Skip to main content

Changing Fashions: A Look at the UK Fashion Industry

The UK high street fashion industry is worth an estimated £44.5 billion. In 1960 10% of household expenditure was spent on clothing and footwear. Today, thanks to discounted prices, lower production costs abroad and a flood of Chinese imports, only 6% of household expenditure is spent on keeping us fashionable. Encouragingly for the consumer, between 2001 and 2005 average clothing and footwear prices fell 14.4% whilst the cost of living has risen by 12.6%.

Discounting is rife in the ultra-competitive UK fashion market. Marks & Spencer remains the market leader in the sale of high street fashion, but faces fierce competition from discount fashion specialists such as Primark and TK Maxx. Increasingly, affluent younger consumers are buying formerly exclusive high fashion brands such as; Prada (Italy), Chloe (France), Hugo Boss (Germany), Burberry (UK) and Donna Karan (U.S) to mention but a few.

The rise of cheap imports has nearly wiped out UK manufacturing. These days UK manufacturing concentrates on specialist fashion clothing or luxury products, mostly made for wealthy consumer in other developed countries. A continued trend in the fashion industry is the integration of manufacturers and retailers. The top three fashion retailers in UK; Next, Marks & Spencer and Arcadia (Topshop, Dorothy Perkins, BHS etc.), are all manufacturing and retailing their own fashion brands. Exceptions to this vertical integration are the street fashion brands of Nike, Adidas and Reebok, who prefer specialist retailers.

To conclude, the UK fashion market will continue to be driven by retailers rather than manufacturers with a polarisation between discounters and full-price retailers. The full-price retailers will capitalise on young consumer demand for couture-house designs, quality materials and individual styles sold as “fast fashion” with items offered for a limited time before new styles are released. Forecasts to 2010 are for the women’s, girls and infants fashion market to grow by 23% with a 15.6% growth for the men’s and boys fashion market.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

India's swine flu death rate is increasing

Friday, August 14, 2009 MUMBAI: A 26-year-old woman died Thursday of H1N1 swine flu in the southern city of Bangalore, raising India's death toll from the virus to 20, authorities said.The death was the first reported in India's information technology capital, the Press Trust of India reported.Meanwhile in Pune, the worst-affected in India, two more victims of the virus died Thursday, raising the death toll in that western city near Mumbai to 12, the report said. The victims were an 11-month-old boy and a 75-year-old old woman.US media reported movie halls, schools and colleges were ordered closed Thursday for three days to a week in Mumbai, the commercial and financial capital of the country, as fear of the pandemic spread.Prajakata Lavangare, a spokeswoman for the government of Maharashtra state of which Mumbai is the capital, said similar orders were issued in Pune, which is also located in the state.The woman who died in Bangalore was identified only as Roopa, a teacher in...

Snake bite deaths

Monday, July 06, 2009 COLOMBO: The Sri Lankan government recorded some 33,000 snake bites in 2008, with most of the victims coming from remote villages.The Department of Government Information said in a statement that most of the snake bite cases could be fatal if neglected.The statement said snake bites are often neglected in Sri Lanka as victims do not seek treatment at hospitals where advanced medication is available. Instead, the victims rush to traditional type of treatment which could be a risk, reports Xinhua.Snake bites death at domestic level, outside hospitals, go unrecorded, said the statement.Most victims of snake bite are from the rural and remote villages where there is no electricity after dusk.Statistics show that Sri Lanka has over 90 species of snake with around 10 species possessing venom capable of killing a human being.In Sri Lanka the annual death rate due to snake bite envenoming is one of the highest in the world being 6 in 100,000 population.

Suicide bombings kill 18 in Iraq

Thursday, August 13, 2009 MOSUL: At least 18 people, most of them members of the ancient Yazidi religious sect, were killed when two suicide bombers blew themselves up on Thursday in a packed cafe in northern Iraq, a local government official said.At least 31 people were also wounded after the bombers detonated suicide belts packed with explosives in the cafe in Kalaa town, in the district of Sanjar, local district chief Dakheel Qassem Hasoon, told a foreign news agency."Two suicide bombers entered the Cafe Barbaroz at 4:30 pm (1330 GMT) and blew themselves up, killing 18 civilians and wounding 31. Most of the victims were Yazidis," Hasoon said.Kalaa, northwest of the insurgent stronghold of Mosul in northern Nineveh province is predominantly populated by the minority Yazidi religious sect, as well as Arabs and Kurds.The attack is the deadliest since Monday, when 51 people were killed across Iraq, including 28 members of the tiny Shabak sect cut down when two truck bombs det...