To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out the World?
Lucy Siegle
An expose on the fashion industry written by the Observer's 'Ethical Living' columnist, examining the inhumane and environmentally devastating story behind the clothes we so casually buy and wear.Coming at a time when the global financial crisis and contracting of consumer spending is ushering in a new epoch for the fashion industry, To Die For offers a very plausible vision of how green could really be the new black.Taking particular issue with our current mania for both big-name labels and cheap fashion, To Die For sets an agenda for the urgent changes that can and need to be made by both the industry and the consumer. Far from outlining a future of drab, ethical clothing, Lucy Siegle believes that it is indeed possible to be an 'ethical fashionista', simply by being aware of how and where (and by whom) clothing is manufactured.The global banking crisis has put the consumer at a crossroads: when money is tight should we embrace cheap fast fashion to prop up an already engorged wardrobe, or should we reject this as the ultimate false economy and advocate a return to real fashion, bolstered by the principles of individualism and style pedigree?In this impassioned book, Siegle analyses the global epidemic of unsustainable fashion, taking stock of our economic health and moral accountabilities to expose the pitfalls of fast fashion. Refocusing the debate squarely back on the importance of basic consumer rights, Siegle reveals the truth behind cut price, bulk fashion and the importance of your purchasing decisions, advocating the case for a new sustainable design era where we are assured of value for money: ethically, morally and in real terms.
To Die For
Is Fashion Wearing Out the World?
Lucy Siegle
Copyright
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
Copyright © Lucy Siegle 2011
Illustrations by Claire Meharg
The right of Lucy Siegle to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007264094
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Epigraph
Hey Daisy darling
Don’t take it all as read Why don’t you ask a few more questions instead?
I know you think that everyone should be paid what they’re due But there are people in this world who don’t think like you do They don’t think like you do And some don’t think at all.
KARINE POLWART, ‘Daisy’,
from the album Scribbled in Chalk (2006)
CONTENTS
Cover (#ulink_e36afbcf-7fcd-57b1-b6b5-168fd192c83f)
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
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 Prints
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
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Lucy Siegle
About the Publisher (#ue02b0c63-183b-5bd9-841b-29cbf5c131bd)
Introduction
Every year, around eighty billion garments are produced worldwide. Incredibly, when we buy one of them, we are able to learn very little about where it was made and assembled, and in what conditions. Consumers, retailers, designers and brands have a responsibility to the workers who make our fashion, but we’ve closed our eyes to a back story of exploitation and dangerous conditions. Every single one of our wardrobes is tainted. Seduced by the alliance of fast fashion with value prices, we’ve failed to notice that international trade rules and laws have their harshest impact on the most vulnerable in the supply chain. Where once cotton production was based on slavery, today’s fast fashion has brought the type of working conditions outlawed in the West at the turn of the twentieth century to every Developing World town with a fabric-processing or sewing facility.
I love fashion. But I want it to excite and inspire me, not to make me really, really angry. I have watched and aided and abetted as the fashion industry and consumers have sunk deeper and deeper into a cycle of exploitation of each other, the planet and the millions of workers who toil on the global assembly line in shocking conditions. But when I took a closer look at the true environmental and social impact of the seemingly innocuous and frippery-filled industry, I came to the conclusion that enough was enough.
For anyone labouring under the misapprehension that their individual decisions are too small and too insignificant to have any influence over the status quo, I want to set you straight. As the global population swells and the amount of natural capital, particularly untouched wilderness,
decreases, the planet is under unprecedented pressure. This means that it has never been more important to take wise individual decisions, as well as collective ones. It has never been more critical for us to consume with care and intelligence. It’s no secret that the present rates of consumption are unsustainable, and it will come as even less of a surprise that fashion’s are wildly out of kilter.
Why give fashion the time of day? Why not dress exclusively in old clothes and charity-shop finds? I’ve become pretty familiar with the school of thought that regards fashion as unnecessary and corrupt, the deep-green (and dare I say puritanical) doctrine that finds the very notion of fashion distasteful. But it is simply untrue to say that all fashion is superficial, needless and stupid, and to ignore the semiotics of style. The way we dress is fundamental to our self-expression.
