To Die For

Is Fashion Wearing Out the World?

Lucy Siegle

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780007264100
• eBook ISBN:
  9780007432530
• Topic: Économie
• Subtopic: Économie de l'environnement

Chapter 1
Fat Wardrobes and Shrinking Style

How my Fashion Sense and Yours has Lost the Plot

This is not my ‘beautiful’ wardrobe. Every morning when I wake up I am directly confronted by my fashion history. Mistakes, corrections, good buys, bad buys, comfort buys, drunk buys: they refuse to go away. This is because my ‘primary’ wardrobe – as distinct from the other two wardrobes I’ve had to take over in the past ten years to accommodate the growing volume of my clothing collection – is opposite my bed, and the door, like a broken zipper, will no longer pull across to hide the tale of excess. If I squint I can even make out a rather nasty polyester pinafore mini-dress I used to wear in the early 1990s.

Having failed to embrace at least one fashion – the consumerist purchase-and-purge churn of the day – because I’m a bit of a hoarder, you might expect me to be more upbeat about my large collection of clothes. You could argue that my curatorial instincts should have left me with a style treasure trove that I could one day hand on to another generation of fashion lovers. Sadly, it hasn’t worked out like that. In the cold light of day many of the micro trends I’ve ‘invested in’ – T-shirts with chains, a one-shouldered jump suit, and other designer lookalike items – merge to form a type of sartorial wasteland. However, it is true that my wardrobes (plural) also represent a sort of time capsule: evidence of a revolution in fashion that has changed the way we view and wear clothes forever. They have catalogued the defining macro trends of our generation, and so have a preserved-in-aspic quality about them.

My collection is testament to the extraordinary way we now consume clothes.

The fact that I tend to hang on to many of my clothes might be atypical, but the type, volume and variety in the depths of my cupboards are predictable. Despite the fact that I’ve spent many years greening up the rest of my life, not to mention urging readers of my newspaper column to try to do the same, for a long time my wardrobe represented a bit of a black hole. I made a few attempts to buy with a keener eye on the ecological fallout – prioritising sustainable fibres, alternative designers and labels that prioritise low environmental footprint or social-justice concepts such as Fairtrade. But I was noticeably still consuming. In fact, I couldn’t quite get the hang of not consuming. The truth was, although I might have been more ‘green’ than most, in that I began to limit my patronage of certain retailers, I was still buying furiously, placing me in a demographic whose spending was increasingly out-of-control. And I don’t have to come around to your house and have a look to make a good guess at what you’ve got in your cupboards, because over the last decade and a half not only have we bought more at increasing speed, but our tastes have become increasingly homogenised.

If your clothing journey follows not only fashion trends but consumer trends, you’ll find you have only a small amount of formal wear and a similarly small amount of office wear compared to a decade ago; the whole world appears to have embarked on a permanent Dress Down Friday. Instead, you’ll have hangers and shelves and drawers full of home and leisurewear, and there’s likely to be evidence that you’ve bought into some strange new apparel categories such as luxe loungewear (a kind of daywear/pyjama hybrid made from a similarly hybrid fabric such as a cashmere blend). The most ubiquitous item is likely to be the T-shirt, along with its close relation the skinny-ribbed vest. You’ll also probably find that you’ve accumulated a number of dresses in the last five years, as we’ve indulged an obsession with ever more feminine ‘flirty’ dresses. You’ll have more knickers and bras than women at any other time in history. And thanks to the ubiquity of stretch lace and other fancy textile mixes, not only will they be more numerous, but prettier and more sophisticated, now that we’ve moved on from the tyranny of the thong, more embellished and better adapted to the art of seduction than ever before. The UK market in intimate apparel (the distinctly unsexy trade name for lingerie) had stretched to an amazing £2.8 billion¹ by 2009, which meant that it had grown by 16.1 per cent. For reasons that will become obvious, I’m sticking primarily to women’s fashion in these pages, but I will say that if you’re male, or have any boys in your family, you’ll have found that sportswear will have had a ‘profound influence’ on their wardrobe. You yourself will almost certainly have more pairs of jeans than you’d ever have thought necessary to own in a lifetime. By 2006 Europe was consuming 391 million pairs of jeans² every year. (On this small island we really went for it: in 2007 an incredible three pairs³ were being sold every second.) I can count nineteen pairs in my wardrobe, of which only four are in what I’d term active service.

