Pleats Please - Issey Miyake

I could spend all day in Selfridges, it is one of my favourite places to visit when in Central London and I can guarantee that my day will end browsing around the high end/boutique floor! Although the clothes are mega expensive and looking around this area can be very depressing when you are a student, this always gives me extra drive to do well in life because when i'm older, I WILL be owning these clothes!! The brand that i immediately go to look at is "Self Portrait", this has been my favourite brand for a while (as you can see from my profile picture - I am wearing one of their dresses from last season!) but it becoming well known and i like discovering brands or collections that not many people have heard of. 

During my recent visit at Selfridges, my aim was to find something original and unique that I hadn't seen in every mass market shop because to be quite honest, i'm getting bored of the high street stores! Issey Miyake's style has always caught my attention but when I saw the current collection featured in Selfridges, "Pleats Please", I fell in love. This collection includes clothing that is made completely from pleats and although this sounds bit boring, the amount of work that has been put into making each garment is crazy! Each item looks so elegant and the fabrics are so luxurious. Below are a few of my favourite items from the collection:

Photo Credit - selfridges.com

Photo Credit - Chloe Ferdinand
After the discovery of "Pleats Please", I was on a mission to find a cheaper version of something similar to Issey Miyake's style. At first this seemed a difficult task because at the moment, a lot of stores are stocking up for party season so there are lots of beads and sequins around. But, with determination, I found a black pleated dress from the boutique section in Topshop similar to the items above!!

Dress - Topshop, Shoes - Zara

Don't feel like you always have to start with high street brands because thats within your budget, get some inspiration from other places and create your own designer outfit.

Designer clothing is not impossible to own,  just find an alternative... 
until you can afford the real thing!

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

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