Designer clothing refers to apparel created by a specific fashion designer or licensed by a person or brand. It is often considered luxury clothing, known for its high quality and haute couture appeal, made for the general public and bearing the label of a renowned designer. Licensing designer names has been a common practice within the fashion industry since the 1970s. Designer clothing includes a wide range of apparel, such as designer jeans, which can often cost several hundred dollars.
Designer clothing originally referred to apparel created by a specific designer. The definition has since expanded to include designs licensed by a designer or company. Licensing designer names was pioneered by designers like Pierre Cardin in the 1960s and has been a common practice within the fashion industry since the 1970s. [1] Designer clothing is often expensive, luxury apparel known for its high quality and haute couture appeal, made for the general public and bearing the label of a well-known fashion designer.[ citation needed ]
Brands are often used to identify designer clothing. However, designer clothing may not always be created by the founder of the company. For instance, the actual designer behind Chanel today is not its original founder, Gabrielle Chanel, but French designer Virginie Viard. The quality of the clothing and its degree of resemblance to the designer's original work can vary significantly depending on the licensee and the terms of the agreement made with the designer. Some agreements may limit the number of garment styles that can be produced, allowing the designer to veto any designs they find unappealing. Examples include:
Designer clothing includes a wide range of apparel, such as designer jeans.
Designer jeans are available at various price points, typically ranging in the hundreds of dollars, with some even approaching US$1,000. [2] Before the Great Recession, premium denim was one of the fastest-growing categories in the apparel industry, and there seemed to be no limit to what customers would pay for the latest label, fit, finish, or wash. [3]
Americans purchased US$59.2 billion worth of jeans in 2018, with over 450 million pairs sold, according to Alexander Eser. [4] However, only about 1% of jeans sold in the U.S. that year cost more than $50. [5] Since the "Great Recession," the landscape for premium jeans has changed. "Charging $600 for jeans for no reason at all — those days are over," said You Nguyen, the senior vice president of women's merchandising and design for Levi Strauss & Company. [3]
The difference between $300 jeans and $30 jeans often comes down to factors such as fabric quality, hardware, washes, design details, abrasions, and the country of manufacture. A "fancy" pair of jeans that has been treated with abrasions, extra washes, and other techniques to break down the denim and achieve a worn-in texture undergoes a certain amount of damage in the process. As a result, the expensive jeans may be more delicate than the cheaper ones. Jeans brands also distinguish themselves from season to season by using patented materials, such as rivets and stitching, and by applying special washes and distressing techniques. These methods may include dyeing, pressing, and even using sandpaper or drills on the raw denim. Such processes can be particularly costly when done in the U.S., where factories must adhere to more stringent environmental and labor standards than in many low-cost nations. [5]
To be produced domestically in the United States, jeans must be priced at "$200-plus," according to Shelda Hartwell-Hale, a vice president at Directives West, an L.A.-based division of the fashion consulting firm Doneger Group. [5] The profit margins on premium jeans can be substantial. One retail executive notes that the gross profit margins for private-label jeans, which he manufactures for Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Sears Holdings Corp., and other retailers, are less than 20%, while the margins for his own premium lines range from 40% to 50%. [5]
Fashion is a term used interchangeably to describe the creation of clothing, footwear, accessories, cosmetics, and jewellery of different cultural aesthetics and their mix and match into outfits that depict distinctive ways of dressing as signifiers of social status, self-expression, and group belonging. As a multifaceted term, fashion describes an industry, styles, aesthetics, and trends.
Jeans are a type of trousers made from denim or dungaree cloth. Often the term "jeans" refers to a particular style of trousers, called "blue jeans", with the addition of copper pocket rivets added by Jacob W. Davis in 1871 and patented by Davis and Levi Strauss on May 20, 1873. Prior to the patent, the term "blue jeans" had been long in use for various garments, constructed from blue-colored denim.
Ready-to-wear (RTW) – also called prêt-à-porter, or off-the-rack or off-the-peg in casual use – is the term for garments sold in finished condition in standardized sizes, as distinct from made-to-measure or bespoke clothing tailored to a particular person's frame. In other words, it is a piece of clothing that was mass produced in different sizes and sold that way instead of it being designed and sewn for one person. The term off-the-peg is sometimes used for items other than clothing, such as handbags. It is the opposite of haute couture.
Thigh-high boots, known also as thigh-length boots or simply thigh boots, are boots that extend above the knees to at least mid-thigh. Other terms for this footwear include over-the-knee boots, a name originally used for 15th century riding boots for men. These are sometimes called pirate boots, especially when cuffed. Over-the-knee boots are sometimes abbreviated to OTK boots. Lengths vary from reaching just over the knee to reaching almost to the crotch.
Jordache Enterprises, Inc. is an American clothing company that markets apparel, including shirts, jeans, and outerwear. The brand is known for its designer jeans that were popular in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Since the 2000s, Jordache has also diversified into real estate in the United States and other ventures in Israel. The brand name Jordache is a contraction of Joe, Ralph, and Avi Nakash.
7 For All Mankind is an American denim brand founded by Michael Glasser, Peter Koral, and Jerome Dahan in 2000 and headquartered in Vernon, California. It was purchased by the VF Corporation in 2007 and sold to Delta Galil Industries in 2016.
