A 1980s Liz Claiborne suit available for purchase on vintage resale site Gypsy Moth
It was this realization "that you can follow a piece of clothing — exactly as you might follow the course of a river — from the place where the cotton is grown to the moment that the customer finally disposes of it" that inspired the book. The "conspiracy" was that on its journey, "the skirt or coat is subject to the most extraordinary hype by designers, fashion editors, store buyers, publicists, shop assistants and the rest of the fashion circus." A circus which Coleridge joined when he took the job as Editorial Director of Condé Nast in 1989. He stayed at the company until 2019, climbing his way to the top; when he retired, his title was President of Condé Nast International.
Coleridge's descriptions are quaint by today's standard; after he wrote the book, the fashion industry kept growing. In fact, between 2012 and 2019, fashion grew exponentially. The ideal GDP annual growth is set between 2 and 3 percent; in 2019, the apparel industry's market growth worldwide rose 6.16 percent.
When The Fashion Conspiracy was published in 1988, Coleridge wrote, "The decade from 1978 has been decisive for fashion, as important as the 1950s were for the motor industry, and the 1970s were for computers. Designers like Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, and Giorgio Armani have created from nothing fashion empires on a scale and with a speed that seemed impossible in the mid-70s. In less than ten years, they have achieved annual turnovers of $1.3, $1.1, and $1 billion respectively, and furthermore have largely held onto the equity themselves. This has produced a compelling new factor in the world economy: designer money."
I have referenced Kennedy Fraser's The New Yorker article 'The Fashionable Mind' in this newsletter before. Published in 1978, on the eve of the decade Coleridge cites, Fraser warns of the pervasiveness of marketing and hype around fashion — the trends, the proximity to money and power, its association with individuality and self-expression, and the rise of celebrity culture. In conclusion, she writes, "While the rush is on, fashion is good for business, but it is hardly beneficial to society, talent, or the mind. And in the long run, fashion may prove very bad for life."
Meanwhile, something had been bubbling under the surface away from the pizzazz of luxury fashion. In the years just after the Second World War, a young, industrious Swedish entrepreneur Erling Persson had traveled to the US. Inspired by the retail chain Lerner Shops, which offered inexpensive fashionable garments to a broad audience, he went back to Västerås, a city in central Sweden, and in 1947 he opened his first store. He called it Hennes, and he intended to build it into a retail chain with "fashion at prices that will suit everyone."
In the 1960s, the UK and Ireland saw similar stores emerge. In 1964 in Sheffield, a city in the North of England, Topshop (originally Top Shop) opened, selling women's fashion for ages between 13 and 24. The Times of London said it was high fashion for the "young and different generation." In 1969, on Mary Street, a narrow thoroughfare in Dublin's city center, the Weston family entrusted the retailer Arthur Ryan to set up a discount clothing chain. The first store in Dublin was called Penneys, and when they expanded to the UK in 1973, they renamed it Primark — to sidestep American chain J.C.Penneys ownership of the name Penneys outside of Ireland.
For Hennes, Topshop, and Primark, the 1970s saw a period of rapid expansion. Primark opened its first shop outside of Ireland, in Derby, England, in 1973. Hennes, later known as H&M, started to grow internationally, opening stores in Norway and Denmark, and in 1976 they opened their first shop in London. By the same year, Topshop, had fifty-five standalone branches. In 1975 in a port city in the northwest of Spain, A Coruña, Amancio Ortega, who had learned to make clothes by hand as a teen, opened his first Zara — featuring low-priced lookalikes of fashionable higher-end clothing. Zara's growth came in the following decade, firstly throughout Portugal, and in 1989 they opened a flagship in New York.
The 1980s were a time equally of excess and rising inequality; it was increasingly fashionable to use material goods to express yourself. When you didn't have the money to buy designer labels, you sought to be fashionable through lower-priced options. Journalist Tamsin Blanchard remembers that in 1980s London, "The high street then was very different, and you got your clothes from other places… We were buying secondhand clothes; we were making clothes and cobbling things together."
