“We thought we could be a little different by celebrating body positivity and using curvier girls and the customers liked it.”īy understanding, embracing, and super-serving the core customers, Saghian was able to quietly build a large, loyal fan base. “All our other competitors were always using the same models over and over,” said Fashion Nova founder Richard Saghian in a rare interview with Paper. As Fashion Nova became more popular, so did the Kim Kardashian phenomenon and long overdue body positivity movement-finally, curvy women were seeing media images that portrayed them and their bodies as attractive and desirable. As the line expanded to include more day looks, like their extremely popular, hourglass-figure-friendly jeans, Fashion Nova became a cult favorite. And Fashion Nova kept things affordable the company has mixed in increasingly expensive looks over the years, but most items still hover around the original median of $20 to $30. Plunging necklines and body-hugging dresses fed the needs of a demographic that hadn’t seen any other company focus on stylish, well-fitting, sexy clothing options in the past. The fast fashion players by and large all but ignored a major demographic: Curvy women who want clothes that are really designed for their bodies.įashion Nova began selling affordable club attire in a Los Angeles-area mall in 2006. Sure, when there was pressure for plus-size options, the companies would offer them-but they were always adapting the fashion model-oriented designs into plus-size pieces, and never into pieces that celebrated curves. Since fast fashion designs are based off clothes from the runway, they naturally trended toward smaller sizes for smaller, far less curvy bodies. Japan’s UNIQLO played a major role in undercutting The Gap by noticing a customer desire for cheap but stylish basics, so they created a line of inexpensive wardrobe staples at a fraction of the cost.įashion Nova also struck gold by being ahead of a trend and creating clothes for what was once treated as a niche audience. Forever 21, originally Fashion 21, opened in 1984 flipping South Korean designs for the underserved Korean-American community in Los Angeles. If certain trends went underserved or completely unserviced by this crop of retailers, new brands emerged to take a slice of the market. Through the 1990s and 2000s, the one-two punch of the internet and cable television sped up trend cycles as well as the public’s appetite for fresh looks. In the 1970s and 1980s, H&M, Zara, and Topshop became leaders in fast fashion by figuring out how to transform runway and editorial designs into cheaper versions for the masses in less than a month. With the advent of the sewing machine and cheap factory labor, the middle class started to get a taste of high fashion from small shops and eventually, department stores. So what’s fueling their meteoric rise? Betting big on Instagram and the power of influencers-and knowing how to capitalize when those bets paid off.įor most of human history, people made or bought clothes bespoke to our bodies. Despite absolutely no interest in search engine optimization, Fashion Nova was one of the top five most searched fashion brands in 2017 and the most searched fashion brand in 2018. And now, another brand has emerged with the ambition and strategy to crank fast fashion cycles to whiplash-inducing speeds: Fashion Nova.įashion Nova has emerged as a gigantic player in the fast fashion space in a relatively short amount of time. That included upstarts like Forever 21 and Missguided, which pumped out new clothes faster than their predecessors to grab a chunk of the market. This retail trend of flipping runway looks into mass-produced likenesses was dubbed fast fashion, and padded the profit margins of brands like H&M and Zara.Īs media consumption evolved and trend cycles sped up, many fast fashion brands came gunning for those retailers. The average person still couldn’t get their hands on haute couture, but high fashion became easier to reproduce in a way that the general public could afford. Over the course of the 20th century, high fashion gradually moved from purely aspirational to somewhat accessible.
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