Love,want,need – the language of fast fashion

Love, want, need - a phrase central to the common ‘need desire’ language of the fast-fashion industry and the media. Created for the consumer.


Fashion is no longer just seasonal. It changes by the week, and even by the day, with the ‘fast fashion’ peddled by high-street mega-chains such as Primark central to the transient trends and enduring need culture. But it’s not just fashion that’s fast and fleeting; the instant and 24/7 nature of digital media also requires a continual stream of fresh content to keep readers interested.

So as publishers and brands become ever more dependent on each other to shift their products, they’ve developed a new language of ‘need desire’ which has been willingly adopted by young fashionistas – a status term itself a construct of this new idiom.

Shop, don’t buy

‘Love, want, need’, ‘must-have piece’, ‘shop the look’ - all phrases now in common use in fashion magazines, on fashion sites and fashion blogs are just a more sophisticated form of advertising, which has always been based on the creation of need and want.

‘Shop’ has become the verb of choice over the more appropriate ‘buy’, as shopping is considered a form of sport and an acceptable past-time - especially for the teenage girls and young women targeted by such messages. ‘Buying’, although it is essentially what shopping is, is too practical and, particularly during the recession, a word to be avoided.

But even in the financial crisis language was employed to maintain the need culture that the economy relies on: ‘Recessionista’ and ‘bargainista’ became common terms, adding status to and congratulating those who found a way to continue shopping throughout the hard times.


The language of love

The language of fast fashion is now just as widely used by consumers as the publishers and brands. They are, perhaps unknowingly, doing the job of the advertisers via new forms of word-of-mouth - on their fashion blogs, on social networking sites, on the high-street.

The idiom is emotive and passionate with words such as ‘crush’ and ‘lust’, once reserved to describe the emotional attachments of humans to other humans, now used to express desire for clothing and fashion accessories. It is as hungrily devoured by the consumer as the fast fashion items themselves – so widely utilised that girls don’t need to finish their sentences to be understood by their peers. “I love…” is attributed to objects of desire, as well as used as an expression of acceptance of another’s fashion choices. And where words aren’t required, making a heart shape with your hands expresses the same thing.


Fashion and content, sitting in a tree…

With everyone now a content creator, there is little difference between working on a fashion weekly and writing content for a brand – just maybe that there’s more variety of brands and products to promote in an ‘independent’ magazine. The fashion weeklies depend on the fast fashion industry to supply products to write about just as much as the industry depends on the weeklies to promote their products and help create the constant desire for the new.

Look magazine, for example, ‘Britain’s best-selling fashion weekly’, includes regular features ‘this week we need…’ and ‘fashion trends of the week’, and accompanies every calendar event with messages that the consumer needs to shop for it: ‘Your Bank Holiday Weekend Wardrobe Sorted’ shouts a headline on the front-cover of the most recent issue of the magazine. With a website to maintain the need for the new is ever intensified – reduced to hours rather than weeks - and such features couldn’t exist without fast fashion.

These would most likely have seemed ridiculous editorial concepts thirty years ago but it’s all advertising – just not as we know it.

Which other fast-fashion phrases have you heard? Do you use them yourself? Let me know in the comments box below.

What's new copy-cat?

British fashion designer Luella Bartley’s eponymous label may have lost financial backing at the end of last year, but it seems that its spring/summer designs will see the light of day after all, be it via fast-fashion dresses.

Boohoo.com’s recently launched spring/summer collection features a number of pieces boasting a heart cut-out similar to Luella’s distinctive design and an almost identical Eighties-inspired polka-dot bandeau dress.



Of course this isn’t the first time that fast-fashion retailers have blurred the line between taking inspiration from and copying the work of top fashion houses, and it won’t be the last.

Just weeks ago Lindsay Lohan was accused of copying a Jen Kao Fall ’09 dress for her 6126 fashion line after sketches of her designs seemed to show striking similarities between the two. In 2007 French fashion house Chloe forced Topshop to destroy over 1,000 yellow dungarees, claiming that it was a copy, and in the same year the Diane von Furstenburg (DVF) Studio filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against U.S. retailer Forever 21 for allegedly plagiarising two of its spring/summer dress designs.

While Luella may not be producing the dress designs it showcased at London Fashion Week for the upcoming season, Bartley may still be able to sue for breach of copyright, giving that, we are assuming, she hasn’t licensed or assigned copyright to others. In which case, could the online retailer be seen to be gaining financially at the expense of copyright holder Luella?

And where would Bartley stand if she re-launched her brand, with the help of a new financial backer, and wanted to roll out the designs? Would there be damage by association? Would her original designs lose desirability due to the fact that thousands already owned similar pieces?

Of course, the two labels are catering for very different markets, one offers top-end designer and the other high street fast-fashion, and it remains to be seen if such imitation will much bother former fashion journalist Bartley, who is due to publish a book with the working title ‘Luella’s Guide to English Style’ in September.


Imitation - the highest form of flattery?

They do say that imitation if the highest form of flattery, but it isn’t always seen as such in the fashion industry. Indeed, fashion houses used to physically hide their designs from competition. A Business of Fashion article on the subject quotes a 1950s’ press officer for Christian Dior as saying that “all precautions must have been taken to ensure that no member of the profession would be attending” their fashion shows.

But, as the article rightly highlights, thanks to the rise of fast fashion and the volume of fashion bloggers, the industry has never been as transparent as it is today.

According to the author, Competition and Intellectual Property lawyer Hanne Melin, the law dictates that Intellectual Property Rights mustn’t “unreasonably restrict the ability of others to develop new ideas and produce new works”.

But as ‘implied license’ can be used as a defense against copyright, with a defendant stating that the copyright owner knew what they were doing and for a significant period of time did not act to prevent it, the impetus must lie with the fashion houses to actively defend their copyright.

This is exactly what Diane von Furstenburg did by establishing a three-year strategy to address counterfeiting and intellectual property issues, during which Forever 21 was just one of the companies hit with a lawsuit.

Such cases will surely have acted as a warning to others not to even think about ‘sampling’ the DVF’s designs, and if other labels want to be seen as similarly untouchable, they must fiercely defend what is theirs.