This unit learning, I have a framed understanding of the four pillars of the fashion business, I considered and learned a lot about the theme’ what challenge does the fashion industry face’, ‘how to attract Gen Z ‘,’ what ‘s the valuable purpose can give to a brand’ in the lecture and seminar. I exercised my ability to read, summarize or paraphrase academic literature in the process of blog practice. When I start to try doing my blog editing, I feel hard to sort out logical links to the literature and conclusions I have outlined, sometimes my overview of the reference source is confusing. I feel very stressed and struggle when I consider whether the citation part, I chose can correctly reflect the discussion directions which require to involve in each blog. Besides, I was constricted by my English oral proficiency in the seminar group discussion, and I cannot fully express my personal view sometimes. For instance, when we were going for the brand diversity discussion, I want to share a report I read before that women are now underrepresented at the top of leading fashion brands while confusing how to further conclude of this phenomenon. Also, I’m facing the learning skills challenge in the Monday lecture. Those things both affect my understanding of the course content.
The critical thing and citation problem was pointed out by my classmate in the planet blog peer-to-peer reflection class. She analysed the reason resulting to this, I was not organized when I start to do research, which means after finishing reading one article I didn’t think about which place should I put the reference source and opinion into and what conclusion I could get to follow them, let alone comparing the different quote views to do critical thinking. So she suggests I made the structure of the whole blog before starting to do further research which can avoid listing my mind and ensure that I made the argument around the key point. Through the first-time blog practice, I clearly recognized that I should improve my logical thinking and paraphrasing skills.
In this whole practising process for the blog, I find my myself having a lot of patience in reference sources reading but lack of summary and classifying ability. Language support class provide some basic model, paraphrasing verb and some citation scenario, which help me a little bit, but I still need to spend more time learning by reading a related essay from the google scholar website, analyzing the essay author and how they deal with their citation paraphrasing and browsing essay reference list to find their original quote. For remaining and improving my reading skills, I start to schedule exclusive reading time in my daily commuting time, reading the Moodle reading list book or the BOF and Drapers daily subscribe news, aiming to let my scanning and skimming speed as quick as the English native speaker. With regard to the language problem, I mention above, it is obviously will be a considerable threat in the further. Youtube and Netflix is the temporary main way to do a daily accumulation to improve my speaking and learning skills and I will amply use the school resource to have a conversation with more native students in break time or after class.
The purpose is the final pillar of the fashion business, it delivers the ‘why’ of the brand’s existence beyond profit. A company that clarifies the content of its purpose and firmly put it in every step of the company development strategy will achieve better economic feedback.
The mission, vision, value, and proposition of a brand are closely related, which helps brands set the appropriate framework for their business. Jonson (2017) believes that clarifying brand purpose gives the brand stronger resilience in marketing disruption and purpose drive profit and performance in uncertain times. Purpose can help a brand separate itself from the rest of the market (Johnson,2016 )and convene employees to deliver distinguishing experiences for customers. The purpose of the brand reveals the ‘why of the brand’, not just storytelling to the customer, according to the report from the EY Beacon institute survey of 1470 global leaders representing companies across various industries with the topic’ How Can Purpose Reveal a Path Through disruption ‘, revealing that purpose, not profits, is the crucial point to success among the rebellious global economy. Meanwhile, Vision state what the company want to achieve as an outcome of the purpose that is set, and Mission explains how the purpose gets done.ASOS is a good case to display considering the purpose and making the corresponding action toward accomplishing the final goal. The brand set its 2030 goals involving two aspects——be Net zero and be more circular for the aim of the planet, and be transparent and be diverse for the aim of people. The company developed toward these two goals in integrity initiates a lot of related activities in recent years and achieve a significant statistical breakthrough in their recent years’ KPI.
the infographic of ASOS planet-based goals statistic
In accordance with Curry (2020), nowadays, Gen Z expects companies to institute and fulfilled clear stances on social or political issues. it’s true that they have strong powder to use social media and their pocketbook to impact and shape corporate behaviour.
In terms of how brands communicate to Gen Z, in accordance with Wilson’s (2021) article,‘digital campfires’ already become a popular place in the span of three years, he claims that ‘the biggest cultural moments to capture the attention of younger audience s in 2020 happened on digital campfire platforms’, younger audiences are leaving many traditional social platforms and gathering to smaller, more confidential online destinations. Fortnite is a representative example of recent popular ‘shared experience campfires’ which is a massive gaming platform and has 350 million accounts, the brand is famous for its ‘brand integrations’ tactic. Marvel and Nike have debuted custom skins (Wilson,2021) and limited edition product drops inside the game.
