Introduction

The survey of the United Kingdom’s (UK) fashion industry concluded that the

fashion industry in UK is now worth more than 21 billion pounds in one year and the

value get even bigger when the tourism and related businesses are included. It could be

as much as 37 billion pounds (“Telegraph,” 2010). Every year, there is an event known

as London Fashion Week (LFW), where top designers present their new collections for

the next season. LFW can bring in more than 100 million pounds a year (Armstrong,

2013).

Fashion had started over a thousand year ago, and it is involves in many different

areas such as fashion designs, businesses, fashion events and the film industry. The

purpose of this paper is to show the evolution of London fashion into the current trend

and to show the various reasons why London has become fashion capital and remained in

first place for over two years. This paper also include with the history of London fashion,

the reasons why London deserve to be the fashion capital, the background story of LFW

and the positive impacts it has made. Finally, it will present case study of the differences

in fashion industry between the UK and Japan.

1.0 Fashion Capital - London

1.1 Background Information

A fashion capital is a city which has international fashion trends influences and is

a centre for fashion industry, including designs, fashion events such as fashion shows,

and products. Fashion capital also get involved in businesses, entertainment, financial,

and been recognize for the distinctive individuality. Fashion capital complies by Global

Language Monitor, Texas Company, that studies and tracking trends of language usage

in worldwide. Global Language Monitor studies the content of online media,

international print, and also social network blogs and sites in order to assemble the list.

1.2 Reasons Why London has become Fashion Capital

London fashion capital has been affected by three main reasons which are the

duchess of Cambridge, Catherine Elizabeth Middleton, the London Olympic 2012 and

fashion education in London.

The Duchess has proved that she can be impactful for brand names in British

(Paul Payack, 2012). The clothes began to sell out online within hours after Kate worn

and printed version of her photo wearing them were out. For example, she worn velvet

black Dulwich coat to attend a wedding in January, which sold out in hours, the website

has thousand hits around the world. The duchess be able to mixed high end fashion and

street style, if she wear clothes from designers that no one can effort, she would not help

the brand boost the number of income, so she did make some enormous impacts by

wearing affordable brand (Lepore, 2012).

Figure 1

The above picture shows that the Duchess has had effect on fashion sales. Red

LK Bennet coat rose up 15 percent, Asda’s coral colored jeans went up to 88 percent,

Littlewoods Hockey Stick went up more than 238 percent, Burberry coat rose to 300

percent, but the highest increased number was the boots, Russell and Bromley rose up to

663 percent.

Second reason is, latest Olympic was being held by London and it was extremely

successful. 2012 summer games brought in a number of impacts and gave a 37 million

pounds boost to UK economy (“Olympic,”2012). In the clothing and shopping stores,

buyers spent 184.7 million pounds complied by Visa and the retail sector seemed to be

the most benefits than other (Boew, 2012).

London has been the best city for fashion education and number one fashion

school located in here, Central Saint Martins, their fashion school educating the world

and the influx benefit by foreign such as Richard Nicoll from Australia (Mower, 2011).

2.0 London Fashion Week

2.1 Brief history of London Fashion week (LFW)

There are big four cities for Fashion Week in the world, Milan, Paris, New York

and London is one of them. LFW first started in 1984 at the car park, it was turned to

exhibitions and runway shows. In 1992, only limit number of designers got to show their

collections, and this year was the year that Alexander McQueen showed to the public for

the first time at LFW. In 1993 LFW turned back their huge runway because supermodel

Naomi Campbell was topless at Phillip Treacy show (Gregory, 2010). It was among of

celebrities during 2000s at LFW such as Maria Grachvogel had Victoria Beckham in

2001, Matthew Williamson’s 10th Anniversary had Prince performing in 2007

(genestyle, 2013).

2.2 Details of London fashion week

LFW, usually held in February and September. Organizing will be done by

British Fashion Council and funded by a lot of sponsors. Each season over 5,000 people

attend including media, journalists, photographers and buyers. LFW takes place at

Somerset House. There were 60 catwalk shows on the official schedule on latest LFW

which took place in September, 2013 (British fashion council, n.d.).

