The Fashion Business Revolution

COURSE DESCRIPTION:
Caveman couture started over 25 000 years ago. The first time a hunter returned with animal skins for protection and warmth marked the beginning of the Fashion era. Much much later in 19th century France, Napoleon III summoned Charles Frederick Worth to imagine a magnificent wardrobe for his wife Empress Eugenie. This established the foundation for Haute-Couture in Paris and kicked-off an ongoing and ever-changing narrative tale of clothing as an expression of social interaction, status recognition and identity. Today the global retail apparel industry is estimated at US$1.1 trillion and is one of the largest businesses on the planet, connecting and consolidating a multiplying effect of industry sectors. The scope of the fashion industry extends beyond fibers and fabrics to shoes and accessories, magazines, boutiques, trend forecasting agencies; it also provides fruitful employment to farmers, blue-collar workers, high-end executives and creative artists. This course will examine the spectacular evolution of fashion from a tiny dressmaker's workshop serving the elite to an explosion into mainstream global consumption in which marketing revolutionized the business of fashion forever.

COURSE OBJECTIVES:
To understand the foundations, climate and evolution of the global fashion industry and how branding and marketing have transformed the art of dress.

EXPECTED LEARNING OUTCOMES
- Understand the scope of the fashion industry and its economic importance
- Trace the history of the democratization of fashion
- Identify the language of fashion and its development and prediction over time
- Recognize the anatomy of a fashion trend in an ever-changing sociological context
- Comprehend the ideology of fashioning an identity and how brands revolutionized the clothing industry
- Create the Muse/target customer and design to a brief
- Recognize how marketing transformed fashion products
- Understand pricing, fashion marketing channels, wholesaling and the art of retail
- Recognize the increasing importance of product extensions and licensing in fashion empires
- Understand the life cycle of a product: from development to consumer