ONE BUTTON TOO MANY HAS popped off my frocks.
One hem more than I can bear has worked itself loose and sagged to my unhappy knees. One final thread – on a camel’s back of strays over the years – has wiggled about, demanding to be tugged, only to rudely unravel into a bird’s nest that was once half my jumper. Or my coat.
My eyes are tres fatigue from the hectares and hectares of racks and racks of crappier than crap fabrics fashioned into disintegrating frocks and tops and Ts and jeans that pucker and pill and scratch and fall off. If fashion is a pyramid with haute couture on top, then this global pool of cheap crap is on the bottom and still, though we have the marvellousness of Dion Lee and Sass & Bide and Willow and Josh Goot and a thousand thrilling others, it’s getting bigger. And bigger. And worser. And worserer.
I shuffle in the currents through high street chains and webshops around the world, and I am amazed to be lured, like too many others, to the model-shot bargains and stuffed rails of crap that groan all around. Amazed at the bounty in this fool’s paradise. I love it all. No, hate it all. No love! No, hate! No, no, no… “Wow! Goot-esque digital print splice-panelled shapely silk-like frocklet for only $49.99! Can you believe that price?
Close up though, or soon after KER-CHING! the love and magic dissolve. Crap, again. One wash – tops – the decay has already started. How could you be so stupid? Again. The cheek! But it sells. You bought it. YOU! (O Discerning One With Multiple Willows and Goots in Your Wardrobe – YOU.) With matching cardboard shoes, $35.99.
And, never mind the waste and irritation. Are enough of us worried yet, about where all this stuff winds up? After one wear, or three, when it shrinks or runs or fades or puckers; who wants it then? Where does it go? Forget rag-bags and the warm toasty glow of giving your crap to the Salvos too: “At least someone can make use of it.” Well, no. Not this Everest of nasty former $50 polyester cast-offs, they can’t. The Salvos, the Mission, St Vinnies, their ilk – they can’t shift it.
Charities are stuffed. Increasingly, the outlets in my orbit hang out their “full” shingle or, at best, pick through the marching tsunamis of abandoned frocks, hunting for designer brands, mega-labels, “vintage” stuff. That’s all they can salvage, they say, because that’s all that the second-tier thrift-frock-shopper wants: good quality, nice finish, recognisable label or, at worst, a quirky history they can tell over lunch: “You’ll never guess what I found!” The rest of our abandoned dross is barely fit for rags, landfill or chopping up for carpet underlay. Which is precisely where most wind up.
Since shopping evolved into an end in itself, pocket-money budgets have spread thinner and thinner over more and more frocks shopped on a zillion no-date nights and listless Saturdays. It’s the look. Everybody’s wearing it. I want one. Wrap me three.
It’s capitalism and the churning certainty of fresh fashion profits every season. Every month. Every week. High Street mega-chains even boast they have refined their rip-off systems, can turn around a style from catwalk or red-carpet paparazzi snap to rack in 10 days. Imagine. Ten days, a patternmaker, a couple of low-wage, barely legal factories in a bog-poor nation just off the supply-chain transit passage, a few flat-out trucks and – voila! – 100,000 more frocks destined within a year for the Salvos. And, that’s just one style!
Well, hand on heart, I for one, won’t be buying it. From this day forward, dear Voxfrockers, no $49.99 frock nor $35.99 pair of heels, no matter how tantalisingly Goot-esque or Pradarama they appear, will sway me from this trinity of adages my sainted mother droned at me until I was cross-eyed with annoyance but which I ignored until now: “Quality is remembered long after price is forgotten”, “The lazy man and the cheap man travel their road twice” and “You get what you pay for.”
Amen. (Sorry mum).
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Voxfrock’s light reading suggestions for The Unconvinced: “Overdressed; the shockingly high cost of cheap fashion”, by Elizabeth L. Cline (2012), and “Poorly Made in China”, by Paul Midler (2011).