You now demand roughly four times⁴ the number of clothes you would have in 1980. You will spend at least £625⁵ a year on clothes – but remember that’s just the average. And you are getting a lot of bang for your buck (or clothes for your pound). In one year you’ll accumulate in the region of twenty-eight kilograms⁶ of clothing (again, this is the average) – adding up to an estimated 1.72 million tonnes⁷ of brand-new fashion being consumed on an annual basis in the UK. But the really arresting thing is – and I’ll keep coming back to this – that almost the same quantity⁸ of fashion that you buy you will end up dumping prematurely in the rubbish bin.

Despite your fat wardrobes and hard-to-shut drawers, philosophically speaking you won’t be very happy with what you’ve got. In the way that I think of the shiny leggings (two pairs) that I bought in an effort to emulate the 2009–10 winter season trend, you will often come across pieces in your own cupboards that make you think, ‘What on earth possessed me [to buy that]?’ We have more clothes than at any other time in history, but have become less and less fulfilled and secure in our purchases, precisely because we have become such passive consumers. We watch, we follow, we pick off the rail – herdlike – and we find ourselves at the cash till.

In moments of clarity I wonder, what am I actually holding on to? If I was being generous, I would say that twenty years of investing in high-street fashion has resulted in a mixed bag. If I was being ungenerous, I’d say it was a shambolic ragbag. There’s certainly a jumble of materials – man-made fibres jostle for space with cotton, and a bit of wool. There’s a similar confusion of styles and ideas. Clearly I’ve invested time, money and emotion in my wardrobe, but after two decades avidly consuming fashion, do I have anything to show for it? I’m sorry to say that the real worth of my wardrobe is probably negligible. To put it bluntly, many garments in my possession are destined for landfill rather than posterity.

FASHION FRENZIES

May 2007 saw the reopening of the former site⁹ of a sedate London department store near Oxford Circus. It had been converted into a 70,000-square-foot¹⁰ fashion empire, with seventy-six fitting rooms and eighteen escalators. Though obviously it wasn’t the shopfittings that the hordes of female shoppers came to admire that opening day, but the unbelievable prices. For the price of a latte and a panini they could pick up a pair of shoes and a dress that gave more than a nod to pieces by big-name designers.

The extraordinary fashion economics that Primark was able to achieve – bringing hit fashion buys for the lowest prices in living memory – was already enough to generate column inches aplenty, but the opening of the Oxford Circus store was notable for another reason. You would imagine the prices were already low enough, but somehow a rumour circulated¹¹ among the swollen, near-hysterical and almost exclusively female crowd outside that everything was on sale for £1. The scene descended into chaos as desperate consumers battled to get to the front of the crowd. Young women scrambled over each other, pulling hair and collapsing in heaps on the pavement. Mounted police arrived to control the throng, and two would-be shoppers were carried off in ambulances for medical treatment. We’ll never know the origin of the everything-for-a-pound rumour, but the ridiculous thing was that if the frantic customers had wandered to another Primark store further down the street they could have picked up exactly the same deals without having to fight to get to the rails.