Nike collaborates with Fortnite to launching new avatars’ skin sets.URL; https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/news/the-jumpman-zone-and-the-air-jordan-xi-cool-grey-come-to-fortnite
Fortnite is also good at collaborating with celebrities, like football clubs or hip-hop artists to offer player’s avatars new skin sets and provide exclusive action or hold online concerts, which congregate a lot of players to attend. Besides, the brand also engages users in creative mode, letting players build their islands (Wilson,2021). Overall digital campfires like Fortnite and Roblox actually give fashion brands a lot of opportunities to engage in the cyber world, simultaneously advertise and market for profit， which is also the runner of digital campfires happy to see.
Johnson,C(2016)The Difference Between Brand Purpose, Vision and Mission.Available at:
Fashion is a business, so profit is one of the crucial pillars for fashion companies to consider, remaining the normal commercial running and connecting to the company scale.
The size of the fashion industry、
The scale of the fashion industry is remarkable in terms of both economic value and practitioner in the industry worldwide as the fashion industry accounts for 2% of the GDP(Ariella,2022).
With referring to statistics, the size of the global apparel market in 2021 wealth 1.5trillion dollars (Smith,2022）and 430 millions Labor force worldwide in 2021(fashion united,2022).there is a different scales of fashion marketing and production in different regions, United States and China are occupied the majority of garment requirement and both producing ample higher revenues comparing to other countries. 154billion dollars’ worth of apparel were exported from China, with US is second only to the EU in the value of apparel imports.
How a brand remains competitive in uncertain economic times;
In recent years, with the continuous changes in the global economy, consumers’ consumption behaviour and habits have changed accordingly. Brands need to strive to maintain brand competitiveness under such circumstances, optimizing from ‘supply chains and assortments to way of working(Sidebar,2022).in accordance with McKinsey‘Ten theme across three categories will be critical for the fashion business in 2022’, logistics gridlock is definitely an issue making an incredible impact on the supply chain, with logistical logjams, rising shipping costs, and shortages of many kinds of complexity, companies must reconsider their sourcing strategies while implementing cutting-edge supply -chain management, building in greater flexibility to keep products flowing with customer demand in the year ahead (Sidebar,2022).luxury brand should realize the customer shifts in the majority of the offline flagship store and due to travel restrictions in some countries, according to Mckinsey(2022), international tourism is not expected to fully recover until between 2023 -2024. Luxury players should engage more deeply with domestic consumers and invest in clienteling for local e-commerce channels. Statistics from many fashion information websites show that in 2021-2022, consumers are increasingly concerned about the social responsibility of brands, the sustainable technology adopted, and the management of brand recycling programs, so the brand has an accredited sustainable model and advanced recycling and reprocessing technologies will be more competitive .increasing the investment on the technology of circular textiles to let closed-looped recycling system starting to be rolled out at scale is necessary for a brand to developing and consolidating market. Besides, with more and more people raising their sustainable consumption behaviour, the pre-loved and vintage market is thriving， however, along with the concern about the counterfeit problem, so many luxury brands use new technology to launch their chip–product passports, get rid of the authenticate card, confronting the fake product phenomenon in second-hand market.
How do creative directors bridge the gap between creativity and commerce?
Demna Gvasalia is an example, He was the rebellious icon of the fashion industry in recent years, giving Balenciaga’s catwalk show full of theatrical and full of storytelling, the AW2018 Balenciaga show a powerful and poignant new direction for Demna, the set of the show against a giant snow mountain, scrawled with graffiti messages that read ’think big ‘,’ the power of dreams, ’no borders’ and ‘you are the world,’ and the first time he introduces a set to his work. The show combines scenery, model performance, and the brand’s new quarterly ready-to-wear, which is called the designer’s artistic language output. the collection of hoodies, T-shirts, bum bags and baseball hats that appeared in the Balenciaga AW18 collection all emblazoned with the WFP logo with the slogan ‘Changing lives, saving lives（Shackleton,2018). .it was a kind of It is expression of the designer’s own art form due to Demna’s own childhood experience of being helped by the WFP. ’Fashion and art have historically shared a parasitic and independent relationship’ (Stevenson,2019）.In recent years, Demna has filled Balenciaga’s fashion design style with critical, exaggerated, absurd and solemn design language, combined with the show scenery similar to contemporary art, establishing the image of a pioneer artist. The brand Balenciaga serves as a medium for him to express his artistic form. This has contributed to Balenciaga’s success in recent years. as Nancy Troy(2003, P27) claimed that the artistic image which been built by the designer is also kind of a marketing strategy, potentially helping the brand media promotion as a signal of the brand.
