Dress to impress at home: Retailers recast spring looks

Desperate to sell pricey spring looks during the coronavirus lockdown, retailers are turning to social media to show their latest styles in somber, stay-at-home settings.

This report produced by Yahaira Jacquez.

Retailers, desperate to sell pricey spring looks as stores are shuttered and shoppers are confined to their homes, are turning to social media, but with a stay-at home twist.

This model wears a nearly $300 Reformation dress while lounging alone on her bed.

And this lime green miniskirt, it looks fine next to the house plant.

While skimpy dresses and skirts typically fly off the shelves at this time of year - not in 2020.

One fashion executive summing up the problem this way: "people don't buy a new outfit to stay at home." Still, retailers are trying dangling discounts online.

This Rag & Bone blazer typically $550, is now marked down to $412.

But even with discounts on warm-weather looks, customers are flocking to loungewear and activewear.

For example, Zalando, Europe's biggest online only fashion retailer, says it's seen an uptick in customers shopping for comfortable apparel and yoga clothes.

But despite that strong demand, retailers have little to no bandwidth to change course and rush out more items designed to be worn indoors.

Therefore - the excess product in the system will need to be liquidated, according to one former department CEO, so everyone's trying to find any way that they can to sell product now.

That may be one reason department store operator Saks suggested to its nearly 2 million followers on Instagram that they should consider logging onto their virtual Zoom meetings in a puff-sleeve wool dress, theirs for nearly $2000.