Promoting Fashion & Aesthetics

Shillong has always been a fashionista’s delight. From street fashion to haute couture, men and women here love to explore everything that’s in vogue. To take this fashion frenzy a step farther and to promote beauty and aesthetics, a group of like-minded people founded Fashion Society Shillong back in 1983.

The Society, which will celebrate its coral anniversary on October 6 this year, is all about promoting the inherent talents of local youths by providing a platform in the form of beauty pageants, fashion shows and musical gigs.

“It is not really a modelling agency. Most of the young talents venture on their own equipped with our certification to enter bigger arenas,” says Aldous Mawlong, chairman of the Society.

Mawlong says the Society does not sponsor participants in national competitions but “if sponsorship is available from the government or business houses then definitely it can tap on these resources and promote youngsters”.

Talking about the evolution of fashion world both locally and globally, the head of the Society asserts that there has been a transcendental change in the way people look at models and in the way models look at themselves.

“The focus today is not only on being fashionable but also being comfortable. There is a shift from just good looking to also be healthy, which explains why most models follow a strict regime of lifestyle, diet and exercise. They also abstain from what is called ‘loud dressing’. Personality plays a vital role in the overall category of looking good,” explains the expert.

The Society meticulously selects the contestants, who have to be between 16 and 25 years of age, for Miss Shillong beauty pageant, which is not an annual event. It conducts practice sessions on catwalk, speech, make-up and grooming. It explores ways to network with similar organisations, the central and state governments and semi-government bodies “for uplifting its activities and achieving its objectives”. The society is also making efforts to archive exhibits, texts, costumes, weaves and other art forms in the latest formals.

However, Mawlong, who joined the Society after its inception and took over as the convener in 1986, says, “We never encourage anyone to give up their studies or jobs because the rat race in the outside world is real. If they are extraordinary and have a great sense of determination coupled with the right contacts and sound financial backup, then it is a different story altogether.”

Besides the beauty pageant, the Society organises various other events like musical shows and Cherry Blossom Festival. It also comes up with a lifestyle magazine called Tattoo Magazine’.

Celebrities who have attended the various events of the Society are Moon Moon Sen, Zeenat Aman, Rahul Dev, Shikha Swaroop, Hina Ramani, Kylie Dorjie and Vijay Kim, among others.

How Lululemon and Under Armour are saving the fashion industry

Athleisure is not a fad. It is not a trend. Athleisure is here to stay. How do we know? The growth of this segment of the retail sector far outpaces apparel as a whole, and it's being led by two relative upstarts: Lululemon and Under Armour. Athleisure has replaced jeans and t-shirts as the new casual. So how did this happen?

Fitness is now fashion

For the past couple decades, fitness and nutrition awareness have been on the rise in American culture. This has made athleisure –a strange hybrid of athletic wear and business casual –the biggest growing segment of the apparel industry. In 2015, retail sales overall were flat, but sales of athletic apparel was up 12% according to Fortune. Even more impressive, a report published by Global Industry Analysts, Inc. states that the global market for athletic apparel is projected to reach $231.7 billion by 2024.

Gone are the days when dress codes prevailed. Today, brands like Nike, Adidas, Lululemon, and Under Armour thrive not only because of fitness trends, but because Americans have embraced dressing down and being comfortable. Athleisure is a broad category that is made of athletic apparel that can be worn outside of the gym—like yoga pants or sneakers with suits.

Shopping behavior has changed

It’s big business. Nike, Adidas, Lululemon, Athleta, Under Armour and others are all seeing healthy profits while traditional clothing retailers like Abercrombie & Fitch, Gap, and J.Crew are struggling. Fewer people are shopping at malls as mall landlords look to re-invent them as lifestyle destinations (instead of simply shopping retreats). People are spending less on clothing overall. When they are shopping for clothing, they are looking for discounts. Fast fashion, discount stores, and Amazon are stealing customers from traditional retailers. In the period from 2008-2015, sales of athletic apparel boosted the entire apparel industry by 4.1% on average. Take the athleisure out of the equation and that number shrinks to 0.2%. Basically, the public’s love of yoga pants, leggings, running skirts, and other athletic wear is fantastic for sales — especially in women’s apparel—unless you’re a business selling regular clothing.

