Ageism Could Cost Billions to the Fashion Industry
Hello and welcome to the fifth week of moderated, a newsletter created to dive into insights and phenomenons in the Fashion Industry. It also has a curation and summary of the most talked last week’s events of the industry, offering further readings for more details.
For everyone here for the first time, nice to meet you! I hope I can somehow help you to keep up with the fast-paced Fashion Industry. If you haven’t subscribed yet to receive a weekly issue by e-mail, you can just by clicking below.
This week at moderated, I explored the ageism problem in the fashion industry, the under-explored opportunities of the 50-plus-year-old consumer segment, and how older women are conquering their space in the fashion market.
But before we jump into the main article, check the last week’s recap of the Fashion Industry.
Last Week’s Recap
American Fashion Industry in Trouble: J.C. Penney Files for Bankruptcy
Last Friday, the 118-year-old retail chain J.C. Penney became the most recent bankruptcy in the American fashion industry, joining other giants such as J. Crew and Neiman Marcus Group, and the menswear designer John Varvatos. The pandemic was the last drop for the company that has been battling a decade of bad decisions, executive instability, and damaging market trends. J.C. Penney is by far the largest casualty of the coronavirus financial impact, if we take into consideration the number of stores. The retailer has over 800 stores around the United States and around 85,000 employees. Jill Soltau, J.C. Penney’s CEO, stated that the chain will have to close stores but it expects to emerge from “Chapter 11 and this pandemic as a stronger retailer.” Similar to other retailers, the fashion giant had closed all its stores across the U.S. in March, due to lockdown measures. So far, it just managed to reopen 5% of them. To know more about what led to J.C. Penney’s bankruptcy, check these articles from CNN and The New York Times.
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Brands and Designers Want to Rewire The Fashion Industry
After the “Open Letter to the Fashion Industry”, wrote by a group of designers and executives such as Dries Van Noten, Tory Burch, and others, more fashion leaders decided to make a proposal as a reaction to the fragility of the fashion industry revealed by the pandemic. The #rewiringfashion proposes to review the traditional fashion calendar, finally recognizing its issues. The proposal stated:
“We are a group of independent designers, executives, and retailers from around the world who came to the fashion industry along different paths but for the same reason: a belief in the beauty, imagination, and craft that remain at the core of this business. And yet, we find ourselves facing a fashion system that is less and less conducive to genuine creativity and ultimately serves the interests of nobody: not designers, not retailers, not customers — and not even our planet. It's time to slow down and rediscover the storytelling and magic of fashion.”
Facilitated by Business of Fashion, this project counted with big names of the fashion industry, like Phillip Lim, Isabel Marant, Proenza Shoulder, other retailers, and indie labels. With meetings going on for over a month now, they suggested changes in three industry pillars.
1) Concentrate men’s and women’s fashion weeks in January and June, debuting new collections right before they hit stores and reducing travels for media and buyers.
2) Give more freedom to designers and brands to create their fashion shows, without limitations imposed by fashion councils.
3) Break the discounting vicious cycle by not applying excessive markdowns in Spring/Summer 2020, delaying traditional sales to January and July (North Hemisphere), and stopping in-season discounting (including Black Friday, Singles Day and Cyber Monday).
For these changes to happen, it is important that a major luxury fashion conglomerate (LVMH or Kering) joins the cause. For now, it is an idea that could not only change completely how the fashion luxury sector works but also the rest of the industry, once high street brands will have a smaller timeframe to reproduce trends usually presented during fashion weeks.
To read the full #rewiringfashion proposal click here.
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Luxury Brands Are Raising Prices in The Middle of the Pandemic
While the whole world discusses the massive discount season that will probably come with the inventory crisis created by the fall of fashion sales during the lockdown, Chanel and Louis Vuitton increased their prices globally. Yes, you read it right, increased. Louis Vuitton raised its prices by 3% in March and 7% in April. Chanel was even bolder; it increased the price of many iconic bags and some small leather goods by between 5 to 17%.
This pricing strategy made consumer queue for products in Asia, to guarantee handbags before a new price increase. This created almost a reverse sales effect. In Seoul, the lines for Chanel were so long that the city, afraid of the Covid-19 infections, is considering suspending the French brand from doing business there.
Chanel stated that the rise in prices is an adjustment to the rise in luxury raw materials and production costs, which occurred due to the pandemic. Even if these factors may be a reason, the rise in prices also helps Chanel and other luxury brands to increase their margins, compensating, in part, for a year in which sales are and will continue low. This strategy is working very well for them in Asia, but it takes some guts to hike prices during such a strong crisis. Gucci, Mulberry, and Prada, for example, are not willing to take this risk. Also, even though this pricing strategy may work for luxury brands, it is not applicable to brands lower in the food chain, furthering differentiating luxury fashion from the rest.
