Animal prints gone wild

Remember when animal print was in, back in the 90s? Along with camo? Well as ever with the world of fashion, this ‘wild’ trend has come back around and we’re as leopard clad as can be.

It’s seemingly crept up on us and now every fashion retailer has a selection of animal print and even your mum’s got a snake print blouse.

A recent article in The Guardian asserts that this rise is more than just high fashion trickling down to the high streets - as usually this trend would fall into the mainstream and then quickly die - but seeing as all ages and styles are sporting the animal look, its ascended the usual channels; “It is a print that has gone beyond being a current fashion statement to establishing itself as a wardrobe perennial.”

The layers of meaning that animal print has accumulated over its varied history has all come to a head in 2018 - its sexy, empowering, rebellious and undeniably feminine.

Using search intelligence we can see when this animal frenzy permeated our styles and who knew about it first.

Animal print in 2018

If we look at the below chart showing search volume, the growth of interest in animal print clothing has grown exponentially in the last year:

There looks as if there have been a small resurgence for animal print in the latter half of 2016 and 2017, but nothing compared to the high interest in August 2018

Who’s king of the jungle?

If we delve deeper into search volume, we can see which specific animal print is the most sought after:

Undoubtedly, leopard print (green line) is driving the animal print trend, with 82% more interest in August 2018 than general animal print (purple line) searches.

That being said, all four of these search categories saw uplift in August.

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Retailers and animal print

Retailers are all jumping on the safari wagon, but who is winning the top spot for animal print terms?

Broken down into search categories, we can see that River Island is dominating animal print overall, and especially for leopard print searches.

Interestingly, two footwear-only retailers perform in the top 15; Office and Dune. People are looking for that head to toe look.

An online zoo

Taking River Island as an example, many retailers have created optimised content dedicated to this trend -

Having a whole section of your site for trends, with all relevant products grouped in one place, helps searchers find what they want faster and lets Google know you’ve got the goods to be prioritised for.

Some retailers are really riding the wave of this trend and instead of creating just one area for animal prints, they’ve littered their site with animal print fashion. If we look at the site Quiz clothing, almost every hover has an animal print product-

New In:

Dresses:

Jumpsuits:

Clothing:

Its inescapable!

Have we reached the height of the trend?

Using Google Trends to track this, it looks as though the animal print craze is yet to reach its peak! There is still major opportunity to be had.

It’s important for retailers to recognise rising trends to be able to make the most of demand. Trends are easiest to see emerging online, and the data gathered from the web can be used to inform not just digital content, but even product strategy. Do you need to be making leopard print scarves? Yeah, you really do.

If you like the fashion insights in this blog, you can see more by downloading our Fashion retail report.

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