It costs a lot of money to look this cheap
Here’s a fact for you: In 2009, the UK’s leading clothing retailer was… George at Asda.
Let’s pause to let that air for a moment.
If you’re in the US or Canada, you may remember the TV ads a few years ago when the George line was introduced at Wal-Mart. There was a hot girl skipping around the streets of London in a towel, leaping on and off Routemaster buses, doing bell kicks in the shadow of Big Ben, etc. I think the strapline was “fashion straight off the streets of London” or something similar. This ad, while being mostly a tissue of lies (any woman wandering around London in a towel would end up knifed or with hypothermia or both, and Routemasters were scrapped back in 2005 thanks to health and safety), was accurate in one regard at least. If you want the authentic London look, head for Wal-Mart, because the average Londoner’s clothes are cheap, unflattering and made in vast foreign factories.
If you live in London, chances are that your clothes come, if not from Asda, then from one of the many high-street chain stores that dominate the ready-to-wear market — Next, Oasis, Zara, Reiss, H&M, Primark, Karen Millen. Let’s say you work in an office. You’re probably wearing: a thin sweater with 3/4-length sleeves, made of synthetic fibers or a poor-quality wool blend; a cotton-lycra work shirt of dubious fit, also with 3/4 length sleeves; M&S bra and panties; standard work trousers with little or no wool content; thin socks you bought at the market; and the shoes… let’s not talk about the shoes. Your quasi-leather ballet flats or wobbly heels are cheap and shiny, they offer no support, they are sad. You’ve spent over £200 on this outfit, your feet hurt and probably you are cold. You are wearing a full ensemble of false economy.
I’m not singling out Londoners as inherently bad dressers; I dressed this way for the first few years I lived here, because I had no money and no choice. I’m trying to point out that if you live in London and you’re not rich or making a conscious effort, it’s difficult to dress any other way. For numerous complex reasons I don’t fully understand, England has been almost totally colonized by the evil empire that is modern mass-market RTW. It’s painful to live through but it’s useful to observe, because it’s here that I’ve seen the phenomenon in its purest form.
Value in clothing has become merely notional now that clothes are so cheap to make and required to last only a year or so. Any meaningful link between what you pay for clothing and what you get seems to have been not only severed but obliterated from the public mind. People wander around shell-shocked by their high-street fashion victimhood — damp and cold and dowdy, but only very dimly aware of it. My English boyfriend owns a garment I will call a windbreaker for lack of a better word, because it is not windproof. It is not waterproof. It is two shades of gray. It has no hood, no pockets and no insulation. It is a garment without beauty or function. The shop called it “streetwear”, and he paid over £100 for it. Putting the money in a pile and setting it on fire would have kept him warmer. Multiply that by the population of Britain and you have a monstrous epidemic of unconscionable waste.
Ranting about value for money in clothing is up there in the public imagination with trainspotting and fighting the metric system — a harmless preoccupation for the elderly and eccentric. But understanding quality in the things you wear is a Jedi power for modern life. The moment the penny dropped for me was the moment I realized, while huddling at a bus stop on a damp, chill November morning, that by buying three cheap high-street “winter” coats in three years, I had spent more money than if I’d just bought one very good quality coat at the outset, and was still shivering. It was Terry Pratchett’s Boots theory in action.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness.
– Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
That was when I decided to save up and buy a winter coat from J. Crew that cost twice as much as any coat I’d ever owned before. It’s heavy double-cloth, lined with Thinsulate, in basic black. It’s classic, well-fitted and warm even when wet. I call it my Cloak of Invincibility, and it gives me a warm glow of pleasure every single time I put it on. I cried buckets when it was stolen and had to buy a replacement, pushing the total cost up to £500 or so, but it is still worth every penny. I’ve never gone back.
I’m looking forward to Fashion on the Ration because I’ve wanted for a long time to move away from the standard wardrobe containing a lot of offhandedly-chosen garments of not very good quality toward a smaller wardrobe of well-coordinated, high-quality clothing, and this will force me to do it. I don’t think striving for quality in clothing need cost an exorbitant amount — £50 is an acceptable price for a sweater, and I’ve found as-new Brora cashmere on eBay for that much — but the difference is more than economic; it’s the difference between a garment you love and a garment you don’t. That’s as big as the difference between Facebook friends and real friends.
If you’re reading this, I assume you’re someone who thinks about clothes. How and why do you buy? What does value for money mean to you? What is your personal Cloak of Invincibility?
