The Project: Converting thrifted cashmere sweater into cardigan.

The Mission: A trip to the nearest haberdashery supplier reasonably likely to stock everything I need.

Supplies purchased:

• 2 m poly satin ribbon in color sort of vaguely approximating cardigan (they didn’t have any green grosgrain)
• 1 spool thread in color a bit closer to my cardigan
• 12 shell buttons
• 2 seam rippers

Total cost: £15.28 [convert this to your local currency]

• Seam rippers: £2 each
• Shell buttons: 60p each
• Ribbon: 40p/metre
• Thread: £1
• Tax (17.5%): £2.28

Total time spent: 2 hours

• 45 minutes’ cycle ride to shop
• 10 minutes in shop
• 1 hour 5 minutes’ cycle ride home (rush hour, multiple detours, coat fell out of basket at one point and had to be retrieved)

Reasons why I am sewing a cardigan in June:

• Current temperature: 55°F
• Average temperature drop after sunset: approximately 20°F
• Brora’s certainty that you will need a cashmere sweater even in summer: 100%

• British Pathé says the future will be great because everyone will be dressed in plastic!
• Unsung Sewing Patterns spotlights women’s overalls on the American home front. (Thanks, Carmen! This also happens to be my next sewing project.)
• The 2008 BBC series Blood, Sweat & T-Shirts sent half a dozen carefree British fashionistas to India to experience life at the other end of the garment industry, with harrowing results. Some thoughtful Finn has painstakingly uploaded episodes to YouTube.
• Let’s Clean Up Fashion provides audits of various UK high-street clothing retailers’ stance on labor conditions in their supply chains.
• Casual orientalism and flat-out balboa in Maharaja, 1943.
• It’s wedding season again! Conscientious objections from 1929, 2004.
• Maru and Gregory Peck make everything better.

I think I’ll stick with my step-in, thanks.

Meanwhile, Primark, the retailer whose clothes are so cheap and unpleasant that even charity shops don’t want them, enjoyed a bumper year in 2009. They’ve even had an  an environmental phenomenon named after them!

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?