Traditionally there were two important dates in the clothing industry: the fall “fashion week” which presented the next spring-summer collections and the spring “Fashion week” for the next fall-winter collections. To this base was added two “Pre-Fashion weeks” interspersed between the two mentioned above. The world of clothing has lived with these four dates for a long time.

 

 

Enter Fast Fashion, which can be translated into French as “ephemeral mode” or “express mode”. It refers to clothes that have the particularity of being cheap and being put on sale very quickly following the various fashion shows or new outfits worn by the “people”. It allows middle-class consumers to be dressed in cheap, trendy clothes. Of course these are average quality clothes. They are not made to be worn for a long time and to last. They correspond to the desire of the consumer who constantly wants to renew his wardrobe. In the extreme, for some consumers, a garment can only be worn once. As a result, we now see brands specializing in Fast Fashion carrying out up to 52 mini Fashion Weeks per year, ie producing one collection per week. Clothes that are produced, sold and worn in the same week. That's fast!

A new niche in the clothing market!

Until the middle of the 1980th century, fashion was reserved for the wealthy classes, the “High Society” and, for the vast majority of the population, novelty was not a need. Most often the consumer buys a garment to replace the one that is worn out. Rather than change, he seeks continuity. Everything changed in the 90s and XNUMXs when “shopping” became a leisure activity and dressing was also a way of expressing oneself.

At the same time, at the economic level, appear, on the supply side: new inexpensive materials, mainly synthetic, rapid manufacturing methods, greater speed and lower transport costs; on the demand side: an increase in consumer purchasing power and a strong attraction and taste for novelty, especially among young people.

The advent of Fast Fashion is a new demand that an offer is ready to satisfy: a new market to conquer. Companies like Zara, H&M Group, UNIQLO, GAP, Forever 21, rush into it and see their turnover explode. The market shares of the various companies in the clothing industry are redistributed. In the fifteen years between 2000 and 2014 the production of the Fast Fashion part of the clothing sector doubled. Thus in 2020, Zara, with 2136 stores in 96 countries, achieved a turnover of EUR 19,5 billion, while H&M achieved a turnover of EUR 20,5 billion during the same period, that is to say the economic weight of the Fast Fashion sector.

 

 

Controversies around Fast Fashion

Fast Fashion is blamed for a lot of pollution, huge amount of waste and encouraging a wasteful mentality. You should know that the clothing industry is the most polluting industry after that of hydrocarbons and that Fast Fashion only reinforces this harmful aspect of the clothing sector. The fact that the materials used by Fast Fashion are of average quality means that a significant part of the production cannot be recycled to supply the second-hand market. They will be directly part of the waste, once their short life has passed. This is all the more damaging since currently 75% of the world's population wears clothes bought by users. On the other hand, it is estimated that there is in the wardrobes of consumers in rich countries the equivalent of 47 billion dollars of unworn clothing. What to wonder about the functioning of our society.

Finally, the Fast Fashion industry is criticized for being mostly "relocated" and for not being too careful about the working conditions of the workforce it employs, whether directly or indirectly. , in low-income countries. But again, this is not unique to Fast Fashion, but to the entire clothing industry. Let us remember the collapse in 2013 of the Rana Plaza in Daca, capital of Bangladesh, which caused the death of an appalling number, 1127, of workers, mainly workers of course, women who did not work for the clothing but not for its Fast Fashion part.

 

 

This is in fact a feature of the entire clothing industry. In addition, it is not always a practice specific to relocated factories, as illustrated by the troubles of Boohoo, a major Fast Fashion company, in Leicester, England, where a large part of the clothing sold by Boohoo is produced. Employees worked in appalling conditions, were forced, against government guidelines, to come to work during the 2020 lockdown even though they were sick, and all for £3,50 an hour, less than half the guaranteed minimum wage. A media campaign against Boohoo denouncing these practices did not prevent Boohoo from announcing a 39% increase in sales between February 2020 and February 2021, helping the pandemic, for a turnover of 2 billion euros .