I love how you’ve said it here, I also want “to move away from the standard wardrobe containing a lot of offhandedly-chosen garments of not very good quality toward a smaller wardrobe of well-coordinated, high-quality clothing.”
Stumbled upon your blog from Sew Retro and started reading older posts, and this one really got me thinking… I work in the apparel industry, but I love to sew and appreciate quality over quantity, so I live both sides of the argument. I’m cutting production costs at work, then I go home and carefully sew up a one-of-a-kind dress with handcrafted details. The more I sew, the less interested I am in buying ‘disposable’ clothing…and the more I want my wardrobe to be well-planned, practical and of a higher caliber.
Anyways I’m rambling, just wanted to say I enjoy your writing and following your challenge!
So I went back in your archives, which I like to do for blogs that I like, to see where people are coming from.
“I’ve wanted for a long time to move away from the standard wardrobe containing a lot of offhandedly-chosen garments of not very good quality toward a smaller wardrobe of well-coordinated, high-quality clothing,”
AMEN, SISTER!
This is my goal too. More coming soon on Dart and Hem. and glad to hear the thinsulate lined J.Crews are all I dream them to be.
Thanks so much for this post. I just found your blog a couple of days ago and am fascinated with your Fashion on the Ration project. I completely see the logic in purchasing higher quality more expensive clothing over the cheap thrills that we are all hypnotized by at times! Keep it up! I can’t wait to see where this project takes you.
Thought-provoking and depressing in equal measure… Actually, today I’m wearing entirely my own label – jeans, stripey top, and fleece jumper. Only the shoes were storebought, and I can’t even remember when that was! It’s funny you mention your big winter coat being lined with thinsulate – I set out to make the warmest ever coat last winter after being frozen and windburnt too many times on my alking commute across Tower Bridge, so I interlined mine with microfleece. A combination of the wool coating, microfleece interior, and silk lining seriously does the trick. My only regret is following conventional wisdom and not interlining the lower sleeve (since it’ll be against the body, you don’t need the extra layer they say) – on these especially cold days, I can feel the wind creep in along a thin strip of the back of my arm… d’oh!
I only wear clothes I’ve made myself or bought in charity shops (excluding underwear!) – it’s amazing the quality you can suddenly afford if you shop this way and are prepared to hunt through the racks of Primark nastiness that fill charity shops these days. If you make (and customise) your own clothes you can get a good fit too – my sewing machine has paid for itself over and over. I often buy garments a hundred sizes too big just for the fabric. You can also be sure your beloved garment wasn’t made in a vast sweatshop by Chinese children.
I’ve noticed that with socks. I love socks, and I have a whole dresser drawer full of cheap, cute socks…but the ones that I wear now? The three pair I’ve knitted myself out of $25/ball sock yarn. They’re so good that when I knit my parents pairs for Christmas, they’re fighting over them.
I really enjoyed reading this post.
I’ve been going through a clothing revolution myself. I work at home so I don’t need much office wear, going in less than once a month. In some ways, it’s great as I can buy one or two outfits and that is all I need for “dressing up”, but in other ways, it is bad as I have very quickly lost my grip on fashion. However, I could look at it as a blessing in disguise. I need less “nice” clothing, and so when I do buy some, I can afford to spend more. I ruthlessly gutted my wardrobe of things I just don’t or can’t wear anymore (body changes post baby). So I’m down to a skeleton crew of clothes and am trying to be careful as I build it back up.
The thing about mass market clothes is that frequently the cuts are designed for “typical” shapes. Many women have shapes and curves (or lack thereof) that off the rack clothes just don’t fit, particularly if they are cheaply made. When you learn to sew, not only can you build that quality in, you can make clothes that fit YOU, not some mythical creature with a body like a dress form.
I live in a chilly, damp, rainy climate (seattle) and jackets, socks, shoes can’t be faked if you intend to walk or catch the bus anywhere outside. You need to gear up with things that work in the weather and they are not cheap.
I am excited to read more about your rationing; it’s a great idea. Best of luck on it.
I think part of the problem is that a lot of people simply don’t know what good quality clothes look or feel like. If you’ve never had anything truly well made, you don’t know how much of a difference it makes in fit and ease of wear. Since I’ve started buying vintage clothes, I’ve noticed that a lot of the pieces from the 40s and 50s are beautifully lined and have little details like extra buttons and hidden fastenings that make them fit so much better. Now I know to look for good quality fabric and well made garments, while previously I just assumed that the more expensive something was, the better made it was, which is daft as everything seems to be made in China these days.
