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Chapter 2

Faster and Cheaper

How Big Fashion has Taken Style to the Brink

By July 2008 Primark’s flagship store in Oxford Circus’s annual turnover reached £200 million³⁰. At Primark prices that’s an awful lot of clothes, but not to worry, because in the first ten days of trading this single store sold one million garments³¹. Those lowly prices meant that consumers need not even concern themselves with queuing (or elbowing) their way into fitting rooms to try potential buys on. If they took them home and changed their minds, where was the penalty?

Perhaps that mindset explains why a fashion industry commentator, working for a trade publication, watched in horror as she saw one satisfied customer emerge with six or seven brown paper Primark bags full of clothes. It was raining heavily, and as the young woman proceeded down Oxford Street one of them broke around the handles and folded cotton flopped onto the pavement. Naturally the journalist expected the girl to bend down and collect the brand new clothes, but no. She just walked on. Fashion was apparently so expendable it had turned into litter.

There is little doubt that fashion has become disposable. Researcher Sara Giorgi, looking into what influences consumer change with the goal of finding ways of making our approach more sustainable, has found some breathtaking examples. ‘I don’t wash socks³²,’ she was informed by one respondent. ‘They are too cheap to buy. They are, though! It’s dearer to wash them than it is to go and buy them.’ I know things have become cheap, but until there’s a definitive energy crash I’m not entirely⁴² convinced by the economics here. I suspect it has more to do with convenience. The next respondent chips in, ‘It’s like me. I go on holiday. Go and get like a pack of – underwear, and you just – just throw it away. What are you going to do, bring them back [in your suit]case?’

THE NEW MODEL ARMY

By the millennium the UK’s mainstream fashion industry was largely freed from the shackles of actually producing anything. As it cast off manufacturing facilities and disgorged machine operators to the dole queues, it was clear that the British fashion industry was more about the selling of clothes than the making of them. With the exception of a few stubborn outposts, hundreds of years of manufacturing heritage were junked in ten short years³³, and some extremely high-profile brands, like Burberry³⁴, moved their manufacturing abroad. The once brisk trade in home-grown apparel was as dead as a dodo, replaced by a clothing market that relied almost entirely on imports³⁵, that was all about shiny shopfronts and the charismatic owners and CEOs behind vast retail empires³⁶.

The undisputed king of these was (and arguably remains) Philip Green. Owner of the rather pedestrian high-street staple BHS, Green bought the Arcadia group for £850 million³⁷ in 2002. It was widely agreed that he had pulled off the bargain of the century: netting Arcadia gave him Topshop, Topman, Wallis, Evans, Miss Selfridge and Dorothy Perkins, and therefore a significant slice of the British high street. But while all of those were much-loved brands, they weren’t exactly setting closets on fire. That was about to change.

Within a few months Green was rarely mentioned in the media without the attendant cliché that he possessed the Midas touch. Topshop had achieved something extraordinary. In financial terms it accounted for £1 billion of UK clothing sales by the first half of 2005 alone (bear in mind that the entire clothing market was only worth £7 billion). Green’s apparent ability to turn these humdrum stores into cash cows that made the British high street the envy of the world was celebrated by business analysts, the fashion press, and especially consumers. Topshop became a destination point for anybody who was interested in fashion. For us consumers it was a straightforward process. You simply turned to the pages in magazines that prescribed how to ‘get the look’ from international runways, and popped into your nearest Topshop to find affordable pieces that took their cue from the design trends on the rail. Admittedly the cut, the finish and the fabrics would have given a modellista (a handicraft professional working in the luxury industry) a nervous breakdown, but they were immediate and cheap facsimiles.

I wouldn’t like to suggest that I was in any way above this. I was as punchdrunk on the formula as everyone else. My allegiance actually predated Green’s transformation, as I shopped pretty religiously in Topshop Oxford Circus from 1992 when I arrived in London as a seventeen-year-old university student. I still have a few things from that era: strange Lycra flared leggings and cropped tops – oh dear. My visits began to tail off from early 2000 as I became increasingly worried about Arcadia’s sourcing policies and its failure to join the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) – at the time of writing, Arcadia is still not a member. There was also the fact that I had begun to feel a bit too old, and instinctively wanted a better cut. By the time I bagged a ticket for the front row at the Topshop show in 2009 I was already researching this book, and the magic bubble had burst for me.

But not, it seemed, for the rest of the style press. At London Fashion Week in February 2009, Topshop’s status remained undiminished. By that point, indeed, it had become the most exciting thing about London Fashion Week – a statement that I think would be hotly denied by the British Fashion Council – bolstered by the fact that this spring/summer 2010 season was the sixteenth time Topshop had sponsored New Gen (New Generation, or up-and-coming talent. When you think the alumni of New Gen include Matthew Williamson, Christopher Kane, Erdem, Jonathan Saunders and the late Alexander McQueen, the excitement by association is understandable). Besides, Topshop’s mainline show has a reputation for ‘delivering’. All of which explained why, even on a Sunday, the great and the good of fashion had faithfully traipsed to a warehouse in Kensington.

Once I had negotiated the many doormen (there was a high security presence, for reasons that were never entirely clear) I too was quickly transported. The Topshop show was every bit the theatrical masterpiece I had been told about. A runway with a surface like silver ice and a backdrop of neon and glitter strips. A bank of photographers at its end assembled in what looked like a precarious vertical pyramid. The legions of fashion editors and stylists, all clad in black, determinedly flooded the place like stormtroopers, albeit ones with purple Moët et Chandon notebooks and outsized leather bags. It went dark. It went very dark. And then we were off : a relentless stream of neon- and glitter-clad teenagers, like glowing tadpoles on the silver runway. Every three or four girls a new motif or accessory was introduced: a clutch bag, a raft of bangles, a scarf. All bang on trend, all fun and uncomplicated. This was fast fashion on the move, and it was deeply seductive. When the audience showed its appreciation with sustained applause it sounded almost grateful. It was a moment of dazzling frippery at a time when the nation was plunging into a dark recession.

