Fashion Brand Identity - Individuality versus Conformity
The 1980s saw the retail revolution transform the British high street. This was symbolized, as several writers since then have noted, by the success of the Next chain, which brought fashion with a higher design input within the reach of average income consumers, male and female (Mort 1996, Nixon 1996). The availability of more differentiated goods, together with what appeared to be a more carefully designed appearance, reinforced the process of social fragmentation as tastes proliferated, and people strove to be different through the access they appeared to have to a wider range of goods. Even low income groups began participating more noticeably in this leisure field where individuals were invited or prevailed upon to 'invent themselves' in different ways as a mark of individuality, a sign of identity. As Stuart Hall recently noted, young black people, 'with hardly a penny in their pockets', paraded the streets in demonstrations of spectacular consumption (Hall 1997). As Baudrillard argued, consumption had achieved a new prominence simultaneously with the way that culture and the media were now focal points in people's lives (Baudrillard 1988). Suddenly everything seemed to become more cultural. This was as true
Barnard (1996) reveals the political and aesthetic connections between making and doing looks in his etymology of the word 'fashion'. He describes the political (self-other) connotations implicit in the word's relationship with the Latin words factio, associated with factions and power, and facere (and the French word faire), which connotes making or doing (1996: 37). It would seem that, for Barnard, the journey from naked infant to clothed and 'civilized' adult is an evocative metaphor enabling him to understand, both cognitively and imaginatively, what has been involved in our journey from nature to culture. Like Freud, he considers that the route the infant takes in growing up is also the one traveled by the mind in arriving at its final structure of id, superego and ego. Despite the persistence of these themes, the range of women's magazines and changing patterns of circulation and readership suggest that women consume and use magazines in complex ways. Magazines of the 1980s and 1990s are organised around diversity and choice as the basis of customised techniques of femininity. This approach accords with the general popularity of the 'psy' complex in contemporary western culture. Women's magazines offer readers a smorgasbord of identifications, practical skills, objects of desire, and competing sources of prestigious imitation. The revised techniques of femininity supplant the choice between domesticity versus self-presentation with a tension between work and family in a lifestyle characterized by activity and independence. By casting women in this proactive model, women's magazines construct women's culture around individuality and achievement rather than around conformity and duty. (Craik, 1994). The relation between individual distinction and group conformity must be understood, not only within groups, but also in terms of comparisons across groups. Although empirically interrelated, these dimensions can be separated analytically. A within-group distinction is a comparison of the individual to their peer-group. An across-group distinction is a judgment by a group's members of their unconventionality in relation to other groups. Both dimensions can be observed through interviews and questionnaires. The volume of foreign sales shows the USA and Japan to be the single biggest foreign markets. Even here these are mostly all licensed sales which bring in only a small proportion of returns to the United Kingdom designers (Salmon suggests that L125 million of licensed sales brings in only L15 million) (Salmon, 1991). It is quite clear that these two markets, particularly Japan, have continued to show this interest in United Kingdom designers. Paul Smith, as we have seen, now has an enormous market in Japan. Whistles also have three of their own outlets there and several of the other designers who participated in a Salmon study moved towards producing primarily for Japan in the early 1990s when the United Kingdom market went into recession (for example, Workers For Freedom, Vivienne Westwood and Katharine Hamnett). In the Salmon study only thirty five per cent of all sales were to the home market (making the United Kingdom the single biggest market). But in a study carried out only a few years later, the designers sold primarily to United Kingdom consumers, and managed their foreign sales on what could only be described as a haphazard basis. An order would be placed by a buyer at a big American department store which then had to be produced and delivered to a strict deadline. This whole transaction was conducted primarily by the designers themselves. At the peak of their success, as we have already seen, Coates and Storey had three agents working for them in different countries, but this part of the work proved by far the most difficult to coordinate, especially in terms of keeping track of and being paid for foreign sales. The administration and paperwork involved, as well as the initial capital required to employ a
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 9686
Approximate Pages = 39 (250 words per page double spaced)
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