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Retail is Slowing Reopening in Paris and Milan
Two Fashion Capitals are reopening after lockdown. Paris and Milan are slowly starting to reopen retail and go back to work. With measures such as limiting the number of clients and constant cleaning of the stores, these two major cities of fashion are waking up again. Many fashion companies are also based in these two cities, while a big part of luxury production is based in the whole country of Italy. Therefore, the rhythm of fashion creation and production will probably slowly come back too, the big question is: are consumers eager to buy fashion products now?
To read more about the reopening of businesses in Italy and France, check this article from Business of Fashion.
Ageism Could Cost Billions to the Fashion Industry
I currently live in Neuilly-Sur-Seine, a small city right next to Paris, where many traditional Parisian families live in their fancy apartments with a view to the Tour Eiffel or at massive hidden mansions. Neuilly is a city of old money, and because of that it is full of women that are usually over 70 years old and, I can guarantee, dress better than you and me. I call them the “fancy grandmas of Neuilly”. They wear luxury handbags, classic tweed jackets, silk scarfs, large sunglasses, and classy pearl necklaces - all styled in the most sophisticated way you can imagine. They are fashion icons for any age. Seeing these incredible women around my city made me start reflecting on why we don’t see more women like that in fashion campaigns, magazines, and fashion shows.
Then, this month, British Vogue had their oldest cover “girl” so far, the 85-year-old actress Judi Dench – and zero people disliked that. Besides the great timing, with the older population suffering more the health impact of the Covid-19, this cover brought to discussion the irrational age prejudice present so strongly in the fashion and entertainment industries, while at the same time not making her feature at the magazine about age. It was about her being an amazing woman, that’s it. This prejudice, called ageism, makes less and less sense, not just because inclusion is finally being demanded, but also because, with people living longer and families having fewer babies, the 50 plus years old population has been growing more and more in the last years. With the pandemic, ignoring these older fashion shoppers is making even less sense and I will try to show you why.
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The Cost of Ageism
Ageism is the prejudice against older people, something unfortunately very present in the fashion industry. No, the industry does not attack older people, but it doesn’t make much effort to include them either. It's extremely rare to see women over 50 years old in fashion campaigns, magazines, and runway shows. When they do get featured, it is usually sided with a message of “sexy at any age” or “age is just a number”. These messages carry many problems. First of all, we need to talk about the fact that age is much more than just a number. According to Melanie Pereira, a 61-year-old Psychiatrist and Cognitive Therapist, these are some of the things that age is, beyond a number:
“Ageing is a natural life cycle. Age is life experience and brings more reflections about ourselves than any other stage of our existence. Age comes with body changes that go beyond wrinkles, it transforms our shapes, for women, especially after menopause. Age brings the need for more health care and acceptance of our eventual limitations. Aging has the goods and the bads, like any other moment in our life. Ageing is part of life and we will all go through it, hopefully.”
On top of that, titles as “sexy at any age” usually come with sided by an older woman that is being praised for looking younger and a pressure for all of us to avoid aging. If these women need to look younger to be featured in the fashion industry, is that actually an inclusion of this generation?
This disconnection of the fashion industry with the older population is a widespread issue. Martha Boundreau, AARP’s Chief of Communications and Marketing Officer, stated that many advertising agencies had never dealt with marketing campaigns targeting older consumers. That may justify why campaigns for this age group are so disconnected from its consumers. In fashion, brands tended to assume that if they targeted the younger audience, it would also appeal to their parents and grandparents. Fortunately, many are realizing this formula does not work.
In design, ageism is subtler, with most companies not even considering older customers when creating fashion garments. If they do design for older consumers, the majority does it without any regard for style. As Melanie Pereira, at her 61 years, stated:
“Older I get, harder it is to find clothes I like. Our bodies change and I don’t think brands take that into consideration, and when they do, the clothes are not pretty, they are boring and bland”.
According to the research done by the International Longevity Centre (ILC), over 50 years old consumers, especially the women, feel that fashion products targeted to their age don’t take aesthetic into account. In fact, they feel like no one is actually targeting them, as stated in the research:
“A number of women indicated that they did not want the mass-market, high-street clothes that they perceive to be designed for younger women but also did not want the limited, staid choice they felt was offered by shops targeting their age group.”
But, if you don’t really care about making the older generations feel more included in the fashion industry (I mean, unfortunately, some people don’t), maybe you will care about their purchase power. The Covid-19 health crisis affected the older generation more, due to the fact they are more vulnerable to the virus. The financial crisis that came with it, on the contrary, harmed the older generation’s purchase power way less. The older population has more financial stability than Millennials and Gen Z, especially the seniors who are already retired and not having to deal with the unemployment rise generated by the lockdown measures. In the US and Canada, for example, consumers aged 50 and up are having the greatest buying demand resilience during the pandemic, as shown by Amperity data research:
In Canada and the US, the older population not only had a smaller decrease in it’s spending since the pandemic started, but it also went from the age group that least contributed to retailers’ revenues, to the one that is most contributing now. But for years, senior shoppers have been becoming increasingly important for retail revenues. The silver generation is growing in number and percentage in almost every country in the world, so is their spending, including in fashion. In the US, the population over 50 years old was responsible for more than half of the country’s spending in 2018. In the UK, this age group increased its spending in fashion by 21% between 2011 and 2018, according to an ILC's research. The study also projects that this value will still increase by 60% until 2040, which will make people aged 50 and over the fashion industry key consumer base in the UK.
