In recently, HushHush's latest survey shows that major street fashion brands such as Supreme and Palace are replacing traditional luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton and Gucci, and become the brand products that young and new consumers in the UK hope to have. In recent years, street fashion is booming in the market, and the trend has already had a profound impact on the global luxury industry.

Today, the young group's purchasing power is getting stronger and stronger. Street fashion has become the key force for many brands to transform and reach the younger class. However, behind the street fashion consumption, there is a growing phenomenon of design homogenization. The number of street fashion market players has increased, and luxury brands and sports brands have joined the scuffle that is making young consumers continue to gather more mainstream attention such as capital, brands and young groups.

Fashion trend media Hypebeast and Pricewaterhouse Coopers have published the streetwear fashion impact report that tells the essence of street fashion business. The report is 21 pages long, from the origin of street fashion, the rise to the analysis social media and various marketing strategies in the rise of street fashion, this report also raises a question, as street fashion becomes more important in the market. With market share continues to expand and change, street fashion brands will replace traditional luxury goods?

What is street fashion?

According to the Street Fashion Impact Report, most (70%) consumers say that street fashion keywords are cool and individual. In essence, street fashion involves the production, promotion, sale and resale of casual fashion. The main products include sports shoes, T-shirts and other casual fashion. The target market for street fashion is aimed at young people under the age of 25.

Street fashion has its own unique ideas and lifestyles. Authenticity and lifestyle are the core of street fashion, it is usually with a distinct personality and a cultural foundation.

Street fashion is streetwear, whose literal definition is simple: fashionable casual wear, and behind this simple definition that hides a multi-billion dollar retail market. Street fashion stems from the fact that in the 1980s and 1990s, young people who were the protagonists of the Pop era set off a global anti-cultural movement in which cultures such as graffiti, hip hop, skating and surfing rose.

Although the current cooperation between streetwear and fashion is driven by profit, street fashion was born with an attitude of independent and creation, as well as a brand without any commercial support and independence. Therefore, street fashion established a complete and loyal community of consumers and cultural congregations in the early days.

Therefore, many times, the madness of young people to street fashion is not the product itself, but the culture behind it and the lifestyle it represents. Young people's pursuit of specific cultural methods and lifestyles is reshaping the consumption pattern of this era. In order to capture the core consumer groups of the times, brands in all fields have tried to use the seemingly popular and popular street culture elements to show youth and attitude.

How does a street fashion rise?

Ten years ago, street fashion was a niche culture, and today street fashion has gone to the masses and has spawned a multi-billion dollar in retail market. The rise of street fashion is not a one-off event, and there are many factors behind it.

First, we need to discuss the difference between street fashion and luxury brands. The barriers to street fashion brand are not from product pricing strategy, but because it is good at making product scarcity, but it redefines the scarcity, and the new style of street fashion has become a valuable collection for young people.

Supreme's Store in New York

The popular Drop new style in street fashion is the use of “hunger marketing” to create the scarcity of products and further stimulate consumer demand.

According to Hypebeast's Street Fashion Impact Report, 41.5% of street fashion companies believe that Drop-style is important for their brand strategy, and more than half (54%) of consumers say that they are willing to drop for wait in line. In the eyes of the industry, the most important reason for “Drop” is that it can create a sense of urgency and scarcity of goods for consumers, even if the goods themselves are not so difficult to manufacture.

Ana Ronchadrop, head of the Masters in Fashion Marketing at the London College of Fashion, gave his own analysis: “We live in an 'on demand” society where brands must innovate to meet the consumer's needs.” In other words, In his view, "Drop" was born with the shortening of consumer attention.

The new concept of “Drop” introduces new products with a strict control rhythm far higher than the speed of the traditional fashion cycle that is aiming to maintain consumer excitement and ensure the freshness of energy sources. This is one of the reasons why the team fill a street outside the store when Supreme launches new products every Thursday morning.

In addition to the new style of Drop, the booming second-hand market has directly promoted the market position of street fashion. Take the sneaker second-hand market as an example. According to a recent report released by the US market research firm Grand View Research, the global sports shoe market is expected to exceed $95 billion by 2025.

The resale market is an integral part of street fashion operations, as the resale market can serve as a benchmark for brand success: the more valuable a product is, the higher its price on the resale platform. Part of the high-top Air Jordan 1 is the most typical, and it is normal to be speculative in the secondary market to 3,000RMB or more. As for the price ceiling, it is more expensive.

However, unlike the scarcity of luxury goods, the sagacity of street fashion lies in its consideration the closeness of people and the high street, covering a wider range of young people.

In Hypebeast's global street fashion survey, about 70% of respondents said that their annual income was $40,000 or less. More than half (54%) of these consumers say that they spend between $100 and $500 a month on streetwear, while another 18% say that they spend more than $500. Only 8% of consumers said that they would buy more than $500 worth of goods, which means that many of the streetwear consumers who participated in the survey that did not buy high-priced streetwear.

