Like their customers, Represent pays close attention to social media. Rather than revolutionize by inventing the next big trend, they've gotten ahead by hopping on current trends quicker than anyone else.
“It sucks up everything in its path, feeding off other designers, destroying the environment we live in with absolutely no remorse for the devastation it leaves behind.” But labels like Sung’s are still taking a page out of the Zara playbook. “When I think of fast-fashion, I think of a massive tornado,” he says. Richard Sung, the co-founder of Las Vegas lifestyle brand KNYEW, knows what makes customers apprehensive about traditional fast-fashion retailers. But to the designers giving the inspiration, like Fear of God’s Jerry Lorenzo, some of these new-age fast-fashion brands are more like imitators than actual designers. And like their more corporate competition, brands like Represent, KNYEW, and MNML have gotten popular by flipping the hottest current trends into instantly-available items, while using social media and YouTube to reach new customers. These brands might not categorize themselves as fast-fashion, but despite their relatively modest sizes, they understand the importance of instant gratification to their style-savvy, cost-cognizant audience. They attribute these strains to divergent spending habits and the rise of competition, but it's also coming from the ground up-via young, independent, hungry labels that have used social media to attract young, trend-hungry customers. In the first quarter of this year, H&M had their first monthly sales drop in nearly four years, and Zara parent company Inditex SA saw profitability shrink to an eight-year low. Interest in fast-fashion is, for the first time, waning. As menswear became more like womenswear-more driven by “it” items from season to season-guys started looking for new ways to keep up with the revolving door of trends. Fast-fashion retailers like Zara and H&M were there to give them the trends they craved at a fraction of the cost (and often testing the boundary between "inspired by" and outright ripped off in the process). But swapping heritage gear for high-fashion looks put pressure on their wallets. It wasn't long before they were trading in Yuketen for Yeezy, Ralph Lauren for Raf Simons, and A.P.C. After the #menswear boom of the mid-to-late aughts, guys began looking in the mirror at their chambray shirts, raw selvedge denim and moc toe boots and wondering what was next for their sartorial lives.
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