Selfridges succeed again!

Visual merchandise is always so beautiful at this time of year. Shopping in central London is such a great experience, and it gets everybody in the mood for Christmas. This year, Selfridges have used astrology for their Christmas inspiration, they have named the theme “Journey to the Stars”. When I first heard the name, it made me think that each window would feature a star and it would be the usual display for christmas.. but then I thought, surely Selfridges wouldn't stick to this stereotype. Of course they wouldn't!
Each window facing the street presents all 12 zodiac signs, when first looking at the displays you do not immediately understand the concept but if you look closely, each window shows the most recognisable characteristic for each of the star signs. For example, for Taurus there is a Bull in a China Shop, Pisces shows ladies of the lake with mermaid tails featured next to glass sculpture and for Scorpios, mannequins have been positioned in a passionate and explosive manner to show the main characteristic of that star sign.

When I came across these window displays, I thought this was such a brilliant idea because it isn’t the normal display of stars, Father Christmas and reindeers etc. It is unique and still looks very Christmassy. The windows are full of creativity and have been put in place to distract shoppers during the crazy period this Christmas, they definitely attract attention to the store. The windows “took over 30,000 hours to design and produce” and you can see this as the result looks exquisite. This year, I haven’t been that impressed with the visual merchandise for stores but Selfridges have definitely succeeded in making our shopping experience festive!

Good luck with the Christmas shopping!

Photo Credit - Google Images

Street Style

Following on from our retail task, we wanted to see if consumers were adopting the trends that we highlighted as the most important for A/W 15/16. From our findings, we realised that the most popular trends that had been translated onto the high street were reptile and fringing. I was surprised that the patterns/trims were spotted more on the highstreet because I thought that more people would have the silhouettes e.g. saddle and duffle bags because this can be sold in different colours, sizes and patterns whereas the other trends were more specific. 

       Reptile Bags - Street Style

It was really interesting to see what consumers were buying and the transformation from the catwalk to the high street. When looking for our specific trends, we noticed that there were a lot of backpacks so we decided to include this silhouette into our presentation as we found hardly any saddle bags or duffle bags. I loved this task, although it was quite hard to approach certain people as they were walking fast and avoided eye contact with us. Most people that we approached seemed hesitant at first because they thought that we wanted them to fill out a questionnaire, but when we explained that it was for street style, most consumers were cooperative and gave consent. 

Although this task may seem scary at first, I would suggest that fashion lovers experiment with street style because you can find out a lot from consumer behaviour.

Photo Credit - Chloe, Ali and Grace

My Love for Stacey Dooley and Feminism

Stacey Dooley has always been my favourite presenter, she is down to earth and always gets completely involved in the topics that she investigates. Alongside fashion, I am also very passionate about feminism and the way that women can be portrayed and objectified. Recently Stacey Dooley has been documenting issues around the world that put women and young girls at risk, purely down to their gender. The second documentary ‘Stacey Dooley investigates - The World’s Worst Place to Be a Woman’ made me think just how lucky  women of Britain are and how our basic rights can be taken for granted. Within the episode, Stacey visits the country of Honduras and some of the despicable acts that happen there are completely unbelievable. This documentary reveals the utter disrespect that the men have for women, they feel no remorse or guilt in abusing and even murdering their wives; many men's response being soley 'They deserved it.' Honduras has the worlds highest murder rate for women, and statistics prove that the numbers are increasing. There has even been a word created for the murder of a woman – femicide, and in the last year alone '1100 women were either murdered or kidnapped'.

A common reason for the murder of a women in Honduras is their beauty. Santa Barbara is known globally for its very beautiful women and the most publicised case of femicide was the death of the ‘countries sweetheart’ Miss Honduras and her sister. Miss Honduras was shot 12 times by the host of the party (her boyfriend). He then went on to shoot her sister who tried to intervene. The brutality of their murders was one of the worst Honduras has ever seen, and the reason for her murder? She was dancing with another man when her boyfriend saw, he used this as his opportunity to kill. Some of the men at the party even helped bury the bodies, when I heard this I felt so angry and disgusted, not one person reported the crime to the police and the other witnesses watched as he shot them both. Watching the interview with the girls' mother made me feel outraged, I wish that her questions could be answered, this is the least he could do after killing both of her daughters for what seems to be no reason at all.

Other cases that were discussed in the documentary were the murder and/or kidnapping of models in general. Models in Honduras are huge targets, this type of job is one of the few ways to escape poverty in this country and some men do not like women having this independence and freedom. They use this as an excuse to take control away from them in an extreme way. Throughout the programme I kept thinking that in our country, women are so lucky as we have a voice and aren’t treated differently just because of our gender. However, then I went on to think about how various brands use women and their beauty to sexualise their campaigns. 

 For example, the Tom Ford campaigns use women as an accessory in order to show the male domination in the shoot. Personally, I think using naked women is demoralising and a disrespectful way to promote clothing and fragrances, it does not increase sales so why do brands do it? The huge clothing chain, American Apparel is best known for its sexualisation of women within its campaigns, customers are always intrigued as to what their new advertisements will be because they always push the boundaries. However, I don't think that showing women's beauty should be displayed to this extent - it is degrading. Unsurprisingly American Apparel recently hit the headlines with their provocative advertisements leading them to bankruptcy, this highlights how women of today's society are no longer standing for this demoralisation.

Quotations referenced from documentary: BBC - The World's Worst Place to Be a Woman

Photo Credit - Pinterest

Accessory Trends A/W

During the week, we were set a group task to research the bag trends for A/W 15/16. I was really surprised to find over 10 key trends for bags alone. As a starting point, I put a moodboard together combining the trends that I had already seen displayed in retail and print (magazines). Then as a group we collected images from magazines and online to create a big moodboard and grouped the trends under subtitles - colour, silhouette, graphics, materials, print/pattern, trims and key styles.