Traditional retailers are struggling to understand the disparity in sales numbers. A few years ago, J.Crew blamed its slumping sales on not having the right cardigan in its collection. Banana Republic blamed its slump on a blazer with armholes too small for the average American woman to fit into. But the truth is more basic. It’s all about the denim. Skinny jeans have been the go-to silhouette for denim for more than a decade. Why go out and buy new jeans if you already have several pairs in your closet? Retailers think that a lack of newness is what is keeping women from refreshing their wardrobes. But, once again, retailers miss the mark.

Meanwhile, shoppers are not out shopping for denim. They want something more comfortable. Something stretchier. Something they don’t want to change out of the moment they get home. This easily explains the rise of yoga pants, leggings, and the entire athleisure category.

Enter Lululemon & Under Armour

Lululemon ($NASDAQ:LULU), the Vancouver-based cult favorite, is one of the smaller players in the game with just over 700 stores worldwide. In early June, its shares surged to a record high after first-quarter results topped expectations. The company reported a 25% jump in quarterly sales with $649.7 million. Lululemon’s gross margin widened as the brand rarely has sales on their merchandise. The Lululemon faithful happily shell out $98 or more for a pair of leggings.

Lululemon’s recent growth is driven by two things.

First, Lululemon his attracting men more than ever. Last quarter, roughly 30% of its new customers were men. In fact, Lululemon is currently attracting male customers at a faster pace than women.

Second, the company has placed its focus on activities other than yoga. The brand has made big headway into running apparel and hosts an annual half marathon in Vancouver each year. This growth potential takes what has been a niche player until now and puts it in line with the industry behemoths Nike, Adidas, and Under Armour. Only Under Armour ($NYSE:UA) has fewer dedicated retail stores—168, but it has a wealth of deals to sell its merchandise in other retailers. Nike has 2.26K stores in some form, and Adidas dominates with 4.9K stores.

Frequent questions in Quora:

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https://www.quora.com/Has-anyone-had-any-shopping-experience-with-Club-Factory
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Jade Holland Cooper on building a £10 million fashion brand

When Jade Holland Cooper was seven years old, she started her first business. "It was selling eggs," she remembers. "I had 30 hens, and the other day I found my old notebook where I was listing variable costs and profit – I've always been quite commercially minded."

Today, the 31 year old has swapped eggs for clothes. But one suspects that there is still a notebook somewhere in which she scrutinises the accounts. Indeed, she reveals the best piece of advice she was given when she said she wanted to start a fashion company was from her father: "He said I had to make sure I combined creativity with knowing the numbers; so I learnt about the financials and now run the business strictly according to regular management accounts."

Holland Cooper's father is a farmer and her mother worked as a couturier in London and Paris. It is perhaps unsurprising that, with these dual influences, as a teenager she was torn between pursuing a place at fashion college and one at agricultural college. The Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester won out, but it didn’t take long for her to rethink.

"I was going to all these social events in the country," Holland Cooper explains. "I'm a country girl at heart – I grew up on an arable farm in Suffolk, after all. So, I'd travel around to the polo and horse trials, and everywhere I went I noticed there was a lack of stylish, fashionable clothing for women to wear at these sorts of places: clothes that had the flair of urban pieces, but with a countryside influence." She decided there was a gap she could fill and determined to have a go; she reasoned that if she ended up wanting to learn farming, she could do that at home with her father without the college time. She was 21.

"I was really young, I suppose, but I had this idea and I was convinced I could make it work," she explains. "And I am tenacious – like a dog with a bone once I make up my mind to do something. The hardest thing was persuading people to take me seriously and then having to hire and manage people who were often twice my age. But I soon showed that I knew what I was talking about and things quickly took off."

The principle behind the business is simple, she says. The town/country fashion divide is being broken down by widely available imagery on social media and online and the fact that now many people have places in both. "In Cheltenham, where I'm based now, this is so apparent," she explains. "We have great arts festivals and horseracing here, and there are good restaurants and shops. Many people live between here and London now, and they want sophisticated, elegant and stylish clothes that can work in both settings."

A look at the website (through which the label does 60% of its sales) shows how this philosophy has developed a modern take on classic country-influenced clothing for men and women. Scottish-tweed jackets stylishly cut to give a fashionable fit, waxed cotton capes that are as well suited to festivals as to the polo, skirts in houndstooth and brown Prince of Wales check that can do boardroom as well as outdoors, stylish short coats in camel and country check that are equally at home in the Cotswolds and Chelsea, as well as a wide range of accessories, including on-trend tweed baker boy caps.

