The new austerity
Fashion is not metaphysical. Researching WW2 austerity restrictions in Britain has really brought home to me how heavily it is influenced by practical constraints. What we think of as the defining style of an era doesn’t fall from the sky or arise from the unfettered brains of a few geniuses — it’s determined, at least in part, by what materials exist, how much labor is available and what it costs, the lifestyle of the people who wear it and the mood or mores of the culture it serves. Fashion may have its head in the clouds, but its feet are always planted firmly on the ground.
1940s Britain is one of the most clear-cut illustrations of this phenomenon. Design was all but dictated from Whitehall by austerity regulations (after all, there are only so many things you can do with 6 seams in a skirt). Voluminous silhouettes were impracticable, as they wasted manufacturers’ fabric rations and cut into their profit margins. Women’s dresses were styled to favor wool and rayon because the Nazis were squelching trade from cotton-growing countries. The war spread to Asia, rubber disappeared from the market and suddenly French knickers came in again (they buttoned up instead of using elastic). And so on.
The more I see of these chains of material cause and effect, the more I wonder whether we’re not living in the midst of a new austerity ourselves. Only this austerity isn’t brought about by war; it’s brought about by globalization, fiercer market competition, accelerating turnover, increased demand for growth and the race to the bottom dollar. In the name of the new austerity, material and labor costs must be cut, production runs must be increased, standardization must be encouraged and near-instant turnarounds must be facilitated so that retailers can keep selling us more, faster, for less. And although these austerities may help make the industry bigger, leaner and more profitable, our clothes are getting smaller, flimsier and shoddier.
From Dana Thomas’s Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster:
Luxury brands that were publicly traded had to answer to their shareholders, who wanted more of a return, more profits… How could luxury brands slash the production cost of their goods and maintain the same high level of quality? In fact, they couldn’t. There had to be concessions. In the name of profit — or, to put it more bluntly, greed — luxury brands began to compromise their integrity.
Some cut corners in ready-to-wear. “I remember being in fittings in the mid-nineties where the CEO came in and said, ‘Women don’t really need linings’,” one former major luxury brand assistant told me. Soon that became the industry standard. “There’s a raw-edge cutting, which is deemed post-Japanese avant-garde from a design standpoint, but actually is an easy way to cut production costs,” another luxury brand design assistant explained to me. “You can imagine how much less time and money it takes to make a dress or jacket if you don’t have to sew the outer fabric and lining together, press them, fold them back on themselves, press them again and add another seam to keep it together. If you do a raw edge, you just cut the edge and it’s done.” Another Italian brand trimmed costs by cutting sleeves half an inch shorter. “When you get to a thousand, you see the savings,” the assistant explained.
Many luxury brands cut costs by using cheaper materials. Example: In 1992, I bought a pink sleeveless Prada cocktail dress that was made of iridescent cotton and silk faille, fully lined and finished beautifully. It cost $2,000, but it is couture quality and will last forever. Ten years later, I bought a pair of thin cotton-poplin cropped trousers at Prada for $500. I put them on, and the gentle passing of my foot ripped the hem out. I put my hand in my pocket, and it tore away from its seam. I squatted down to pick up my two-year-old, and the derriere split open. I hadn’t had those pants on ten minutes and they were literally falling apart at the seams. I mentioned this to a former Prada design assistant. “It’s the thread,” he told me. “It’s cheaper and breaks easily.” When I told him about my gorgeous dress from 1992 that was as solid as a Rolls, he nodded. “That was then,” he said with a sigh.
I’ve been mulling over my “new austerity” theory for a long time, but as a shopper only. It would be nice to get the perspective of someone inside the industry who’s seen the changes of the last 20 years. With that caveat, here are some exhibits for the prosecution.
Exhibit A: Two decades of “shrunken”, “skinny” and “cropped” styles — sleeves, pant legs, jackets, belts, jeans. Our clothing has been literally shrinking, receding from our ankles, wrists and natural waists and squeezing us tighter and tighter. It may just be coincidence, but I can’t help noticing that these styles use less fabric and thus cost less to make. Apart from “boho” skirts made of cheap tissue-thin cotton, when was the last time we saw a truly voluminous mainstream look?
It’s weird. Throughout human history, the rich have paraded their wealth by dressing as big, as bling and as flamboyantly as possible.