I imagine it was even more exciting four years before, when Topshop had its first proper London Fashion Week show, because you can say what you like about this high-street giant, there’s no denying it brought some excitement to a rather dull set-up. Much of that ‘Midas touch’ was actually applied by Jane Shepherdson, who was at the helm of Topshop in 2005, when the flagship Oxford Circus shop’s sales exceeded £100 million³⁸ in a single year in the midst of a consumer downturn, and the chain would sell out of 5,500 sequin vests in half a week.

Shepherdson had a fabled way with style, managing to pick the trends that she knew would be lapped up and getting them instore at just the right time. By 2005 she had twenty years’ experience at Topshop, beginning as a buyer who had allegedly earned her sartorial stripes by staking her whole career on a job lot of tank tops³⁹ that became one of the store’s biggest hits.

‘A lot of the time these days I actually feel much happier when I go through my existing wardrobe, wearing some of the clothes I’ve kept for a long time and looking different precisely because I’m not wearing the latest thing,’ says the Jane Shepherdson of 2010. ‘When you slip into wearing the trend of the hour, maybe that’s the easy thing to do.’ She laughs. ‘Even though of course I’m sitting here in a camel cashmere jumper, which is apparently the trend.’ The woman who is credited with engineering Topshop’s supreme reign in fast fashion is now head of Whistles, having engineered a management buyout in 2010. She can also frequently be heard expressing sentiments about fashion that have more in common with the ethical fashion movement than the mainstream. For example, she is on record as saying that rich people buying cheap clothes and bragging about it is ‘very vulgar⁴⁰’, a sentiment with which I wholeheartedly agree. Like me, she appears to have reached saturation point with ‘fast fashion’. She’s had her fill of insubstantial pieces and the endless churn. ‘I know!⁴¹’ she says. ‘And I’m in fashion.’ ‘Jane,’ I venture rather timidly, ‘do you ever feel like you created the monster?’ Her expression is a cross between remorse and bemusement. ‘I do get asked this. On one hand it’s ludicrous, because I didn’t invent fast fashion at all. If I had done, surely I’d be a millionaire by now, and I am definitely not that. Our motives were pretty simple. All we were trying constantly to do was to create the best possible design for the price that we were committed to – one that was affordable to our customer base. We thought at the time, well, we’re selling lots of stuff , but let’s make stuff that at least has some design integrity and make it interesting and exciting. That’s what we did.’

There’s no doubt that that simple aspiration to imbue clothes with ‘some design integrity’ worked. As Shepherdson acknowledges, ‘When I joined Topshop a real fashionista would not have been seen in it. It wasn’t the thing to do. It was a different ethos. You wore designer or you wore high street.’ She certainly changed that. It became de rigueur to shop on the high street again. ‘Every girl admits to shopping at Topshop,’ wrote business journalist Nick Mathiason, profiling Shepherdson in the Observer in 2005. ‘Inevitably you end up creating trends,’ Shepherdson says, ‘and of course people think they have to have them. It becomes quite hard to pinpoint where it all started.’

Following the indisputable success of Jane Shepherdson’s strategy came a raft of retailers who were determined to emulate Topshop’s success, and indeed take it further. Fast fashion became an industry standard, and clothes were produced in smaller production batches and at dizzying rates. High-street fashion was on high alert to every trend and consumer whim, defined by the industry as ‘quick response’.

Emulating the Topshop magic meant getting the quickest supply chains possible. In industry terms this meant decreasing production times. Staff responsible for buying and sourcing went into overdrive. To compete they needed to react urgently to any change in trend. Every part of the production cycle was squeezed, concertinaed into days and hours rather than weeks. ‘Time to market’ (the all-important period in which factories sew garments to meet orders and then deliver them to the stores) was halved, then quartered. There was less time to identify future trends and translate them into clothes, as it became commonplace for buyers to fax their Developing World suppliers at all hours of the day and night with tweaks and changes from the UK design team.

A few years ago, a factory supplying a major retailer would have expected to manufacture 40,000 garments across four styles for twenty weeks. Today it will be lucky to get commitment from the retailer to manufacture four styles at five hundred garments per week for just five weeks. The remaining 30,000 will be ordered at the last minute, when the design team has worked out whether the mainstream consumer has been inspired by Taylor Swift , Daisy Lowe, Lindsay Lohan or none of the above.

While Topshop managed to slim its production period from nine to six weeks, H&M cut its lead times from design to rail to just three weeks. In fact, according to the revered fashion journalist Hilary Alexander, it was H&M that launched fashion that was effectively ‘disposable’, and you don’t get faster than that. Even back in 2003 she had reservations: ‘I’m not entirely convinced that that is such a good thing,’ she said, referring to the fact that some garments were so cheap ‘that literally you’d be lucky to get two to three wears out of it, and then you’d chuck it away’. This new money-spinning way of working the rag trade was based on a rather dry notion of ‘lean retailing’ that subsequently achieved near-doctrinal status in business schools. The new model held everybody’s attention – analysts, economists, the press and of course fashionistas. After all, if you fitted into the latter category, what was there not to like? For starters, there was a surfeit of choice. Topshop for example would bring in 7,000 lines⁴³ each season.

If Topshop and H&M were consciously after the youth vote, with cut-for-teen-frame styling and sequined hook-ups with of-the-moment celebrities, they weren’t the ones that brought the ultimate revolution. That was left to what seemed like a slightly staider, more grown-up name on the high street: Zara. On the surface Zara represents a conundrum for me. I remember looking at it early on – the Spanish brand owned by Inditex arrived in the UK in 1998, but has been a fixture in its native Spain since 1975 – and thinking it looked like a range for a generic type of European yummy mummy. It wasn’t long, however, before I found myself visiting with decreasing gaps in between, despite the fact that I didn’t aspire to dress like a Zara woman. It was as if I was being taught to like it.