But you can see where the distrust of fashion emanates from. We’ve recently shopped our way through a massive wardrobe upheaval, our buying patterns subverted by multinational businesses with the sole aim of making money for their shareholders. Almost overnight we have become used to consuming fashion with reckless, addicted abandon, buying more clothes than ever before, reversing centuries of fashion heritage, knowledge and understanding in the process. This is a revolution, and a largely unwelcome one. Strangely, given the extent to which we have altered our buying habits, there’s a lack of research of this consumerist phenomenon. Which is largely why over the past five years I’ve taken to carrying out my own unofficial surveys. Wherever I am, and whatever story I’m covering professionally, I usually spot a fashion story. For example, sent to Manchester to do an item on women ruining their feet by wearing high heels, I was more struck by the amount young women on limited incomes were spending on ‘it’ bags. Our fashion frenzies over the last decade tend to give away far more than just what is or isn’t on-trend.
It is a sign of the times that fashion regularly makes newspapers’ front pages or business pages, even if indirectly. Today’s stories are not just about Kate Moss or the size of Philip Green’s yacht (or both); they are about the more prosaic stuff of fashion, such as cotton. Occasionally this leads to some arresting headlines – ‘Cotton Bras are Rebounding!’ for example – but what it really confirms is that, with the exception
of the extractive industries and the food chain, few industries are as connected to the natural world as fashion. At its most simplistic, fashion is dependent on water, on crops such as cotton, and on a whole host of animal species. Yet the fashion industry has barely begun to factor in the consequences of its actions on habitat loss, shrinking biodiversity and climate change.
The good news is that there is a small window of opportunity in which to rescue fashion, the queen of all the creative industries. The rules are beginning to change. Garment workers are fighting back (because so many cannot continue to exist on the wages our wardrobes are willing to pay), and the conscientious consumer has the opportunity to fight alongside them. The huge retailers and brands need your custom, and the government wants you to keep shopping – but it is time to change the terms.
My fear is this: unless we as fashion-lovers and consumers assert ourselves, the industry will take the path of least resistance. The combination of the global recession and the inevitable price rises of majoringredients of the fashion supply chain, such as oil and cotton, will see the big players, the multinational brands and the giant retailers that control the UK high street, become even more ruthless in grabbing their margin. The victims will be the producers, the garment workers, and eventually you and me, as design and quality are sacrificed. I don’t want that to happen.
It is a battle: our weakness has become their stock in trade. Meanwhile, their enemy is the intelligent fashion consumer who asks the right questions and buys more carefully. This book is intended to guide you towards becoming that consumer. It takes you beyond the swing tickets and into the heart of contemporary garment production to reveal the truth about materials, production, and the wardrobe lives of our clothes. It also acknowledges the good as well as the bad, and aims to help you forge a fashion future that matches your aesthetic to your ethics. Ultimately, the intention is to reconnect you with the passion and excitement that turned you into a fashion-lover in the first place.
Lucy Siegle, April 2011
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 billion
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 jeans
every year. (On this small island we really went for it: in 2007 an incredible three pairs
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 times
the number of clothes you would have in 1980. You will spend at least £625
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 kilograms
of clothing (again, this is the average) – adding up to an estimated 1.72 million tonnes
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 quantity
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 site
of a sedate London department store near Oxford Circus. It had been converted into a 70,000-square-foot
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 circulated
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 all
, 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 stagnant
, 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 million
, 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 range
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 phenomenon
, 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 people
’ (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 menu
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
all 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 destination
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 cent
in just four years, between 2001 and 2005. I have shoeboxes full of receipts and wardrobes that are full to bursting point to prove my dedication. During the same period prices miraculously dropped by 14 per cent. Instead of buying fewer garments and pocketing the change, we actually bought more, increasing the volume of clothes we welcomed into our homes (often fleetingly) by a third
. And don’t forget accessories: a quick look at my intertwined hill of shoes, pumps, trainers, wellies (a single pair of wellies is apparently not enough: I have four) and heeled boots – a number of pairs of which are in limbo while I try to find one of the last remaining cobblers – demonstrates that I have bought into the extraordinary global fashion trend for them too: in 2003 total expenditure on footwear in Britain surpassed $50 billion for the first time. We now buy an average of 4.1 items
of clothing each a month. Trying to remember what you bought last month is a bit like trying to remember what you ate. You might deny that you bought anything, but you’ve probably overlooked something
– the vest top you picked up when you were walking past a high-street store, or the cute little pyjama short set you spotted in the concession store at the station.
