Fast Fashion

A Cut from Clothing Poverty with Exclusive New Content

Andrew Brooks

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783606863
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

Fast Fashion: A cut from Clothing Poverty marks the two-year anniversary of the disastrous collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh on 24 April 2013. Featuring a new introduction along with a chapter from the previously published Clothing Poverty: The hidden world of fast fashion and second-hand clothes, Andrew Brooks stitches together the events of the Rana Plaza tragedy with the hidden world of fast fashion, providing a short but enlightening exposé of the global commodity chains which perpetuate poverty.

CHAPTER 10

Fast-fashion systems

London Fashion Week

For 500 years a palace has stood at the site of Somerset House on the north bank of the River Thames. The present design dates to the eighteenth century and is inspired by the columns and piazzas of Ancient Greece and Rome. Across the centuries this grand mansion in the heart of London has housed prestigious institutions and been a home to royalty, the Navy Board, the Inland Revenue, the Courtauld Institute of Art and King’s College London. As a seat of empire and a centre for art and learning, the palace has a long history of hosting international political and cultural events. It is now a self-styled ‘cultural beehive’ that hosts creative and scholarly endeavour. Twice a year London Fashion Week comes to Somerset House. The calm of the English neoclassical palace is disturbed by a decadent celebration of clothing design and consumption. A catwalk is set up within a dark avant-garde prefabricated pavilion; pop music reverberates around the courtyard; and at night light shows project sponsors’ logos onto the elegant stonework. Fashionistas spill out of Somerset House onto the Strand and into surrounding coffee shops, where they gossip and compare notes. And they wear the most outragous outfits – silver mackintoshes, orange playsuits, rubber trousers. Nothing seems over the top when the fashion community descends upon the palace. Meanwhile, design students hang around the arched stone gateways snapping photos of new looks, while promotional models hand out flyers to passing members of the clothing trade. Within the inner sanctums of Fashion Week, inside the jet-black pavilion, access is carefully controlled. Only the chosen few from the garment industry and their celebrity friends get a runway seat and see the new collections by Daks, Jasper Conran and Vivienne Westwood close up. Catwalk shows are pure theatre. The house lights dim, tension builds; then the runway is suddenly illuminated; at the same moment electronic music kicks in and models come down the catwalk in perfectly choreographed movements. Shows feature tall, elegant muses in couture designs. Many clothes are outrageous and will inspire future fashions rather than be worn in the real world. Other collections showcase new looks that will soon make it to clothing stores across the global North. Between shows, journalists, stylists, designers, fashion scouts and retail buyers mix at exclusive receptions, enjoying cocktails in bars on the Embankment terrace overlooking the river. At the end of the week the carnival departs, leaving hundreds of empty champagne bottles in its wake, at which point the mass clean-up operation commences to restore the palace grounds.¹

In the days that follow, the designs showcased by runway models and the new trends worn by celebrities and the fashion community are reported in the printed press and relayed online around the world. Outfits are rated and debated. Fresh looks emerge and provide inspiration for new mass clothing production. Fashion shows in London, as well as in Milan, New York, Paris, Tokyo and elsewhere in the global North, herald much broader fast-fashion systems of provision. Clothing culture is influenced by wider processes and reflects social change. This makes fashion difficult to define. As Coco Chanel recognized, ‘Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street. Fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.’² The types of couture collections that are exhibited at Somerset House, as well as the material culture that surrounds London Fashion Week and other fashion shows, feed into new clothing systems of provision, helping to generate retail demand and determine what is on sale in malls and department stores.

Consumers do also affect demand, but they have less autonomy than they imagine. Demand is stimulated. Only clothing which meets a consumer niche will sell; but these market niches are also shaped and manipulated by the fashion sector, as Alexandra Shulman, editor of British Vogue, notes: ‘Fashion is smoke and mirrors. We create images, we create a world of stuff, yes, ultimately to make people want to have it.’³ Image-making, led by fashion designers and retailers, and propelled by the media, creates new demands for clothing and simultaneously erodes the socially constructed value embedded in previous trends. Consumers are placed in a never-ending contest to purchase more. Changing meanings are attributed to clothing, deriving from the ways in which people think about colours, fabrics, the length of dresses or the design of logos. Broader behavioural norms and cultural values influence how fashions are perceived. Meanwhile the inherently expansionist elements of capitalist society work together to compel people to buy more clothes.⁴

The majority of consumers in the global North are not ‘slaves to fashion’; the symbolic value of clothing is just part of their decision-making process when they go shopping.⁵ Many people claim to have little or no interest in clothing, but everyone adheres to some culturally constructed norms of dress – business suits for office work, jeans for the weekend, cocktail dresses for Christmas parties and so forth – which continually change. Trends are never static, but rather are kept in motion, giving rise to fast-fashion systems of provision. The collective growth in demand for consumer products is essential for capitalism to ensure the smooth functioning of the world economy and diminish the opportunity for crisis. The fact that good used clothing, which can be worn again, is regularly ...