Legend has it that when the first Zara store opened in Britain, on Regent Street in London, shoppers were a little mystified. The prices seemed high, and I’m told (perhaps apocryphally) that if consumers said they would come back when there was a sale, the assistants would tell them that come sale time the pieces would not be there. In fact, even if the tentative shoppers were to come back next week the pieces wouldn’t be there. That was not the Zara way.

The Zara way – the one that broke all previous rules – had several defining characteristics, but number one (and sacrosanct) was that the Spanish retailer manufactured only relatively tiny quantities of each style. This sounds a small deal, but effectively it turned fashion retail on its head. Instead of focusing on quantity, Zara’s cadre of around two hundred designers⁴⁴ in Spain come up with around 40,000 new designs each year, of which 12,000 are actually⁴⁵ produced (that’s 5,000 more than Topshop). Years ago, when I worked in a shop as a Saturday girl, we were forever phoning up customers when new deliveries came in (or at least we were supposed to). Not any longer, because in Big Fashion stock replenishments are for wimps. How does this affect the consumer? Well, as a shopper, if you hesitate at the point of purchase you’re probably going to miss your chance. This creates a terrible hunger in the consumer, creating what Harvard researchers have referred to as ‘a sense of tantalising exclusivity⁴⁶’, a pervasive fear that if you pause for thought, the opportunity to bag that affordable version of a catwalk sensation (Zara is known as ‘interpreting rather than creating afresh’, as retail and fashion analyst Davangshu Dutta sensitively puts it) will be snatched from you forever.

Both Zara’s ability to take ‘inspiration’ from hot catwalk pieces and the hunger engendered by small, fast-changing product lines are in evidence from press coverage around the time Zara opened its largest European store in London, ‘a 3,000-square-metre temple to consumption’, as journalist and design expert Caroline Roux described it: ‘Among the bewildering selection of clothes, I spotted a passable interpretation of a Christian Dior embroidered Afghan on the rails (£95), a Pradaesque brocade waistcoat (£45) and a black wool coat (£65) that was enticingly similar to something by superchic Italian label Costume National (£565). An assistant even pointed me in the direction of what he called “the Anna Sui collection”, an up-to-the-minute assortment of patchwork, denim and boho chic (Sui is a veteran New York designer who shows on the catwalk).’

Roux suggested that a reason for Zara’s appeal was the short amount of time each line was given to prove itself (absolutely no longer than four weeks). The only way you could be a Zara groupie was to pop in as often as you could manage. Whereas a typical retailer could expect its customers to visit four times a year, Zara could bank on an average of seventeen visits⁴⁷. This explained my frequent sorties, equally frequently resolved by exiting the store with the distinctive blue paper bag. ‘The girls in the office⁴⁸ know that new stock comes in on Tuesday and Thursday, and off they go,’ Julian Vogel, Managing Director of fashion PR company Modus, told Roux. ‘It’s a guilt-free high.’

‘This business is all about reducing response time. In fashion, stock is like food. It goes bad quick,’ said former Inditex Chairman José Maria Castellano, who many credit with coming up with the Zara blueprint for blink-and-you-miss-it fashion. The whole point was to take the risk out of fashion for the retailer (as we’ll see later, it’s arguable that the risk gets pushed down the supply chain, onto those whose lives are already unbearably uncertain). Zara had no truck with discounting 35 to 40 per cent⁴⁹ of its merchandise (the normal figure for fashion retailers) because it had ordered skinny jeans in the wrong wash, or a jacket with last week’s lapel size. Instead it set up a system that means it only ever discounts around 18 per cent⁵⁰ of its products, according to analysts.

Rather than trudging along taking nine to twelve months to decide on a style, using forecasters and analysts to advise on upcoming trends a year in advance, then taking a risk on ordering and choosing colours and fabrics, Zara turned the process on its head. Instead of the usual phalanx of style and colour forecasters poring over industry reports, it set up a relatively large production team at Inditex’s Spanish HQ in the distinctly non-fashionable Arteixo-La Coruna, and relied on them to liaise with trendspotters on the ground, constantly emailing and phoning in with suggestions to get a highly reactive consumer-led view of what’s hot and what’s not. If the hipsters suddenly develop a thing for vampires, or swing away from brogues and Victoriana, the Inditex office will know about it.

The result was that 163 Zara stores across Europe (sixty in the UK) received new fashion pieces twice every week. There were a number of ways by which this was achieved, including some very technical processes. These included buying semi-processed, uncoloured fabric, known as ‘greige’, that could be finished and dyed at short notice, depending on what hot trends the cool hunters were texting in. There were systems, often enthused over by logistics professionals, of underground tracks that moved finished garments to hundreds of chutes to make sure each store was sent the right packages at the right time. But the big thing Zara did was to produce 50 to 80 per cent (estimates vary) of its lines in Europe, so that it became famous for identifying a trend and having the resulting fashion in store within thirty days⁵¹. To be that fast requires the heavy use of air freight, and commentators have described the dizzying pace of twice-weekly air shipments with Air France and KLM cargo, as planes from Zaragoza land in Bahrain laden with stock for Inditex stores in the Middle East, fly on to Asia, and return with raw materials and half-finished clothes. In common with other industries that aren’t exactly addressing sustainability head on, this is predicated on cheap oil.

Looking at some conventional timespans for getting hold of garments from far-flung production bases, you can see why Zara’s model is so attractive to its eager customers. One study⁵² of Egyptian exporters of cotton clothing, for example, estimated the time taken to import yarns from India and Pakistan to a storage facility at thirty days. To this had to be added customs clearance, including waiting time (another two weeks), a few days for the preparation of export documents, four hours to pack a container (in recent years clothes containers have increased in length from twenty feet to forty feet, such is the unprecedented demand), and then sailing time (from Alexandria in this case, to New York, where the cargo must again clear customs and then go to a testing laboratory). The result was a yawn-inducing ninety to 120 days⁵³, far too long for a trend-based sun dress inspired by a Hollywood actress. By the time it arrived she could be well out of favour.