 

 

Like what it is very difficult to go against the Fast Fashion, a market which for the moment to the enthusiasm at the global level of a large segment of consumers. The global youth market is a growing market. We should not think of Europe where the population is aging but Asia, for example, think of India where more than half of the population is under 25 years old and more than 65% are under 35 years old. That ! It's a market! The average age in India is 29, 37 in China and 48 in Japan.

This enthusiasm for Fast Fashion is due to the fact that it allows a significant portion of consumers to get the clothes they want and when they want them. Fast Fashion has also had the effect of bringing down the price of clothes, but not just any clothes, innovative and stylish clothes. With Fast Fashion, being dressed in the latest fashion, being “well dressed”, having a full wardrobe is no longer the exclusive prerogative of the “rich and famous”. Thanks to Fast Fashion, even those with average incomes can regularly buy “classy” clothes, dress in “fun” and extravagant pieces and, if necessary, wear different outfits on a daily basis. As such, Fast Fashion has participated in the democratization of fashion and thereby of society.

 

Recently, Fast Fashion has started working with some of the greatest designers of the moment. Thus H&M collaborated with Alexander Wang as well as with Giambattista Villi. Giambattista who has dressed Rihanna, Amal Clooney, Ariana Grande and Emma Stone, among others. The articles, for women as for men without forgetting the accessories, of these two stylists are sold exclusively through the sales network of H&M throughout the world. As they should, they are aimed at a young clientele, opening up “High Fashion” through “Fast Fashion” to new social classes.

Fast Fashion and me

For me, as a Coach and Image Consultant, no matter what outfits you wear, whether in terms of color, silhouette, style, there are principles and rules to know and respect if so much is that we want our outfits to be in keeping with who we are, contribute to giving us presence and credibility and, icing on the cake, make us feel comfortable whatever the circumstances. It must be said that by nature I am more into the durable than the ephemeral. But that doesn't prevent me both from understanding and appreciating that one can be in the "fun" and want to change clothes almost daily and do so over a relatively long period without ever really putting the same outfit back on. I think that there too I have my say for the greatest benefit of my ladies!

 

 

 

 

As those who follow me know, in June 2019 I left with my family to settle in London. A move that was not planned at all and therefore absolutely unprepared, but an opportunity that I decided I had to seize at all costs.

Not speaking a treacherous word of English, this posed a serious problem for me regarding the pursuit of my professional activity as a Coach and Image Consultant, an activity that I had exercised until then only face-to-face and in French.

The challenge was daunting. A challenge that I had all the more reason to take up following the appearance of Covid 19 at the beginning of 2020, triggering a pandemic which could only further justify the implementation of my "Reborn Program". online.

It so happens that already in France I sensed that it was going to be essential, given the ever-increasing share of the Internet in the economy, that I set up an “online activity” component in the relatively near future. So I had from afar started to follow coaches on the internet who offered such training. I regularly received their offers. In fact, this move to London left me no other alternative: I had to follow such a course.

As you can imagine, there are all kinds of training courses to create and develop your online business, for all budgets and over all periods ranging from one to two weeks to several months if not a year. . In my choice, my demanding character and my professionalism were decisive: I saw this training as a medium-term investment, a capital that I brought to my company and the opportunity to give another dimension to my activity as a Coach. and Image Consultant: I chose a top-of-the-range training over six months.

These were six intense, rich, exhausting months, with a competent, passionate team, available and committed to contributing and seeing everyone's success. Months with a cohort of motivated and involved participants who wanted it, coming from different backgrounds and all ready to exchange, collaborate, to mutually enrich each other. Motivating and enriching encounters.

At each stage I knew that I had made the right choice, the results were not long in coming and from London I began to reconnect with my potential French-speaking clientele while at the same time I began to build my offer. high end online. A demanding, rigorous, exciting job. A puzzle was falling into place.

After the basics developed before it was put online, each of the six modules of my online program “Reborn” was then completed as my first coaching sessions progressed.

 

 

It is clear that it was hours and hours of work. For each of the six modules of my top-of-the-range “Reborn” program, I spent dozens of hours, in particular making videos, developing support files while favoring one-to-one online coaching. The objective was to achieve a coherent, impactful whole that fully fulfills the mission to which I had committed myself by agreeing to coach my first clients online.

