It must be cultural, though.

[isilya]

Well, the major reason is that pants are usually static: in a boutique that gets new dress and skirt stock every three weeks, you'll have the same five pairs of pants for three months. Pants are cut like so: classic black pants, suit pants, trendy pants. One store might have the same classic black pants all year and suits are generally in stock for at least four months.

Boots are similarly static; boots come in for winter and stay the whole season, there are no new boots added mid-season.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Because we have so much snow, we actually have two types of boots - the regular ones, and the "warm" ones. The former come out earlier in the fall obviously.

I hadn't thought about the smaller selection of pants. But considering the variety of pants I don't really see why the stock isn't changed more often. Jeans don't change, but with the piles of candy-coloured and striped jeans-cut pants and cords here in the last few years, it does seem like they could restyle the trouser-mannequins once a week. The odds of seeing the new pants styles from H&M in the window when they arrive is really low - if I want to check if they've got something I have to go inside and hunt around for it (yesterday they had about three styles of striped jeans and a whole raft of coloured ones in the new stock).