Even Philip Green doffed his hat to Zara. ‘Genius⁵⁴. What the fashion industry is all about,’ he said in an interview with Retail Week magazine. ‘When Madonna gave a series of concerts in Spain,’ noted business expert Robin Dymond on his blog Scrum, Agile and Lean Methods, ‘teenage girls were wearing at her last performance the outfit she wore for her first concert.’ Although I was amazed that looking like Madonna was still a kudos-raising activity for teenagers in Spain, I got the point. He saw another direct translation for an older market: ‘When Spain’s Crown Prince Felipe⁵⁵ and Letizia Ortiz Rocasolano announced their engagement in 2003, the bride-to-be wore a stylish white pant suit. Within a few weeks, hundreds of European women were wearing something similar.’

Other pretenders to the high-street throne got the message. Esprit and Mango tried the same approach: short lead times and multiple seasons, along with reduced delivery times – these could be as little as forty-eight hours⁵⁶. What was definitely out of fashion was holding onto lots of stock, or indeed any stock.

As consumers we rapidly changed our priorities. Long-standing skills of buying clothing, such as assessing for quality or looking at labels, were junked in favour of getting our hands on what was new as we adjusted to the Zara-like thrill of swapping two wardrobe seasons a year (and the delayed gratification of waiting to embrace those two seasons) for upwards of twenty. While the world’s mainline Fashion Weeks continue the charade of spring/summer and autumn/winter seasons, in real terms they are now about as relevant to contemporary life as learning Gregorian plainsong.

Zara’s policy was what we might call a game-changer. While it won plaudits in the financial press and saw its share price rocket – a share offer to the public in 2001 was over-subscribed twenty-six times, raising 2.1 billion euros⁵⁷ – brands such as M&S, with relatively pedestrian stock turns that were at least twenty days slower⁵⁸, and often with lead times of six months, found themselves getting a lot of stick for being plodding and dowdy. Inevitably there were casualties as fashion brands that had long been mainstays of the high street were thrown into a do-or-die situation. Many of these represented the middle market – not too cheap, not too fast, but truly affordable clothing where standards of quality and longevity were still in evidence. Those brands scrambled to try either to up their fashionability (Next, for example, attempted to be clearer about its style and direction), or slashed their prices to try to compete.

In retrospect, the criticism of previously cherished middle-market brands just before the millennium was exceptionally harsh. Laura Ashley, Next and Monsoon were all accused of misreading ‘the all-important female fashion market’ as they urgently attempted to ‘restructure their offer’. M&S famously came in for years of ridicule, not least at the company’s own AGMs, which took on a theatrical quality. In 1999 Teresa Vanneck-Surplice, a private shareholder, waved a pair of a rival chain’s knickers at then M&S Chairman Brian Baldock. ‘Your underwear’s⁵⁹ got boring!’ she said, adding, ‘I may be fifty-two but I like my underwear sexy.’ To the delight of the assembled media, Vanneck Surplice proved a similarly dynamic complainant during 2007’s AGM, when she told Stuart Rose (by that time Executive Chairman) that she was still unhappy with M&S’s offerings, which was why she was dressed head to foot in Primark. (‘It won’t last⁶⁰,’ responded Rose with splendid ambiguity.) To varying degrees the crime of the middle market was that it was no longer deemed fashionable. Next to the neon-lit, sequin-strewn running track that fast fashion streaked up and down, the middle market was frankly an embarrassment. So while the Dutch-owned C&A appeared as one of the top ten UK clothing retailers in 1999, just a year later it announced it was closing all of its British stores.

In 2000 you wouldn’t have found me mourning the middle market. I was far too busy adding to my collection of jeans and shoes. But now I’m pausing for a brief moment of regret. Yes, it’s a case of you-don’t-know-what-you’ve-got-till-it’s-gone, but the middle market was, with a great deal of hindsight, the best way to avoid sucking all of the health out of the fashion industry, including a loss of control over the supply chain. It was the most sustainable, mainstream way of ensuring affordable fashion.

OUT OF CONTROL: THE RUNAWAY STYLE TRAIN

I don’t want to compound the air of regret, but if only it had stopped there. Fast fashion had its merits – it certainly brought excitement. The jury’s out on whether you can have responsible fast fashion (it certainly doesn’t sound very sexy), but what if it had stayed true to Jane Shepherdson’s original idea, to make better, more fashionable clothes at affordable prices? Naturally there would have been some deficit environmentally – every time you make something there’s an impact – but we would have stood a chance of minimising the negative effects.

Inevitably the signs of this revolution – the bulging wardrobes and the women staggering around with multiple store bags – attracted attention in non-fashionista circles. By the late 1990s economists and business analysts, alerted by the superleague profits of previously workaday stores, were taking a closer look. What on earth, they wondered, was going on? It was the equivalent of hearing the strains of a prolonged and increasingly wild party until you feel compelled to get out of bed and see the action for yourself. And it was some party: a story of spectacular growth made more captivating to analysts because historically the clothing sector in the UK had always been a bit of a damp squib, but it was now displaying incredible figures. From 1900 to 1938 things were glacially slow, then became even worse with the Second World War, when clothes were subject to rationing⁶¹. Only from 1975 did the British public finally begin casting offsome of its make-do-and-mend attitude to fashion, as the UK market swelled to reach an unprecedented size by 1999. The UK Fashion Report for 1998–99 proclaimed the UK clothing and footwear industry to be worth £26 billion⁶² (up from £11.7 billion in 1983). There was more to come. In 2009 it was worth an amazing £46.05 billion, and accounted for 5.3 per cent of all consumer spending.

