Women Balk at New Fashions : Higher Hemlines, Prices Trip Up Apparel Industry
Turned off by seesaw hemlines, high prices and a lack of captivating fashions, women have put the brakes on clothes buying and put a big dent in the nation’s apparel industry.
Consider Christine McCarthy, who gave up on the big department and specialty stores when they started showing a lot of above-the-knee styles. “A guy’s not going to wear shorts to work, and I’m not going to wear a miniskirt,” fumed the First Interstate Bank senior vice president. Now, she buys many outfits directly through designers catering to executive women.
Or attorney Andrea Y. Slade, who wears conservative but updated fashions for judge and jury and was feeling “desperate” about her summer wardrobe. “Nothing they’re selling is appropriate for what I do, especially the short skirts and bright colors.”
And Barbara Tell, a real estate development executive who bemoans the lack of stylish yet classic apparel. “The clothes are geared to a very young market,” she said. “That stopped a lot of my buying. And the quality of the fabrics and the price of the clothing just don’t match.”
These are the women who should be the bread and butter of U.S. retailing, the baby boomers in the workplace, the thirty-something crowd seen by retailers as having money to burn and a burning need to frequently replenish wardrobes with image clothing. They make up a big portion of the women 18 to 65, 70% of whom are working.
But for nearly a year, women like these have made themselves scarce in the nation’s clothing shops, with the result that many merchants have reported a string of lackluster sales gains or, in some cases, steep declines from the year before.
For February through May, Carter Hawley Hale Stores, owner of the Broadway, reported that sales were down 2% from the year before at comparable stores. The Limited, a leading specialty retailer, showed a decline of 5%. And Dayton Hudson, parent of Target and Mervyn’s, cited weak women’s clothing sales in reporting a small 1.5% gain.
No Real Growth
“Apparel retailing is experiencing a period of slow growth that’s really unprecedented for the 1980s,” said Carl Steidtmann, vice president and chief economist of Management Horizons, a consulting firm in Columbus, Ohio. “You really have to go back to the 1974-75 recession to find a period when apparel sales actually contracted.”
By year-end, Steidtmann noted, leading specialty apparel retailers will have had their second year of essentially no real growth in sales volume. Where dollar gains have been reported, they have been largely wiped out by the clothing industry’s recent rampant price inflation--a sharp 6.2% run-up in the last year for women’s apparel--which resulted from the plummeting value of the dollar and quota restrictions that raised the cost of imports.
The price increases seem to have eased lately. The consumer price index for May, issued last week, showed a slight drop in women’s apparel prices after two months of increases.
Through their reticence to spend, women have expressed frustration with retailers and apparel manufacturers for trying to swing fashion to the short and clingy as millions of women approach middle age and increasingly need garments that wear well in the workplace. And they have thrown retailers into their own recession, even as much of the rest of the economy continues to show strength.
The slump “was precipitated by the fashion industry’s death wish and the whole need to hype short skirts and to attempt to manipulate the fashion-buying public in a way that is so anachronistic,” said Carol Farmer, a New York retail consultant. “Women didn’t like the fashions, which were unflattering, and they rejected them.”
Even once high-flying specialty merchants such as the Limited, which for years had the fashion world by the tail, have been saddled with oversupplies of merchandise that simply do not appeal to the public.
Few Signs of Optimism
Department stores have fared somewhat better because stagnant sales of women’s apparel were tempered by healthy sales of home furnishings and other items. But at those stores, too, the watchword is caution, retail consultants and analysts say.
After all, many of these chains have just passed through a years-long transition in which they weeded out hard-line goods such as furniture and major appliances and filled the space with women’s sportswear, the most troubled apparel category.
With few exceptions--notably Nordstrom, Dillard Department Stores and, recently, the Gap--stores have been crying in their cash registers for months, and there are few signs of optimism for the coming months.
“Everybody is in trouble,” said Al D. McCready, national director of retail and wholesale trade at Deloitte Haskins & Sells, a big New York accounting firm. “You have a heck of a time finding anybody who will say anything positive.”
Retailers and clothing designers have only themselves to blame for the slump, industry watchers say.
The apparel business “had so many years of mindless expansion in the casual looks, especially the sweats and active sportswear, that it didn’t have to come up with anything new,” said Joseph Scheines with Kurt Salmon Associates, a New York-based consulting firm. “All of a sudden, that stuff peaked, and they’re looking for something to replace it.”
The problems are widespread. “Some very large manufacturers are starting to panic because their fall bookings are just not there,” Scheines added.
According to some observers, the downturn stemmed from a failure by designers and retailers to stay in step with demographic shifts. Baby-boomer women have had children and bought houses, which compete with clothing for spending dollars.
Meantime, most of the thousands of specialty stores in the nation’s malls continue to cater primarily to the shrinking juniors category, whereas the women with the bucks are in that older population bulge. So, faced with uninspiring or unsuitable fashions, women are frequently more inclined to dress up their kitchens and bathrooms than themselves and to make do with accessories to update the clothing they own.