Most streetwear offers a wide range of target consumer groups at a relatively low retail price, while high-demand products will enter the resale market at high prices.

Second, in addition to marketing strategies, social media has also played an important role in the rise of street fashion.

Hypebeast's Street Fashion Impact Report on Social Media Impact

According to a report released by Hypebeast, social media has also accelerated the rise of street fashion, with about 96% of street fashion consumers using Instagram. Alison Levy Bringé, chief marketing officer of Fashionmetrics, a luxury data fashion trend analysis company, said: "Today's street brands are hard to profit from traditional media reports, so they must stand out on social media."

The traditional fashion industry often adopts a top-down model: the fashion style and fashion trends are determined by the industry. Street fashion has subverted this “centralized” fashion model, using a consumer community on social media to derive a “decentralized” fashion model.

Street brands often interact directly with customers, communicate on social media, and communicate with consumers in the store to build their brand awareness. Through social media, street fashion is not only gets popular trends from existing street styles and designer ideas, it is more about getting opinions directly from consumers. Street fashion consumers have as much power as fashion industry insiders to influence trends. They can use social software to express opinions in trendy communities and have a significant impact on street fashion trends.

Is Japan affecting the global street fashion market?

First, from a regional perspective, according to Hypebeast's Street Fashion Impact Report, Japan is still the biggest market for street fashion.

Hypebeast's Street Fashion Impact Report Consumers' spending on street fashion in different regions

Among respondents in South Korea and China, 20% of respondents said that the average cost of street fashion is between $300 and $500. So far, Japanese respondents reported that the highest average spending, with 32% of Japanese respondents saying that the average cost of street fashion is $500 or more.

Second, consumers often want to feel the connection with the brand. The Street Fashion Impact Report shows that the majority (70%) of respondents said that social issues related to brands are important to them, and almost half (47%) of respondents said that if brands have misconduct, they may stop buying goods. Therefore, even if it is a small and personalized street fashion, the brand image has a weightlifting position for them.

In addition, unexpectedly, street fashion is more dependent on offline stores in the choice of shopping venues. According to the Street Fashion Impact Report, more than half (53%) of consumers surveyed said that physical brand stores are their main buying channel, and only 13% said they would shop through social media. Consumers say that product diversity and production availability are the most important factors for online and in-store shopping.

Hypebeast's Street Fashion Impact Report Consumers' Choice of Shopping Locations

It can be seen that social media as an important marketing channel, although affecting people's attention to street fashion, social media is not the final determinant when shopping.

Will street fashion subvert traditional luxury goods?

In recent years, with the street elements becoming the hearts of young consumers, major luxury brands have begun to integrate street fashion into luxury brands.

According to Hypebeast's Street Fashion Impact Report, 76% of respondents in the global industry survey of fashion and retail executives said that they believe streetwear will continue to grow substantially over the next five years, which also marks the dominant position of streetwear is growing.

In 2017, the collaboration between Supreme and Louis Vuitton marked a turning point in luxury fashion perceptions of streetwear. In 2018, Louis Vuitton appointed street fashion designer Virgil Abloh as creative director of menswear. Balenciaga is also moved to the streets style under the leadership of Vemments founder Demna Gvasalia.

In addition, large-scale investment in street clothing has become more and more common, and Japan's A Bathing Ape (BAPE) gained investment as early as 2011. In 2018, footwear retailer concepts reached an agreement with Amazon's Zappos and sporting goods, and was supported by LVMH.

Street fashion does have more vitality than luxury. Street fashion products are not susceptible to changes in seasons and trends, far exceeding the periodicity and short life cycle of many fashion trends. As a result, the value of street fashion has begun to match the value of contemporary art or collectible luxury, with collections starting from jewelry to sneakers.

However, although it seems that street fashion is growing rapidly, it is hard to say that street fashion will replace or completely subvert the luxury market.

The views in the Hypebeast report shows that streetwear and luxury clothing should be a mutual relationship. Luxury fashion and streetwear will never be the same in the true sense, and they will not be the same system. The report shows that luxury brands themselves have irreplaceable artistic value due to their long process time and design connotation. Street fashion should not be the end of luxury brands.

Balenciaga 2019 Winter Autumn Series

It is worth mentioning that street fashion is a luxury brand and faces great risks. Especially in the context of consumption upgrading, material consumption is shifting to spiritual consumption, and the emotional resonance and cultural identity represented by younger emerging consumers are more valued. The street fashion luxury is not in line with the original intention of street fashion culture, and its core group abandoned the mass brand for the absolute niche culture.

Although street fashion was originally a niche culture soil, niche means that it does not have a large-scale commercial foundation. Once a tide brand chooses a large-scale market expansion after the appearance of a phenomenon-level explosion, it means that the original core may be lost. The value of the group.

Street fashion and luxury brands are still the pros and cons of coins, alternately leading, but never overlapping.

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