The research described in this paper was instigated by Jaeger Limited and the Coats Eaton Group. The objective was to investigate the viability of marketing a new range of women's wear to the middle market, where it was felt there was a gap. The clothes would be fashionable, of good quality and moderately priced, and would be marketed through a range of High Street shops.
Since this was the first ESOMAR seminar on Fashion Research, there was no precedent to provide any guidelines. At the first programme committee meeting, we again tackled this problem. We didn't manage to come to any conclusions about what we really meant by fashion, other than deciding that, whatever it was, it probably affected industries apart from the textile industry. Consequently we decided to throw out a broad net, and to try to attract anyone who thought that "Fashion" was sufficiently important to them to come to the seminar, leaving it to the participants to define for themselves what they meant by fashion.
To face this situation our team has worked for several years to perfect a system designed to detect and to monitor socio-cultural trends. The system presently functions as a syndicated service.
The shape of our paper is this. First to describe to you the background and our objectives. Second, to tell you briefly what was done. Third, to run over the key results found in Great Britain, fourth to say how they were used. And finally to offer a few thoughts on fashion, as illustrated by this study.