‘Dug in Their Heels’
Last year, when fashions began to change, it was in exactly the wrong direction for customers 30 and older who were more concerned with taste than trends, according to Joseph H. Ellis, a retail analyst with Goldman, Sachs & Co. In a recent report, Ellis described the apparel downturn as a “debacle.”
In particular, he said, women customers, particularly the vast majority who live outside the more fashion-forward metropolitan areas such as New York and Los Angeles, “dug in their heels” when it came to shorter hemlines and frivolous, frilly, flowery looks inspired by Paris designer Christian Lacroix.
“The real issue now is taste, and taste is different than fashion,” said Walter K. Levy, chairman of Walter K. Levy Associates, a New York-based retail marketing firm. “Women are saying, ‘I’ve made it. I can afford better quality fabrics and more expensive clothes.’ ”
Susan Rolontz, executive vice president of the Tobe Report, a New York fashion trade magazine, agreed that “customers are looking at the fashion business with a jaundiced eye” because they dislike the styles and view many prices as artificially high.
But she maintained that the shorter styles were “an exciting movement” and that retailers simply blew it. “We really had every opportunity to sell customers new clothes; we had gone as long as we could with ankle and floor length,” she said. “But everybody started saying ‘mini,’ and customers started saying, ‘Uh-uh.’ ”
Merchandise Mismatch
Women who decided that short skirts were fine for parties and casual wear but unfit for the office found a dearth of other compelling new styles.
“Certainly, there is a mismatch between merchandise offered and the bulk of prospective consumers,” said Sandra Shaber, an economist with the Futures Group in Washington. “The most spending power by women is held by those who aren’t teen-agers anymore.”
With business fizzling, big clothing manufacturers and retailers have had to hustle to correct some problems in styling and prices.
Acknowledging that “the consumer has stayed away for very good reasons,” manufacturer Bernard Chaus, chairman of the New York-based company that bears his name, is hoping to win back shoppers for his fall career lines by reducing the number of casual outfits and creating a variety of mix-and-match items for a more individual look. To address the “sticker shock” problem, the company also cut overhead expenses and changed fabrics, in some cases reducing prices by 30% or more.
For example, some jackets that last year sold for $110 have been lowered to $60. But purists, take note. Whereas last year’s garments might have been 100% wool, this year’s are a less costly blend of polyester and wool.
Business Dried Up
Although merchants have continued ordering cautiously for fall, Chaus said the company is finally seeing modest increases in orders after nine months of so-so sales. And for the so-called holiday lines that will hit stores in early November, response is even better--a “180-degree turnaround.” But, Chaus noted, “It doesn’t happen overnight.”
At May Co. California, merchandise buyers scrambled to adjust hemline offerings after a “sensational” business in short skirts from last July through Christmas dried up by February. “We did get caught in early spring inventories because we were very aggressive,” said Steve Powers, senior vice president and general merchandise manager of sportswear and special sizes. The store quickly changed orders for March and April and is showing skirts knee length and longer.
For some smaller retailers, the downturn proved too much. Nancy Heller, a Los Angeles sportswear designer for 17 years, has seen half a dozen of her West Coast specialty store customers close in the last six months. And larger stores are being very conservative. “Retailers are going to manufacturers that they’ve had longevity with and are safe,” she said. “That’s where they’re putting all their money.”
Established houses are benefiting from the retailers’ conservatism. Orders at Carole Little, another Los Angeles designer, are up about 40% over last year at Saks Fifth Avenue and Bullock’s, according to Chairman Leonard Rabinowitz.
Taking a safe approach could backfire, however, if bored customers refuse to be tempted by the lack of variation. “I won’t buy clothes that are the same,” said Nancy Kewin, a vice president at Roland Corp., a Los Angeles maker of electronic musical instruments. “The same pieces are everywhere--Ellen Tracy, Anne Klein--rack after rack in every store, from Robinson’s to Bullock’s to the Broadway to Nordstrom. I want something unique.”
‘Miss Marple’ Theme
Desperate for something that will catch shoppers’ fancy, designers have taken to offering an array of styles and hem lengths for fall. They are banking heavily on pants, for instance--not as a panacea but as an option for women who are confused by vacillating hemlines.
Scarred by their “mini” experience, designers seem to be grasping for ideas. Women’s Wear Daily, a leading trade publication, recently ran a two-page photo spread showing mid-calf, pleated skirts with fitted jackets under a “Miss Marple” theme. Industry observers said they doubt that the dowdy, fictional English detective will solve the mystery of poor sales. In fact, some said, the whole notion that Women’s Wear Daily and 7th Avenue, New York’s fashion street, should dictate fashion is passe.
“It’s possible that we are reaching a new era in apparel design where it will be less Fashion Avenue leadership and more Fashion Avenue listening and responsiveness,” said McCready of Deloitte Haskins & Sells.
Does the slump in clothing bode ill for the economy at large? Not necessarily, economist Shaber said. “For people who were worried about the economy overheating, which would mean more inflation and higher interest rates, this has been a welcome turn of events.”
