Fashion
The fashion industry continues to rely heavily on synthetic fabrics, such as polyester, but those textiles are highly polluting. A new study calls on Europe to intervene and even link coronavirus financial support to climate objectives.
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Louis Vuitton has ventured into the hospitality industry with its very first café and restaurant: Le Café V and Sugalabo V. The French luxury brand chose the Japanese city of Osaka as its location.
As of today, Sellpy, the second-hand platform of fashion giant H&M, is also operating in Austria and the Netherlands. The demand for second-hand clothes has been growing steadily in recent years.
Online fashion retailer Asos is putting 295 million pounds (334 million euros) on the table for labels Topshop, Topman, Miss Selfridge and HIIT from retail group Arcadia which went bankrupt.
H&M Group has also been hit hard by the second lockdown wave: in 2020 profits plummeted 88 per cent, while sales were down 18 per cent. Crisis management in times of the coronavirus is costing the fashion giant dearly.
Start-up Finesse raised 4.5 million dollars for artificially designed clothing: algorithms create fashion by listening to young people on social media. Clothing trends are easier to predict than the stock market, it would seem.
Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof is receiving hundreds of millions of euros in state aid. With the importance of the department store group for town centres as the main argument, although not everyone is convinced.
Belgian textile entrepreneurs Peter and Kristof De Sutter have been appointed by the Commercial Court of Dendermonde as the buyers of bankrupt fashion chain e5. With a bid of 2.5 million euros, the Flemish family beats Colruyt Group and Danish fashion player BTX.
Under the name The Founded, Bestseller has launched a new online platform, where all brands of the group will have a place. The current Bestseller website will be transformed into a corporate website.
Things are moving on the British fashion market. Online fashion platform Boohoo is taking over Debenhams but is leaving the stores for what they are. In the meantime, Asos is ogling Arcadia.
H&Mbeyond, the Swedish fashion giant's innovation lab, and NeXR Technologies are working together to develop a virtual fitting room that will allow customers to try on perfectly fitted outfits quickly and easily.
Arket, one of the brands of H&M Group, starts renting out children's clothes this week. The Scandinavian lifestyle brand will collaborate with the Dutch clothing rental company Circos.
GrandVision, the owner of eyewear chains Pearle and Eye Wish, had a decent quarter considering the circumstances. For the year as a whole, however, the group had to swallow a substantial decline in sales.
Birkenstock is in advanced takeover negotiations with investment group CVC Capital. For 4 billion euros, the 250-year-old sandal brand may become a sister of luxury watch brand Breitling.
Superdry saw its losses increase significantly in the first half of the broken fiscal year. Meanwhile, the coronavirus crisis continues to weigh on the British fashion group. The start of the third quarter also appears to be anything but successful.
Marks & Spencer is one of the first major brands to join the movement that is calling to end forced labour in the cotton and garment industry in the region of Xinjiang, China.
