To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out the World?. Lucy Siegle
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