To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out the World?. Lucy Siegle
to the weekly style bible Grazia in 2005. The emphasis was on refurbishing your look on a weekly rather than a monthly basis, and this tied in perfectly with the emergence of the big value players. Readers could afford to have it all. You could change outfits four times a day, live the wardrobe life of a WAG, pretend you were Lindsay Lohan if you so desired. For a while nothing appeared able to dent the crown of the value players, not even conflicting or troubling undertones. So it did not overly matter that almost at the same time in 2005 that Primark’s Arthur Ryan was named ‘most influential man in high-street fashion’ by fashion industry bible Drapers, his retail empire was named ‘most unethical retailer on the high street’ by Ethical Consumer magazine (a publication with fifteen years of experience in grading companies). If it hurt, it didn’t show.
Even so, the discounters can get defensive about cheap, cheap fashion, and sometimes consumers get defensive on their behalf. In common with food, where retailers go misty-eyed and tell us about old ladies on pensions now being able to afford ready-made pasta dishes, the same retailers tell us that this is why they have – in the manner of a caped crusader – wrestled down the price of style, democratising the cost of clothes for families on low incomes so that small children can keep warm. The value retailers like to propagate the idea that they are producing ‘affordable’ clothes for vulnerable consumers who would presumably be reduced to wearing rags if it wasn’t for the service Asda, Tesco, Peacocks, Matalan, New Look, Primark et al. provide with their commitment to ‘family apparel’.
But before we give Terry Leahy, Arthur Ryan and the rest of them good citizen awards, it is worth looking at who has really catapulted these retail gods into millionaires’ row. affordability in fashion is a hot potato of an issue. I see no reason why fashion shouldn’t be affordable, but shouldn’t the fast-fashion and value retailers drop the Hovis act? The fact is that they moved aggressively into the fashion market, desperate to claim as big a slice as possible of this retail pie, and more often than not their prime audience is not the low-income family but the well-heeled fashion fan.
For starters, it’s interesting to see how quickly value retailers move house, shifting into ever more prestigious retail locations. A flagship store plus all the positive press coverage that comes with it attracts a richly profitable clientèle. As one analyst puts it, these factors seem ‘to have de-stigmatised76 discount shopping for the middle-income groups who were [once] the mainstay of the mid-market’. Another expert, writing on Primark’s ability not only to hold on to the top retailer spot
(in terms of the highest-value share of the clothing market) during the recession-plagued year of 2009 but to increase that share of its market by 18.2 per cent, was in no doubt about which audience the retailer should be thanking: ‘[Primark] enjoys77 a relatively young customer base which has been least impacted by the economic downturn because of fewer financial responsibilities.’
Make no mistake, the value retailers are gunning for fashion’s most voracious consumers. That includes the 16 per cent of consumers, innovators and early adopters who can be termed ‘highly fashion aware78’: who are not just conscious of trends, but likely to act on them. So it’s no surprise that British consumers now buy 40 per cent of our clothes at ‘value retailers’ with just 17 per cent of our clothing budget. The value retailers are clearly as fashion-conscious as everyone else, going out of their way to attract designers and labels with high-fashion overtones. As I write, Asda is just about80 to launch its second collection with Barbara Hulanicki, world-famous as the founder of 1960s brand Biba.
You might also discover – and I was alerted to this by an article in the style press – that once a value retailer has its feet under the style table, it might ditch its ‘value’ dogma altogether. In March 2010, for example, Tesco launched F&F Couture, a sixteen-piece collection. Pieces included a puffb all polyester dress at £140. ‘F&F signifies81 a new era for supermarket fashion,’ Jan Marchant, Buying Director of Tesco Clothing, said at the launch of the label.
RECESSION CHIC
‘Don’t worry!’ I’m blithely told when I have one of my little turns about levels of consumption and the march of fast, cheap fashion. Ever since the global downturn I have been confidently reassured that the pants and sock discarders, the Primark bargain litterers will change their ways during a recession. By the end of it, they’ll be darning their socks in a wholly sustainable manner. To be fair, it did appear that as the economy nosedived in 2008–09 planet fashion began suggesting that there were choices to be made. These may have been small gestures, or pyrrhic victories, but there was some evidence that fashionistas were tightening their tiny little belts. ‘Gucci or Gas?’ asked Harper’s Bazaar. OK, it was hardly a blueprint for surviving the global downturn, but you get the idea.
Meanwhile, experts predicted that there should be an average rise in womenswear prices by 4.7 per cent between 2008 and 2012. We’ll return to this later, but labour costs have increased by 50 per cent in the past four years across provinces in south-eastern China – aka the sewing room of the world. Fast fashion is dependent on cheap fibres, predominantly polyester and cotton – which account for more than 80 per cent of all fibre production worldwide. Both are dogged by sustainability issues. These factors suggest that the fast, cheap party we’ve been experiencing for over a decade should by rights have started to wind up.
If I had a pound for every time I’ve been told that the recession would take the heat out of the way we acquire and use fashion, I’d have enough for a real aviator jacket. But rumours of the death of fast, cheap fashion have been greatly exaggerated for two main reasons. Firstly, we’ve adapted to this new style paradigm so enthusiastically that it’s difficult to break the habit. Secondly, value fashion offers us the moon on a stick, and anaesthetises us from the real issues in our wardrobe.
In fact the value retailers have never had it so good. They now take a bigger slice of the collective wardrobe than ever before. In January 2009 Primark overtook Asda82, Walmart’s representative on UK earth, as the biggest low-price clothing retailer. There was more to come. Despite reporting ‘challenges’ such as cotton and synthetic fabric costs, the value retailer overtook Asda and M&S to reach the coveted top spot of the largest clothing retailer83 in the UK by volume (i.e. for all clothes sold) by the summer of 2010. In November that year Primark announced that it would be opening six new shops in time for Christmas. Even as times became progressively harder across all sectors, where fashion was concerned the value retailers appeared to have been given a get-out-of-jail-free card. In September 2010, according to the office for National Statistics, while the rest of the retail trade was in a slump, non-food sales for supermarkets were soaring, and clothing and footwear sales rose by 6.1 per cent84 by value and 4.8 per cent by volume compared to the same month the year before. In April 2010 Tesco clothing sales had broken through the £1 billion barrier85 for the first time.
The ascendancy of the value retailers might even be boosted by extra customers in a time of recession, as there will inevitably be some flight downmarket by middle-class consumers. Within hours of the announcement in October 2010 that in future child benefits would be means tested, independent fashion retailers and labels at the pricier end of the market were fearing for their own livelihoods. The connection might not be immediately obvious, but in 2013 benefits to many middle-income families will be cut, and according to independent fashion retailers this money was previously additional disposable income for the household that went on bolstering the wardrobe. ‘A middle-class lady86 [with one child] gets about £80 month in benefits, so in three months she has enough to buy one of my dresses. It’s in effect her spending-spree money, and that’s who I sell to,’ Tanya Sarne, owner and founder of premium