It has long been accepted that styles trickle down from the catwalks into
mainstream fashion,
In the early 1990s fashion trends Punk and Hippie style combined to form the Grunge look.
Grunge was a colourful, dishevelled style clothes for both sexes with heavy ex army boots.
In Britain the home of
negligent chic Grunge elements merged with New Age Traveller dress, both
on the street and within the fashion industry. Neither of these styles was
particularly successful with urban high end fashion consumers,
whose lifestyle required more formal attire.
From the mid 1990s, modern, functional clothes became more common than the dressed
down mood of the early 1990s. Many men discarded their broad shouldered and boxy
power suits in favour of softer,
more subtly tailored garments with sloping shoulders and a long, lean
fit.
Single breasted jackets dominated the fashion market. In the UK, custom made suits marked increase
in the demand among young, fashion conscious men as 1990s mens fashion. Conversely,
the US led the trend for dress
down days in the workplace and some companies adopted a permanent dress down policy, which
allowed smart casual wear to replace the executive suit.
From the early 1990s, fake fur and winter high fashion trends for modernistic quilted and padded
outerwear remained popular.
In the early to mid 1990s technological developments rise cyber fashions. These were
inspired by Punk, specialist sports clothes and footwear, futuristic clothing was
constructed from materials that had never before been used in fashion, notably neoprene,
polar fleece and high performance micro fibres. All these materials and styles fed into
both mainstream and high street fashion.
Although in 1990 a haute couture gown and a tailored suit could cost a very high price,
some women continued to demand luxurious and prestigious high fashion clothing as 1990s womens fashion.
During the early
1990s, however, haute couture collection clients were at an all time low, however, these often high
profile figures was appearing at key events wearing expensive high fashion designers clothes.
Understated, stylish designs in 1990s fashion combines with glamorous, sexy designs
were fashionable, mens high fashion couture and menswear collection include white cotton singlets, Missoni's colourful
geometric knits , flowing clothes are made in high quality fabrics, and unisex clothes.
Mens and womens wear collections which reveal urban ethnic influenccs, downbeat, enduring
and elegant designs, chic, fluid designs, tailored clothes which are also uncompromisingly
contemporary.
From the mid 1990s the elegant haute couture trade picked up again, duchesse satin frock coats
and circular skirts which were teamed with black chiffon haute couture shirts with sleeves four
foot long. Haute couture fashion featured exquisite chiffon haute couture gowns, and haute couture dresses
in shiny gold,
skintight high fashion dresses, lace, and full length coat. Fluid designs are at once utterly contemporary
and perfectly in tune with 1990s cutting edge couture fashion, it is the ready to wear
collections the other relation of haute couture are being used more than ever.
In 1990s style fashion, fashion was pluralistic, distinctive seasonal trends in cut, colour, cloth
and decoration could still be identified on the international cat walks. Key looks from
the collections for 1998 and 1999 included minimal, precision cut clothing, modernistic
sculptural designs, predominantly in neutral hues, especially grey and in complete contrast,
vividly coloured, fluid bohemian styles united on ultra luxurious primarily natural materials,
including super fine suede and leather, cashmere, real and fake fur, exotic feathers,
hand felted wool, and embroidered and beaded tweeds. In particular, cashmere was used in
abundance and with versatility, cashmere shell suits, long line cardigans, fine lace,
cobweb knits and organza and chiffon garments, often worn in layers.
The other face of fashion in the 1990s were body skimming designs and sports wear:
garments with quilting, hoods and zipped or Velcro fastenings could be seen in
famous designer collections. Also Parisian haute couture, with caped Shoulders and
sleek lines design, ornate fashion were well served by the embroidery and sequins
used in abundance in fashions at paris haute couture show like Lesage most costly
embroidered outfit. Deluxe bohemian styles, producing long line, layered clothes
in brocades, deep pile velvets, and patchworked and fringed fabrics, all in a rich
palette of amber, terracotta, moss green, deep purple and gold. Sophisticated high
fashion designers focused upon wearability of fashion and clothing, quality and value.
