Are we really supposed to be horrified when talented designers accustomed to making clothes the price of a grad-student stipend create a line for Target? According to Erika Kawalek, the Rodarte team sold out by doing just that.
The article itself is a bit confusing - the author announces that she just returned from China, and implies that the Target line was made there, but never says this outright, so for all we know it's not. But it has to be from China, and the result of poor labor conditions, for the argument to make sense. She calls the Target line's garments "Rodarte for Target clothes are commodities" - what, then, are the clothes from the pricier line?
And, um: "Rodarte is synonymous with craft, which means $3,000 to $12,000 price tags, but nobody calls the Mulleavy's elitist or out-of-touch." Because I read too many fashion blogs, I'm aware of who these sisters are, that they look much more 'normal' (read, non-emaciated) than most women in the industry, and wear jeans and not terribly cutting-edge sneakers, so I suppose compared with an Anna Wintour, a Karl Lagerfeld, the phrase "out-of-touch" wouldn't come to mind. But anyone responsible for clothing in this price range is part of the problem, if we are defining down-payment-on-house-priced clothing as a problem.
We are thus once again being confronted with the "slow fashion" argument. Hand-crafted, artisinal, quality, Investment Piece, blah blah, who cares that most of the clothing women actually wear-for-years is from places like Target. Kawalek writes of how the designers' regular line "practically howled with the sadness of environmental degradation, while at the same time inspired a poetic but equally practical mend-and-make-do approach to self-fashioning." Yes, because the solution for The Environment is to make clothing that costs $12,000, so that no one can afford it, so that no clothing - worn-to-shreds or otherwise - ends up in landfills, because there's no clothing left. As in, of course, it must be better to carry your great-grandmother's Hermes purse than a tote bag or backpack - perhaps if my own ancestors had carried purses and not pushcarts, I'd do the same.
OK, I realize the above is as populist as I've ever sounded, ever. My point, though, is not about Real Women who Wear Target, but about, once again, the nonsense that is pretending that there is Quality clothing, which is worn for years, and on the other hand, disposable junk. $40 clothing is only disposable junk if for you, the default is $4,000.
Monday, December 14, 2009
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5 comments:
hmm...maybe this is only really relevant in New York?
The real thrifty option is to wear clothes from thrift stores for decades. My father almost only shopped at thrift stores, his rationale being a) most clothes in the 80s were ugly, and b) anything that is in good shape after previous wear is obviously of fairly high craftsmanship, and therefore is a good investment. Thus, better to buy an almost new blouse from the goodwill than a new one from target, because the goodwill one will probably look better for longer. There is some truth to that, I think. I have an orange blouse I bought 11 years ago for about $8 at a thrift store (it is Old Navy, so they must have at some point made better clothes), and I still wear it all the time, it has kept it's shape and color and looks quite decent. In contrast, I bought a new orange t-shirt from old navy for about $15 this spring to wear in China this summer. By about the 3rd wash, it was losing its shape, and it looked so cheap I got made fun of by my friend's Chinese relatives. When I told them that I bought it in America and how much I paid, they were totally appalled. They told me no Chinese person of my age who wasn't poor would be caught dead in such a cheap-looking shirt.
But, Old Navy aside, I do agree that by and large, even cheap clothes in America are of high-enough quality that the "quality vs. quantity" argument doesn't hold any sway at the designer level. Sure, a $40 shirt from Banana Republic will probably be a better long-term investment than a $5 one from target, but the $40 shirt is a good enough investment that there is no way you can justify spending $5,000 for a shirt unless you are wealthy and want to spend extravagantly.
Britta,
I don't think the article I link to has anything particular to do with New York. Nor do even wealthy people in New York typically go around in $12,000 clothes. In other words, it's not a 'thing' in New York to be shamed into not wearing haute couture. Thank god for that!
But as for thrift as the best option... cheapest, yes, but I tend not to buy the argument that if it's lasted long enough to get to a thrift store, it's got more life in it yet. It's hard to tell how much something was worn before it was donated - often, people donate the things they haven't much worn, and simply throw out the ones they have once they get unwearable, and even poorly-made clothes look fine after virtually no wear.
That, and I suppose I'm not particularly sensitive to craftsmanship when it comes to things like t-shirts. Even if I can sort of tell that a garment is not of highest quality, this doesn't bother me, nor does it prevent me from wearing it for a very long time. So I have cotton shirts/dresses from H&M, the GAP, etc., that pill when I wear them with a backpack, but that doesn't stop me from wearing them. My point is that it's not so much that cheap clothes fall apart instantly, making it hard to get much wear out of them, but that they look, well, cheap. Which means that if you're not too worried about whether or not your t-shirts look cheap, you can wear cheap t-shirts. Whereas with shoes, say, quality can potentially matter for comfort and durability, and thus wear.
"it's not a 'thing' in New York to be shamed into not wearing haute couture."
I mean, to be shamed *for not* wearing haute couture. Argh.
Where in the U.S. can one still buy a house for $12,000 down?
Anonymous,
No clue. I've only ever rented, and only in NYC.
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