The term "fast fashion" was first used in the December 31st, 1989 edition of The New York Times, in an article called 'Two New Stores That Cruise Fashion's Fast Lane.' The author Anne Marie Schiro documented the arrival of Zara in the US and interviewed Juan Lopez, the representative tasked with heading up the company's American operations. "Every week, there's a new shipment from Spain," he told her. "The stock in the store changes every three weeks. The latest trend is what we're after. It takes 15 days between a new idea and getting it into the stores.” Penelope Francks, an academic wrote that in this period, "The production of fashionable garments, or of "populuxe" versions of high-fashion examples, became less-and-less feasible for the home-sewer and increasingly amenable to ready-made manufacture, using mass-produced cloth, for sale through a specialist clothing retail system. The transmission of knowledge about fashion trends became crucial to the growth of the market on which such production depended, leading eventually to the development of the modern "fashion system," from the Paris catwalk, through the fashion media, to the high-street store."
Yet as these retailers grew, this linear process of the fast-fashion brand looking to high-end luxury fashion for inspiration evolved. In a 2012 article for The New York Times Magazine called 'How Zara Grew Into the World's Largest Fashion Retailer' writer Suzy Hansen wrote that at Zara they "monitor customers' reactions, on the basis of what they buy and don't buy, and what they say to a sales clerk: ‘I like this scooped collar’ or ‘I hate zippers at the ankles.’ Inditex [Zara's parent company] says its sales staff is trained to draw out these sorts of comments from their customers. Every day, store managers report this information to headquarters, where it is then transmitted to a vast team of in-house designers, who quickly develop new designs and send them to factories to be turned into clothes."
This idea that everybody could be fashionable has roots in the 1990s, like how 1970s punk encouraged everyone to join a band. On the cover of the July 1990 issue of The Face, a teenage Kate Moss squints into the camera lens, making her nose wrinkle. Capturing the spirit of the moment, the creative director of The Face at the time, Phil Bicker, said that one of the reasons why the image was so successful was that people believed this was the real Kate Moss as she frolicked on the beach and that she was photographed in her own clothes. "Kate comes through in those pictures, but that isn't how she dressed," he said. "That was how Corinne and Melanie dressed: cheesecloth, army surplus, and Birkenstocks," referring to the stylist Melanie Ward and the photographer Corinne Day who had created the images.
Kate Moss had been spotted by model agent Sarah Doukas in JFK airport as she flew home from a family holiday. Shorter than most models, at five feet six, Moss was simultaneously a girl next door and an extraordinary beauty. In 1994 the nineteen-year-old Moss appeared on the British breakfast television show GMTV with Doukas to launch the Face of 1994, a competition to find a model plucked from the obscurity of the British population. A popular way to discover models was in unlikely locations; Rosemary Ferguson was found by Corinne Day in McDonald's on Oxford Street. Naomi Campbell was spotted window-shopping in Covent Garden, and Cindy Crawford was apparently discovered while detasseling corn on a farm outside Chicago. It left people with the idea that the body was the fashionable bit, and it was how you wore the clothing not where it was from — style was much more critical.
These supermodels, as they became known, moved between the pages of fashion magazines and front-page news as tabloids documented their exploits at parties, who they were dating, what they were wearing "off-duty," and even what they were eating. They appeared on mainstream television programs, and H&M, realizing their selling power, employed "The Big Six" — Elle Macpherson, Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer, Christy Turlington, and Linda Evangelista — throughout the 1990s to appear in their campaigns. Eve Fairbank wrote in The Guardian that the 1990s "was a narcissistic decade, but it was a strange narcissism, premised on the idea we could remake ourselves any way we liked, virtually from scratch."
This idea came in the wake of grunge music, which became popular through bands such as Nirvana, a subcultural expression of individualism that was swiftly commodified. In 1992 Marc Jacobs designed a collection for Perry Ellis, the American fashion brand, inspired by "grunge" and the vintage and workwear clothing the subculture wore. However, in 1995 when Tom Ford presented his first collection as creative director at Gucci, it introduced the winds of change. Blanchard said, "I remember being at that Gucci show, and it seemed like a massive moment, a real shift. The look was still a little grungy, but it was so slick — and fashion. It was super sexy, and it became all about having a Gucci handbag. At this point, fashion moved away from this do-it-yourself, put it together look, to having to have the real Gucci."
