Gap Missed The Most Pressing Normcore And Lost The Prestige Of The Clothing Industry.

Do you remember the time when Gap exploded? The young, twenty or thirty year old, was wearing a Gap Logo T-shirt, jeans and hat. Gap's clothes became the necessary basic parts of the young wardrobe at that time. Unfortunately, that was more than a decade ago. With the sluggish sales, poor creativity and constantly closed stores, Gap gradually lost the prestige of the clothing industry.

The brand, once admired by millions of young people, said it would close 175 stores in North America and cut 250 employees. Now the brand of the academy has never been able to return to its peak.

In order to reverse the decline, in 2012,

Hire Rebekka Bay, a fashion heavyweight, to save its sluggish retail and inject more fashionable blood into the brand.

Bay has helped H&M's sister brand Cos become the hottest fashion brand nowadays.

But the arrival of Bay did not reverse the declining trend of Gap over the years.

Last year, the Gap style suddenly changed. Finch, the best director of the Golden Globe Award, drew a series of black and white advertising short films. Elizabeth Moss, the actress in the most popular jeans, shot the autumn advertisement "Dress Normal" but failed to impress the consumer. In November, sales fell by 4%.

So how did Gap get to this stage? Why did he fall from the tide card to "rotten vulgar bitch"?

Gap once owned every high-low style that every hot designer wanted to imitate. At the Oscar prize presentation ceremony in 1995, Wang Weiwei, a famous Chinese designer, turned Sharon Stone's white Gap shirt and purple skirt into his classics.

Kristin Bentz, a retail expert, said, "this is the last glory of Gap".

Once you walked into a Gap store, you could pick up a white shirt and a khaki trousers and a tannin shirt. You know it looks good.

This is a typical American dress.

In 90s, Gap caught up with a critical moment in the contemporary American pop culture. This brand became very popular, but now the glory has disappeared.

Gap missed a popular trend that it should have caught.

This can be said to be one of the most fashionable styles nowadays. Apple CEO Cook, Facebook CEO Zuckerberg and so on are all followers of this way of dressing.

Normcore is composed of normal (normal) and hardcore (core), which means to do the most basic collocation and "seek freedom from insipid".

The basic T-shirt and khaki trousers are quite similar to those of Gap.

Gap is also trying to regain this trend, but Isha Aran, the author of the feminist fashion blog Jezebel, thinks Gap's so-called normcore is just a cliche of basic money.

In contrast, its competitor, UNIQLO, is much smarter, and its price is lower, which is more in line with people's psychological expectations for basic funds.

The most important thing is that although it is basic, there are dozens of high tech fabrics available in color. When you want to pursue the trend, it also offers a moderate price designer cooperation series.

Regardless of which aspect, Gap finds itself in the predicament of being uncomfortable in the fashion game. It used to be a pioneer of "basic money", but now it has become a "featureless dress". It is hard to say that Gap has become a fashionable "rotten vulgar bitch".

(Basic) used to be a compliment in the fashion world, but for Gap, it is now an insult, a criticism of the lack of imagination, and Gap's failure in the final analysis is still a lack of innovation. This is also a problem faced by many other brilliant companies.

In fact, in the past few years, this brand has always 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 couldn't keep up with the rapidly changing market.

In 2009, Gap sales fell by 7.9%, when e-commerce was just in its infancy.

Instead of making full use of advanced technology to attract new generation of young people, Gap is stubbornly trying to attract customers from previous generations who are no longer the unscrupulous young people who are busy concentrating on their families.

Retailers, however, are recreating in a crazy way, constantly adjusting T-shirts, designing strange print pants, and losing bright colors and cheap marine fabrics.

When young people go shopping at Gap, they can no longer find the basic funds they like in the shop. Gap, as a brand, is at an awkward stage of development.

For innovative brands, it is too old, and for retro brand, it is too new.

With the coming of the next ten years, new competitors have emerged. Fast fashion brands Zara and Uniqlo from Spain and Japan have become the main force of American fashion clothing in a few years.

Bentz said, "I have said that UNIQLO should buy Gap and launch its own brand in North America". Gap should actually become a fast fashion brand such as UNIQLO.