Will Consumers Buy Every Trend They See At Paris Fashion Week?

Fashion week is an event usually held for a week, where  different designers, brands, and houses showcase their latest collections in runway shows and presentations to buyers, media, and celebrities. It's held twice a year, usually in February and September, to preview the upcoming spring/summer and fall/winter seasons. Fashion weeks take place in several international fashion capitals, with New York City, London, Milan and Paris being the major cities in the industry, where the tops designers like to show their designs.

Fashion enthusiasts, retailers, consumers and all key players in the industry attend these events with hopes to discover new trends and features and also experience the creativity of the designers. However, it is unclear whether these trends and features from designers who show their designs at the fashion week are really what informs the trends and more common features seen in the market or the consumers are completely in control.

In this article we’ll be taking a look at the most common features and attributes of designs for Spring/Summer collection from last season, presented at the Paris Fashion week, we’ll be comparing this with the current most dominant attributes seen in the market using the Assortment Analysis feature on Woven Insights.

Dominant features at the Paris Fashion week 2024 Spring summer collection

The fashion week was filled with a wide range of features and attributes, designers created lots of trendy and unique pieces, however, there were features which seemed to appear more in all the collections, across various designers.

The most dominant categories were tops, dresses and outerwear, Longsleeves were the most dominant feature, with designers like Balenciaga, Dior, Loewe, andreas kronthaler, Sarah Burton, Louis Vuitton and Issey Miyake including it in most of their designs, it appeared in 325 designs, while 118 designs were sleeveless and 38 designs were short sleeves.

Other dominant features include designs featuring a high neck and collar. In terms of the fit, A regular fit was more dominant, with 312 designs, however an oversized fit also made noticeable appearance and was seen in 120 designs. Now we’ll take a look at what the market is saying using Woven Insights.

Dominant features in the market

We would be focusing on the assortment analysis on woven insights as it Provides Market insights related to product assortment based on features, styles and product ranges, it’s more detailed and is able to provide insights even on prints and Material!

A general overview of the market shows material as the most dominant feature in the market with cotton taking the lead, followed by polyester. In terms of design, the most dominant feature is long sleeves, followed by shortsleeves, In terms of the fit, 43% of products have Regular fit, 27% have a relaxed fit and 25% have an oversized fit.

The top categories present in the market are tops, dresses, outerwear, bottoms and tshirts, in that order.

According to the woven Insights AI assistant, “ The number of feature combinations far exceeds the number of color combinations for all categories. This suggests that there is a greater variety of features than colours available in the market. As a result, it may be more effective to focus on differentiating products based on features rather than colors. This could involve investing in developing new and innovative features that appeal to customers.”

Conclusion

Some features are a favourite both on the runway and in the market, designs with long sleeves, Regular fit, and outerwears seem to be performing great in both worlds. On the other hand, sleeveless designs, Oversized fit, high neck and collars made more appearance on the runway compared to the market. The dominant categories were similar but t-shirts are dominant in the market but didn’t make an appearance at the fashion week. This goes to show that the fashion week might influence some trends but the consumer’s Demands still dictates what is in the market and factors beyond trends are responsible for this.

Fashion week in different cities share some similarities but there are also lots of differences. Paris was examined in this article, but one city isn’t enough to get all the details from all the different collections,  it’s a tedious task to individually analyse all the different features either for the purpose of research, merchandizing or understanding trends.

Woven insights on the other hand  is able to easily provide more in-depth market insights across different locations, By leveraging insights from Woven Insights and observing trends, brands, designers and retailers will be able to make more informed decisions and provide products that resonate with consumers.