Off-Shoulder Dresses Off The Racks

The off-shoulder dress trend, in effect, has existed since the mid-1800s with the queens in the Victorian era popularizing the silhouette.

There was no Instagram or Pinterest to validate the popularity of the trend back then, but things have changed two centuries since. Today, when off-shoulder dresses are back in vogue, netizens across the world are busy pinning their favorite off-shoulder dress and googling the trend vociferously.

And what’s interesting is the increased interest in the trend in India over the past 10 months. Google Trends reports show that the search index for off-shoulder style has gone up from 17 in October 2015 to 100 in July 2016, placing India on the list of the top 8 countries googling this trend the most.

Off-Shoulder Dresses – Social

And now, a cursory glimpse at the popularity of the trend on social media, amplified by Bollywood’s most influential fashionistas. We culled out five posts of Bollywood fashion mavens Sonam Kapoor, Deepika Padukone, Alia Bhat, and Deepika Padukone wearing the off-shoulder dress from the stars’ Instagram feed and through hashtags.

The collective number of Instagram likes garnered across images featuring the trend on these Bollywood style icons is 7,10,027. That’s an average of a whopping 1,42,005 likes per image!

This is excluding a video that Sonam Kapoor posted in a cheery yellow Reetu Neeva off-shoulder dress,  that garnered 326k views on Instagram.

On Pinterest, the cumulative number of repins that the top five off-shoulder dress images have received are 29400, averaging at 5880 repins per image considered quite encouraging.

Off-Shoulder – Global Brand/Retail

Interestingly, the off-shoulder styles ruling Pinterest boards are aligned with the top-ranking off-shoulder dresses across global websites such as HMUK, ASOS, and Zara. The trending styles typically come in a solid colour ( summer sorbet shades, red, black, and blue seem to be the favorites) or are in denim and are knee-length.

Off-Shoulder Style – India – An Opportunity!

However, we at Stylumia see a very thin selection of off-shoulder in Indian brands and retailers.

While the hashtag generation in India is loving off-shoulder dresses, despite it being not the easiest to pull off, very few brands in India are actually leveraging the adulation that the trend is getting in the digital ecosystem. We observed very few emerging brands make up the handful of options focusing on the trend.

A customer is, therefore left with very few options when looking to buy this trend, even when she has a strong purchase intention. A clear opportunity in our view!

Here are the top trending styles in off-shoulder dresses in India