Why is it that even when they have a point, the various slow-things-down movements - Slow Food, slow art-appreciation, anything else asking us to unplug and return to a simpler time, a slower time - are so very irritating? Is it because we're all in a race of one kind or another, and those telling us to slow down are doing so so that they can get ahead? Is it because pro-slow can mean anti-cosmopolitan which can mean xenophobic?
Or maybe it's because well-meaning attempts to get us to stop being such wasteful Westerners sometimes manifest themselves as pseudo-environmentalist, pseudo-pro-labor arguments for choosing Chanel over H&M, from someone clearly more concerned with helping people not wear what everyone else does to the ball than with landfills. (Via.) The blogger situates himself in a branch of frugality that eschews the obviously correct answer - buy cheap stuff and not much of it - in favor of the more fun-sounding 'buy expensive stuff but not much of it', praise the gods of Quality and I Will Wear This For Years, and feel both smug and thrifty.
Anyway, agreed that the less we spend on clothes, the more disposable we consider them. But! For whom, outside the fashion-and-socialite industry, are 'cheap' clothes that disposable? (And is donation of still-intact used clothes no longer socially acceptable?) For whom, outside these rare exceptions, does the fact that a skirt costs $40 mean huzzah, time to buy a new one every week? No doubt, if I owned a $4,000 dress, I'd take ridiculously good care of it, and could perhaps mimic Golden Age sartorial behavior, wearing just one set of clothes per season, thus saving The Workers and The Environment. But I'm rather fond of my $30 corduroys from Uniqlo, my $17 dress from H&M; for me - and I'm not claiming poverty here - these were monetarily-significant purchases. Designer clothes would mean inability to pay rent; the clothes I own and wear are not "fast fashion", purchased and tossed without a second's thought, but just... clothes. My 'cheap' clothes must be awfully well-made, because they have a tendency to last for years.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
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7 comments:
The indefatigable JFred has beaten you to this project. The point seems to be that, if you're a woman with an unwavering desire to buy incredibly expensive stuff, you can always find a way to justify it to yourself later.
This particular incarnation of post-facto justification may suffer from some shortcomings--for example, what happens to all the items that never get worn at all, or that you've already given away because they were so hopeless? How do they figure into this "CPW"? Another question I have is whether anyone should be excited that an item cost $1.23 a wear, or what that would compare to? If I go to a really expensive restaurant, and eat so slowly that I spend five hours there, it might be that my cost per bite ends up lower than if I bought a $8 burger and finished it in 10 minutes. But it's clearly just sophistry to argue that this makes the expensive dinner a better value.
You have to give the girl credit - I can't imagine going through my own closet, photographing GAP underpants, and pants that I never wore because they were "too tight" - these are familiar enough objects/situations, just not things I could imagine documenting. But it's a sort of brilliant idea. (I'm ostensibly up now to read about autobiography and related genres, and was till reading this - but this seems to fit, actually.)
But there are two problems, aside from the one you bring up re: what does $1.23 really mean: 1) Once you start recording "CPW", you probably pick your outfits differently, perhaps according to a preconceived idea of what most be Worn For Years. and: 2) she is a Fashion Person - she owns a whole lot more clothing than I'd imagine even most wealthy women, plus the whole scale is off for those of us whose high-ticket items are full-priced splurges at H&M, who cannot divide their wardrobes between High and Low, because everything would be if not Low, than at least Lower Middle. To be cheap, or perhaps even just sensible, you probably want CPWs of more like two cents.
Anyway, I'm in full agreement that the whole CPW concept really is skewed towards reassuring yourself that you're not really spending a ton on clothes, while at the same time permitting you to spend a ton on clothes.
I agree that the blogger's study is near-brilliant but not exactly double-blind. As Phoebe could attest, I wear, on a daily basis, stretch velour pants purchased at GapKids circa 1993. People would pay me to stop going outside in these, so they could have the ultimate c.p.w. if I exercised that option.
--E.H.
Yes, I totally agree with your original point about how the real cheap is buying all your stuff at Gap and not buying it that often. The link is just an addendum to the general topic. And I also cannot believe she has the time for such a...generous undertaking in the name of furthering science and the public good, but she is JFred...
Also, I am v. impressed that any human being could manage to wear these even five times in her life.
Oh, oh, one more thing and then I will be done: If you buy a pair of pants for $100 and never wear them, then according to Math, the CPW is not $100, but rather indeterminate, since you're diving by zero. And I think in thrift terminology, that is equivalent to "prodigious waste of money."
Maybe the divide-by-zero issue can be gotten around if you count trying something on at the store as a "wear"?
What's funny to me about CPW is that we're used to getting advice about how a $3 latte is 'really' over a thousand dollars, because little purchases add up. This just reverses the thought process, allowing big purchases to seem small. I don't see how that's productive.
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