Classic Is In, Cute Is Out : Fashion Moves Back to Basics to Help Pull Industry Out of the Doldrums

Stung like other retailers by a year of wretched sales of women’s clothing, Bloomingdale’s in New York mounts an unusual, 13-day promotion to entice disenchanted career women with offers of rebates and one-on-one shopping help.

At Marshall Field & Co. in Chicago, store windows spotlight not new fashion silhouettes--because there really aren’t many except for recyclings of proven pant and skirt styles--but rich colors and updated essentials to supplement established wardrobes.

For the Limited, long a purveyor of casual, loose-fitting sportswear, the focus shifts to more tailored, polished suits, with an accent on “power clothes.”

Seldom has a fall season been so crucial for the nation’s merchants. Stymied since this time last year by persistent slow sales and unable to latch on to any scintillating fashion trends, retailers are scrambling to come up with an appealing mix of merchandise to win back customers that months ago went thataway and that now may want to freshen their wardrobes. Success or failure this season will set the tone for the key Christmas season.

The fall fashions that began arriving in stores last month feature a heavy dose of classic, traditional looks, a sign that designers may be heeding the lessons of the consumer revolt against short, frilly styles. Merchants are making much of options--slim skirts that barely graze the knee and full skirts that graze the grass, tapered trousers for the office and swirly, wide-legged pants for evening. And they are banking heavily on vivid colors--purples, greens, reds and blues--to induce women to get out their checkbooks.

However, with the notable exception of Bloomingdale’s, there are surprisingly few signs that merchants are really pulling out the stops with marketing muscle to take advantage of the pent-up demand for clothing. In fact, many retailers preferred not to comment on their fall marketing plans for this article, perhaps reflecting their uneasiness.

The retailers’ seeming lack of special efforts for the fall leads some industry observers to forecast continued stagnation in apparel sales and rough times ahead for retailers attempting to salvage profits.

“I think they have to go out and woo the customer back into her old habits of enjoying the fashion business,” said Marjorie S. Deane, chairman and publisher of Tobe Report, a New York-based fashion publication. “But I don’t think they’ve really faced up to the problem.”

The apparel industry’s pervasive problems of the last year have been well documented. Designers were unsuccessful in foisting off the “mini” styles on career-oriented, aging women customers who found them inappropriate for the workplace. Meanwhile, no other fashion trends materialized to catch shoppers’ fancy. And fast-rising clothing prices deterred even affluent patrons who simply were not enamored of the short, flouncy, teeny-bopper styles.

In the first six months of 1988, sales of women’s clothing at the nation’s retailers continued their slide, declining 3.3% to $24.2 billion, according to a report by Kurt Salmon Associates, a marketing research and management consulting firm based in Atlanta that surveyed 19,500 households. Sales of dresses and skirts dropped 22% and 18%, respectively.

At the same time, many stores were dealing with myriad disruptions resulting from the industry’s extraordinary wave of mergers and consolidations. In the last three years, many of the nation’s and Southern California’s best-known stores have found themselves with new owners--from Lord & Taylor to Bloomingdale’s to Robinson’s to Bullock’s to Neiman Marcus.

In many cases, ownership changed “at a crucial time when planning was under way for the fall season,” said Bill Flatley, a principal at the New York office of Kurt Salmon Associates. “That had to be disruptive, and I think that’s going to hurt.”

Michelle Y. Davis, a retail analyst with Oppenheimer & Co., a New York brokerage, does not look for a big sales resurgence soon. “I’m personally not overly optimistic,” she said. “Sales figures in the mid-1980s were exceptionally high. . . . Women are a lot more practical now. There’s a lot less impulse buying.

“The pie is smaller, and people are going to have to fight for market share and to give the consumer better value.”

Bloomingdale’s is betting heavily that its unusual fall promotion will help it emerge on top. Devising the strategy, a store executive noted, was a matter of doing some homework--and investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in a broad-based advertising and promotion campaign aimed at marketing a wide range of sportswear, shoes, jewelry and cosmetics to working women.

Customers Older

“It’s really kind of simple,” explained Russell Stravitz, Bloomingdale’s executive vice president and general merchandise manager for ready-to-wear and accessories. “We took a look at where the business was showing signs of strength and a fresh look at who our customer is.”

Late last year, Stravitz said, the store’s annual consumer survey showed “very pointedly that our customer is now much older, with an average age in the early 40s. She is much more affluent, and the vast majority--more than three-fourths--are working full time.”

The shifting demographics scarcely came as news, but the survey hit home that the store needed to concentrate on clothes suitable for professional women who preferred not to bankrupt themselves while getting outfitted. Thus was Clothes at Work born, with the goal of increasing sales by 20% over the same two-week period last year for the 15-store chain.

The promotion, which runs through Labor Day, opened with a cocktail reception for 1,000 last Wednesday night at the flagship store on Third Avenue in Manhattan, where 17 prominent New York career women modeled fashions featured in a special Clothes at Work catalogue. Throughout the program, nearly 50 special events will be held, and customers will be able to make appointments with personal shoppers. Patrons spending $200 or more will receive 15% bonus certificates that can be applied toward other purchases at the store by Oct. 1.

While results won’t be known for some time, Stravitz said early response indicated that “we’ve hit a nerve. We’re hoping this will be the solution for (a successful) third quarter.”

When the 25-store Marshall Field chain, based in Chicago, set out to put together its fall strategy, the overriding element that struck the merchandising staff was color. “We’ve gotten a big help in that fall is loaded with color, and that’s the best stimulus (for business),” said Sal Ruggiero, corporate fashion director. “It started with spring and exploded for fall.”

The flagship store on State Street took a double-barreled approach with its window displays, featuring purple, red and green in one window and six “Must Have” items in another, including a white blouse, pleated trousers, a chemise dress, a brightly colored jacket, a bright turtleneck and suede pumps (a big fashion story for fall).