It must be said that it is a job that has fascinated me since its inception. Not only do I feel comfortable there, but I really have the feeling that it brings me fully into my life mission. A relationship of full trust is established between my coachee and me in which my experience and my career are not for nothing. Any interaction with a potential client or one who has signed up for my “Reborn Program” makes me feel like I really belong. It follows that I give the best of myself for the greatest benefit of the person I coach.

 

 

When I considered expanding my activity with an online program, I feared that not only would some of the direct contact that I value and appreciate so much in person be lost in online coaching, but also that the results obtained by the coachees would not would not be of such good quality. To my great surprise and astonishment, the experience and feedback from the women I coached showed and persuaded me that this was not at all the case. On the contrary, it was confirmed that my online coaches had as many results as those in person. I myself was amazed by their transformation throughout the program and by the speed with which they gain autonomy. In the space of three months of support, I had seasoned dressers.

How could I explain this pleasant and unexpected surprise?

In fact, once observed this unexpected result and looking at it more closely, the evidence jumped out at me.

How much time did I spend designing, developing and producing the videos, files and visual aids for each of the six modules of my online "Reborn Programme", not even counting the online one-to-one coaching sessions?

 

 

Hours and hours! Hours and hours of content made available to every woman who signs up for my online “Reborn Program”. While face-to-face, for each of the six modules of my "Reborn Program", we generally spend two hours together with perhaps an additional meeting depending on the module and the person's understanding. This makes a significant difference and explains to what extent my online "Reborn Program" is not a second best to the face-to-face one.

This does not mean that I think he is superior to him, oh no! But it is good to know how to separate things and recognize the strengths of each of them.

 

 

 

Photo credit: Wipo

A fabric that has conquered a continent through colonization, a continent that has made it one of its cultural marks, a cultural trait that today evokes this continent in the four corners of the globe! An ambiguous story: wax and Africa.

Like many things that "were discovered by Europeans" the Wax, under another name, existed long before natives of the "United Provinces", "Holland" today, discovered it.

Between 1663 and 1674 the Dutch set out to conquer Makassar and Java, today parts of Indonesia. A region where the inhabitants print their fabrics using the technique of "thrift". A technique that consists of hiding certain parts of the fabric so that the dye does not take these places and then obtain a pattern. In Indonesia, and especially in Java, to “spare” places without dyeing, the inhabitants use wax and call their technique “Batik”. It was during this colonization that the Dutch discovered this way of printing fabrics.

 

At the end of the XNUMXth century, the English and the Dutch took over the wax saving technique on their own and set up production units in England and the Netherlands with the intention of selling them on the Indonesian market at better prices than local production. But now, the Indonesians believe that this foreign production is of lower quality than theirs, shun it and suddenly British and Dutch sales do not follow.

At the same time the Dutch fail to conquer the island of Sumatra. A formidable resistance is opposed to them by the sultanate of Aceh throughout a war which will last more than thirty years, from 1873 to 1904. The Dutch miss manpower to take the top, this more especially as Belgium has just terminated with the United Provinces. To remedy this lack of men they decided to recruit mercenaries in Africa in their possessions of the Gold Coast, the current Ghana. These soldiers are sent to Sumatra to reinforce the Dutch troops.

Aceh fell in 1904 after a war that left 10.000 dead on the Dutch side and more than 100.000 dead on the Acehnese side. The surviving African mercenaries return home to the Gold Coast. But they don't come home empty-handed. As good Ashantis, they appreciated the Indonesian “Batik” and betting that their co-religionists will like them just as much, they have converted part of their pay into “Batiks” which they carry in their suitcases with the intention of selling them. Once back in Gold Coast the craze for “Batik” is even stronger than they expected. The well-to-do population tears them away.

This does not go unnoticed by the Dutch, whose production has not found a buyer with the Indonesians. They have unsold stock which they rush to send to the Gold Coast where they are selling wonderfully. The “Wax” was born. A wax-printed fabric using an Indonesian technique, made in the Netherlands and to a lesser extent in Great Britain, sold in West Africa.