From all of the research, we selected a few trends that we thought were more prominent than others:

1.     Colour - Autumn Rust

2.     Print/Pattern – Exotic Reptile

3.     Trims – Cowboy Fringing

4.     Silhouette – 70’s Saddle

5.     Silhouette – Daily Duffle

 

The next stage in the process was to get some primary research and go into a range of shops and consider the trends that each shop had adopted. We went into shops for each market sector - value (Primark/Asda), mass (Accessorize/River Island), masstige (Topshop/Zara), middle (Reiss/Ted Baker) and high (Vivienne Westwood/Gigi Bottega). As well as collecting research for the trends, we had to consider the 7 p's of marketing - price, promotion, people, product, physical evidence, place and process. I found that the value market shops let you get on with shopping and they rarely spoke to you, whereas when I went to the high end retailers, shop assistants focused on their customer service and were very informative and helpful. This created a better shopping experience with a personal touch. When photographing the products, the mass/masstige market shops didn't want us photographing the bags whereas the high end stores were very happy with us taking photographs and gave us a lot of extra information about the products. We thought this was because the high street brands were priced roughly the same and used very similar styles/materials, the staff were more protective over the products. We gathered that these types of stores focused on their competition with one another as they are targeting the same audiences unlike designer brands that have a certain customer and have less pressure on competition.

My 3 favourite retailers for this task were:

1- River Island

I found River Island had the best layout in terms of visual presentation, it was clear that each section was a different colour theme and they had incorporated bags as the central focus and then added other accessories and shoes to match the bag and clothes in that area. I also found that bags were placed all over the store and there was a specific area for them towards the back of the store. One wall was full of pastel coloured bags and the other wall filled with bags of our colour story. 

2- Gigi Bottega

This store was a tiny boutique that sells brands such as Miu Miu, Stella McCartney etc. I liked the concept of the layout, there were four rails and cabinets that were positioned like a wardrobe. I thought that this was unique and they only had a few items of clothing placed on the rails so it didn't look too overcrowded, quality over quantity. The manager was very approachable and friendly which made us feel at ease, she told us that once they sold a bag, they would replace it with a completely new bag as they only stocked one of each bag. I liked this idea because it makes you feel special as no one in the area can purchase the same bag as you from that store.

3- Vivienne Westwood

The interior in this store was beautiful, you could tell that it was expensive. The sales assistance were dressed head to toe in Vivienne Westwood clothing and they knew everything about the different products and best sellers. They told us that there was a bag (The snake board game weekend) that costs £240 made in Nairobi from recycled materials that is hand painted. The proceeds go to the African communities and supports the work of thousands of women micro-producers. Westwood has been working with the Ethical Fashion Initiative since 2010, currently 250 local people are involved in Vivienne Westwood's manufacturing. I found this really interesting but was shocked that there hasn't been much promotion for this product - it was on the first floor of the store and there were no banners or promotional signs.

Our next task is Street Style,

I will be doing a blog post on our findings so stay tuned!

 Photo Credit - WGSN, Google Images

Applying the FCP process

For our first group task, we were only told that we have to pick a colour palette from four choices, then once we picked the colour theme, we had to choose a sub category to focus on. The choice of colour palettes were complex colours, brights, pastels and neutrals. My team decided to pick the bright colour palette and focus on jewel tones.

Throughout this mini project, we followed the FCP process. This involves four main steps:

1.    Context – insight led strategy

2.    The Big Idea – creates an impact to achieve the stated aim

3.    Creative Concept – interpretation of the big idea

4.    Executions – finalised outcomes

Context

To start our research, we each created a pin board on Pinterest, mine was initially called “Brights - Jewels” collating all images that related to our colour story. I started to recognise that lots of interiors were showing up with jewel colours. Most of the interiors had a Mediterranean theme and reminded me of countries such as Morocco. Narrowing it down, I then focused on Morocco and interiors/architecture. I renamed my original board “Mediterranean Jewels” as we collectively decided this would be our theme. Whilst researching, I came across the Yves Saint Laurent house in Morocco, a couple of years ago I visited this house on a family holiday, I found it beautiful and peaceful.

I loved the colours of this house and we wanted to enforce the idea of “bright” jewels, using inspiration from the colours of the house – Moroccan Pop. 

I then created another board on Pinterest called “Kingdom of Morocco” which included other ideas that linked to Morocco, our colour palette and the house. For example, spices, markets, incense, tiles, mosaics and cactus plants.

The Big Idea

From the research, our aim was to use the colour palette with a combination of pop art and try to recreate a sense of Morocco.

 We came up with two main ideas:

1.    Focus on the architecture = use cactus (as this has been a key motif trend) to resemble the house, make the cactus colourful and experiment with composition

2.    Focus on markets/incense/spices = Inspiration from Sex and the City - Use spices combined with eye shadow to get the jewel palette and experiment with presentation

 Creative Concept

After having a peer discussion, we decided to combined the two ideas together, changed the colour of the cactus and got eye shadow/spices to sprinkle onto the paper, however, this looked too busy and complex so we needed to simplify our idea. We focused on YSL House and wanted the cactus to be our focus point.

 We then experimented with different coloured backgrounds and the composition of the cactus. To get the vibrant colours, we edited the colours of the cactus and the background on Photoshop. Altering the hue and saturation helped adjust the cactus to the tone we wanted and replace colour made the background stronger so they resembled the house and our ideal colour palette.

Execution

Finally, we got to our outcome and named the display “An escape to Morocco”

Photo Credit/Colour Strips - Chloe & Millie