“You look beautiful in that dress, it brings out your waist well.”

“How handsome you are in that shirt.”

The way to one’s heart is very complicated, and the designer is aware of that – and so is the customer.

I’ll begin the subject of fashion starting from the end, i.e. with a client purchasing a new dress for a date.

Lena was invited to an evening date at a restaurant by her husband early in the morning, when they wished each other a good day. Lena is a woman who doesn’t fit the standard proportions: big breasts with a narrow waist and curvy hips. She is well aware that shopping doesn’t come easy to her. She would love to find a dress that looks special and at the same time fits her well. It seems that tailor-made dresses will be the only way out, but there is little time, so she started her own search, early in the afternoon as soon as she finished her work activities. The very fact that she has to get herself ready in the bathroom, talking to the mirror and dancing with the razor, made her feel tense. Lena doesn’t like to be stressed, especially when it comes to making sure she is well prepared. She thinks rationally. Online shopping is not an option, for two main reasons: shipping time and not being able to try things on. How about a physical store in a shopping mall, or the one on the city’s main street? There is also a fashion showroom nearby. The mall has the largest selection of stores, but they have the best-selling sizes, which Lena will not be satisfied with. The city’s main street is not very comfortable for shopping, with small boutiques packed with lots of squeezed clothes. A nearby fashion showroom has saved her life more than once. The staff know what they’re doing and it’s also nearby. Time is at a premium.

Did Lena find a dress that stole her heart and made her husband’s eyes fixed only on her at their dinner together?

Life writes different fashion scenarios. Fashion neither began nor ended with a dress. There are fashionable patterns, trendy colours, summer collection, autumn collection, women’s fashion, men’s fashion, skirts, dresses, tracksuits, underwear, suit, shoes – products all around – or are there really? They used to make clothes from hemp fibers, and they were indestructible and incredibly body-friendly. Today’s pervasive polyester is nothing more than a market for oil. The global corporations have been foisting the same thing on us by pouring drinks and later water into pet bottles. Milk in a glass bottle with an aluminum lid – those were the days! People took their health for granted and saw the West as a role model.

Going back to the story – in order for Lena to purchase a dress we need fibers; synthetic or natural. From them we get fabrics or knitted fabrics, which are later used to sew the concept of the dress. The anthropometric atlas gives us a picture of how wide the range of human sizes is in the human population. The more people a manufacturer wants to dress, the wider the size range he has to use. Even though we have global markets – the same dress that will be sought after in the West, may no longer be so attractive in the East. The manufacturer has many things to consider: what volume to manufacture, how much fabrics to order, how many seamstresses to hire, whether a batch will sell out, how to reach a wide range of customers. Will the whole batch of 100 thousand pieces in four different sizes be sold out at the price of 300 zlotys? If not, then what kind of special offer to launch  to get rid of this stock which takes up the storage space needed for the next batches. Your competitors don’t sleep – they collaborate with celebrities, use the reach of influencers, buy paid advertisements, outsource advertising campaigns to specialized agencies, and lease the best premises in shopping malls.

Automation, robotics, outsourcing, agencies, unlimited sources of funding – they all mean that the PROCESS of creating a skirt for our character Lena to wear on a date can be spread over many entities. Lena, who was supposed to be the last link in the thread, became the beginning of the whole project.