Session 2: Know Your Brand!

Session 2 of IFS introduced us to the idea of brand heritage and asked us to focus on looking into the head designers and creative directors within luxury fashion houses. This definitely challenged me, as I was quite used to, in a business perspective, looking into the management history of a brand compared to the designers. This session, however, has allowed me to open my perspective up and really look into the ideas and people behind the designs coming out of luxury fashion houses and the way many big names in fashion intertwine between some of the largest brands in history.

I really liked the research aspect of this session and the way I was able to learn about the design history of multiple brands. For our first breakout group task, we had to choose a luxury brand and research their brand heritage and the way the brand evolved through various creative directors. My group chose Hermes and I found the one person I was able to collaborate within my group to be really helpful and very organised in what we needed to do. This made the lack of participation from other group members better, as I at least had one to discuss and bounce ideas off of. Personally, the brand Hermes has always been somewhat off-putting for me, for their use of animal skin in their products, but particularly when it was announced they had purchased a crocodile farm in my home country of Australia. However, this task enabled me to outgrow this mindset and not be afraid to look into the brand’s history and design knowledge, as the use of animal skin is quite common in luxury fashion houses. By learning about it, I am able to tailor myself towards brands I would prefer to work with in the future that are cruelty free perhaps.

For the second task, we had to individually work on short brand heritage slides, choosing from a brand that we had made shop analysis notes on earlier in the week. I chose Louis Vuitton, but felt that for the future brand heritage report, I would like to look around at a couple of other brands that I feel are more interesting design wise to me.

Shop notes I had made earlier

I’m quite excited to get into researching for the brand heritage report and feel like I’ve gotten a lot out of this lesson. I plan to keep an open mindset going forward into looking at luxury brands and build upon my fashion knowledge within the luxury market.

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