Top 5 Trends in Fashion Now
With Fashion Week kicking off today in London, the capital goes truly fashion mad as designers, models, bloggers and fashion fanatics descend onto London. While Fashion Week is all about showcasing the new trends for Spring and Summer 2017, Kantar Worldpanel looks at the Top 5 fashion retail trends that are happening right now.
1. Athleisure isn’t going anywhere
The athletic twist to casualwear or athleisure is still going strong, despite a fashion market that is experiencing overall decline. Currently, women’s activewear (clothing worn for sports) is worth £267 million, with the category growing at +13.4% since last year, while Womenswear as a whole is in decline of -1.2%. This is boosted by sports leggings or jogging bottoms which are growing at +6.3% YoY. To put this into perspective about how strong their performance is, women’s denim is declining at -0.1% since last year. That’s right, lycra is now outperforming jeans.
2. “Mini-me” clothes for children
Total childrenswear is the only area of the fashion market that is not seeing decline; it is growing at +0.7%. With decreased consumer confidence and shoppers cutting back on spend; childrenswear is always the last area to be hit because parents feel guilty cutting back on buying for their children. Kidswear is also boosted by the trend in “Mini Me” clothes for children- trendy adult clothing like skinny jeans, leather jackets and even track suits in children’s’ sizes. This is evident from retailers like John Lewis and JD Sports, who focus on more branded childrenswear, scooping up market share this year by appealing to parents as they become more conscious of trends for kidswear.
3. 90’s Brands Revival
Retailers have invested heavily this season in 90’s fashion, banking on the comeback of iconic brands that Generations X and Y wore in their youth. While sportswear brands like Adidas benefitted two fold with the 90’s resurgence and popularity of athleisure, other brands like Calvin Klein had life breathed back into them by millennials. Known for their racy ads with Kate Moss, Calvin Klein brought back their iconic black and white campaigns and switched out Moss for the poster kids of the selfie generation - Kendal Jenner and Justin Bieber. From last year, the brand grew 25%, yet among under 25’s Calvin Klein grew a whopping 62%, driven by the popularity of theirbranded women’s lingerie and men’s boxer shorts.
4. Convenience shopping
While online shopping has been around for quite a while, retailers are now having to become more digitally savvy in order to compete with pure players who dominate online spend. Capturing 23% of sales, up from 21% last year, online continues to see growth in sales of +7.5% year on year while stores is declining at -3.0% since last year. Online growth is driven by the fashion pure players, such as Amazon and Asos, who have grown sales by +16% and +8% respectively over the course of a year. While multichannel retailers are worried about growing their online business at the expense of store sales, pure players are growing through new shoppers and increases in frequency. By turning themselves into a fashion destination, like Amazon, or a lifestyle hub, like Asos, these pure players are able drive growth while multi-channel retailers have to manage a multi-pronged strategy to entice shoppers.
5. Plus size spending
Designers at Fashion Week may be notorious for sending waif thin models down their runways, but are they ignoring plus size women at the cost of sales? Over half of women in Great Britain are a dress size 14 or above equating to £6.6 billion in womenswear sales. Not only is this group lucrative to the fashion industry, but sales in larger sizes are positively performing while smaller sizes are contributing negative. For example, sales in size 8 are declining at -5.5% while size 20 is growing at +2.8% since last year. Retailers and designers should make a conscious effort to think more about plus size women because growth could be even larger if they do so. A recent Washington Post article stated that, “More than 80 percent [of plus sized women] said they’d spend more on clothing if they had more choices in their size, and nearly 90 percent said they would buy more if they had trendier options.”
Source: Kantar Worldpanel Fashion Panel 52 w/e 31 July 2016