Assignment 1
MDSE 5240 Global Fashion Retailing
Name: Linh Le
Date: 02/01/2015

Assignment 1

Importance of fashion in the global market
Clothing demands are beyond of people’s regularly basic need that is to keep human body warm. Many people today like wearing something that makes them feel comfortable, nice, happy, and even some have confident feeling when wearing clothes with a designer label on it. From social and cultural perspective, fashion is to show your personality. More generally, fashion is also identification of cultures. People from different cultures, regions or countries can be recognized by what they are wearing (Williams, 2014).
From the economical perspective, fashion industry is beneficial to the global economy for a number of reasons. Firstly, it produces clothing that is one of essential needs. Along with the growth of advanced technology and transportation, fashion becomes global and customers over the world can access to merchandises. Similarly, manufacturers and retailers have opportunities to expand their market globally. Many countries take advantages of fashion industry to develop their economies. For instances, Singapore, as a utopia of high-end shopping, attracts approximately 19 million visitors a year (Wheeler, 2013). They also promote their tourism industry by giving tax refund policy for international tourists at airport. Another example is UK economy with value of roughly 26 billion GBP contributed by fashion industry over last five years according to The Information Daily (2014). Moreover, fashion not only creates jobs for economies and brings income to people working in the industry, but also draws a ripple effect and inter-relationships in the job market within other fields, which belong to the whole supply chain. According to Rachael (2013), if fashion disappeared in global economy, the global recession would be 10 times worse than what it would be.

Fashion theories
Fashion changes and evolves constantly. Fashion theories help to understand how fashion innovations are created and spread before being accepted by wearers. Literature includes three theories of fashion such as trickle down, trickle up, and trickle across. The first one explains fashion evolution is based on the traditional process of imitating and adapting trends from leaders in famous fashion centers like London, Milan, Paris, and New York. These designs are copied and adjusted with wide range of lower prices that customers can afford. In other words, fashion trend passes from high fashion to common people (Abbasi, 2013). In contrast, in the second theory, fashion ideas are starts from street fashion to high fashion. With this theory, common life is used as inspiration to create new ideas that will reach to the runway. The third theory, trickle across, explains about how fashion innovation develops by ideas from various designers targeting to various market segments at different price points (Abbasi, 2013).
Fashion theory evaluation
However fashion designs are innovated, it is undeniable that fashion design is always seasonal and changeable. The time for a product cycle might be long or short depending on customers’ acceptance. Nowadays, seasons are so last season. People know a lot more about fashion so they want to see new designs more often (Cochrane, 2013). Thus, it is the new trend when winter collections are presented during summer time and vice versa. It is, thus, very critical to catch the trend, have good development skills and always innovate creative design in fashion industry. It is illustrated by success of fast fashion brands like Zara, H&M, Forever21, etc. Zara is considered as pioneer for fast fashion with new arrivals to its store coming twice a week (Whitehead, 2014). Meanwhile, H&M and Forever21 have new style shipped daily, and Topshop launches 400 styles on its website every week (Whitehead, 2014).
Fashion is both of tangible and intangible. Customers choose