The Hottest Trends In Fashion Now - Forbes

Nike React Element 87, the hottest men's product right now.

Courtesy Lyst and Nike

There’s a shopping site called Lyst that helps consumers search for fashion products they want to buy. Lyst claims it is the largest global fashion search platform, you can find over five million products from 12 thousand different brands on its site and the company has raised over $65 million in capital. Lyst says it tracks more than 10 million global searches per month. Lyst uses that data, observing what people want, what they’re looking for and what they’re buying, to understand consumer behavior.

Fashion is changing a lot. When baby boomers were the most important customers, luxury was the highest aspiration and the intrinsic quality of a product, how it fit and how it’s priced were the variables that drove consumer demand. Now that millennial consumers and Generation Z consumers are the drivers, consumers want something else. They want products that facilitate great experiences and there is less demand for products that scream out the name of their brand than in the past. As a result, it’s harder now to have a hot brand than in the past and brands are being commoditized. Those brands that can still retain their cool factor are scarcer and harder to create. It’s not merely a matter of spending gobs of money on advertising and promotion. Now it’s about convincing consumers that brands are socially conscious, environmentally sensitive, pay fair wages through their supply chain, have artisanal characteristics, create a community and relate to consumers’ locality and concerns. All of that is harder to do than anything that has come before it.

Lyst has used its data to identify the brands that are hot now. The list of the world’s hottest brands is below and you will know most of the names on the list. But the world leader and hottest brand in the world right now may not be familiar. Off-White is a brand created by Virgil Abloh, who is the artistic director of Louis Vuitton Men’s and a number of other artistic and creative ventures.

The List Of The World’s Hottest Brands In The World Right Now

1. Off-White
2. Gucci
3. Balenciaga
4. Valentino
5. Fendi
6. Prada
7. Stone island
8. Versace
9. Vetements
10. Saint Laurent

Aside from listing the hottest brands based on real data, there’s other information that is very revealing about what is happening now more broadly. If you think about what men’s products are desirable now and which brands make them, your mind can wander into various things. Wrong. The hottest men’s products now are all…sneakers. No shirts, pants, jackets, hats, nothing but sneakers made the list, not even shoes. What’s even more interesting about that list of ten is that six of them are Nike products. So when you ask, “what’s hot now in the world of men’s products,” the answer is really just, “Nike.”

In women’s it’s more varied. On the list of top ten hot items right now is a pair of sneakers, a headband a belt, a handbag and other items. What’s different now is that Nike also made the list but not with footwear. The Nike product that’s the number seven hottest women’s product in the world right now is a hijab, a head covering worn by Muslim women with a Nike swoosh on the side. The world’s largest sporting goods retailer, Decathlon, which is only just getting started in the U.S., recently abandoned plans to sell a sporting hijab in France. When that happened, it boosted Nike’s social mentions by 4,900%.

Nike Pro Hijab

Courtesy Lyst and Nike

It’s not news to say that brands have to have their finger on what consumers want, as Nike clearly does, to prosper. What’s news is that being current is much more about culture than it has ever been. It’s not that product quality or value has diminished, those characteristics are as important and as competitive as ever. But now there are more skills that a brand needs to master to succeed. It not only has to produce great product, it has to have the right message, attitude and tone that consumers want to hear in the moment. That makes building a brand more challenging than ever.

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardkestenbaum/2019/05/09/the-latest-fashion-trends-nike-off-white-gucci-balenciaga-valentino-fendi-prada-versace-virgil-abloh/