Garment
Industry Changes 1960s – 1990s
During the 1960s
-1990s, the U.S. garment industry became increasingly corpora-
tized, dominated by big industry players. The industry contracted from once hav-
ing a large number of small companies making ready
-to-wear clothing, all staffed
by designers who hoped to get good sales from this year’s “hot little number”
(Vecchio & Riley 1968). The first
-cycle clothing market that consumers encoun-
tered in the 1950s and early1960s was more diverse than today in terms of the
number of producers and potential styles; starting in the late 1960s, consumers
gradually found fewer style choices due a number of changes.
In the late 1960s, garment
-industry companies took their stock public and de-
signers began to license their names to products not produced in-
house. Clothing
corporations sought cheaper labor overseas in order to cut costs and gain wider
profit margins for shareholders (Agins 2000; Vecchio & Riley 1968). From the
late 1960s onward, the U.S. clothing industry globalized. By the 1980s, the first
-
cycle clothing market was characterized by a relatively small number of large
producers. Moreover, with licensing and outsourcing, quality control became a
problem and diminished consumer confidence about whether it is worth paying
more for a
designer label (Agins 2000). During the 1970s recession economy, an
American obsession with bargain hunting arose as consumers learned they could
find clothing of similar quality for lower prices at discount retailers (Zukin 2004).
Simultaneously, during the 1970s, the market for secondhand and particularly
vintage clothing in the U.S. expands to the degree that the
New York Times
reports
vintage clothing demand is outstripping supply.
According to Sharon Zukin (2004) standardization and dull shopping expe
ri-
ences become the norm. In the 1980s, corporations develop “lifestyle marketing”
where the brand image is emphasized over the product’s intrinsic qualities (Klein
2000). This homogenizes every department store’s floors into a collection of the
same brand boutiques
– Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, Donna Karen, Nautica,
Eileen Fisher. Formerly, consumers could easily see a diversity of styles and
comparison-
shop in departments like Coats, Dresses and Formalwear (Zukin
2004). This change drains a sense of spontaneity and discovery from the depart-
ment store experience.
The trend in vintage clothing becomes established during the 1960s –
1980s as
U.S. clothing industry changes led to relative standardization of clothing styles,
garment quality, and shopping itse
lf. While Cassidy and Bennett (2012) proposed
that consumers sought vintage clothing as a reaction to fast fashion of the 1990s,
garment industry conditions that homogenized clothing and consumption experi-
ences were present well before. Fast fashion merely
accelerated these tendencies,
giving consumers with an interest in vintage and secondhand clothing little reason
to solely purchase new clothing.