If older generations are growing in size and spending more on apparel, why do most of the fashion industry keep ignoring them? For starters, Young buyers are still the main responsible ones for the growth of luxury fashion, as more of them enter this market. Also, many studies pointed out that spending on clothes, shoes, and accessories usually declines after a certain age, which in the US, for example, is 44.
But the thing is, even though attracting the older generation is becoming more important for fashion companies, that doesn’t mean all efforts should be shifted to this customer segment. The idea is to include older women in the fashion industry, not necessarily focusing solely on them. It is understandable that fashion retailers don’t want to be the “store that my grandma buys at”, because whenever this generation passes, the store won’t appeal to the next one. But yet, if a brand attracts an older consumer, that doesn’t necessarily mean it won't appeal to a younger one. A brand can market both generations. It is not easy, but it is possible. The 50-plus-years-old customer segment is a multi-billion dollar business opportunity that fashion brands are not tapping into.
Some specialists also question if older populations don’t decrease their spending in fashion after a certain age, because they are not being properly targeted as consumers. I believe there is a shift in behaviour and priorities, but if marketed well, older consumers can increase their spending in fashion, especially with the higher purchase power they have when compared to younger generations. In addition, older consumers very often don’t have their kids living home anymore, therefore, they can spend on themselves way more.
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The Greynacsence
The “Greynascence”, which is the resurgence of the 50-plus-year-old to advertising and media, is a phenomenon that demonstrated the non-explored potential of this generation in fashion. Trend-watchers trace the beginning of the “Greynascence” to 2015, when the then-80-year-old author John Didion became the face of Céline, while Saint Laurent had the musician and artist Joni Mitchell for its campaign. However, bloggers such as Lyn Slater, who has over 700k followers on Instagram under the name “Accidental Icon”, rose to fame even before, in 2014, showcasing stylish outfits for older women and staring campaigns for brands such as Uniqlo. This approach was extremely rare at the time and, even though it got better, it is still not as common as it should be.
Brands such as Mango and Lojas Renner explored this shift and saw very good results from their campaigns with older models and personalities. “When you show an older woman in a campaign, not only does she have the power to inspire a younger person, but also the power to inspire her generation”, stated Ari Seth Cohen, the founder of Advanced Style, a Blog and an Instagram focused on the “sartorial savvy of the senior set.”
Social media played an important part in demonstrating that there is a public for older women in media and advertising. Maye Musk, a model and also the mother of Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk, returned to modelling when she was almost at her 70s because of Instagram. Her agent suggested that she created an account and posted pictures and it was almost an instant success. She was featured in countless campaigns for major brands, was in Elle’s cover, and walked for Dolce & Gabbana’s runway show, all that being over 65 years old. As she said, before she needed to go through an agency and brands had to bet that she could bring sales, with social media, she could show her success with the public beforehand and brand trusted more. “After 50 years of modelling, I’m an overnight success,” Musk said. But models over 50 are still rare, Slater was the first one and for a long time the only one at her agency. She even stated that she managed to sign with them because of her already large voice and community.
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The Fashion Industry Should Learn How to Deal With Aging
With the Covid-19, the already existing ageism became very visible. People stating the virus was not that bad because it mostly affected older people was a hard thing to hear. This disregard for the lives of seniors is shocking; especially due to the fact we will all age if we are fortunate enough to, so one day we will be in their place. The irony is that the younger generations are suffering way more with the economic crisis that is coming with the lockdown measures. The older population, as stated, is in its majority either retired or more financially stable than the youngsters. Therefore, older consumers are already becoming more important for the fashion industry during the lockdown and will probably become even more after, with the financial crisis that is taking place and the ageing of the global population.
It is refreshing to see the fashion industry making more effort to include seniors, but it is still not enough. This approach also shouldn't transmit ageism. Brands should hear what these consumers actually want, and make the effort to deliver it. To keep ignoring older fashion shoppers is to ignore a segment of loyal consumers with money to spend that is set to keep growing by billions of dollars. Let’s just stop excluding older generations from the fashion industry once and for all. Because in the end, we all know some "fancy grandmas of Neuilly" type of women that is full of style and deserve to be praised by the fashion industry.
Thank you for reading this week’s moderated and next Tuesday I will be back with more.
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