So true! Fit is a problem as well — we’re so used to fit provided by stretch knits that it’s hard to get a feel for how a tailored garment should sit. This is a problem to me when I’m sewing; I’m still a long, long way from mastering fit because often I don’t know what good fit looks like, especially in garments with a very different line from modern clothes. But you’re right, vintage garments can provide useful clues.
Yes, yes, and yes. I flat out stopped buying clothes last year because they were always crap with too-short sleeves and too-thin material. I can be badly dressed and cold for free.:-P
I’m a stay at home London mum, trying to balance my husband’s salary between the four of us and not doing particularly well at it, so clothes shopping is a real issue, specially when I remember how much money I used to have, sigh. So for the last 6 years I’ve been shopping on the cheap and have come to the conclusion, like you, that it isn’t actually cheap. It’s been six years now since I’ve had to drop my clothes budget (from for example £70 trousers to £15) and for the first three or four years I got by because the clothes I’d brought pre-kids were reasonable enough quality to last but clothes no matter how well made will last forever in a
house full of small kids. So when I first had to start supplementing my wardrobe with cheap tops for a tenner, I was shocked by the quality of the material, how badly they washed, how quickly they became unbearable, even forgetting for a moment the horrible skimpy cut. I had to buy new boots, I bought a pair for £40, I walk everywhere and the soles wore thin in a couple of months, I bought another pair for £40, within a month the nail holding the sole on had broken through into the boot and into my foot, that prompted me to scrape some money together and spend £200 on boots, that was 3 years ago, I’m still wearing them, so money saved.
The whole thing prompted me to become interested in sewing and I’m slowly creating my own wardrobe, far better.
My hat is off to you!
It’s interesting how many people, me included, have taken up sewing in recent years partly or mostly because of dissatisfaction with the quality and ethics of mass-made clothing.
Until very recently I was guilty of exactly this – buying an excessive amount of cheap clothes, some that I love, but most that are just okay. I work at Oxford Circus – it’s an office joke that I do an inventory of every clothes shop’s collections during my lunch hour, and I’ve been known to hide shopping bags from my boyfriend when I get home.
However, since becoming a burgeoning seamstress I’ve totally gone off shopping. I still love looking at clothes, but nothing seems good enough anymore. The joy of sewing is that you can make something that you lurrrrrve – perfect pattern, perfect fabric, perfect fit and lots of little gorgeous touches that make you swoon…
I think my attitude to clothing has change a lot since I started making my own. I’ve started looking for things that actually look good with my body type and not just what’s on fashion at the time. Also my new awareness of fabric and techniques means that I’m much more aware of what I’m buying, and I’ve come to find that in the main UK shops the link between quality and cost has completely disintegrated, hideously expensive tops in cheap fabrics, or cheap fashion dresses made from good fabric but with such poor quality stitching that you can only wash them once. As far as I’m concerned the biggest problem is that we’re exposed to such I high volume of rubbish that people aren’t capable of picking out the gems. Also I fully agree with your comments on footwear, by buying cheap non-supportive footwear people are not only causing themselves problems now they’re setting themselves up to be crippled in their future, and I really don’t want to be spending my old age with bunions and flat feet.
I’ve reached the same conclusion; it’s probably wiser to save up and buy quality than to buy loads of cheap clothes. And especially with shoes, I will never buy cheap shoes again!
I’ve kind of got another angle to it though: for me it’s more about actually making a thought-through decision if I REALLY want this piece of clothing or not than to buy more expensive clothes only. I have some clothes from H&M and other chains that I’ve worn about a million times, and other that I’ve worn once. I think part of the problem with the cheap chains is that it’s so cheap that it’s easy to just buy things, things that you don’t really need. I got fed up with the piles of clothes that I never wear, they drown me!
That kind of decision – the well thought through one – is easier to make when you buy more expensive clothes than when you buy really cheap clothes.
And obviously, “my” way of shopping takes some knowledge of materials and quality, you have to pick the gems… (a lot easier for us seamstresses!).
Personally I love shopping quality designer clothes at outlets. Half my wardrobe is bought that way… at a fraction of the price. And after I started to buy that kind of clothes I’ve truely realised the value of quality in clothes (and I might just buy them at full price some time…).
I like the “used Rolls-Royce” method of clothes shopping — buy yesterday’s luxury item for cheap! I have a couple of male friends who are addicted to vintage Grenson shoes.