It’s an open secret in the luxury business that clothes, despite being central to brands’ images and the focus of their flashy runway shows, aren’t where the money is. That job, traditionally, has fallen to accessories, especially items such as so-called “It” bags—those recognizable, signature products such as the Chanel 2.55 or Louis Vuitton Speedy that are as much about showing off status as function.
No item sums up modern fashion as neatly as a sneaker.
Just when Gap Inc. thought clear skies were ahead, a storm cloud appeared.
Conventional wisdom holds that American consumers have changed a lot in the past 30 years. Just look at millennials and the many things they’ve killed.
Jimmy Choo is best known for the sort of fancy heels celebrities wear down red carpets. But another part of its business is also thriving right now: sneakers.
At Gucci’s resort show in Rome yesterday, freedom was a guiding theme, including a woman’s freedom to choose when it comes to abortion.
Cambodia’s biggest employer is its garment industry. Garment manufacturing has been critical to the country’s economic growth over the past several years, and has helped lift workers out of poverty. But those workers now find themselves caught between their own government and the European Union.
Clothes and footwear are some of the most knocked off products in the world. Many of the counterfeits come from China, and dupe unsuspecting customers every day. The US military has apparently become one of those unsuspecting customers.
Streetwear may have become one of the most disruptive forces in fashion in recent years, but it would be easy to write off as a fleeting trend. It boils down, the thinking goes, to sneakers and hoodies, and eventually people will tire of those and move on, as they do with everything else in fashion.
The US footwear industry is pushing back against Donald Trump after the latest move in his trade war against China.
A major force in fashion says it will abandon the industry’s longstanding practice of using adolescent models—sometimes as young as 14—to represent adults in photo shoots and runway shows.
Something is off in the fashion business. Say a woman and a man who graduate school with comparable educations, grade point averages, and internships enter the fashion industry at the same time. As they start moving up the ranks, everything is fine for a while. But eventually, the woman is much more likely to get stuck in middle management while the man continues to rise.
The US is in the process of increasing tariffs on essentially everything the country imports from China, meaning industries spared from previous tariff hikes are probably going to be hit now. One category where shoppers are likely to start feeling the effect on their wallets is footwear.
It’s official: Rihanna and LVMH, the world’s largest luxury conglomerate, are launching a luxury brand together. Called Fenty, it will stand alongside brands that include Louis Vuitton, Dior, Celine, Givenchy, Fendi, and others in LVMH’s fashion division.
Underwear, denim, and a celebrity—for decades, those have been the main ingredients in a successful Calvin Klein campaign. The trend goes back to at least the 1990s, when campaigns featured Mark Wahlberg and Kate Moss; more recently, Justin Bieber and Kendall Jenner have stripped down for the brand.
As the world’s largest sneaker company, Nike appreciates how complicated it can be to know your correct shoe size.
Of all the long controversial topics that are still unsettled in 2019—abortion, immigration, etc.—you wouldn’t expect that the way women and girls choose to cover their legs would be one of them.
China’s appetite for fashion is mostly focused on foreign labels, especially when it comes to luxury handbags. But the carefully considered titles that image-conscious luxury brands give their bags aren’t necessarily how China’s shoppers refer to them.
Reaching more female customers has been a top priority for Adidas since 2015, when it announced the company strategy that’s still guiding it today. Then, as now, sales to women were a disproportionately small slice of the total business—as they generally are at big sneaker brands, which historically haven’t designed for or marketed to women anywhere near as much as they have men. For brands that can win them over, women represent a lot of potential dollars.
Recently, when Runner’s World magazine put out its newest guide to the best shoes for every type of run, it included a newcomer among the stalwarts. For longer road runs, it recommended Under Armour’s distance-training shoe, the Hovr Infinite, and put it front-and-center on the cover of its print issue.
In March of last year, Puma surprised a lot of people when it announced that, after a two-decade hiatus, it would relaunch its basketball business. Within a few months, it had signed Walt “Clyde” Frazier—an NBA legend and the namesake of Puma’s Clyde sneaker—to a lifetime deal. It inked what were reportedly pricey endorsement contracts with top NBA prospects Deandre Ayton and Marvin Bagley III. It revealed that it would release its first basketball shoe in 20 years. And it named rapper Jay-Z creative director of Puma basketball.
It’s doubtful anyone was asking for Crocs with a fanny pack attached, yet those very shoes are one of the latest releases from the maker of foam clogs.
The global fashion industry has a problem.
Zozo, the company behind Japan’s largest fashion e-commerce site, wanted to transform the way people bought clothes online with its plan to eliminate standard sizing and offer every customer a near-custom level of fit.
