The Evolution of Clothing

A recent New York Times article called attention to the fact that clothing designed for heat is moving from a niche product into the mainstream, according to one expert quoted (Lorna Hall, director of fashion intelligence for consumer trends forecasting agency WGSN).

Lighter fabrics, built-in protection against ultraviolet rays, cooling and sweat-wicking clothing are all part of the mix. That isn’t the only evolution in clothing: since COVID started, the long-growing popularity of athleisure wear has skyrocketed.

As early as 2020, as Sourcing Journal reported, the Boston Consulting Group predicted that the next few years could be “the most tumultuous that most people in the fashion industry will ever know. Agile, decisive brands that can free up capital to invest can set themselves up to create advantage in adversity. They can right-size operations and adopt new business practices while continuing to give customers what they want.”

In 2021, Fast Company observed that “while athleisure dominated our early pandemic wardrobes, many of us are getting accustomed to a new hybrid lifestyle that requires more than just matching sweat suits (as much as we love them). Occupying that literal comfort spot between work attire and leisure wear, workleisure’s moment has arrived.

Feet are part of the equation: Birkenstocks, the popular German shoes that originated for orthopedic use, have only grown in popularity. They are worn by Gwyneth Paltrow, Sienna Miller, Claire Foy and countless other celebrities as well as ordinary people everywhere. The company was recently valued at more than $4 billion.

Move Over Sports Stars…Are Influencers the Ultimate Brand Ambassadors Now?

Open a social media app like Instagram and you’ll likely find carefully curated posts sponsored by brands flooding your feed.

Like billboard advertising that lines the road, this defines marketing of the 21st century as all digital-first ad campaigns travel down the social media highway.

What stands out about this kind of targeted marketing are the faces being used to sell you everything from sneakers to women’s apparel to the latest tech products.

While in the past, Hollywood stars and national sports heroes were the go-to personalities used to reach consumers, now, it’s social media influencers who are being used to bring you targeted ads to get you to engage with your favorite brands.

A new industry

It’s a strategy tied to algorithms and the ways consumers interact on their accounts. Sometimes it’s even difficult to tell what a sponsored ad and a more organic post by a user who has generated a big following. Honestly, in 2020, is there much of a difference?

In fact, influencers have such, well, influence that an entire industry has been built around them.

The Guardian interviewed Beca Alexander, the founder and president of social media casting and management agency Socialyte Collective. Her firm represents about 100 influencers, each one having about 30,000 to 2 million followers.

“There are a variety of ways they earn that revenue, and we work on strategies that best suit the individual style and audience of each one. Some might focus on promoting as many brands and products as possible, but always being aware of the natural synergy with their own ‘brand,’ so it feels authentic, while others have contracts with a curated range of brands to work on exclusive long-term campaigns,” Alexander told the British newspaper.

Out with the old

A lot goes into the constructed, highly choreographed influencer post. The right lighting, the perfect pose, the witty caption, spotlighting the product or brand in question in a way that feels organic to that influencer’s identity — it’s all part of the delicate process of marketing as we now head firmly into the third decade of the 21st century.

We all remember how the second half of the 20th century was defined by the celebrity endorsement.

Think Michael Jordan’s game-changing partnership with Nike. Product and star were so interlinked that Air Jordan is synonymous with the iconic basketball star. High-end fashion and beauty brands like Chanel have long gravitated to movie stars from an early association with Marilyn Monroe to its splashy Baz Luhrmann-directed ad campaign starring Nicole Kidman.

Now, those kinds of endorsements are less valued. They still make an impact, but why pay millions for an Oscar winner or an NBA champion when you could employ an influencer to reach millions upon millions of consumers by just simply hitting the “share” button?

What makes influencers special

While no less manufactured than a traditional celebrity, social media influencers bring with them the air of relatability and trust in a product and brand.

“These people have a profound connection with their audience, built on trust, credibility, authenticity and value. Above all, they maintain close relationships with a community of followers that they have built on their own,” according to this 2018 Medium article. “Thanks to the Internet and social media, the influence has been democratized. People who created valuable and useful content have built a large follower base. And companies have recognized this as a potential opportunity for marketing, many of which have launched successful influencer campaigns.”