2.3 Benefits

Behind the Luxury runway show there is the serious business, fashion contribute

almost 21 billion pounds to UK economy and over 16 billion pounds to indirect impact.

The fashion marketing can make up to 214 million pounds, 205 million pounds made by

fashion media and fashion education also bring in 16 million pounds. During London

fashion week, designers employed over 810,000 people, which is the largest employer of

all industry.

3.0 London versus Tokyo

3.1 Fashion Style

Both of countries are famous for street fashion because Tokyo has number of

young Japanese dress up like anime characters call Cosplay. London been praised for

fearless and had sense of style individually. These countries have their own style of

dressing, they are different but it can show that their styles are beautiful and glamorous.

What can be surprising is Japanese has a lot of styles to dress from cute custom to punk

rock style such as Lolita, Cosplay, or Kawaii (Rakuten, n.d.). Japanese are mix and

match tradition with modern style from western to create new style. While UK fashion

can mix every piece of clothes together and they like to mix pattern and printed, but it is

never look too shiny (Charlotte, 2010). For instance, they love to mixed floral and leather

coat. British fashion wears tight with everything and leather jacket due to the weather and

it is popular item for UK fashion. For Japanese, even though they have many sub-style to

wear, British people seem not to pay attention. They focus on how comfortable they got

when they dress and their look is similar to people who just woke up, especially their hair

will always look messed up. On the other hand, Japanese hair usually goes wide range for

the style, focus on cute hair style and they dye their hair in different color (Fresh fruit,

n.d.).

Figure 2

Source : (TokyoFashion, Vogue)

Figure 2 shows that Japanese styles look slightly like a character in a fairytale and

make up is kind of crazy in order to copy the character from Anime. For the British

woman, she wearing clothes that comfortable and her makeup style is looking natural.

3.2 Extend of globalization

England most well-know brand is Burberry. This brand found in 1856 by Thomas

Burberry. It went overseas after 53 years of finding brand (Burberry, n.d.). Topshop is

one of the big UK brand, it had gone global after 46 years and first flagship store located

at Boardway, New York (Wilson, 2009). Examples show that UK brands like to make

themselves oversea. However, Japanese expert mentioned that international fashion

industry is too detailed and focused too much on local market to make it gone global.

Also not many of Japanese brands known outside the nation. For example, A Bathing

Ape has made the extent beyond the national fashion industry but Japanese designer did

not notice anything. Japanese has weakness at going global, what they need is to make

their brand overseas and shop in foreign countries (Tabushi, n.d.).

Conclusion

Fashion Capital, which is the centre of fashion and leads the main fashion train.

London was named as fashion capital for two years ranked by Global Language Monitor.

It can be seen clearly that the duchess of Cambridge is one of the reasons that London

has become a Fashion Capital. She wears the clothes from UK designers and the latest

Olympic Game which held by London also the reason of London being Fashion Capital.

Moreover UK’s fashion education is known as the best in the world, many fashion

designers graduated from UK fashion school. London is also one of the big four cities

that have famous even namely London Fashion Week, every year London held LFW for

six days, and more than 5,000 people attend to the event. (“Uncsbrp,”n.d.). Each year,

there will be a number of designers show their new collection. UK economic make over

21 million pounds from this luxury event.

In the future, London may not be able to stay in the first place of fashion capital

list because the reasons which made London become fashion capital are too weak and

have no long term effect. If, Middleton not famous in next few years and her style

changes, she might not be popular anymore and that may cause lesser citizen and shopper

queue up to buy the same clothes she’s wearing. For the Olympic Games, it took place in

2012, and the effect will last only few years down the road. Later on, if London cannot

have any significant event there will only be tourist and the business people who will

travel to London. The last reason is that girls, stylists, or fashionistas will always have

the mind that Paris is their Fashion capital. Due to the best designers, most of them are

from Paris such as Dior, Chanel or Louis Vuitton and Paris fashion week is the top of big

four fashion weeks.