I call this seismic shift in making, selling and buying fashion the alchemy of fast fashion. Alchemy, the medieval forerunner of chemistry, launched many practitioners on the ultimately fruitless quest to turn base metal into gold. Fast-fashion alchemy has done something similar, turning basic fabrics and a frill-free supply chain into a Balenciaga-alike fashion fix. Just like alchemy, there’s an unquantifiable mystical element to this dark art, because the stellar fiscal achievements of fast fashion took place at a time when clothing prices were actually falling. This is worth spelling out. We were clearly purchasing a lot of wardrobe fodder. In 1990 we cumulatively spent £23 billion on clothes and shoes – the lion’s share, almost £19 billion, on clothes; trends dictated that a large proportion of this will have gone on boot-cut jeans and some on the tyrannical reign of the babydoll dress. We achieved all of this with just 4.5 per cent of our household budget (in the 1960s we spent far less on our wardrobes, but they accounted for 10 per cent of our budget). By 1998 those figures had soared. We were now spending £32.5 billion on clothes and shoes a year, £27.7 billion on clothes alone. But interestingly this still accounted for only 5.7 per cent of our budget. In July 2001 sales of clothing and footwear in the UK were up on the previous year by a huge 12 per cent, the highest annual rate of growth since the mid-1970s.

But in real terms the price of clothes had fallen dramatically (and, I might add, chaotically). This is the point at which the dark side of the fast-fashion alchemy kicks in. Between 1996 and 2000 clothing prices fell each year, and in the epoch-defining year of high sales, 2001, they fell by 6 per cent⁶³. The analysts could almost hear a giant balloon deflating. A study by City analyst Mark Hudson from Price waterhouse Coopers, tracking Next Direct’s catalogue between 1995 and 2005, confirms that something very weird happened: prices had actually dropped 40 per cent⁷⁹ over that time. In the four years from 2003 to 2007 average prices in retail fashion fell by 10 per cent.

A 1998 study found that between 1982 and 1995 the amount of time a motor-vehicle worker had to put in to earn enough to purchase a suit fell from twenty-five⁶⁴ hours to eighteen. Consumers did not require a formula to pinpoint what was happening: we were simply spending less and buying more.

ENTER THE DISCOUNTERS

Fast fashion taught us to prioritise speed. Its influence in most of our wardrobes is undeniable, but it was not the whole story. The real alchemy – turning base fabrics into golden trends that both the consumer and the financial markets went crazy for – only occurred when fast fashion was allied to the lowest price points in history. While the foreign fast-fashion giants – Gap, H&M and Zara – will doubtless have staked some sort of claim in your closet, in 2002 their total market share was still just under 5 per cent⁶⁵. The biggest invasion of planet fashion, with the biggest reverberations, belonged to the so-called ‘value’ retailers, also known as ‘discounters’.

Those leading the charge – Matalan, Peacock’s and New Look – were known for their ‘aggressive pricing strategies⁶⁶, selling at 30–50 per cent below’ the prices of the good old mid-market. But none of them had quite the clout of Primark. Primark originated in Ireland, and growing up there I was familiar with it in its other guise as Penneys, the go-to outlet for school socks and vests. I can safely say I would never have believed that twenty years later it would be earning plaudits in glossy magazines for its military jackets and polkadot dresses. The discount retail chain, whose parent company Associated British Foods provides us with cupboard staples such as Ryvita, Kingsmill and Ovaltine, arrived in the UK in 1974, but it has remained something of an enigma. Little is known about its septuagenarian founder, Arthur Ryan⁶⁷, who stepped down in 2009 after forty years, except that he instilled in the company a belief that all products must make his legendary 12.5 per cent profit margin. According to an article in the Irish newspaper the Sunday Business Post, Ryan was supposedly once approached by a factory owner with a product costing £5 that would sell for £10. Ryan reportedly told him he was not interested unless he came back with a product that cost £3 and could be sold for £7: ‘I don’t care⁶⁸ how you go about it – just do it,’ he reputedly said. When a journalist⁶⁹ from the Scotsman tried to verify the story, Primark denied it. ‘His view would⁷⁰ almost be counter-intuitive,’ a former employee told the Sunday Times in 2007. ‘He would look at a product line that was selling well at £5 and cut the price to £3 because it would sell even more.’

Primark was to the discounters what Zara was to fast-fashion retailers – a trailblazer that showed the profits that could be made, and an organisation to emulate. The opening of its flagship London store in May 2007 was followed by mammoth stores in Manchester and Bristol. The discounters persuaded us to trump all other values with a single myopically focused question: ‘But is it really, really cheap?’ From then on, that was all the consumer wanted to know.

By 2006 value retailers represented the fastest-growing part of the retail pie: retail analysts Verdict prophesied⁷¹ that by the end of the year, for every £4 spent on fashion, £1 would go to a value retailer. Of course this came true, and just eighteen months later industry bible Drapers breathlessly reported that ‘Primark has moved⁷² a step closer to toppling Marks & Spencer from the top spot in clothing market share, after its volume share leapt to 10.1 per cent.’ Who wouldn’t want a piece of that? After the high-street retailers adopted this approach, it was only a matter of time before some strange new entrants began to get in on the act.

FROM FROZEN PEAS TO FASHION FIXES: HOW THE SUPERMARKETS GOT IN ON THE ACT

If I hadn’t anticipated that my friends and colleagues would one day be fawning over products from a subsidiary of Associated British Food, I was even less prepared for the fashion revolution that would see us throwing in cashmere twinsets on top of frozen peas in our supermarket trolleys. But any market doing obscenely well by leveraging pressure down the supply chain will eventually attract the attention of the British supermarkets. In 2003 Tesco began its quest to take a bigger slice of the non-food retail pie, including fashion. It had secured a licensing deal with the phenomenally successful US global brand-management company Cherokee⁷³, that would exclusively supply ‘family apparel’ – a rather strange, catch-all term – to Tesco. Since clothes attract bigger margins than groceries, it’s no surprise that in quick succession three of the Big Four (Tesco, Asda and Sainsburys) entered the fashion arena. By 2005 supermarkets held 19 per cent of the fashion market. In October 2010 Tesco confirmed its intention to become the world’s biggest fashion brand, launching its first standalone fashion store (without the frozen peas) for its clothing brand Florence & Fred. It chose to test the waters for this venture into discount fashion in the historic city of Prague.