As the ways we interact with our social media platforms become increasingly sophisticated, expect the influencers you scroll by in your feed to continue to play a major role in how you see and consume brands.

Why the Athleisure Industry is Thriving During COVID-19

We live in a time where we are almost forced to embrace comfort in how we dress. Shelter-at-home recommendations to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has meant we all are spending time working comfortably from our living rooms. Zoom video calls have replaced the office and as a result, “work clothes” have been replaced by … sweatpants.

This casual-friendly environment has benefitted one big clothing trend in particular — athleisure.

Athleisure on the rise

Athleisure simply means sportswear, or clothing that would normally be worn during athletics or physical fitness but that can be applied in a versatile way.

We see it all around, from a brunch out with friends to a night on the town. Clothing originally designed for the basketball court or the yoga studio has become a practical, and ever stylish, way to express oneself.

On the rise over the past decade, athleisure has benefitted from our current pandemic era. The need to embrace comfort while working at home has meant we don’t necessarily need a closet full of office-friendly formal wear.

Recently, CBS News reported on what an economic boon the “new normal” set by our current public health crisis has been for companies specializing in athleisure. While overall apparel sales were down 34 percent between March and July compared to the same period a year ago, athleisure has flourished.

The news network reports that sales of active shorts were up 3 percent. Sweatpants increased 2 percent and sports bras zoomed up 7 percent, during the same time, according to data from the NPD Group.

"We see active categories are doing well and gaining dollars, while other categories have been put on the back burner because we are leaning toward an at-home, active lifestyle and using activewear for everyday purposes," NDP Group apparel industry analyst Maria Rugolo told CBS.

The staying power of activewear

It’s clear that athleisure is here to stay.

Overall, the athleisure market size was valued at $155.2 billion in 2018 and is expected to skyrocket to $257.1 billion by 2026, according to MarketWatch.

They cite two big things at play: the cultural and professional changes brought on by COVDI-19 as well as the rise of millennial and “Gen Z” consumers who are now outnumbering more formal wear-favoring baby boomers.

In fact, Digital Commerce 360 reports that athleisure is almost 20 percent of total online apparel sales.

With work at home and the looming presence of more coronavirus shutdowns globally, expect athleisure’s influence to only grow.

It’s everywhere. Whether it’s affordable department store giant Kohl’s staking a big bet on athleisure bringing a needed retail comeback, Gen Z continuing to embrace leggings and yoga gear over, well, actual pants, or high profile trendsetters from entertainment to even politics, like current Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris, the future is bright for activewear.

A long history

One thing to keep in mind is how it’s always been with us. Everything from the popular polo shirt to even jeans all have origins in sports and physical activity. Eventually, these clothing items found themselves at the forefront of fashion and popular culture.

Just take this quote from Derek Thompson’s article in The Atlantic on the indelible history of the trend: “The theme of the past century of Western fashion is this: We take clothes designed for activity, and we adapt them for inactivity. And that’s true beyond the world of sports. For decades, Levi Strauss jeans were worn mostly by men working in factories and farms; today, denim is for loungers. Wristwatches were pioneered in World War I to keep soldiers punctual; today, we embrace them as peacetime jewelry.”

Essentially, we’ve always repurposed functional clothing to be part of our daily fashions. The current COVID-19 crisis and the immediate changes it has made on how we socialize, and work is another inflection point where how we live influences what we wear.

The History of Entertainment and Sports Marketing

It is almost impossible to avoid modern marketing’s gravitational pull. It is all around us — from commercials during your favorite TV show to ads tied to podcasts to endorsements from the famous athletes and influencers you follow on your social media feeds. Brands want to follow your behaviors as a consumer, finding the best way to reach you directly through engaging entertainment and sports marketing campaigns.

How did we get to the current state of marketing? It’s a long winding path leading to the sophisticated, targeted marketing campaigns of today.

Where it all began

Our love of sports and entertainment — ways to seek escapism in our daily lives — has always been a clear way for brands to reach us. The first inkling of modern sports marketing, for instance, stretches back to the 1870s with tobacco cards that highlighted popular baseball players of the age, writes Douglas Idugboe for Smedio. It wouldn’t be until the first half of the 20th century when advancements in technology found a more engaging way than sports cards to reach broad audiences.

