Fashioning a new future for the fashion world
Posted by freemexy on April 15th, 2021
Not even a pandemic could stop New York Fashion Week, though it did look different. This past week the shows went on without the typical fanfare, and with far fewer fans. To get more fashion news today, you can visit shine news official website.
Perhaps the biggest change came from some of the biggest designers forgoing Fashion Week all together."We wanted to be respectful with what's happening with everything around us," said Tory Burch. It isn't that the designer and her team aren't working, but in March the chief creative officer of her namesake brand shut down her office and 300 stores worldwide. "Quite honestly, we were fighting for every bit of business that we could get," said Burch.As the U.S. went on lockdown, clothing store sales plunged a record 79%. Retailers struggled to survive; some didn't. With work from home the norm for many, pajama sales spiked 133%, slippers at 75%. Hello sweatpants, goodbye jeans!Correspondent Alina Cho asked, "Why would anyone want to buy a dress right now?" "Our sport collection is performing really well," Burch replied.
"But so are our dresses. And people want to go and they want to feel that joy and optimism." Of course, during a pandemic, fashion may not seem like a priority to some, but it's actually a 0-billion-a-year industry, and one, Burch said, that is too big to fail.Burch even got on the photo with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin with her pitch: "We need to save American jobs. And the fashion industry is close to four million jobs that were at risk. And we weren't being talked about like the airline industry.
We needed to be addressed." Dr. Valerie Steele, museum director at the Fashion Institute of Technology, said, "In the Depression, we saw a lot of people who couldn't afford to buy a new dress. And a lot of dressmakers went out of business. We may see something of the same thing now."Dr. Steele said some of the best fashion has come out of tough times: "It was a lot of creative fashion that emerged in 1918, 1919, after the flu epidemic." Like the fun flapper dresses of the Roaring 20's, and Christian Dior's iconic "new look" – that cinched-waist silhouette that became popular after World War II. "It wasn't really that new, but it had all been put on ice," said Dr. Steele. "And so, people were just so excited about looking beautiful and feminine and romantic again." Cho asked, "What does the future of fashion look like to you?""Fashion will survive," Dr. Steele replied. "The idea of dressing up, of making yourself look special, seems to be hard-wired into human beings. That's the good news. The bad news is that it's gonna be tough."