Holland Cooper's hunch about the desire for this hybrid look was correct. In ten years, the firm has gone from being a 21-year-old's dream to a £10 million business, with two stores in the UK (and five new ones in development) and many others stocking its wares around the country and abroad, including Harrods, where it is the best-performing label on the 5th floor. Along the way, the founder has managed to build a successful relationship with a network of factories in the UK, and has championed British wool and tweed. This year alone she bought 800,000 metres of British tweed. The homegrown element of the business is something she is very proud of, as is the in-house apprentice scheme she has started for young people to get them into the fashion industry.

What advice, then, would this young entrepreneur give to others thinking about striking out on their own? "Do not be swayed from your vision," she says emphatically. "If you believe in yourself, be clear, understand your journey, your customer, and make sure the DNA of the brand is always there. Don't create products that your customer doesn't understand and doesn't want. Create for real people; don't just create product for the sake of it."

Artificial Intelligence Could Help Generate the Next Big Fashion Trends

A fashion designer working on a new collection has an idea, but wonders if it’s been done before. Another is looking for historical inspiration—1950s-style wasp waists or 80s-era padded shoulders.

Soon, they might turn to Cognitive Prints for help. The suite of AI tools IBM is developing for the fashion industry can take a photo of a dress or a shirt and search for similar garments. It can search for images with specific elements—Mandarin collars, for example, or gladiator laces, or fleur-de-lis prints. It can also design patterns itself, based on any image data set a user inputs—architectural images, amoebas, sunsets.

“Fashion designers arduously put in efforts and time in coming up with new designs which could potentially be trend-setters,” says Priyanka Agrawal, a research scientist at IBM Research India, who has worked on Cognitive Prints. “Additionally, they have inspirations like architecture or technology, which they aspire to translate into their work. However, it becomes difficult to do something novel and interesting every single time. We wanted to make it easier for them by augmenting the design lifecycle.”

The AI image search engine, a collaboration between IBM and the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), was trained using 100,000 print swatches from 10 years of winning Fashion Week entries. Users can filter results by year, designer or inspiration (say, “Japanese street wear”). Designers can get inspired, or can make sure their inspiration is really their own and not inadvertent plagiarism (Gucci was recently accused of ripping off designs from legendary Harlem tailor Dapper Dan; they’ve since launched a collaboration).

The Cognitive Prints team is looking at making several extensions to the tool’s abilities. They want to enable designers to make custom edits to Cognitive Prints-generated designs, like changing the background color or, say, swapping spirals for circles on a fabric. They’d also like to teach the tool to design entire garments given just a few specifications, like “red one-shoulder dresses with ruffled hem.”

The use of AI in fashion has exploded in recent years. Various online services use AI to peruse the internet or your own social media data to suggest new outfits it thinks might be to your taste. Indian designers Shane and Falguni Peacock used IBM’s AI platform, Watson, to search a half-century of Bollywood and high-fashion images—some 600,000 in total—to help them create a new East-meets-West collection. Tommy Hilfiger partners with IBM and FIT to use AI to help identify trends in real time, for a quicker design-to-store time. Amazon has created its own AI designer as well, capable of generating new garments.

Agrawal thinks we’ll be seeing much more of this in the near future.

“As AI progress continues to advance, fashion [will] see more transformations,” she says. “For example, with the rise of conversational agents and virtual reality/augmented reality technology, it should not be long until users can not only query fashion catalogs but also interact, iterate and [be inspired by] the technology.”

Muchaneta Kapfunde, founder and editor-in-chief of the technology and fashion site FashNerd, agrees. AI is becoming common at the retail end of fashion, she says, with stores using algorithms to predict customers’ needs. It’s also being used in attempts to create more sustainable materials, an important consideration in an industry that’s one of the world’s top polluters.

But Kapfunde thinks it will be a while before AI tools like Cognitive Prints are ready to design quality garments on their own.

“The idea of using technology to design a perfect dress, it sounds great in theory, but there’s still a lot of work to be done. It’s not so easy to implement,” she says. “We still need the human touch.”