Drucker encourages us to view contemporary artworks as vague fields of reference that ‘resonate profoundly through our shared cultural knowledge base.’( Stevenson,2019)
Art nowadays no longer exists independently of mediatized representations of reality。 So it’s normal for the creative designer to express the form of art or merge a kind of concept in their work. However, at the same time, the designer should focus on the promotion of their creativity and storytelling about their new concept to let the customers better accept the design. For example, a brand runway show is a good place to express and describe more representational of the meaning behind the creative by the An allegorical and directional setting. The designer should make sure that whatever they produce, which needs to face marketing, it’s necessary to be accepted by their target customer, they should consider the brand followers ‘ feelings, and the index of expected sales, letting the business keep going.
People are one of the pillars of the fashion business, which are the centre of every organisation with impacts across all social and cultural dimensions of our world.
Members of Gen Z are true digital natives, immersing in the internat ,social networks and mobile systems since their earliest age .They are comfortable at deal with and accept many source of information from different area , integrating virtual and offline experiences.beause of their excellent cognition.GenZ as customers,( Francis & Hoefel,2018) their consumption as an expression of individual identity, which means they will pay a premium for personalized offerings and customized touches. What’s more, GenZ, pay more attention to ethical concern and also have high acceptability to the new form of consumption products become services and services connect consumers.
Gen Z is more likely to value brand names and the ability to resell a fashion item. This means brands should consider reselling ability at the producing stage to improve the competitiveness of their products (Drapers,2022).
Rental and resale continue to grow in popularity among younger shoppers, in line with Drapers 2022 data,39.8% GenZshoppers have bought second-hand and would do so again.
The logistics models of the rental market could be intricate yet, however, investment continues to flow into this part of the market, in March 2022, peer-to-peer rental app ‘By rotation’ raised 2.3million pounds in seed funding to support its international expansion plans, a lot of luxury brand also join in to explore this channel, like Burberry.
It’s worth noting that in 2022, 51% of Gen Z express the willingness to pay more for sustainable and ethically made items(Drapers,2022) Many brands already launched their sustainable line for a few years and start their recycling plans, but most of these still remain in a small scalp, facing a lot of technical barriers, some fast fashion brand even was doubted that they just the ‘greenwash ‘for their brand to reassure customer, just a few brands like Patagonia and Pangdaia now be accepted by the public as doing well at sustainability. So brands and companies with a larger capital base should invest more in circular and sustainable technologies from production, educating Gen Z to have more distinguishability for sustainable goods.
Besides, the number of people who buy fashion via social media continues to rise with the number of people who say never use social media before for fashion inspiration has fallen from 19.4% in 2021 to 14.9%. According to Drapers (2022) data statistics, 62.8% of Gen Z in the past 12 months browse Instagram for fashion inspiration and 60% of both Gen Z and millennials purchase by clicking through a social media post. In that case, it’s very necessary to improve the Gen Z convenience online shopping experience by providing more relevant commerce opportunities and remaining the brand news active and media exposure in their social strategies.
Fashion brand retailers should also keep a close eye on developments in the metaverse, in total,44.9% of Gen Z expressed that they would consider exploring metaverse environments created by fashion brands and retailers, such as virtual stores, shopping events or product launches, in the future, data rising to 49.4%.many compan like Boohoo develop their advertisement in the online gaming channel like Roblox .Besides, dressing digital avatars offer fashion creative brand a huge potenial market ,many brands collaborated with Fortnite launching latest avatars skin set and provoking hotpot concern in the’ campfire ‘ (Draper,2022).Nike announced equity acquisition the PTFKT, a NFT creating company who quickly made more than 600 virtual shoes last year, help the Nike further expand the virtual product collection.
DIESEL’S NEW NFTS BRING FW22 COLLECTION TO THE “D:VERSE” Available at:https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/diesel-dverse-nft-collection/$D:verse-Diesel NFT collection Available at:https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/diesel-dverse-nft-collection/
Gen Z care about the offline shopping experience at the same time, according to the mintel the so revamping the offline shopping model and service experience is essential to retailers.
Many luxuries noticed that the collaboration culture is still thriving, In line with the Lyst index data (2022), Gucci skyrocketed 286% in the 48 after its collection with Adidas was released in June. It is risky to attract and broaden GenZ customers by opening a subsidiary line to a brand with uncertain demand and consumption trends of GenZ, and the cost is too high. Besides, brands need to maintain and inherit their brand identity. The main line of the brand from the design concept to the pricing is difficult to fully conform to GenZ’s aesthetic and also not affordable for GenZ to some extent. So collaboration is a nice choice for the brand to attract GenZ customers by avoiding those risks. As the Lyst 2022 hottest brands show, the top. 10brands listed in front all launched their collaboration collection in the past year, choosing the place according to their new collection theory to present their runway and change or name a new ambassador endorsing their latest collaboration. obviously, the collaboration will bring more exposure to social media, which involves offline new collection event news, new brand representation celebrity new look media report and KOL online promotion. Which is the main way to attract GenZ.
