Many people argue that the expansion of fashion advertising has led to an increase in misrepresentation; unrealistic expectations and low self-esteem issues like body image and ageism. However, there are positive impacts of marketing in the fashion industry. Fashion advertising has provided consumers with a choice to select products that fit their individual personalities and tastes. It has encouraged consumers to choose the best products to satisfy their needs. Fashion marketing and advertising also has economic and social benefits. Advertising encourages companies to compete against each other to provide new and better products for their target market. It is true that the rise of fashion marketing has led to increases in stereotypes, where ads portray women and minorities by linking groups to specific products and materialism, where people compete to purchase more and better items; however, the development of digital marketing has inspired individual to purchase items that suit their wants and needs. Fashion marketing has increased consumer awareness of various brands from different countries. The defined location for the paper will be in the United States from the 1920s to today. The paper will include historical analysis from other time periods like the nineteenth century as a foundation for how marketing developed into today’s mainstream …show more content…
There are three theories of how fashion has disseminated throughout the world before marketing: trickle down, trickle across, and trickle up. The theory of trickle down means that fashion began in the upper class and gradually made its way to the lower class. In the Empire of Fashion, Gilles Lipovetsky argues that fashion played a substantial role in modern democracy. There was a slow inclination to democratize fashion, to mix up dress styles, although commoners were unable to endure the same fabrics, headdress, or laces as the upper classes due to sumptuary laws. Despite the implementation of sumptuary laws, they were never effective: Strict rules, lax practices. (31) By the late seventeenth century, luxury goods were essentially a means of communicating and upholding social and political; however, “the diffusion of fashion has mimesis at its core.” (30) Members of the third estate began to adopt materials worn by noblemen. Once fashion disseminated into the center and lower classes, it disrupted the class distinctions it meant to define; it generated social ambiguity and permitted the citizen to violate the natural order. Trickle up means that fashion began through the youth and street fashion. Fashion made its way up the social class. In Yuniya Kawamura’s “Japanese Teens as Producers of Street Fashion,” Kawamura discusses the influence