If you’re like 90% of my readers, the two decades that have just ended were an era of unprecedented wealth for your country. So why is the vocabulary of that era’s styles — “shrunken”, “skinny”, “cropped” — more appropriate to the inmates of prisons and workhouses?
Exhibit B: The disappearance of nuance in sizing. Remember when buying shoes meant having your feet measured and then being offered multiple sizes and even (surely I’m dreaming this) multiple widths? I can grudgingly understand why catering to various widths might not be feasible in an increasingly competitive market, but when did shoe manufacturers decide that even half-sizes were not worth their while? More importantly, why did we let them?
Exhibit C: When did real leather become a luxury so rare that it had to be universally simulated? Even goods marked “genuine leather” are more often than not Frankenleather, made up of low-grade hide scraps held together with glue, coated with a thin layer of hide and textured to look more like the real thing. (This still counts legally as leather.) I suspect this is why patent and other deliberately fake-looking leather surfaces appear on the high street season after season but finishes like suede are less often seen. Where is all the leather going?
Exhibit D: Thinner and thinner knits (like J. Crew’s Dream sweaters, for example). Yes, some of them do drape nicely and look lovely, but I’m freezing.
Exhibit E: The decline of tailored design. Many of the women’s styles I see on the street are fit-free — either so stretchy as to be form-fitting on anyone, or shapeless. I also see stretch used inappropriately to replace tailoring in classic women’s shirts and jackets, which doesn’t look so great. Designing RTW in tailored styles is not impossible — as late as the 1920s, ready-to-wear women’s clothes were sold in standard sizes with the expectation that purchasers would have them tailored to fit — but it is more complicated. Now styles that depend on tailoring for success seem to have fallen by the wayside and clothes are designed to “fit” (stretch) right off the rack. (The small amount of tailoring that still exists is woefully confused about its identity. Women’s suits in the UK are a trainwreck.)
The new austerity: is this really a thing that is happening or am I going crazy? I welcome your comments. What have you observed on the streets and in the shops where you live?
Thank you so much for this article! I’ve basically taken the last 6 months to a year off from buying clothes because I have very clear ideas about what I want in a garment (and what looks good on my figure), and there is nothing in any of the shops that answers this need. When did firm seams become so unfashionable? When did every dress become made of cotton jersey knit? Since when is a collar too much to ask for? I have mentally consigned everything on the market to the American Apparelizing of clothing and am hoping to sit back and wait it out. I’m a bit nervous about that now that I’ve read your thoughts on the matter; will it be that classic silhouettes are gone for good?
Thank you for your article. The UK clothing market has certainely declined in quality and the prices are not as low as they used to be. Tthe main catalyst for me to start buying Vintage as a 16 year old was wanting to look like my fashionable elder relatives, who shopped vintage and second hand, and always looked stylish. I generally have never replaced my wardrobe each year and tend to wear my clothes for at least two years and then intermix with new pieces and expensive accesories and jewellery. My best lasting clothes aside from the Vintage has been dresses and skirts I bought from America from Forever 4 years ago! Mostly made from cotton and American made, I wonder if that still applies today? I have an awful time with shoes, the soles seem very thin, even with expensive shoes. The sides dig in rather it is plastic or leather, or they are really stiff. The best shoes I have ever had, have leather uppers and interiors. They have been resoled and reheeled numerous times. Now I tend to buy more of my clothes from independent designers from etsy or internet as I hate seeing lots of people wearing the same thing or variations of the design, and its better made and last longer which is something Im very glad I invested in when I had the income.
Vintage shoes are often incredibly good value — my top three favorite pairs of shoes are all 1940s and 1950s. Sturdy, elegant, comfortable. If you buy online you can often get a better fit than in-store, as many vintage shoes are non-standard widths and good vendors give exact internal measurements. And my favorite skirt is a classic tailored, gray wool flannel straight skirt made by St. Michael (M&S’s old own brand) that I bought from a charity shop. These items of clothing all came from mid-range brands of their time, but are so solidly made they are practically bulletproof.
Of course, the samples may be skewed because sturdier clothing from previous eras is more likely to have survived until now, but who is making clothes and shoes like this now, at any price? I am genuinely curious to know how much money I would have to hand over to get a cardigan, skirt or shoes that was well-made without being luxury priced and branded to within an inch of its life.
