Fashion Trend Revival - Fashionable cultural heritage

Fashion industry is characterized by fast changing trends, short product life-cycle and high demand uncertainty; therefore, the task of fashion designers to come up over and over within relatively short period of time with new designs by fulfilling the consumers’ needs is quite challenging. Fashion has a different life cycle than other products or services; fashion trends appear cyclically; old designs can be also a great source of inspiration for designers. In Hungary the cultural heritage elements in the recent years again became a determining factor of the fashion trend. This thesis is focusing on researching the motivation behind the Hungarian fashion designers for using cultural heritage elements in their designs with qualitative research. 14 interviews, made with fashion designers who took part in the Re-button! Hungarian is in fashion competition, were analyzed with NVivo10 qualitative data analysis computer software package. The competition is a government initiative which in its announcement called designers for creating cultural heritage inspired collections. Cultural heritage as part of the national identity cannot be viewed only as another fashion trend feature. It has a deeper, underlying meaning than other inspirational sources, which is the reason why it could stay regardless on fashion trend, historical era constant inspirational source for fashion designers. The extent to which cultural heritage elements are applied and the motivation behind using them has several reasons which are discussed in the thesis. Certain economical, political, folk psychological changes can strengthen and make the cultural heritage elements visibly fashionable. The current trend can be also attributed to the economic changes; the development of the Hungarian creative industry.