Until the 1950s Wax remained a luxury product. It was at this time that the "Mamas Benz" were born, mainly in Togo, they were the ones who popularized Wax and made it a fashion icon in Africa. In the 1960s, at the dawn of independence, several African countries began to produce “Wax” themselves. This is the case in Ghana, Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire. It becomes a pan-African fabric to the point that in the world "Wax" is associated with "Africa".

So here is the story of "Wax" in a nutshell, a fabric with a fascinating history with many twists and turns, a story that is far from over as one would expect from such a hybrid at the time. multiple identity that makes its life against all odds and emerges where it was not expected. And it is precisely this multiple identity that today wax is at the heart of a controversy with political ramifications.

For a few years, houses like Jean-Paul Gaultier, Louis-Vuiton, Agnès.B, Balmain, Stella Jean, Dries Van Noten have used Wax in their collections. But it was at Paris Fashion Week in 2017 when Stella McCartney, the daughter of Paul, a recognized stylist-creator and owner of a multinational fashion company, used Wax fabrics for her fashion show that the controversy broke out. She is accused of cultural appropriation. But the Wax, having more than one trick up its sleeve, makes others like Imane Ayissi say " Stop the Wax. Africa has better to show, Africa deserves better! ". Still, today from Accra to London, from Abidjan to Paris, from Lomé to New York, Wax is sold and bought.

On the one hand we therefore have Afro-Descendants who have appropriated Wax to such an extent that a non-African descendant fashion producer using Wax is accused of "cultural appropriation" and on the other hand we have Afro-Descendants who do not recognize themselves in the Wax to the point of saying that " Africa has better to show and that Africa deserves better than being associated with the Wax. Could we expect less from the Wax, he who " defies the possibility of being assigned a fixed identity. Political, ethnic, artistic, and always reinvented, the Wax has many faces and has not finished surprising us. as historian Anne-Marie Bouttiaux, Professor at the Free University of Brussels, writes.

For my part I do not disdain the Wax, far from it, but there are two things that I keep in mind and which dictate my behavior: On the one hand the Wax is indeed the product of colonization and still today the African production covers only 10% of its needs. The other repercussion of the craze for 90% imported wax is that it marginalizes all other truly African fabrics, going so far as to eliminate them.

For me, born on the continent, who had the chance to walk the land of my ancestors, a land of mountains and rivers, of sun and freshness, a land which gave me the chance to see, to touch and to adorn myself with the beauty of “Ndop” and “Toghu” to witness the disappearance of these fabrics would kill a part of myself. And this is where today I am so happy to see that an artist like Imane Ayissi, a great fashion designer, an African, appropriates such materials.

 

 

Thanks to his vision and his understanding of history, by imposing himself at the international level, he means that once again Africa, as it has done and has done for millennia, enriches the world. I sincerely hope that he will make all our sisters and brothers understand that dressing in the beauty and diversity of the real fabrics of the continent, from "Kente" to "Oborn", is more than a back to basics is a liberation and the epitome of modernity. The best way to appropriate an image that can only bring us harmony and respect and connect us to the strength of the ancestors.

 

 

 

Why not go further and do your “Image Report”!

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To this end, make an appointment with me for an energy balance coaching of your Image and together in 1 hour and a half of time and we will meet your resonance to allow you to tell the world what your true value is and put it in resonance with your Image..

The opportunity to find together what characterizes you and makes you vibrate.

A gift that can only benefit you!

So grab your chance!

I book my appointment online for my “Image Energy Report”

 

Once again I took my pilgrim's staff! On Thursday June 13, 2019, in front of an audience of women entrepreneurs who are members of Business Women and invited by Mr. François Dehayes, Mayor of Coye la Forêt and President of the Community of Communes of Aire Cantilienne, I had the opportunity to talk about my passion: Image Consulting. A profession that is too often seen as addressing "people" and other stars of the world of entertainment and the media. In front of this chosen and open audience, I was able to share my vision of what Image Consulting really is: An approach that goes in search of what we are deep within ourselves in order to express it through the image we project. And as you can see and hear on this video, thanks to the attention paid to me and the many exchanges, I feel that it was a most rewarding morning not only for the women entrepreneurs of Business Women but also for the Mayor who knew how to mix Image Consulting and election with humor.