Yes, I’m complicit, but isn’t it comforting that there’s always someone who appears to be much, much worse? I breathed one of those rather ungenerous sighs of relief when I interviewed another Lucy, a twenty-one-year-old unemployed graduate, for a TV show. Despite being yet to find a job and carrying a fairly heft y student loan debt, she confessed to spending between £200 and £500 on fashion a month. As she showed me through her wardrobe it was clear that she loved clothes. She planned what she would wear days in advance, she ripped pages from magazines with looks she wanted to emulate – she was serious about fashion. I really admired her sense of style: as a tall, svelte blonde she was a natural clothes horse, but she also knew how to throw a look together. She was one of those people who, reduced to a tiny budget, would almost certainly have had enough style intuition to dress from a car-boot sale and still look great. But she would never take that risk. Her great, expensive downfall in wardrobe terms was that she absolutely refused to wear the same thing twice. With a social life like Lucy’s, which centred on frequent visits to the same two or three West End clubs, she needed a lot of different looks. She claimed that her friends would have ostracised her for the crime of repeat showings. Given that A-listers like Kylie Minogue are frequently picked out in magazine fashion faux pas columns for wearing the same python shoes more than once, I didn’t doubt her.
Hardly a day went by without Lucy adding something new to her wardrobe. About 30 per cent of the rail she showed me was occupied by clothes still with their swing tickets, that she hadn’t yet worn. In 2008 Oxfam made a valiant attempt to get buyers like Lucy to donate these unworn but new clothes – a survey for Oxfam and M&S found that one in ten of us admitted to wearing just 10 per cent of our wardrobes, and estimated that there were 2.4 billion garments just hanging there gathering dust. It was the age group just above Lucy, women of twenty-five to thirty-four, who harboured unworn clothes of the most value – reckoned to be an average of £228
each.
Lucy’s main aspiration when I met her four years ago was to be a WAG. There’s contention over who coined the epithet – the Daily Mail claims it, but Grazia magazine certainly popularised it – but it has always been heavily associated with glamour and fashion. I don’t know if this is still Lucy’s life goal. Perhaps she has even achieved it. In which case her fashion consumption will have graduated to its own Premier League, typified by the fabled Cricket boutique in Liverpool that services the fashion needs of WAGs and soap stars. It stocks a heady mix of labels, from Balenciaga to Marc Jacobs, and has proved an irrepressible fountain of fashion stories, particularly for weekly magazines. When I visited in 2006 I asked the owner, Justine Mills, if negative comments in the style press had any effect – Alex Curran (now Mrs Stephen Gerrard) had, for example, been slated for teaming a canary-yellow Juicy Couture tracksuit with Moon Boots. Yes, there was certainly an effect, she told me: ‘After she’d been
on every worst-dressed list, we got orders from all over the country.’
THE QUICK DEATH OF SLOW FASHION
It’s difficult to remember life before this new model, but that was the time when my style consciousness was really forming. I do recall developing a sort of hunger to dress differently, and a passion for stripy tights and denim cut-offs. And despite the fact that I definitely didn’t live in a hub of fashion experimentation during those years – variously I lived in Devon, Derby and Mullingar in the centre of Ireland (you get the picture: these were not style capitals) – I don’t remember feeling particularly short-changed or lacking in inspiration. When I think of the 1980s I think almost automatically of The Clothes Show. I was a big fan of the original programme, launched in 1986. When it was relaunched in 2006 I watched it still, and appeared in a couple of series when the show broached the subject of ethical fashion. Funnily enough, even though the second run of The Clothes Show was screened well into the era when consumers could recreate any look in the blink of an eye for under £20, I never found it as compelling.
Back in the 1980s there was an aspiration to own stylish things, but you usually had to wait, and plan a strategic visit to a limited number of high-street stores – Miss Selfridge, Dorothy Perkins and Tammy Girl, for example. At other times you had to cobble together a look from charity shops, strange independent retailers and markets, or collective fashion spaces showcasing one-off designs or small runs from designer makers. The fabled boutiques of the 1960s and 1970s, Biba and Sex (which incidentally managed to revolutionise design and fashion without having to turn the production model on its head), led to collectives such as Hyper Hyper in South Kensington. (I should be clear here that I’m talking about the real Hyper Hyper, a glorious palace of kooky design that was essentially a market. The equivalent in the North-West was Manchester’s Aflex Palace. They were places where new designers with very small collections could sell in central locations. It had absolutely nothing in common with the Hyper Hyper that sprang up in Oxford Street in 2009, filled with synthetic ‘value’ clothes. So high was the plastic content of most of those garments that you could smell the hydrocarbons as you walked in.)