You can see how it worked. The grocers applied the same ruthless pragmatism to fashion as they had to food, engaging in a series of loss leaders and price wars which changed the landscape of planet fashion beyond recognition. In the great supermarket wars of 2003, when Tesco and Asda were vying to outdo each other⁷⁴ with 1,000 products, fashion was key: Asda’s George jeans were being sold for £6; tailored women’s trousers plummeted from £9 to £7; skirts from £7 to £5; jackets from £14 to £12. If you pause for a minute, does that remotely add up? Granted, a cheap-as-chips jacket will be a fairly straightforward piece, but consider the detail: the buttons, the seams, the pockets, the level of embellishment. If it was at its true price you’d expect it to be made of cardboard. Ditto the Asda wedding dress, launched in November 2007 at £60. The rewards for the multiples (supermarkets) for leaping out of their comfort zone of food and into our wardrobes proved to be huge: Asda’s George brand is worth £2 billion a year, making it one of the company’s biggest assets. By 2009 Tesco, the undisputed heavyweight of multiple retailing, was making nearly £6,000 a minute⁷⁵, every single day.

PRIMARNI, THE TOAST OF THE FASHIONISTAS

The combination of fast and cheap fashion was like catnip to consumers, and we fell completely under its sway. But there wasn’t a lot of critical thinking or engagement going on in the style press or the wider media either. In fact the value retailers were aided and abetted in their quest for domination of the UK fashion market by a compliant fashion media that was as titillated by the conflation of fast and cheap as everyone else. The ‘wow’ prices and directional styling of pieces retailing for £3 to £4 were given reassuring tags, ‘Primarni!’ and ‘Pradamark!’ (the latter works less well, I think). They helped to destigmatise fashion pieces that were as cheap as chips. It became rather cool to trot about in worthless, disposable fashion.

A watershed in the British media was the change from the dominance of monthly style titles such as Marie Claire and Glamour to the weekly style bible Grazia in 2005. The emphasis was on refurbishing your look on a weekly rather than a monthly basis, and this tied in perfectly with the emergence of the big value players. Readers could afford to have it all. You could change outfits four times a day, live the wardrobe life of a WAG, pretend you were Lindsay Lohan if you so desired. For a while nothing appeared able to dent the crown of the value players, not even conflicting or troubling undertones. So it did not overly matter that almost at the same time in 2005 that Primark’s Arthur Ryan was named ‘most influential man in high-street fashion’ by fashion industry bible Drapers, his retail empire was named ‘most unethical retailer on the high street’ by Ethical Consumer magazine (a publication with fifteen years of experience in grading companies). If it hurt, it didn’t show.

Even so, the discounters can get defensive about cheap, cheap fashion, and sometimes consumers get defensive on their behalf. In common with food, where retailers go misty-eyed and tell us about old ladies on pensions now being able to afford ready-made pasta dishes, the same retailers tell us that this is why they have – in the manner of a caped crusader – wrestled down the price of style, democratising the cost of clothes for families on low incomes so that small children can keep warm. The value retailers like to propagate the idea that they are producing ‘affordable’ clothes for vulnerable consumers who would presumably be reduced to wearing rags if it wasn’t for the service Asda, Tesco, Peacocks, Matalan, New Look, Primark et al. provide with their commitment to ‘family apparel’.

But before we give Terry Leahy, Arthur Ryan and the rest of them good citizen awards, it is worth looking at who has really catapulted these retail gods into millionaires’ row. affordability in fashion is a hot potato of an issue. I see no reason why fashion shouldn’t be affordable, but shouldn’t the fast-fashion and value retailers drop the Hovis act? The fact is that they moved aggressively into the fashion market, desperate to claim as big a slice as possible of this retail pie, and more often than not their prime audience is not the low-income family but the well-heeled fashion fan.

For starters, it’s interesting to see how quickly value retailers move house, shifting into ever more prestigious retail locations. A flagship store plus all the positive press coverage that comes with it attracts a richly profitable clientèle. As one analyst puts it, these factors seem ‘to have de-stigmatised⁷⁶ discount shopping for the middle-income groups who were [once] the mainstay of the mid-market’. Another expert, writing on Primark’s ability not only to hold on to the top retailer spot

(in terms of the highest-value share of the clothing market) during the recession-plagued year of 2009 but to increase that share of its market by 18.2 per cent, was in no doubt about which audience the retailer should be thanking: ‘[Primark] enjoys⁷⁷ a relatively young customer base which has been least impacted by the economic downturn because of fewer financial responsibilities.’

Make no mistake, the value retailers are gunning for fashion’s most voracious consumers. That includes the 16 per cent of consumers, innovators and early adopters who can be termed ‘highly fashion aware⁷⁸’: who are not just conscious of trends, but likely to act on them. So it’s no surprise that British consumers now buy 40 per cent of our clothes at ‘value retailers’ with just 17 per cent of our clothing budget. The value retailers are clearly as fashion-conscious as everyone else, going out of their way to attract designers and labels with high-fashion overtones. As I write, Asda is just about⁸⁰ to launch its second collection with Barbara Hulanicki, world-famous as the founder of 1960s brand Biba.

You might also discover – and I was alerted to this by an article in the style press – that once a value retailer has its feet under the style table, it might ditch its ‘value’ dogma altogether. In March 2010, for example, Tesco launched F&F Couture, a sixteen-piece collection. Pieces included a puffb all polyester dress at £140. ‘F&F signifies⁸¹ a new era for supermarket fashion,’ Jan Marchant, Buying Director of Tesco Clothing, said at the launch of the label.