Major Fashion Names Among Worst Offenders in Britain Gender Pay Gap

LONDON — This week, as the final hours ticked down to the deadline for British companies to report their gender pay gap data or face a fine, a flurry of last-minute filings revealed a stark and unflattering trend: Fashion and beauty brands, predominantly focused on female consumers and audiences, and often employing an overwhelmingly female staff, are among the worst offenders in the country when it comes to paying men more than women.

The explanation, according to several companies? A coterie of men in a handful of top-tier executive roles, while the majority of entry-level, retail, design and distribution center jobs are held by women, creating a gendered, pyramid employment structure reflected across sectors in the fashion industry.

Take Condé Nast Publications Limited, publisher of magazines such as Vogue, Vanity Fair, Glamour and GQ. The company reported data on Tuesday that revealed it to have the largest mean gender pay gap favoring men among all British media publishers and broadcasters, despite having more women than men at every pay quartile.

The company reported a mean gender pay gap of 36.9 percent (in other words, when comparing mean hourly rates, women earn 63 pence, or 83 cents, for every 1 pound, or $1.40, that men earn) and a median gap of 23 percent (when comparing median hourly rates, women earn 77 pence, or $1.08, for every £1, or $1.40, that men earn).

In a statement published alongside the data, Condé Nast attributed its salary skew to its longstanding and male-dominated senior leadership team. The chairman of Condé Nast Britain, Nicholas Coleridge, for example, has held various roles across the executive team since 1991. Jonathan Newhouse has led Condé Nast International for over 30 years. The statement said that across three-quarters of its business, the company had not found evidence of an appreciable gender pay gap. Three-quarters of all Condé Nast employees are female, with the bottom two salary quartiles particularly dominated by women.

The disparity of wages that exist within most fashion businesses was further underscored by the figures produced by many brands and retailers. The middle market women’s wear brand Karen Millen pays women 49 percent less than men on a median hourly basis, meaning that, companywide, men’s median pay was double that of women. Women made up 84 percent of the company’s top positions, with a female C.E.O. and C.F.O., and the same proportion of men and women received bonuses, yet women’s median bonus pay was 96 percent lower than men’s.

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In a statement, the company said that this was because the majority of its retail assistants and distribution center staff were women, and that the small percentage of male employees worked mostly in its head office.

“Our gender gap paints a misleading picture about our commitment to gender diversity and equality,” the statement read, adding that when head office roles were excluded, the gender pay gap dropped to 6 percent. It did not, however, address why so many head office roles were filled by men instead of women.

Other high-profile names included Victoria’s Secret, with a median hourly rate gap of 19 percent, and Benefit Cosmetics, which revealed a 30.7 percent median hourly rate gap, although women made up more than 90 percent of each pay quartile at the company. At Burberry, where women make up 70 percent of the luxury fashion group’s employees, there is a 26 percent gender pay gap in favor of men, who get higher bonuses too. None of the companies in this article wished to provide further comment beyond the statements released with their data.

“While we continue to take steps to ensure employees at all levels are able to fulfill their potential and further their careers at Burberry, and are recognized for their contribution, we know we can do more,” said the Burberry chief executive, Marco Gobbetti, when the company released its data last month. “This report shows that we have a gender pay gap in the U.K. The gap is influenced by the fact that we have fewer women in senior positions, however we are committed to narrowing this gap as we work to develop more women leaders to drive the growth and success of our business.”

More than 2,500 companies, equivalent to one in four, submitted their gender pay gap figures in the 48 hours before midnight on Wednesday. Last year, the government ordered all British companies with more than 250 employees to publish their gender pay gap reports by midnight on April 4.

The hope, it said, was to shame companies into doing more to close the divide. On the final day of results, findings indicated that 78 percent of companies showed a pay gap in favor of men, 14 percent had a gap favoring women and 8 percent had no gender pay gap. The government calculated that Britain’s overall pay gap is 18.1 percent.

Prime Minister Theresa May called the gender pay gap a “burning injustice,” and added that the whole of society would remain “poorer” if outdated employment practices went unchallenged.

The effort in Britain is one of a growing number of initiatives among countries to promote equal pay. Australia recently mandated gender pay gap reporting for most companies, while in Germany a new law will require businesses with more than 500 employees to reveal their pay gaps. The fashion industry, riding high on selling female empowerment via T-shirt slogans and social media hashtags, is starting to look like the employer equivalent of the emperor’s new clothes.