I guess as truthful fashionistas, you know a thing or two about Fashion Calendar. But, in case you have any doubts, let me share some quick insights with you.
- There are 2 seasons in the Fashion industry: Spring/Summer and Autumn/Winter. You might have seen before written “SS14 collection” for example, which means “Spring/Summer 2014 collection”.
- Fashion works usually 6 months in advance. Therefore, Spring/Summer collections are showcased in September of the previous year and Autumn/Winter collections in February of the same year.
- For designers it’s very important to keep in line with this calendar because it’s when buyers make orders to fill their stores in the next season.
- This means that the collections we have seen during New York Fashion Week this February won’t be available for us, the final consumers, until next September!
As you see in the image, Season 2 is presented and carried out between January and August but prepared during the whole previous year.
Many believe that this Fashion Calendar has no sense, neither for independent and emerging designers nor for well established ones. Some of the designers who have shown year after year at New York Fashion Week in the past, spending thousands of dollars on it, have decided to change their strategy this year by saving huge amounts of money spent in runways that at the end, don’t generate any sales.
As I said before, buyers generally follow this fashion calendar to make purchases and fill their stores, but at the same time, it has no sense either! Us, the consumers, we want to buy the pieces we see in media right after seeing them and not to have to wait 6 months for them to come to stores. The old Fashion Calendar is no longer applicable in today’s extra-demanding and flexible culture.
It is for this reasons that many designers have jumped into alternative ways of promoting their collections out of the traditional calendar including participating in collective pop-up stores, opening their own, hosting a brand presentation, carrying a trunk show, etc. These are all alternatives that bring closer the designer with their final clients, cutting on costs and preventing waste.
That is more or less the philosophy Eva follows with her brand Ecoology, one of the most successful collections in our store!
As the designer of a sustainable menswear line stated, “designing off-calendar and specifically for the needs of our customers means that our energies are invested in what is truly important: producing a quality sustainable product, keeping marketing costs to a minimum and passing on the savings to our customers.”
In Beiñ, The Touch of Spain we believe in this new movement, we believe we are in need of a change and that is why we bring you our brands through small events and pop-up stores in the city all around the year! Fashion calendar has to adapt itself to the new world and flexibility is the first milestone it will have to achieve!
