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

[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.