Alfred Sung is a Canadian fashion designer and businessman. He is well known for producing apparel, fragrance, accessories and home fashions for women and men. He was born in Shanghai and raised in Hong Kong. Sung is the brother of late Hong Kong actress Lydia Shum. He is also a founder of Club Monaco, a mid-priced, high-end casual clothing retailer.
The term designer label refers to clothing, luxury automobile manufacturers and other personal accessory items sold under an often prestigious marque which is commonly named after a designer, founder, or a location-like where the company was founded. The term is most often applied to luxury goods. While members of the upper middle class, or the mass affluent, are perhaps the most commonly targeted customers of these designer labels, some marquees—such as Cartier, Rolex, Montblanc and the haute couture — tend to a wealthier customer base. But almost every designer brand has merchandise that the middle-class wouldn't normally be able to afford, such as exotic skins, furs and hides, limited edition pieces, or things simply priced higher. Designer label companies use their smaller and cheaper merchandise, aimed at the middle class, such as wallets, fashion jewellery, key-rings and small accessories, to make the majority of their income, whilst the more expensive pieces such as haute couture, high jewellery, hand-bags, shoes and even furnishings are usually reserved for the wealthier upper-class clientele.
History of fashion design refers specifically to the development of the purpose and intention behind garments, shoes, accessories, and their design and construction. The modern industry, based around firms or fashion houses run by individual designers, started in the 19th century with Charles Frederick Worth who, beginning in 1858, was the first designer to have his label sewn into the garments he created.
Southpole is an American wholesale clothing and fashion company, designer, distributor, licensor, and marketer based in Fort Lee, New Jersey, with operating headquarters in New York City. The company was founded in 1991 by two Korean American brothers, David Khym and Kenny Khym under their company name, Wicked Fashions Inc. The company's showroom is located on Fashion Avenue in Manhattan.
"Fashion victim" is a term claimed to have been coined by Oscar de la Renta that is used to identify a person who is unable to identify commonly recognized boundaries of style.
Fashion design is the art of applying design, aesthetics, clothing construction and natural beauty to clothing and its accessories. It is influenced by culture and different trends and has varied over time and place. "A fashion designer creates clothing, including dresses, suits, pants, and skirts, and accessories like shoes and handbags, for consumers. He or she can specialize in clothing, accessory, or jewelry design, or may work in more than one of these areas."
The Great Western Garment Company (GWG) was a Canadian denim and western wear clothing company founded in 1911 in Edmonton, Alberta by Charles A. Graham and Alexander Cameron Rutherford, the first Premier of Alberta. The company was acquired by Levi Strauss, starting in 1961.
A cruise collection or resort collection or resort wear sometimes also holiday or travel collection, is an inter-season or pre-season line of ready-to-wear clothing produced by a fashion house or fashion brand in addition to the recurrent biannual seasonal collections — spring/summer and autumn /winter — heralded at the fashion shows in New York, London, Paris, and Milan.
Haute couture is the creation of exclusive custom-fitted high-end fashion design. The term haute couture generally refers to a specific type of upper garment common in Europe during the 16th to the 18th century, or to the upper portion of a modern dress to distinguish it from the skirt and sleeves. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Paris became the centre of a growing industry that focused on making outfits from high-quality, expensive, often unusual fabric and sewn with extreme attention to detail and finished by the most experienced and capable of sewers—often using time-consuming, hand-executed techniques. Couture translates literally from French as "dressmaking", sewing, or needlework and is also used as a common abbreviation of haute couture and can often refer to the same thing in spirit.
Frank Mechaly in Marseille, France and raised in St. Tropez, is a jeans designer and brand maker, specializing in premium denim. Though he has successfully launched a number of brands including Sacred Blue and Blue Cult, he is probably best known as the founder and creator of 575 DENIM which has been embraced by celebrities such as Cameron Diaz who made a point of publicly acknowledging her affinity for the jeans during an appearance on Saturday Night Live. Mechaly has now launched his much-anticipated new brand of premium denim called RockStar.
Ralph Lauren Corporation, the legal name of the Ralph Lauren brand, is an American publicly traded luxury fashion company that was founded in 1967 by American fashion designer Ralph Lauren. Headquartered in New York City, the company produces luxury products. Ralph Lauren is known for marketing and distributing products in four categories: apparel, home, accessories, and fragrances. Known mostly for its flagship brand Polo Ralph Lauren, the company's brands include mid-range, sub-premium, and premium labels up to its highest priced luxury Ralph Lauren Purple Label apparel.
Tilmann Wröbel is a Franco-German fashion designer born in 1964 in Düsseldorf, Germany. He is currently working and living in both Biarritz, France and Düsseldorf, Germany.
DSTLD is an American clothing company, founded in 2014 by Corey Epstein, Ryan Jaleh and Mark Lynn and backed by Asher New York Holdings. The California-based company designs and retails a line of mostly denim-based clothing. The company has become known for its relatively affordable pricing, environmentally friendly design and manufacturing, a direct-to-consumer retail strategy.
The term "fashion brand" includes all the brands that operate within the fashion industry. A fashion brand combines symbolism, style, and experiential elements, and it needs to differentiate its products and coordinate its supply chain to succeed in the market. Consumers commonly employ brands as a means of expressing either their genuine identity or an idealized self-image that they aspire to achieve.
