Why Did Gap Fall From The Tide Brand? Missed The Most Compelling Normcore

Remember Gap When the fire explodes? Proud young people in their twenties and thirties, wearing Gap Logo T-shirt Jeans The hat is concave everywhere. Gap's clothes became the essential basic items in the wardrobe of young people at that time, but it was a pity that it was more than ten years ago. With sluggish sales, poor creativity and constantly closed stores, Gap gradually lost its reputation in the clothing industry. The brand once admired by countless young people said that it would close 175 stores in North America and cut 250 employees. Now it is difficult for the academic brand to recover to the grand occasion at that time.

In order to reverse the decline, Gap hired Rebekka, a heavyweight in the fashion industry, in 2012 Bay saved its weak retail and injected more fashion blood into the brand. Bay has helped H&M's sister brand Cos become a hot fashion brand today. However, the arrival of Bay did not reverse the sales decline of Gap for many years.

Last year, the Gap style suddenly changed. David Finch, the best director of the Golden Globe Awards, was hired to shoot a series of black and white advertising short films. Elizabeth Moss, the actress of Mad Men, wore the most ordinary jeans to shoot the autumn advertisement "Dress Normal”， However, it failed to impress consumers, and sales fell by 4% in November.

So, how did Gap get there? Why did she fall from a trendy brand to a "rotten vulgar bitch"?

Gap used to have a high low style that every popular designer wanted to imitate. At the 1995 Academy Awards ceremony, Wang Weiwei (a famous Chinese designer) turned down the white Gap shirt and purple skirt for Sharon Stone, which has become a classic.

Kristin, a retail expert Bentz said, "This is the last glory of Gap.". Once, when you walked into a Gap store, you could pick up a white shirt, a pair of khakis and a tannic shirt. You know it looks good. This is a typical American dress. In the 1990s, Gap caught up with a critical moment of contemporary American popular culture, and the brand became very popular. But now the glory has disappeared. The biggest crisis of Gap is the serious lack of force.

　　 Missing fast fashion

In fact, in the past few years, this brand has been accompanied by identity crisis. Gap used to be a high profit brand, but with the changes of the times and the ups and downs of the economy, retailers cannot keep up with the changing market. In 2009, Gap sales fell 7.9%, when e-commerce was just in its infancy.

Contrary to making full use of advanced technology to attract a new generation of young people, Gap also stubbornly tries to attract customers from previous generations, who are no longer those unscrupulous young people in those days, and they are concentrating on their families. However, retailers are recreating in crazy ways, constantly adjusting T-shirts, designing strange printed trousers, and losing bright colors and cheap marine fabrics. When young people go When Gap was shopping, they couldn't find the basic style they liked in the store any more, Gap， As a brand, it is in an awkward stage of development. For innovative brands, it is too old; For retro brands, it is too new. With the coming of the next decade, new competitors have emerged. Zara and Uniqlo, fast fashion brands from Spain and Japan, have become the main forces impacting American fashion clothing in a few years.

Bentz said, "I already said, Uniqlo Gap should be acquired and its own brand launched in North America. "Gap should actually become a fast fashion brand with high quality and low price like Uniqlo.

　　 Gap missed the most compelling normcore

Gap missed a popular trend that it should have caught - normcore, which can be said to be one of the most compelling fashion styles nowadays. Apple CEO Cook, Facebook CEO Zuckerberg and others are followers of this way of dressing. normcore It is composed of normal and hardcore, which means to make the most basic collocation, "seeking freedom from the blandness". The basic T-shirt, khaki pants, is actually quite similar to the Gap of the past.

Gap also tries to regain this fashion, but Isha, the author of Jezebel, a feminist fashion blog Aran thinks that Gap's so-called normcore is just a cliche of the basic model. In contrast, its competitor Uniqlo is much smarter, its price is cheaper, and it is more in line with people's psychological expectations for basic models. The most important thing is that although it is a basic model, there are dozens of colors of high-tech fabrics to choose from. When you want to pursue the trend, it also provides mid-range designer cooperation series.

In any case, Gap finds itself in an uncomfortable predicament in fashion games. It was once the pioneer of "basic models", but now it has become "featureless dress". To put it mildly, Gap has become a fashion "vulgar bitch". Basic used to be a compliment in the fashion world, but now it is an insult to Gap and a criticism of the lack of imagination. The reason why Gap has been declining is, in the final analysis, its lack of innovation, which is also a problem faced by many other once brilliant big companies.