The advent of radio broadcasting and television changed everything. In 1922, New York radio station WEAF aired what is considered the first-ever radio commercial for telephone giant AT&T. Just 19 years later, New York media would claim another marketing milestone — the first TV ad, a commercial for Bulova Watch Co. seen during a Brooklyn Dodgers game on what is now WNBC.

The emergence of celebrity

Perhaps what really defines American entertainment and sports marketing is a combination of celebrity and product. The stage was set when on August 26, 1939, an experimental station in New York broadcast the first televised baseball game — a contest between the Cincinnati Reds and Brooklyn Dodgers. The one-and-only Babe Ruth was beamed into 3,000 homes, according to MLB.com, helping to further cement his status as an iconic sports star.

It also marked a precedent for how mass audiences would consume widely distributed images of nationally — even globally — identifiable figures like Ruth.

How we market

In a 2011 piece for The Atlantic, Marc de Swaan Arons highlights how the mid-20th century “Mad Men” of advertising made marketing what it is now. He cites the emergence of major packaged goods companies like Procter and Gamble and General Foods in the 1950s that helped combine targeted advertising, technology and the allure of celebrity to form the kinds of marketing campaigns we know and love today.

A shift occurred as the decades moved on. It wasn’t just brands themselves that were in the advertising business but the retailers that distributed them. Arons writes that by the 1990s, retailers themselves embraced what he calls “the branding game”.

“By selling more, higher quality, but particularly better-branded products, they could not only dramatically improve their margin mix, but that they could raise the profile and reputation of their own brand as a whole,” he writes.

Now, you could almost say we are our own brands and retailers. The universal presence of social media has made it so that we can broadcast to our own audiences what we’re wearing, watching and listening to and why you should do the same, too.

It’s a big part of modern life and one that started through the likes of early telephone ads and grainy black-and-white broadcasts of Babe Ruth.

Hollywood, COVID-19, and the Future of Movies

The global film industry has been experiencing drastic change since the advent of streaming video on-demand (SVoD) services. As these services grow in popularity, movie studios are shifting toward developing content for these services and less so for theatrical release. The COVID-19 standstill is magnifying these shifting consumer tastes. A recent article from WeForum’s Stefan Hall and Silvia Pasquini examines how the global film industry is transforming—for better and for worse—and how film studios and theaters are adapting to the future of SVoD services.

Theater Attendance Is Taking a Back Seat to Streaming

Movie theater attendance is declining worldwide. This is largely influenced by the immense popularity of streaming services like Netflix and HBO Max. As a result, film studios have less interest in theatrical releases. Say Hall and Pasquini:

“…The amount of time studios show movies exclusively in theatres before releasing them for sale, download or streaming [is shrinking]. Since the turn of the century, the theatrical window has narrowed by more than two months.

“This change reflects consumer preferences for content consumption, which increasingly favor SVoD. Many SVoD services are now owned or invested in by movie studios, which mitigates incentives to maintain a long theatrical window and intensifies an increasingly competitive streaming environment.”

What Lies Ahead

Hollywood’s business model is increasingly moving from third-party distribution and single-ticket sales towards owned distribution and recurring revenue, say Hall and Pasquini. With SVoD services, “a single movie or TV series is rarely a profit driver; rather, recurring subscriptions […] produce value.”

The authors continue, “Media companies no longer optimize releases for fixed schedules, primetime TV slots or popular holiday weekends. Instead, the goal is increased engagement, thereby improving user retention and data on content popularity.”

It is predicted that investment in content creation will come from distribution platforms like Netflix and Hulu instead of film studios. More film studios will bypass theatrical release. This will hit independent theaters especially hard, and they will need to come up with creative ways to keep audiences engaged. In the wake of COVID-19, movie financing will be riskier due to health and safety concerns, and independent companies will find it harder to raise capital. This could lead to a lack of diversity in movie content.

While this sounds bleak, this isn’t the definite end of the movie-going experience. There is still nothing like going to the movies—it is now a matter of creating a balancing act with streaming video.

You can read WeForum’s full article on the future of Hollywood in the wake of COVID-19 here: Can there be a fairy-tale ending for Hollywood after COVID-19?