I recently tried on a shirt that was so flimsy, my thumbnail went straight through it. I do not have long or jagged nails, it was just that thin! I think the quality in clothes has gone down considerably and this book:Delux, How Luxury Lost its Luster, does a great job of explaining whta happened and why..
Good post! I think I noticed something was amiss in the 90′s when all of a sudden you couldn’t put your hands, nor anything else for that matter, in your pockets. Cost cutting indeed!
This makes me feel guilty, because I’m back in California visiting (I live in Denmark), so shopping here is like going on a 50% off everything sale. I’ve stocked up on tshirts at the Gap because it’s better quality than I can get at H&M in Copenhagen for less money (especially when they’re on sale) but I’m still not expecting them to last longer than until the next trip over here in a year or so. I’m really annoyed about the jeans though because I’m really tall, and they shrank a lot even though I didn’t put them in the tumble-drier. (And one pair shrank more than the other and the only difference is a different rinse – I’m going to end up cutting them off and making a pair of capris out of them, which is ANNOYING.) My sister is lucky because she has really short legs, so she just washes her jeans and takes them to a tailor to hem up. I wish.
In spite of all this discount shopping – I didn’t buy anything besides jeans that wasn’t made of a knit. I’ve learned my lesson as far as tailored things are concerned – I have to make them myself. Except I just don’t know what I’m going to do about the jeans.
On my first trip back to Toronto after I moved to the UK, I went on a huge (for me) targeted-strike shopping spree. Clothes in Canada just seemed to be better quality, generally, or at least way cheaper. And if there’s one thing that sucks more than a cheap flimsy top that patently cost nothing to make, it’s an EXPENSIVE flimsy top that patently cost nothing to make. I turn up my nose at cheap fashion in London because it all just looks so awful to me, but if I were living near a well-stocked Target, I wonder if I’d be singing a slightly different tune.
Interesting post. I also find the shrunken look disturbing–especially on men (see J. Crew). It seems that 10-15 years ago when all the clothing manufacturing moved to China, the quality was really quite good and the actual quantity of material was reasonable. I have older, made in U.S.A. clothes–dating back to the 1930′s that have nice fabric but are very badly made, so I don’t think the decline was just outsourcing. It seems that since the manufacturers can’t cut labor costs any lower, they are using less and less materials? Meanwhile they have to introduce more and more collections to keep sales up.
I really enjoyed this post. It brought up some things I have been thinking about lately, in regards to the vast consumerism and how companies try to cheapen products to increase their profits (while in turn making us buy things more often because their cheaper! I hate the endless cycle…). You also made some great points that I hadn’t really focused on; namely that clothing manufacturers might have been subtly using the trend for “smaller, tighter” to push those profit margins even further.
Honestly, the whole issue of cheap, throw-away products makes me sick. I don’t live a lavish lifestyle in any means–comfortably, but not excessively. I hate when I have to go purchase replacements on products that don’t last. I’d much rather cough up an extra $50 or $100 on something up front, than have to replace it in the next two years. (Recently we’ve had things from the vacuum to year-old car tires going! All because they were shoddily made and part of the “planned obsolescence” I hate.) I think one reason people have become less demanding about quality, is because they get greedy about quantity. They’d rather try and live like the rich and famous than live within their means. So because they can get 6o more things for the same price as 6 used to be (of higher quality, I might add), they opt for the more at the cheaper price and make. I’d much rather live with less than more. The amount of waste we’re generating in the West because of our excessive consumption and planned obsolescence is sickening.
Sorry for the little rant. lol. I just finished reading a book that dealt with the 40s and rationing (in terms of fashion), and it’s been something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. The fact that our grandparents made it through some pretty tough times on less (The Great Depression and then WWII), and our ancestors didn’t live with as much either, makes me wonder how wise this “new age of consumption” is? Are we just hurdling towards a black abyss of over-consumption and waste?
Thanks for the thought-provoking post!
♥ Casey
blog | elegantmusings.com
This is becoming my mantra — less stuff, more quality. (It helps that storage space is limited in London.) I’m experimenting with spending more on fewer individual garments — stay tuned for a post.