‘Fashions, after all¹², are only induced epidemics,’ George Bernard Shaw pronounced loftily sometime around 1906. True, he wasn’t referring directly to the fashion industry – between 1900 and 1938 the market for clothing in the UK was virtually stagnant¹³, so GBS was spared the vision of young ladies staggering under the weight of multiple store bags while trying to manoeuvre the latest overgrown ‘it’ bag onto public transport. But his observations happen to be unnervingly prescient in the context of present-day fashion, now that we have reached a point at which clothes shopping has more in common with a compulsion than a love or respect for style. ‘A demand, however, can be inculcated,’ the great bearded playwright continued. ‘This is thoroughly understood by fashionable tradesmen, who find no difficulty in persuading their customers to renew articles that are not worn out and to buy things they do not want.’ Finally, ‘the psychology of fashion becomes a pathology’. George, you would not have liked what our wardrobes have become, but in a way you did warn us.

We weren’t listening. The heady mix of celebrity and ‘affordable’ fashion has been wafting down British high streets. The launch of any line involving bothingredients is almost guaranteed to trigger more scenes of stampeding women and security cordons. ‘The arrival of Godot bearing the first Playstation 3 and the formula for world peace could not be more eagerly awaited,’ observed columnist Mary Riddell of ‘K-Day’ in 2007, when Kate Moss appeared briefly in the window of Topshop at Oxford Circus to launch Part I of her eponymous collection (this brand endorsement was worth a reputed £3 million¹⁴, and raised Topshop’s sales by a mammoth 10 per cent).

Despite K-Day being closely followed by L-Day (the launch of singer Lily Allen’s range¹⁵ for New Look), I saved myself for C-day, at the hugely successful Swedish retailer Hennes and Mauritz (better known as H&M), when the results of a ‘flash collection’ from ‘designer to the stars’ Roberto Cavalli would be revealed to an appreciative public.

By this point H&M was particularly expert at harnessing designers with massive profile and a couture background to produce branded collections of cut-price offerings for mere mortals. It had begun with the launch of a Karl Lagerfeld collection in 2004 that, as revered fashion writer Suzy Menkes put it in the New York Times, kicked off ‘a media phenomenon¹⁶, marking a seismic cultural shift and creating lines of eager shoppers in capital cities across the globe’. Of course, this involved a rather different way of operating for some of the couture designers – where they had been making ten to fifty pieces, collaborating with a mainstream label suddenly meant scaling up to runs that were counted in the tens of thousands. Naturally there was a huge trade-off in terms of quality, and some cultural differences to overcome. For example, we learned that Karl Lagerfeld apparently does not think that fat-bottomed girls make the rockin’ world go round. He was reputedly dismayed to discover that H&M wished to stock his creations in size 14 and 16, when he had meant them for ‘slim, slender people¹⁷’ (welcome to planet fashion). But apart from this embarrassment (H&M quickly apologised), overall these types of superstar designer and high-street-store alliances seemed to keep both parties happy. It is easy to see why. The mainstream retailer got to plug into the public’s frenzy for anything with celebrity and luxury cachet, while the A-list designer saw the opportunity to get in front of a huge, mainstream audience. Roberto Cavalli suggested to the press that his H&M collaboration would offer ‘a tasting menu¹⁸ of his most appetising signature designs’.

Ultimately, I’m afraid, I failed to feast on much of it. As the doors opened, the burly security guards looked rather nervous – and it was obvious that this was going to be a sell-out. I was quickly enveloped in a scrum of high ponytails and flying elbows as frenzied shoppers pushed, grabbed, swore and ran towards the tills. By the time I got near the remnants of the collection the front of the mob had already gorged itself. Every few minutes a set of courageous shop assistants attempted to restock the area, but as they ripped open boxes and shovelled out more bustiers, macs and Capri pants they were unceremoniously ripped from their hands by shoppers who tore open the thin plastic wrappings themselves. When the crowd moved as one entity across the sales floor to where it had spied, with its single mob eye, another hapless salesgirl attempting to find a way onto the shopfloor from an alternative stockroom door, all that was left behind was a flutter of plastic packaging and a scramble of hangers. Then there were the cold, calculating shoppers gathering up seemingly indiscriminate armfuls of clothes, irrespective of size apparently, and without making eye contact as they marched to the cash desk. These, I learned later, were the eBay buyers. Just a couple of hours later, those who had been unable to make the launch themselves could bid for a piece of diffusion Cavalli at prices that had more in common with his mainline collection than an H&M range.