RECESSION CHIC

‘Don’t worry!’ I’m blithely told when I have one of my little turns about levels of consumption and the march of fast, cheap fashion. Ever since the global downturn I have been confidently reassured that the pants and sock discarders, the Primark bargain litterers will change their ways during a recession. By the end of it, they’ll be darning their socks in a wholly sustainable manner. To be fair, it did appear that as the economy nosedived in 2008–09 planet fashion began suggesting that there were choices to be made. These may have been small gestures, or pyrrhic victories, but there was some evidence that fashionistas were tightening their tiny little belts. ‘Gucci or Gas?’ asked Harper’s Bazaar. OK, it was hardly a blueprint for surviving the global downturn, but you get the idea.

Meanwhile, experts predicted that there should be an average rise in womenswear prices by 4.7 per cent between 2008 and 2012. We’ll return to this later, but labour costs have increased by 50 per cent in the past four years across provinces in south-eastern China – aka the sewing room of the world. Fast fashion is dependent on cheap fibres, predominantly polyester and cotton – which account for more than 80 per cent of all fibre production worldwide. Both are dogged by sustainability issues. These factors suggest that the fast, cheap party we’ve been experiencing for over a decade should by rights have started to wind up.

If I had a pound for every time I’ve been told that the recession would take the heat out of the way we acquire and use fashion, I’d have enough for a real aviator jacket. But rumours of the death of fast, cheap fashion have been greatly exaggerated for two main reasons. Firstly, we’ve adapted to this new style paradigm so enthusiastically that it’s difficult to break the habit. Secondly, value fashion offers us the moon on a stick, and anaesthetises us from the real issues in our wardrobe.

In fact the value retailers have never had it so good. They now take a bigger slice of the collective wardrobe than ever before. In January 2009 Primark overtook Asda⁸², Walmart’s representative on UK earth, as the biggest low-price clothing retailer. There was more to come. Despite reporting ‘challenges’ such as cotton and synthetic fabric costs, the value retailer overtook Asda and M&S to reach the coveted top spot of the largest clothing retailer⁸³ in the UK by volume (i.e. for all clothes sold) by the summer of 2010. In November that year Primark announced that it would be opening six new shops in time for Christmas. Even as times became progressively harder across all sectors, where fashion was concerned the value retailers appeared to have been given a get-out-of-jail-free card. In September 2010, according to the office for National Statistics, while the rest of the retail trade was in a slump, non-food sales for supermarkets were soaring, and clothing and footwear sales rose by 6.1 per cent⁸⁴ by value and 4.8 per cent by volume compared to the same month the year before. In April 2010 Tesco clothing sales had broken through the £1 billion barrier⁸⁵ for the first time.

The ascendancy of the value retailers might even be boosted by extra customers in a time of recession, as there will inevitably be some flight downmarket by middle-class consumers. Within hours of the announcement in October 2010 that in future child benefits would be means tested, independent fashion retailers and labels at the pricier end of the market were fearing for their own livelihoods. The connection might not be immediately obvious, but in 2013 benefits to many middle-income families will be cut, and according to independent fashion retailers this money was previously additional disposable income for the household that went on bolstering the wardrobe. ‘A middle-class lady⁸⁶ [with one child] gets about £80 month in benefits, so in three months she has enough to buy one of my dresses. It’s in effect her spending-spree money, and that’s who I sell to,’ Tanya Sarne, owner and founder of premium womenswear brand Handwritten, told Drapers. Let’s leave aside the moral rights and wrongs of using taxpayers’ money to fund premium-dress buying for a minute, and imagine the likely scenario. If she is too addicted to acquiring new pieces to curtail her fashion buying altogether, Sarne’s customer could just take her spending spree down the price chain.

Doubtless, value retailers, from Peacocks and Primark to Tesco and Asda and everything in between, will be hoping that this proves to be the case. At the time of writing even more brands are battling to join the value-retailing fashion fray. Argos, the famous catalogue purveyors of toasters and tents, is reportedly intending ‘to stage a land-grab⁸⁷ in the fashion market in a challenge to established clothing retailers’. Then there’s Japanese fashion chain Uniqlo, that has the fast/cheap alchemy off to a fine art and is currently seeking to ‘strengthen its position⁰⁸⁸ in the UK market’ by planning huge 20–30,000-square-foot stores across London (double the size of its average existing store). It has the rather scary stated intention of becoming ‘the biggest global⁰⁸⁹ casual-wear company by 2020’, according to an interview which Daisuke Hase from Fast Retailing, Uniqlo’s parent company, gave to the Japan Times in October 2010. He rather laboured the point by adding, ‘We call ourselves Fast Retailing. We move things very fast. Please keep an eye on us; we will change the world very quickly.’ Yes, Mr Hase, I am watching. And let’s not forget a foray from US fashion giant Forever 21, opening any day in Birmingham’s Bullring and expecting to do well as, according to its Executive Vice-President, ‘Forever 21’s fast-fashion concept⁰⁹⁰ perfectly suits the European consumer’s appetite for trend-led fast fashion at value prices.’ No doubt.

Rather than a return to slower fashion, with its natural blowholes and steam vents to ease the many pressures on the system, so far the downturn in global finances seems merely to have consolidated the alliance between ever faster and ever cheaper fashion. This is Big Fashion (its closest relatives being Big Agriculture and Big Pharma – as in pharmaceuticals), where the power of a whole sector becomes concentrated in the hands of a few major players whose primary aim (arguably to the exclusion of all others) is to make money for shareholders.

Unless we do something to break it, we will remain bewitched and in the grip of the alchemy of the cheapest, fastest fashion we’ve ever known, all the while continuing to squeal with delight, ‘How do they get it that cheap?!’ It’s a question that retailers are understandably loath to answer. When they do provide a response, expect smoke and mirrors and the determined obfuscation of big business that isn’t ready to admit a missingingredient. It’s to do, they will say, with purchasing power, efficiency and leverage over the supply chain. Ever hopeful, I decided to ask Big Fashion players again, ‘No, really, how do you make clothes that cheap?’