I’ve thought about this a lot lately. I had occurred to me that the poor quality and fit of clothing had to do with cost cutting but it had never occurred to me that the styles themselves might have to do with it. I’m so tired of having clothing that doesn’t fit properly and falls apart. I’ve just started to teach myself to sew in the hope that eventually I can make myself a wardrobe that fits well and will last. I stay at home with my children but they are too young for me to be sewing much with them around so it will probably be years before I achieve my goal.
Does anyone else hate how stretch added to denim or tops is touted as being a way to achieve a better fit? The jeans always seem to be sagging off of me by the end of the day and the shirts really won’t fit you any better with a wee bit of Lycra added. I’d much rather figure out how to make myself dungarees that I like (and in 40′s and 50′s styles, thank you very much) and that fit me very well so that I don’t NEED any stretch.
Fantastic post, and a lot of issues I’d never thought of before (the trend towards skinny jeans does look very suspicious once you think about it in terms of manufacturers’ bottom lines!) And of course the disposability of cheap clothing is also quite handy for manufacturers to keep us coming back for more! I suppose it’s something of a trade off, and that given the move towards fast fashion and short-lived trends, the manufacturers assume that we won’t mind if the dress we bought six months ago has fallen apart, since it won’t be fashionable anyway. This is quite exploitative, imo.
I had to change my shoe purchasing habits about a year ago when I realised that as well as wearing out within a month (and being seriously ethically dodgy too), my £2 primark trainers were giving me tendonitis and other foot problems. I now only own two pairs of shoes that I wear regularly, but that provide proper support, and will actually last (I’m writing a blog post about the class privilege inherent in my being able to say that, however!) I’m trying to approach clothing in the same way as well – one thing I realised from participating in Me-Made-May is that the number of clothing items I actually need is very small.
Randomly I was thinking about the shoe thing the other day. I haven’t had my feet measured since I was about 8 and boy did I love those machines (particularly when they were upgraded to electronic ones where you stood on the machine and it automatically moved blocks in around your foot to get correct measurements, I always expected it to eat my foot!).
Unfortunately, as a result of growing up having my feet measured every time I was bought a new pair of shoes has left me with a severe disability. I have no clue what size shoe I am. It doesn’t help that different shops and even different styles within a shop can come up different sizes. I have recently eBayed about a dozen pair of shoes that, despite loving, I just couldn’t pretend actually fit me any more (and then put the profits towards … well, more shoes actually – I didn’t say I was smart).
Not only are shoes that fit becoming increasingly hard to find, but finding shoes that don’t tear my feet up, don’t have soles so thin I feel like Sam Vimes and can read the streets of Cardiff like I’m walking a map is nigh on impossible, and don’t even get me started on shoes that last longer than a summer. Even wellies are now being made to last only one festival.
We live in a disposable nanny society that has standardised almost every aspect of our lives. I freeze every winter or end up looking like the Michelin man and have soggy feet from the leaky shoes I’m wearing that don’t fit me. I don’t know about anyone else but I’m a little over it.
I very much agree with you on this topic. With the only exception being the use of leather. Being a vegetarian I’m glad if leather is used less and less. I do believe leather is irreplaceable in some cases like for quality shoes or protective motorcycling gear, but why should a couch or a purse have to be in leather? That’s only because of the overuse of animals. That being I’m glad that leather is imitated even if it’s still not up to the same quality.
Us people who can make our own clothes are in a privileged position in this day and age. We can wear clothes that FIT us. Our clothes can be as covering as we want them to be, which is probably why many Christians make their own modest clothing themselves. The store bought clothing is often to flimsy and showing. Depending on how much effort we put into it, we can have couture clothing without the price-tag, and better quality at that if the quote above is to be believed! We can wear the style we want to without having to be fashion victims: which makes us unique, creative, daring and maybe even ahead of fashion!
Very interesting post. I tend to think that $2000 is the price you have to pay for a nice cocktail dress, $500 for a quality pair of trousers, $253 for a quality pair of jeans (I personally try to only buy organic cotton, as conventional cotton causes so much harm to the environment and the workers – therefore $253 is the true cost of a pair of jeans, it’s just not reflected in the price of a pair of conventional cotton jeans as the cost is being absorbed elsewhere – by the people and land that produced them)
But obviously you can’t even get a quality pair of trousers for $500 any more. I think with the luxury brands now you just pay for the name as often as not, but any meaning the name represents has been lost. I won’t wear something just because it has a name on it, unless I know that name has a reputation for the highest quality. The “trickle down” from luxury to high street seems to have been lost too – it’s more of a “trickle up” by the looks of things.
