To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out the World?

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 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 third22. 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 items23 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 £22824 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 been25 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 cent28 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 Korea26. 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 cent27 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 study29 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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