H&M to debut 'see now, buy now' collection at Paris Fashion Week

Dive Brief:

Swedish fast-fashion retailer H&M on Thursday announced its first “See Now, Buy Now” collection, dubbed H&M Studio.
H&M Studio will present the collection on March 1 during Paris Fashion Week and make it available to customers immediately after the show on its website and in select stores beginning March 2.
The show will include key womenswear looks, and for the first time, a full menswear collection as well, the company said.

Dive Insight:

With this move, H&M appears to be making fast fashion even faster, feeding consumer hunger for more immediacy.

“Bringing fashion immediately from catwalk to checkout marks a new era for the fashion industry and we are very much looking forward to testing this exciting new format,” Pernilla Wohlfahrt, H&M’s Head of Design and Creative Director, said in a statement. “We also want to share this moment with our customers and are therefore showing the fashion show live on our website.”

H&M launched its first Studio collection in Fall/Winter 2013 with a show during Paris Fashion Week aligned with runway calendars. This year, the runway calendar has sped up; Several fashion houses, including Burberry, Salvatore Ferragamo, Tom Ford, Michael Kors, Thakoon Panichgul, Rebecca Minkoff, Tommy Hilfiger and others, have similarly moved to make new designs available immediately.

Shoppers no longer want to wait to be able to wear designs that were unveiled months ago, and they don’t want to encounter designs out of season, experts say. In fact, “season” has become somewhat notional as fashion has gone global, with various seasons happening at various times in the world at once.

Not to be outdone by the designers it often mimics, H&M is joining the trend. But it’s not clear what that might do to the retailer’s ability to produce the styles that shoppers want while leaving behind the ones they don’t. Fast fashion has traditionally beat fashion makers in getting popular styles onto racks with speedy manufacture of cheaper merchandise, but the pressures of “see now, buy now” may impair their ability to gauge which styles will sell best.