As to the industry perspective, I wonder if you read Fashion Incubator. I bet she would have a thing or ten to say on this issue.
Oh, I only wish she would! Kathleen is the one who originally opened my eyes to the corner-cutting in design that leads to (e.g.) stupid amounts of sleeve ease in commercial patterns.
oh, that is interesting; i never thought having too much ease in the sleeves would have anything to do with cutting costs. i’ll have to check out kathleen’s blog.
Your blog has made me rethink a lot of my clothing choices in past months, so unsurprisingly I agree with most of your assessment here. That said, the quote from the Deluxe book really rubs me the wrong way, as does the entire concept of the book. Is it the “integrity” of couture houses that she’s mourning, or the fact that even using her privileged funds, she can’t get an outfit that’s tangibly different from what the dirty proles wear (“as solid as a Rolls”)? Because if we’re all wearing badly-made clothes made of low-quality fabrics, I’m not exactly shedding tears about the fact that rich people do, too.
Although I guess — I mean, I hope — that she addresses issues of consumer class and privilege elsewhere in the book.
The book is really worth a read — the author may belong to the Prada-wearing classes, but she is diligent in exploring the social implications of the luxury industry and its effects on the people of various socioeconomic backgrounds who support and buy into it, from Chinese factory workers to prostitutes who prefer to be paid in Prada to the newly rich in Asia, the Middle East and Russia. I think her point in this passage is that couture used to be the end of the market where you could reliably obtain top-quality goods, but if they’re cutting corners even in couture — if luxury is becoming a matter of smoke, mirrors, glue and cheap thread — what hope is there for the rest of us?
I agree with Kitty and a few others. We’re in a credit ran, convenience based society now. In regard to everything from clothing to food to our houses!
When the Industrial Revolution hit, it created this novel new concept called “leisure time”…very slowly mind you, over the decades, but as more and more day to day life aspects were mechanized, people had more and more time for leisure activities. That process though has been escalated post-WWII to now where ALL people have is leisure time. People expect to be able to access Facebook at work and whine when they can’t. Someone else cooks for them (or it takes two minutes to microwave dinner), someone else makes their clothes and if they want something new they can buy it for cheap, instantly. Its come so far that now instead of using that leisure time to better themselves, enjoy life, people are just planted on couches doing NOTHING but watching Lost.
Wow….sorry. Got a bit wrapped up in my head and viewing it this was makes it really seem like we’ve reached the “decline” aspect of the Roman Empire.
We have more money, more time, access to better materials and products if we CHOOSE…and yet our culture is really falling off the charts.
I’ve noticed a decline in quality even within the last few years. I used to be able to buy a T-shirt that would wear for two years or more, now they are tissue-thin, have atrocious quality control, and I’m luck to get a season out of them.
And don’t even get me started on stretch denim as a substitute for properly cut jeans. UGH.
The fact is, while on the surface we in the US and UK appear to have an ever-increasing standard of living, it’s all been built on cheap credit. Real wages have been declining w/r/t the cost of living since the 1970s. Also, as you’ve pointed out before, quality is a sort of habit. If an entire population expects to be cold and miserable all the time, that’s exactly the kind of clothes they’re going to get.
Good point about the leather. God knows we eat enough beef, where are those hides going?
Even t-shirts–they’ve gotten so thin and flimsy. It’s a sad state of affairs, and I like to think it’s one of the reasons I knit my own sweaters. At least there I know the quality is good … unlike my sewing! I can sew a straight seam together, but my homemade clothing always looks so … homemade. And that’s assuming I can find decent material anywhere, since there are so few good fabric stores any more. Sigh.
You really hit on a nerve here. I notice every year my favorite store that sells nice short sleeved fitted t-shirts, the cotton fabric gets thinner and thinner. Plus, my boys always blow out their jeans in the knees even when I have them change out of their “school clothes” and I think I’m the only one in the neighborhood that cuts them off at the knee and hems ‘em up for shorts in the spring. The ‘new austerity’ is just corporations making do with cheaper goods. My seamstress friend asks why would people want to save and buy quality things and have them for years when you can go to Target and buy a whole new wardrobe for 200 bucks instantly and then it wears out you dump it and buy more.