In 1999 high fashion remained with textile developments, many initiated by the
sports wear industries, fed into and broadened the boundaries of fashion colour,
textures and construction. Engineered textiles combined natural fabrics with glass,
metal and carbon dioxide to create lightweight hybrids; new coatings included
silicone finishes conceived to speed swimmers through the water and holographic laminates.
Reference: “20th century Fashion”, written by Valerie Mendes and Amy De La Haye;
1999 Thames & Hudson Ltd, London.
Creativity-based goods are among the most specialized of all goods.
Creativity, like culture, is profoundly rooted both in time and in space. The
culture of creativity, or its inherited capital, is inextricably linked to a place, or
- in a social sense - to a community and its history. As far as creativity is
concerned, time and space matter.
Yet theory on efficient economic behavior is mainly grounded in goods
lacking a specific collocation in time or in space. In fact, the more time- and
space-specific a commodity becomes, the less efficient is the market
mechanism in regulating its production and consumption. The more
specialized a good becomes, the less capable is the price system of supplying
relevant information, and the less likely is the competition rule to accurately
predict results. Thus, the market is an imperfect model for the regulation of
creativity-based goods such as fashion, design and art.
This paper aims to reveal some of the limitations of market behavior analysis
concerning creative goods, using the world of fashion as a backdrop for
discussion of the economic effects and idiosyncratic characteristics of creative
endeavors. In this sense, it contributes to a social interpretation of economic
theory, insofar as a society is defined by the place and the time of its
development.
The fashion market is apposite for exploring the problems posed by market
behavior as it relates to creativity. The enigmatic influence of culture within
the fashion industry is manifested in several ways. The culture of creativity -
with its recondite fall-out on the originality of an object, its aesthetic and technological quality, and its image – is a distinctive feature of fashion products, whose essential characteristic is that of embodying symbolic values: they are semiophore goods (Santagata, 1998a; Barrère and Santagata, 1998). Moreover, it is the designers themselves, their imagination and fantasy, their views of society and of the history of humankind and their manners and beliefs, that represent the true deux ex machina of the workshop-atelier, that mysterious and productive place where fashion is made manifest in the beauty of its forms.
Indeed, the presence of celebrated designers in a given place at a given time is an indicator of a creative environment. The number of creative designers living in Paris during the XIX century is impressive (Table 1). It also heralds the increasing internationalization of fashion designers, another factor related to the spatial component of creativity.
The felicitous coupling of haute couture with prêt-à-porter is an excellent example of the creative forces at work in the fashion world. Ready-to-wear and haute couture apparel had already been made available separately, but the merging of these two worlds was an absolute Paris original.
Nonetheless, analysis of the economic behaviour of the actors - both consumers and producers - is even more revealing of the original, theoretical and social role of creativity and creativity-based goods.
As will be touched on again in the last section of this paper, consumers have developed a post-modern attitude in their choices, by which they attribute greater value to creative and symbolic factors than to aesthetic and functional characteristics. Consequently, the quest for novelty (Lipovetsky, 1987) - with all of its ramifications within the dynamics of the mimicking manners - is the source of economic behaviour affecting social interaction. (Simmel, 1904; Bourdieu, 1994; Waquet et Laporte, 1999). The idiosyncratic and inherited character of creativity-based goods, especially in the fashion world, affects economic behaviour in two interactive ways: by means of involvement in a community or social group, and by immersion in the productive atmosphere of the cultural industrial districts.
International dissemination of technology has levelled the playing field in international competition, and competition in terms of lower production costs is becoming less and less of a discriminating factor. Consequently, the globalization of markets promotes competition in terms of product creativity. Creativity is the engine of competitive differentiation and success. The amount of creative intellectual property comprising a fashion product overrides the material components by far. Unfortunately, this has led to a burgeoning of the illegal market for counterfeit goods, which is fuelled by of the predominance of the intellectual value of a good and by its public good nature (Benghozi and Santagata, 2001).
This paper has three sections. The first presents and discusses three models of creative people and the process of creativity: the creative genius, the manager and problem solving, and creativity as a neurological and social process. The second section is devoted to an economic definition of creativity.