In an absent-minded way I picked up a zebra-print piece, hoping to look at the label to analyse the fabric content, like the eco-geek I am. ‘That is mine!’ a young woman screeched, snatching it from me. ‘I had that in my hand!’ Broadly speaking, I’m a lover not a fighter, and I wasn’t committed enough to the project to enter into a catfight. Besides I happen to think shopping and conflict should never go together. The zebra-print bustier slipped from my hands into hers, and I retired from the Cavalli proceedings.

Aft erwards I reflected that we were certainly experiencing a new type of fashion-shopping experience. These incidents prompt the question, how did we get to this point, where fashion has more in common with a stampede at a football match than the delicate manners and attention to detail espoused by Coco Chanel? While enthusiastic queues have long been a feature of the January sales, this appeared to be something new: mob shopping. The Primark scuffle was the first such incident involving fashion that I can remember in the UK. In the popular imagination it joined the similarly horrifying spectacle of frenzied consumers, driven mad by the rumour of £50 sofas, battling to get into the opening of a new IKEA superstore in Edmonton, North London, two years previously. It seemed to me to represent a new low, where we lose all critical faculty in a retail space, and move closer to the point where (as eco guru Wendell Berry puts it) we operate in a world in which ‘the histories of ¹⁹all products will be lost. The degradation of products and places, producers and consumers is inevitable.’

Berry isn’t over-egging the pudding here. The changing fashion landscape has swiftly led to our degradation as consumers. Actually, you can view this less as an anomaly than as a type of natural progression, inevitable given the increasing fetishisation of cheap clothing, as we rapidly learned to prioritise quantity and variety over quality. The trouble was that being punchdrunk with so many store bags and pairs of shoes, we took a while to notice, and even when we did, an easier response than taking a long, hard look at our new, extremely weighty wardrobes was to say, ‘Where’s the harm?’

SHOPPING JUNKIES

Our ways of buying fashion and our relationship with the garments we own started changing in the mid-1980s. By 2005, academic research was picking up on the salient points. Louise R. Morgan and Grete Birtwistle set up eight consumer focus groups, surveying seventy-one women about their purchasing habits and interviewing ‘young fashion consumers’, by which they meant eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds, in more depth. Nearly all confessed to spending more than they used to, at rates that varied from £20 to £200 a month. This is hardly surprising, but what’s really notable is that they had absolutely no plan as to how long they intended to keep any of their purchases for. They also admitted that when ‘cheap’ fashion tore or became marked or stained, its likely destination²⁰ was not the washbasket, but the rubbish bin.

The old way of buying clothes, in harmony with one’s income and with nature’s changing seasons, the way people wore, washed carefully and darned, has absolutely nothing in common with the way we now consume. I should know: I was a fully-paid-up member of the group of avaricious fashion consumers who ensured that spending on womens-wear in Britain rose by a huge 21 per cent²¹ in just four years, between 2001 and 2005. I have ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 - Fat Wardrobes and Shrinking Style
• Chapter 2 - Faster and Cheaper
• Chapter 3 - Fashion Crimes and Fashion Victims
• Chapter 4 - Tea, Sympathy and Auditing
• Chapter 5 - In the Lap of Luxury
• Chapter 6 - Fashion’s Footprint
• Chapter 7 - Picking at Cotton
• Chapter 8 - Woolly Thinking
• Chapter 9 - Animal Print
• Chapter 10 - Lust for Leather
• Chapter 11 - Dumped, Trashed and Burned
• The Perfect Wardrobe
• Chapter 12 - High-Street Thrills and Spills
• Chapter 13 - Change Your Knicker Drawer, Save the World?
• Chapter 14 - Buying Better Clothes
• Chapter 15 - How Not to Buy
• Notes
• Acknowledgement
• About the Author
• Also by Lucy Siegle
• About the Publisher