This was when fast-fashion gained popular momentum; there was a renewed appetite to have something that looked like the designer collection shown on the runways of Paris, Milan, New York, and London. Blanchard said, "fashion pages, even glossies, like Vogue, would shoot Primark as a way of getting the look — it was kind of cool. This was the beginning of the high street and faster fashion. You could immediately get the look, and it was kind of ironic and funny. But with Gucci, it was much more serious; you couldn't get this look; you had to have the actual thing. That contradiction just ramped up the whole industry." The fast-fashion retailers became so good at copying that Primark clothes were referred to as Primarni in fashion circles — an amalgam of Primark and Italian luxury brand Marni. In the May 2005 issue of British Vogue, the fashion features assistant Emma Elwick featured a Primark jacket in a fashion shoot. PR Week called it a "PR miracle" Elwick said that "When we decided to do a Cheap and Chic supplement, it was one of the first places I thought of." These clothes did not have a stigma attached to them; when somebody asked where your outfit came from with adoration and the reply was H&M, Primark, Zara, or Topshop, this became a badge of honor. Style icon of the mid-2000s actress Sienna Miller was frequently spotted wearing Primark.
David Camp called the 1990s "the Tabloid Decade" a blurring of "distinctions between news and entertainment, between gossip and reporting." In the 2000s, the fixation on celebrity culture only heightened. Following in the footsteps of People and Us Weekly, British magazines such as Heat, which launched in 1999, and Grazia, an Italian magazine from the 1930s, which had its first British issue in 2005, became increasingly influential. Paparazzi trailed celebrities everywhere, eager to get an image of them looking attractive or unattractive — a distinctly binary approach. The photos featured in these magazines scrutinized their life choices and appearance alongside "Get the Look" articles. Fashion editors combed fast-fashion brands for outfits that resembled those that the celebrities had worn. This type of imagery had such an impact that Steven Meisel, the fashion photographer, parodied it in a shoot called 'Hollywood Style' in 2005 for Vogue Italia. Reflecting on her time as fashion news and features director of Grazia from 2005 to 2011, Melanie Rickey said, "the mantra was 'Get It Before It Goes!' – in other words, buy now before it sells out. Our remit was to give news and shoes equal weight. While one page would cover a political crisis, the next would be telling you the best jeans to buy this season, why they were better than the pair you bought last season, and, hell yeah, why not buy another pair!" Writing last year in The Telegraph about the impact this had on the consumption of fast-fashion, she said, "I feel awful about the part I played in encouraging it."
By the mid-2000s, fast-fashion retailers were becoming as powerful as luxury brands. In 2004 Karl Lagerfeld, the creative director of Chanel, launched a collection with H&M — it sold out immediately. H&M went on to collaborate with Stella McCartney in 2005, Viktor and Rolf in 2006, Roberto Cavalli in 2007, Comme des Garcons in 2008, and Matthew Williamson in 2009. They still do designer collaborations; Simone Rocha, the London designer, launched one in February. Lagerfeld said the reason he had done the partnership was to make fashion accessible to everyone. Therefore he was disappointed with H&M, he told German magazine Stern, he felt the company hadn't provided enough inventory. However, this is the model; see it now, buy it now — if you don't, it will be gone. H&M was pleased with the result; a month after the collaboration launched, they reported that worldwide sales were up 24 percent.
The rise of the internet and globalization also accelerated fashion trends through the 2000s; information was shared quicker, and as a result, clothes were bought quicker. The rise of internet shopping meant more people had access to new clothes. In The New York Times Magazine piece about Zara, Suzy Hansen "imagined that different nationalities still had different tastes, at least in terms of fashion." However, when she asked the PR representative at Zara, she replied, "Actually, the customer is more or less the same in New York and Istanbul. There are differences, like Brazilian girls like more brilliant colors, whereas in Paris they use more black. But in general when you find a fashion trend, it's global."
Ellen Sampson, the material culture researcher, said our penchant for "new" clothes is because "on a basic level... newness offers potential for reinvention. If you think about old clothes as bearers of memory, we don't always want that — to carry around our past. Often, we want a sense of forgetting; we want absolution, we want a clean slate." The strategist Jeroen Kraaijenbrink wrote in Forbes that these stores "sell the kid-in-the-candy-store feeling, the Oh-My-God-I-can-buy-all-of-this-and-still-have-money-left experience." Walking into Zara or H&M offers us an opportunity to buy something that will recast how the world sees us. A distraction or a pick-me-up, which can be bought for a meager financial price — the cost, of course, is borne elsewhere. The pandemic has chastened the growth of fast-fashion throughout 2020, but only time will tell if it will pick right back up right where it left off.
Thank you for reading, I will be back in two weeks with a new conversation. In the meantime check out the Fashion Conscious Campaign, an online event that launches today. In partnership with the UN its aimed around delivering the Sustainable Development Goals and features digital booths from Fashion Act Now, Fashion Revolution, Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Fashion Roundtable, the CFDA and others. You can register here.
Shonagh
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