The chain’s early fall business in July has been “very much of a turnaround, and we’re experiencing big increases,” Ruggiero said. “The customer is responding to the color presentations on the floor.”

Moving Away From Cute

This is despite the recent excruciating heat in the Midwest, which has not suffocated interest in bright jackets and printed challis dresses. To date, the store is showing sales increases of 11% to 20% in dresses and suits over the same period last year.

Ultimately, Ruggiero noted, it came down to a decision to get away from “cutesy” promotions of the past and “talk about the things that work for a customer’s wardrobe. The customer is becoming very, very aware of the economy and the investment she needs to make in clothing. She is still very fashion conscious, but an item has to be justified to be in her wardrobe.”

Price is certainly on customers’ minds. Brenda, a film company employee who asked that her last name not be used, is happy about the new push for tailored pants for fall, but notes that some of the new fashion “is very expensive. I don’t know many single women who can afford to pay $200 for a pair of slacks. I just won’t spend the money they’re asking for.”

The Limited, a nationwide chain of more than 700 stores, admittedly picked up late on the trend toward the tailored look. “The fashion changed away from that signature sportswear look, and a lot of us didn’t get on it fast enough,” said Pamela Fields, vice president of marketing for the Limited Stores.

This year, the chain’s private Cassidy line, which used to consist primarily of coats, now encompasses a full suit line. “The big commitment to suited looks is very much a reflection of customer demand,” Fields said. The suits are displayed prominently in the chain’s windows.

Elsewhere, stores appear to be making few radical departures from the marketing of years past. Saks Fifth Avenue’s bow to the increased pressures on apparel is simply the addition to its usual advertising of a series of double-truck ads in a dozen national magazines since February.

“Fundamentally, Saks Fifth Avenue is a fashion store,” said Paul Leblang, senior vice president and director of marketing. “What makes us work is having the best (selection of) merchandise from around the world. When we do it right, the customer responds.

“The customer is currently responding,” he added.

One key to success this season, Leblang said, is alternatives. Like most other stores, Saks is featuring knee-length skirts, longer dresses and pants in all shapes. “Today’s woman is very sophisticated and has a fairly good sense of what looks good on her,” he said. “Confusion comes when you don’t give the customers an option to choose what’s best for them. Those stores that opted to go in only one direction in spring did not give the customer enough of a choice.”

Judith Langer, whose New York-based marketing research firm frequently surveys consumers about their views on fashion, figures that designers and retailers are finally letting women lead the way and stand to benefit with increased business.

“Designers were ill advised . . . to push a style that is no longer demographically correct,” said Langer, president of Langer Associates Inc. “They were not providing alternatives last year. Women were talking options, the trade was talking single choice. This year it has become popular to talk of offering several options.”

No Guidelines

In addition, she said, designers seem to be waking up to the fact that “not everybody has a perfect figure. They could finally be designing this year for real women.”

There are dissenters to the view that offering options will spell relief from the spending drought.

“The average woman still hasn’t a clue about what length she should be wearing,” said Deane of the Tobe Report. “The store stocks are still all over the lot, with as many long as short styles. There are no guidelines.

“Take (designer) Donna Karan’s clothes--pants, two short skirts, the rest long. The customer walking by (Karan displays) wouldn’t know what that tells her to do. I think she has to be told. It’s time for retailers to stick their necks out, and I don’t think most are prepared to do that yet.”

In Deane’s view, retailers are correct to spotlight the “feminized, as we’ve been calling it, sexpot suits. Very curvaceous, very flattering jacket. The pretty little suit with or without an important blouse. . . . That will be tremendous business, especially in colors and patterned wools.” She added a proviso: “I hope the skirt is short enough, just about covering the knee and shorter, to make a fashion statement.”

At many chains, business is showing few signs of a resurgence. J. C. Penney, for example, declined a request for an interview with a merchant. “Obviously, the business is still soft,” a spokesman said, “and I don’t think there’s anything else we can say at this point.”

Analyst Davis of Oppenheimer said sales so far in August have been disappointing, with many stores eagerly blaming the widespread hot weather rather than any fundamental problems with their marketing. Retailers have gone into the fall with slimmed-down inventories, she said. “They’re looking for direction, and it’s difficult to get direction when the consumer is only buying certain (summer) things related to the weather.”

She predicts that, if fall does not get off to a good start, “you get a lot of stores that become trigger-happy on the markdowns,” leading to lost margins.

Retail analyst N. Richard Nelson Jr. of the Duff & Phelps investment research firm in Chicago agrees that “the early scoreboard has not been particularly favorable.”

Rosalind Wells, president of New York-based Wells & Associates, a consumer research firm, and chief economist of the National Retail Merchants Assn., the industry’s largest trade group, foresees a modest pickup in business. “(This past year,) it wasn’t a case of spending being poor because the money wasn’t there; it was really a problem with the merchandise not being what people wanted to spend money on,” she said. “If my assumption is right that the merchandise is in much better shape, I think sales will pick up.” She added that she is getting some “preliminary results to that effect.”

The slowness is having one potentially advantageous side effect as far as prices are concerned, although customers might not reap the benefits any time soon. Depressed U.S. orders in Hong Kong are forcing down the export quota prices of most garments made of cotton, wool and man-made fibers, according to industry reports. “The market stinks,” one U.S. apparel buyer was quoted as saying in the trade paper Women’s Wear Daily. “There’s no demand, there’s no direction. No one knows what the hell to do.”

But analyst Nelson expects retailers to use the price cushion to improve their own profit margins rather than to pass along savings to customers. “The retail margin,” he said, “could very well benefit beginning late this year or by next spring.”