So I wrote and asked them. Here’s a typical example of my letters.

Dear [Chief Executive of a high-street chain],

A recent trade magazine’s review of the high-street stores stated categorically that ‘You won’t find a cheaper aviator jacket at £25 or military-style coat for £29, while jumpsuits and winter maxi dresses go for £13 and £15 respectively.’ The researcher in that case was unable to find any item over £30. My own experiences of several of your outlets tallies with this. I would be very grateful if you could give me the definitive answer to how you are able to offer garments at such a low cost. In short, how do you get them so cheap?

Many thanks

Lucy Siegle

Despite repeated requests, some retailers apparently felt no compulsion to share the secrets of their alchemy, and did not reply. Uniqlo, George (Asda) and Tesco, however, all showed the good grace to do so.

‘UNIQLO is a SPA retailer; “Speciality store retailer of Private label Apparel”, meaning our activities are fully integrated from manufacture through sales, including material procurement, design, product development, production, distribution, inventory management and final sales,’ explained Amy Howarth, head of marketing for Uniqlo UK. ‘We control all elements of manufacture, meaning we can pass on the great price to our customer, avoiding the middle man.’

She then outlined the sheer size of Uniqlo, and how its 965 stores in ten different countries globally (as of November 2010) meant that ‘we are able to offer customers excellent value based on scale of manufacture and production’. So far so clear, but towards the end of the letter the reasons for Uniqlo’s ability to retail at super-low prices become more oblique, and frankly more mysterious: ‘Everything UNIQLO does is deeply rooted in our Japanese origin. We always aspire to ensuring the highest excellence in quality, design and technology.’ The accompanying sheet explaining Uniqlo’s ‘Made for All’ philosophy gives few actual clues: ‘We believe that everyone can benefit from simple, well-designed clothes. Because if all people can look and feel better every day, then maybe the world can be a little better too.’ No doubt. But surely there is an omission here? I saw no reference to the people who actually physically make these garments. From Uniqlo’s response, you’d be forgiven for thinking these clothes materialise on the rails by some Japanese design osmosis.

The letter I received from Fiona Lambert, brand director of George (the clothing arm of Asda, which is in turn the UK arm of Walmart), is clear on the central purpose of George clothing: ‘George was established by George Davies more than twenty years ago with a simple purpose. He wanted to design and sell clothes that represented Style, Quality and Value. For the past twenty years, we have been working hard to deliver that promise and make fashion affordable for our customers.’

She is quick to correct an apparent assumption: ‘It is often wrongly assumed that George’s low prices are simply a result of how we source our garments. In fact, it is because of a consistent focus on efficient operations, and margins that are considerably less than those of the high-street fashion retailers. Reducing costs is not achieved by one single measure but instead demands a holistic view and rigorous examination of all of our processes, spanning everything from supplier relationships to reducing the size of swing-tag labels.’

There follows a further explanation of Asda’s ability to sell clothes so cheaply: it does not need to spend ‘vast amounts of money advertising its George range in order to attract people into its stores’. And as its stores are predominantly based on the outskirts of towns, they enjoy lower rents. Fine. All plausible stuff. But what about the actual making of the clothes?

‘The largest cost in a garment is fabric,’ Ms Lambert continues. ‘We centrally source high volumes of materials including cotton, fabric, buttons and zips to drive cost savings which are then shared with factory owners. In many instances we leverage our scale with Walmart to globally source. We also centrally source all packaging, hangers and swing tags and have even reduced the size of swing tags to cut costs. We have, through our in-store garment hanger recycling process, recycled over 65.5 million hangers to date. The second largest cost is freight. The ways in which we transport our clothing ranges allow us to reduce costs. So, by planning our ranges well in advance, expensive air freight is used only as a last resort.’

Again, all good logistical planning. But it is disconcerting to read, spelled out in black and white, that fabric and freight are the biggest costs of these clothes. Surely we are missing somebody here? There is no reference to the remuneration of the garment workers who actually make them.

Garment workers are not explicitly mentioned in Ms Lambert’s letter at all until near the end, where the fact that Asda has ‘an ongoing relationship with GTZ’, a German NGO working on a pilot productivity scheme focusing on ‘worker skills’, is highlighted. So, high volumes, intricate planning, and at least three mentions of swing tags, but no reference to garment workers as an entity. Tesco’s response comes from commercial director Richard Jones. ‘We work extremely hard to ensure we are more efficient – and more fashionable – than our competitors. We source directly from factories where others go through agents. We leverage our scale and increasing volumes so that suppliers get good-size orders and we get lower unit costs. We employ great staff in the UK and around the world who get to know the suppliers personally, and work out who can offer the best prices with decent technical and working standards. We ensure we give clear specifications so there is little to-ing and fro-ing with suppliers to get the initial design right. Then we have quality and productivity experts regularly visiting factories to ensure efficient production and that there will be few “rejects” among the orders dispatched. We are global leaders in the efficiency (and low carbon) of our transport and logistic systems.’

Mr Jones then introduces the topic of labour rights. He flags up Tesco’s ‘proud’ membership of the Ethical Trading Initiative, and highlights the fact that the company is also working on improving the skills of workers: ‘A broader example of our commitment to support improvement is shown in our current work to establish a Skills Academy for the garment sector in Bangladesh, which will help suppliers to both local and international markets improve production efficiency, raise wages for workers and reduce working hours. The challenges of ensuring decent working conditions, of course, face all clothing suppliers,’ he acknowledges, before ending with a flourish: ‘We’re conscious of how valuable the garment sector is to many developing countries’ economies and believe strongly that the right thing to do is to face challenges in working conditions head on and help improve them – continuing to provide opportunities for jobs and for economic growth – rather than reduce our trade and see those jobs and the opportunities for growth also reduce.’