Like Girlnextdoor brought up ‘vegan leather’ that is incredible! It’s plastic for goodness sake! It’s like the 100% organic cotton jeans for 253.00, please.
The new austerity is not in your head it’s alive and well and doing some big corps some very nice profits.
Thanks for the post, really makes a person think. Like think about sewing me some pants!
All of this is so true! I’m not old enough to remember (or even to have been alive during) the era of real quality clothing, but I’ve definitely noticed the decline in quality since I’ve begun picking out my own clothes. For instance, my first “purse” (actually a mini backpack – ah, the 90s…) was bought for me by my mother after much begging on my part. It was all leather. I know it can’t have cost too much money, as my mother would never have bought an expensive accessory for an eleven-year-old! Now I go into stores and see purses that cost $200 or more made of “vegan leather”. Crazy.
I have suspected the profit motive in shrunken, short, tight clothing for some years. I believe it is the source of the general lack of understanding of fit, and perhaps the source of love of “vintage” items. People don’t realize that the “vintage” look amounts to proper fit.
I take the argument as stipulated, but looking back on the 1990s and pretending that I would have been one of the people in the market for a $2,000 cocktail dress is as silly in my case as pretending that I’d be one of the ladies with the fancy dresses instead of one of the ladies manning the mechanical looms in 1900! I am not sure which tradeoff I’d prefer – absolutely not being able to have more than, say, three outfits, however nice, or being able to have as many rayon-stretch t-shirts as I want, even if none of them fit right. Surely there is a middle way!
At least now we know this kind of textile manufacturing is wrong, you know? It still happens, but at least the machines are sized for fifteen-year-old girls, not preadolescents. When we talk about how people used to dress their kids nicer then they did today, we’re not thinking about these kids, are we? I mean, okay, it’s a cheap trick to pull out Dorothea Lange to make a point – but every description of this book that I’ve read has kind of annoyed me, because the idea that it’s a tragedy that there are more clothes going around and everybody’s buying them is kind of hard for me to fit in my head.
You can totally get organic cotton trousers that are good enough for business casual and picking up toddlers for $40 on Sierra Trading Post or $80 from the brand names Sierra Trading Post sources, by the way. And I’m active and go through pants fast and have never had them wear out sooner then two years into wearing them – this is with things like gardening in my good clothes.
p.s. I don’t mean that those sharecroppers should have been taking better care – I just mean that poverty used to mean that everybody in the family might not be able to actually cover themselves.
This is a valid point and one that sometimes gets lost in the cheap-clothing debate. Even 50 years ago, kids were still running around barefoot because there were no shoes below a certain price point. People in Victorian London regularly kidnapped children in order to steal their clothes, because new clothes were expensive enough for the market in secondhand and stolen clothes to be very lucrative. Children of poor families literally ran around in rags. I see where you’re coming from — I would have spent much of my adult life in jail for indecent exposure if there were no such thing as a five-dollar t-shirt. I’m definitely pro-affordable clothes for all.
What I’d like to see is the end of this crazy pile-’em-high-and-sell-’em-cheap fashion bubble we’ve got going on and a re-evaluation of the meaning of quality and value. Don’t forget that, as with most other things priced for sale to poor people, cheap clothes sometimes cost more in the end.
I never noticed that, but I see what you’re saying. What I find amazing is that people would rather dress in these “styles” than in good quality clothing. I read once that at the turn of the 20th century, 1900 or so a suit of clothing or an outfit for a woman cost the equivelent of a years wages for a laborer. Now days a Laborer gets around 9 dollars an hour and could buy a really NICE outfit or suit for the price of a weeks worth of work.
Why don’t they? maybe because of all the other goods and services that we’ve GOT to have according to the ads on TV, or maybe because we’ve never learned that four letter word our parents and grand parents used regularly, (SAVE) “sorry darling we don’t have the money for that, we’ve got to save our money so we can buy you new shoes and a new coat in the fall, you’re growing like a weed.”
And there’s the death of play clothes for kids. The kid wears jeans to school so it seems silly to make them change out of them to play, til they tear a hole in them and it isn’t IN to sew or iron on a patch to them so they have to buy new ones.
Boy, we could teach a class from this subject couldn’t we?