Another major feature of our wardrobes back then was that a large chunk of our clothes would have been manufactured in Britain, from fibre that was even processed or finished here. From leather stitching and sewing in Somerset to the ancient worsted industry (turning wool yarn into textiles for suiting) in Bradford and Huddersfield, to Coats Viyella producing for M&S in Manchester, ‘Made in England’ was not a surprising label to see attached to a piece of clothing. Nor did it mean artisanal one-man-band production, as it often does now, when more often than not courageous designer/makers try to give the concept of home-grown fashion some resonance. Until just over a decade ago M&S, something of a UK clothing behemoth, sourced 90 per cent
of its own-label clothing in Britain. As you may remember, it was called St Michael, and it was the only clothing that M&S sold. During World War II British clothing production units developed expertise in knocking out uniforms on an assembly line. It wasn’t a big stretch to alter this to menswear, and ultimately to the more profitable womenswear. There was always a degree of outsourcing, i.e. sending cut-and-sew work (the actual sewing part of the assembly) to manufacturers abroad, but this tended to be limited to manufacturers in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea
. In fact it’s fair to say that we had built up a rather impressive peacetime army of tailors, machinists, cutters, finishers, colourists, weavers and of course designers. They were served by the sort of infrastructure, of farmers producing sheep for wool, slaughterhouses producing for the leather trade, cobblers, menders and recyclers (who in those days took the more prosaic form of rag-and-bone men), that today’s sustainable style warriors can only dream about.
You know how the story goes. In 1981 the British clothing and footwear retail market imported just 29 per cent
of all it sold. By 2001 the figure had soared to 90 per cent. Any pretence to style self-sufficiency these shores once had was well and truly kicked into touch.
But the main, overarching distinction between then and now is that back then the fashion industry had built-in air vents to ease the pressure, formalities and systems that dictated the pace of consumption and production. The production model was based on a critical distinction between ‘fashion’ and ‘garments’. At the top of the tree was couture. Its USP was the amount of skilled labour inherent in each piece. The look was in the hands of the designer and creator, and the volume of repeated pieces was limited to tens at the most. Final finishings were typically handmade, and the buyer might not see the finished piece until the very end of the process. This meant that shows could only occur twice a year. The fashion weeks that take place today in New York, London, Paris and Milan (and everywhere else from Copenhagen to Tokyo, Toronto and Beijing) are derivative of these couture seasons.
The next rung down was the ready-to-wear lines – prêt à porter. Here the process picked up a little bit of speed, and the designer/maker process became less rarefied. Exclusivity was preserved in the level of design and often by the name of the designer, but the manufacturing process was more industrialised. Pieces were repeated in the hundreds and thousands.
Next came mid-market fashion, highly industrialised and cut from a standard pattern. These items were essentially basic garments with a fashion twist, and they were designed with a shorter lifespan in mind: it was usually envisaged that they would just last the season that ran for half the year – autumn/winter and spring/summer.
And then came the everyday garments: jeans, T-shirts, sweaters – the basic building blocks of a wardrobe.
Today we take it as read that everything we buy will have a direct lineage to the runway. Even wardrobe basics are expected to be infused with the aura of big design and big designers. The distinction between ‘garments’ and ‘fashion’ has become ever looser, until now we use those terms interchangeably. In effect, basic garments have become fashion. We expect everything, including knickers, nighties and stuff you wear to the gym to sweat in, to be up-to-the minute and preferably linked to a superstar designer.
So, we buy fast and cheap and in huge quantity. Not only is the global wardrobe heaving, its contents are being discarded and refilled at a spectacular rate. A 1998 study
by Dutch academics put the lifespan of the average piece of clothing in a (Dutch) wardrobe at three years and five months, during which it was on the body on a total of forty-four days. Until more up-to-date research is carried out it is difficult to assess today’s fashion turnover, but there is unanimous agreement that it has become much, much faster. We know by the rate at which we buy and the amounts we chuck into landfill each year that many pieces can expect to have the lifespan of a mayfly.
Meanwhile, someone like Lucy is locked in a cycle of sustaining a celebrity look on the non-salary of an unemployed graduate. Cricket, with its Prada and Balenciaga, is well out of reach. You might say it is a miracle that Lucy was able to sustain any type of wardrobe growth at all, but she managed, courtesy of another wardrobe miracle: fast fashion.
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