How designer and retail seasons are different.

Fashion Week month is reaching it’s peak, and you might be wondering how does it all stream down to stores.

Fashion seasons can be confusing. Fashion Week just showed us Spring/Summer 2020, products that will only hit the store next March/April (when is not even summer), while in stores right now, designer and retailers are pushing Fall/Winter inventory that were showed in February. And as soon as December comes, there will be more warm weather clothes mixed with fall and heavy winter items. Wait, what?

Fashion is an industry of both anticipation and good timing. Brands try to stay ahead of the curve by introducing items well before we need them. The challenge comes with managing the relative fast change of seasons and the fine balance of showing off the next thing and stocking what people need functionally during the season.

Most of us will read magazines, follow public figures and window shop before actually shopping for something new. When we do, we already build up a familiarity of the style and colors for the season, which have been previously worn by celebrities and fashionistas. And to take us there, it takes time. That’s why brands start introducing new collections to sell way before the weather matches it, while there is also that section in the back of the store with the exact products you need to step outside, whether it is cold or hot or windy.

But how come they design two seasons if there are new products in the store all the time? Conceptually, designers develop two overarching collections, shown for retailers and fashion influencers 6 months before products hit market, so the press and buyers can start building hype around it. But in practice, that collection gets distribute over time, with lighter pieces hitting the market first, in the case of Fall/Winter, and vice-versa for Spring/Summer. This means that a product can be thought out a year in advance.

Now, fast fashion has significantly shorted the time between concept, production and delivery and that is the pet peeve of designers with mass market retailers: they create the concepts that fast-fashion use as inspiration, but while they take six months to release product to market, mass retailers can take a few months, if not weeks.

Some companies have gone around that with two additional mid-season collection, Cruise (previously resort), which are those vacation clothes we see mid-winter, and Pre-Fall, transitioning items for end of summer, both helping bring additional novelty to their brands. But these collections still have the delaying factor that designer usually face. Now, recently, some brands have decided to take fast-fashion to their own speeding game. Ralph Lauren, for example, started selling runaway items online, immediately after the show, which helped meet the growing consumer demand for instant gratification, but can risk wearing off the hype much sooner than usual.

The point is that there is a fine balance that fashion brands try to maintain between collections introductions and availability for sale; one that is now being forced to change to meet consumers and competition where they are.