Regarding the critical people skills fashion brand should have, referring to the Mikensy 2022 report(108-111), a company need to know how to create a space for employees to improve and develop themselves giving them a learning chance so that employees have a clear mind of purpose, meanwhile creating a sense of belonging to the company and industry, ensuring employee to keep working with a better vision for future development, that’s what Farfatch doing now, pay attention to invest in employee learning and training, cultivate their personal skills and bound with brand development prospect also focus on（McKinsey 2022 p109）. The company also should have a strong CSR policy,(McKinsey, 2022,p.108)which encourage the employee to respond to social and environmental issues, 83% of fashion industry practitioner say that that would improve their loyal if the company did that well. In addition, put DE&I policy in a priority place, company should keep diversity and inclusive norms both in retention strategies and the talent hiring process,42% of fashion professionals rate the industry’s performance as ‘poor’ in prioritizing DE&I as a core value right now, around 50% of employees of colour believe that it is not equally accessible to all qualified candidates. Farfetch’s chief people officer said there is a skills gap between creative and tech specialists, and they try to partner with external businesses and organisations to address this problem(Mckinsey,2022)
Moran. G(2022) Gen Z and Millennials 2022.Available at:
The business of fashion comprises four pillars People, planet, profit and purpose.
According to Ellen Macrthur foundation (no date), The circular economy is a systems solution framework that tackles global challenges like climate change, biodiversity loss, waste, and pollution. The system is based on three principles, driven by design eliminate waste pollution, circulate products and materials and regenerate nature. The fashion industry is known for being a major contributor to world pollution and climate change. Responding to an environmentally sustainable fashion industry should transition from the traditional linear system model to the circularity model.
The fashion industry as a heavy pollution industry has a lot of responsibility to integrate with sustainability development, according to the united nations SDG, it includes 17goals which need to solve, fashion industry has a lot of action and changes needed to be done.
The majority of SDG impact and guide the fashion industry, for example, the 12th SDG: responsible consumption and production, as the major contributor to world pollution and climate change, the fashion industry consume lots of natural resources like water, forest and soil to produce 80 billion garments each year（）and cost 76billion cubic meters of water each year, emitting thousand million tonnes of CO2 at the same time.
In line with three detailed targets in SDG12, by 2030, achieving the sustainable management and efficient use of natural resources and substantially reducing waste generation through prevention, reduction, and recycling .it also notes that ensuring people everywhere have relevant information and awareness for sustainable development and lifestyles in harmony with nature .’
Overproduction is a severe problem in the fashion industry, clothing production doubled between 2000 and 2014,40% of all items which be estimated by consultancy are sold at a markdown, solving overproduction could reduce carbon emissions by 158 million tonnes a year. This SDG target also promotes the development of the fashion industry towards the concept of slow fashion and speeds up the transformation to circular fashion. The breakdown of the target also indicates that sustainable patterns of consumption and production can be achieved by upgrading the science and technology of the recycling and recovery process. so the biofabric and other raw materials exploration and production will be expected as an imperative opportunity to relieve the emission and water pollution in the support chain. Besides, fashion companies should also respond to producing and selling more durable and repairable products to prolong the use and reuse of products, which is important to build a good circular economy.in accordance to Sender (2022), the latest research shows that sustainable customer behaviour was increasing in the last 12 months, almost two-fifths have purchased items supporting them rewear and use for different occasions, rising to 47%of women and half of Gen Z. In keeping with this,69%of consumer has looked for new ways to wear items in their wardrobe rather than but buy new items, increasing to 78% of women change their consumption behaviour. The second-hand market is undergoing a boom， particularly among the younger generation (16-24).this is being driven both by rising awareness of the environment as well as the trend for vintage pieces, with 67% agreeing that it is trendy to buy pre-loved fashion. Compared to women, men prefer to buy more durable items. Overall, to further educate consumers building sustainable awareness, fashion companies should dedicate to creating more transparent processing information for the customer and provide a recycling and repairing community and platform to help customers make the right choice.
1.MOGAVERO.T(2022) Clothed in Conservation: Fashion & Water. Available at:
3. Sustainable Development Goals(2019)ActNow for Zero-Waste Fashion. Available at:https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/08/actnow-for-zero-waste-fashion/
