To the world, France is the capital of fashion. It’s the first word comes up when France is mentioned. Shopping for clothes is the main course for people visiting France, especially Paris. There are hundreds of designer brands originated in France. Mention the most luxurious clothing brands you know and you’ll find the founders were mostly from France.
Home for the world’s most luxurious fashion related brands
Louis Vuitton, Chanel, and jewelry brand Cartier, for example, are all from France. In 2018, Louis Vuitton itself recorded the total sale of $12.6 billion. It scores the 15thMost Valuable Brand in the World according to Forbes. With Chanel’s $5.6 billion total sale and Cartier’s $6.3 billion, three of them achieve$24.5 billion in total. Meanwhile, they are just a representation for the other hundreds of luxury brands from France.
A study by French Fashion Institute (IFM) accumulated the total sales of fashion-related business based in France. And the number is 170 billion euros. It’s far higher than other industries such as aerospace and cars. Aerospace scores 102 billion euros while cars score 39 billion euros only.
Known to the world, yet unknown by the locals?
Sadly, it seems like French people are the only one oblivious to those numbers. While the rest of the world put France as the capital of fashion, French are not. They do not seem to know the weight of the fashion culture in their country. It’s very much underestimated by public authorities of French, said Ralph Toledano. Toledano is the head of two infamous fashion brands and chairman of the French Federation of couture.
Out of more than 61 million citizens, only half a million of them work directly in the fashion industry. According to IFM, the other one million do the ancilliary jobs around the industry. It includes communication, marketing, and modeling.
Not just annual sale, fashion weeks held in France also has a high number of sales. There are in total six fashion weeks a held in France per year. In total, they generated roughly 10 billion euros in annual sales. And it hasn’t even included the other revenues from the coming tourists.
With the full support from the people and the government, we can only imagine how further the fashion industry in France can be developed.
