Mendez
Jayden Mendez
Prof. Frederick Coscia
April 29, 2019
Economics of Streetwear/ Designer Clothing
The clothing economy is truly worldwide. The average person spends around $161 per month on clothes; Others spend that on a shirt. From the earliest times, clothing has stretched out to the furthest reaches of human kind. In each geographic area of the world, individuals used whatever was readily available to them to craft clothing in their own personal ways. They used local plants, animals, and minerals to create clothing. The Chinese took in the mysteries of the silkworm and created silk cloth, Mesopotamians raised sheep for their fleece, Shellfish found at the Mediterranean ocean gave produced purple dye. All throughout time we see cases of us creating clothes and spreading them to other people through trade. Even in the coldest of climates, societies depended on the hides and skins of animals, both land and ocean, trade helped to spread different kinds of cloth and clothing to other groups of people. In time, precious textiles and furs moved by long, difficult ground trade routes or hazardous oversea voyages. Later, textile centers graduated where people wanted large quantities of luxury fabrics and were willing to pay high prices for them. As the U.S. economy continues to grow and evolve, one of the many key factors of our new creative economy is the fashion industry. With a growing number of opportunities to make high wages, fashion is now having a big impact all around the world.
The first kinds of department stores opened in major cities in the United States and Europe in the mid-1800s, the main focus of these stores was clothing. Instead of negotiating with customers over selling prices, like small shopkeepers did back then, these department stores began setting price tags on their goods. Captains of the retail business built nice, elegant stores to present shopping as recreation. Smaller stores specialized in men's or women's apparel, children's clothing, undergarments, or shoes. These stores profited from customer traffic attracted to city centers by big stores.
In today's society people are willing to spend huge amounts of money on their clothing and the industry is one of the top in the world. What limited records survive show that during the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Europe, rich people spent huge proportions of their incomes on luxurious clothing for themselves. This shows that even in the earliest ages, people put A high value on clothing and see it as a way of expressing their social status. Today's research estimates that the global clothing market will reach $278.2 billion this year and increase to $325.8 billion in 2022. We estimate that the US clothing market alone will be worth $44.5 billion and grow to $51.8 billion by 2022. This shows that the clothing industry is constantly growing and boosting the economy, providing more job opportunities for many people.
Clothing can be expensive and with some designer/ streetw...
