The dearth of innovation in the fashion industry

Most brands aren’t looking to do something particularly innovative. Instead, they are looking for short cuts to cut costs by using a cheaper fabric or stitching the garment together hastily which leads to the threads coming apart sooner than one would expect. There are certainly exceptions to this rule. Uniqlo is a winter clothing retailer that developed a winter jacket that is light weight, affordable and keeps you warm. The ability to keeping you warm without needing heavy layers was a major departure from the status quo. They’ve enjoyed success in spades and have since expanded to adjacent product lines such as scarves and gloves. When it comes to menswear though and especially men’s formalwear there has been a dearth of innovation and that is representative of the fashion industry writ large. Brooks Brothers introduced the non-iron shirt in the 1950s and since then there haven’t been major improvements. If anything, we’ve regressed across three areas.

The first and most obvious area of regression is quality. Clothes last half as long as they used to. Low-quality collar stays bend when put through the wash. Too many folks have had the experience of buying and shirt and having it wear out within the first year or eighteen months, an unreasonably short time frame. You purchase a dress shirt for over a hundred dollars only to see the threads start to come off around the pocket after a few weeks. Fast fashion principles seem to be being applies across the industry even to products that are way above the fast fashion price range. The fabrics used feel thin rather than durable. Buy for life or the notion of buying clothing you will be able to pass onto your children as a vintage garment can feel like a remote ideal. And yet, it wasn’t so long ago that was the case. Clothing could enjoy an afterlife, being passed between different members of a family as one member outgrew it or down generations. Nothing was wasted. A high-quality garment at its best is an investment amortized over many years rather than a perishable good that can feel expendable.

Apart from quality, sustainability is another principle that appears to have vanished. When it comes to defining sustainability, we are specifically referring to alterations, mending and repairs. Since clothing is worn there are two possible tributaries to the need for alterations. Those are the wear and tear of time that arises from usage and changes to the size, weight and height of the wearer. While a well-made clothing item can certainly enjoy a longer half-life, no garment is immune to the toll of time. Future mending was baked into the manufacturing process. Prior to ready to wear clothing being popularized, you would select a fabric you wanted to use for your new dress shirt and suit. You would use the requisite amount to make your new button-down shirt and then you would keep the excess fabric for future repairs. The same was true of pants and suits. Having access to the original fabric is a game changer as it allows you renew the garment without changing it. As the world moved towards ready to wear products these principles were maintained for a while. A dress shirt would come with a spare collar and set of cuffs made with the same pattern. When the dress shirt frayed you could take it to a local dry cleaner and sew them on. Pants and blazers came with extra fabric at the seams. If you outgrew your pants or your suit there was room to let them out a couple inches. Clothing that ripped could be easily patched. It should also be noted that sustainability was a two-way street. On one hand garments were designed to allow for future mending, on the other sewing skills were far more widespread. In the 1970s a high school student in the United States might sew a skirt the night before, to wear to school the next day. In a typical household or economic unit, it was not uncommon for there to be someone who had some ability to make clothing.

The third area where menswear fashion has wilted and withered is design. A casual walk through the dress shirt section at a major men’s department store reveals a shocking lack of creativity. Most shirts are plain white or some variation of that such as faint grid line or sky blue. The more audacious shirts may involve a paisley pattern on the inside of a shirt cuff or the collar band which is not even visible while being worn. Often when you run into someone with a nice colorful dress shirt with creative patterns and you ask where they purchased it, it will be from a brand you heard of but a long time ago and they now no longer make such patterns. This is especially true of double cuff shirts which have relegated exclusively to the arena of tuxedos and weddings and therefore restricted to plain white. Prices vary across shirtmakers. To justify a higher price, you need to be able to offer something different. Unique pattern drafting could really be a differentiator for many of these brands, which makes is puzzling that they have not embraced their creating freedom and instead opted to restrict themselves to the same plain designs. Many of them have a legacy vintage collection that is marvelous. Resurrecting even part of it periodically would go a long way towards animating the product and providing a source of inspiration for next season’s collection.

Collar Replacement strives to be a menswear company that defies gravity across all three aforementioned trends. To product high quality garments that will last you for years to come. To prioritize offering repairs and alterations for dress shirts where other firms decline to do so. What really us apart is designing clothing with future alterations woven into the initial garment. When you buy a shirt, we include spare collars and cuffs. The pants come with extra fabrics at the seams to be let out and the hem contains a higher fabric allowance to allow it to be replenished. The blazers can be let out to accommodate a couple sizes up. Tailors have a range of skill sets when it comes to sewing. Out clothing is designed to allow your local neighborhood tailor without any particulate menswear expertise to make all necessary alterations rendering such repairs economical. As far as creativity is concerned, when you change a shirt collar and add a contrast collar you have the opportunity to create a shirt that does not exist off the rack and which is uniquely yours. For out dress shirts, we source vibrant patterns including multi stripe and can support both single cuff and double cuff. The basic philosophy undergirding Collar Replacement is that clothing is not static or disposable. A garment is very much modular and something that develops a life of its own as you continue to work with it, whether when mending or making alterations. The wearer and the adjustments made are an inextricable part of the history of a clothing item and become a source of renewal precisely when others might be considering discarding it.