Week Three

WEDNESDAY - 

Today was very interesting particularly in terms of understanding the street wear market and its brands as my group and myself individually conducted several shop reports on different brands within the street wear segment.  We started by going round different street wear concessions within Selfridges as they had a variety. Here are some photos taken from the brands my group looked at: Including Hood By Air, Bathing Ape, Blood Brother and I.T London:

Looking at these different brands we noticed many similarities including: they all used a similar minimalist urban aesthetic, products were similar with heavy use of black and white as well as bold graphic prints and use of the brands logo on garments.

Overall today was really helpful because I’ve been able to understand how a brand predominantly a street wear brand would represent themselves in their own store or within a department store. Also by analyzing the similarities between the different street wear brands I have identified the key aspects and main features to a street wear brand such as: main aesthetic is quite minimal and urban, heavy use of branding – Logos used heavily across all products, main colours are black and white to stick to the minimal aesthetic and bold graphic prints feature quite a lot.

Week Two

WEDNESDAY - Today my group started looking into global retail chains and the internal and external issues they may face, as a result of this we created a pestle analysis of Zara. We each chose a section to research into and gathered information on: political, ethical, social/cultural, technological, legal and environmental factors.

PESTEL Zara

I found this really helpful although Zara not being a streetwear brand it has enabled me to understand the issues and difficulties a fashion brand will face on a business level as well as how I will need to consider these things once we have chosen our brand to redesign.

Week One

Thursday – 

Today I wanted to look further into the streetwear trend and look at how it’s expanding within the market. I found a really helpful source that highlighted how the market is growing which is emphasised in this chart. 

Source - http://editd.com/blog/2013/06/urban-trend/

The chart highlights that sales of Streetcar garments have increased, for example Baseball shirts have seen a 183.7& increase in sales as well as Slogan tees rising by 52.6% and Slogan Sweaters by 62.5%.


Also with further research and my own knowledge another reason for the streetwear brand becoming more popular is due to societies celebrity culture as high profile celebrities such as Rihanna and Kanye West are photographed wearing a lot of streetwear, as well as this designer collaborations such as Alexander Wang for H&M and Jeremy Scott for Adidas, this bringing the once sub culture trend into the mainstream bigger market.

Week One

WEDNESDAY - 

Today was the start of the group-rebranding project. As a started my group chose a market segment and decided to research into this by using resources WGSN and LSN Global. I hadn’t ever used these resources before but after today becoming familiar with them I have found them very helpful for research particularly on quantitative research. 

I looked into the street wear trend and found the following report:

Source - WGSN Streetwear Reports

I believe that this is an emerging trend because of several different external factors one main one being the political and social effects coming from soviet countries such as the conflict in Ukraine. The Ukraine crisis is in the media regularly and gaining wide coverage because its a important global topic, this having an effect on the fashion coming out of these areas as well as the fashion in other areas. For this reason I found it interesting as it showed how a political and global issue can effect fashion trends.