Here at Cheapness Studies, I've defended 'fast fashion,' or chains like H&M (and my own house of worship, Uniqlo), which are often accused of being inherently wasteful, encouraging us to buy according to 15-minute trends, thus creating landfills entirely made up of harem pants and jeggings. My argument: cheapness means buying cheap clothes, but pretending they cost a fortune. Do this - that is, buy fewer clothes from the chains, and take better care of them - and you will find that the clothes They told you would fall apart instantly keep just fine, year after year.
But! H&M is apparently the devil after all, but not for the reason usually given, i.e. the low quality of their goods. A CUNY grad student discovered that the store on 34th Street destroys unworn clothes so that if they're not bought by H&M customers, no one can have them. And, as the NYT sums up: "It is winter. A third of the city is poor. And unworn clothing is being destroyed nightly."
Of course, if 'slow-fashion' stores are to blame for the same practice, blaming H&M for not charging more for its clothes (see passage in this post and accompanying comments, along with prior comments at Racked) seems a bit beside the point. It's quite possible to condemn H&M's behavior without attributing it to their clothes being cheap, if even expensive goods get this treatment.
Where does all the waste come from? No doubt landfills see more H&M than Prada. But per shopper, who buys more, the woman with a shopping cart at Old Navy or the one with a personal shopper at Bergdorfs? Fast fashion means more waste overall, but more options for those with less. Are fast-fashion stores really purveyors of disposable goods any more than places slightly more upscale? In total, no doubt, because there are so many more of them, but per person? The near-infinite presence of new-looking H&M at both vintage and thrift stores suggests such chains are, in fact, used by some well-off (or non-frugal) women as a source of so-very-now get-ups, but, because this is not how I myself shop at such stores, and I'm neither impoverished nor a cheapness saint, I question whether this is the normal approach to them.
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11 comments:
The other problem with H&M and the like is where the clothes are made, by whom and in what conditions. In the UK a shop called Primark (like H&M does high fashion copies that it sells for peanuts) was discovered to be using child labour. Apparently it doesn't any more, but I'm not sure these huge chains apply Fair Trade principles in their dealings with Bangladesh, China etc.
Not sure how it works in the UK, but in the US, cheap chains are often under fire for labor practices. When, when you look at the labels of even more upscale clothes, they too are made in China and so forth, not hand-stitched by a well-paid Italian with years of experience and a long lunch break. US consumer are asked by the well-meaning not to 'demand' low prices, but even if you demand J.Crew or Banana Republic, both pricier than H&M and the like, you're still shopping at chains with what the Made-In labels do not suggest are different approaches to production.
That's why this new issue brings up a bit of the same. Commenters are enthusiastically ordering boycotts of H&M on account of it's a cheap and thus evil chain, without any knowledge of what the standard practice is at higher-end stores. Some comments at the NY Magazine site suggested the same is done all over the place.
But per shopper, who buys more, the woman with a shopping cart at Old Navy or the one with a personal shopper at Bergdorfs?
I wouldn't necessarily make assumptions about this so long as the two women have similar clothing budgets. My husband and I have roughly similar income for clothing, but he's the kind of snob (and, fair enough, working at a fancier firm) who did get a personal shopper, albeit at Bloomingdale's rather than Bergdorf's, to help him assemble a collection of Armani and Burberry suits. He'd started with 1 nice suit and bought another 4, plus 8 shirts, to be ready to go to work two years ago. Since then he's bought 4 new suits and a tux. Each suit costs at least $700 even when on a fantastic sale. In contrast, I have literally a score of suits and twice as many shirts, because I refuse to spend more than $350 on a suit or $50 on a shirt (and most cost less than that; my last Ann Taylor suit was $170). Given the same clothing budget, my side of the closet is twice as stuffed as his because I buy a lot more clothing at lower prices. I also get rid of my old clothes at a much faster rate than he does, because somehow a buttondown shirt from Victoria's Secret doesn't survive as many ironings as one from Thomas Pink.
You are assuming that the Old Navy or H&M shopper is shopping there out of economic necessity, rather than because she likes to be able to buy a lot of clothing with her budget. Which is reasonable to assume for many people, but probably not actually the people being addressed in these discourses about slow fashion. If I flat out can't afford Bergdorf's, such discourses are utterly irrelevant to me. But if I could afford a Bergdorf's buy once a month if I weren't buying stuff at H&M every week, then I am the target for such arguments and the claim that I would buy fewer items if I shopped at Bergdorf's -- and that I would have to take more care of them and use them longer and treat that less disposably -- seems pretty accurate. And as you say, the quantity of barely-worn fast-fashion at thrift shops certainly suggests the existence of women with Bergdorf budgets but H&M tastes.
Also, the Slate article leaves out the most obvious solution, one implied by the NYT article's mention of the proximity to NY Cares: give the clothing not to a Goodwill or Salvation Army type charity that engages in resale, but to a group like NY Cares or a homeless shelter that directly clothes poor people. That way the clothing is not competing, in the form of such charity thrift shops, with your own retail. If you're worried about its being known that poor people wear your puffy jackets, cut off the damn labels instead of cutting up the clothing. You can then take a charitable tax deduction for the amount that the clothes would have sold new had they sold at their last sale price (this being the retail value of the clothing). Assuming this works the same way it does for individuals, that means you can reduce your tax bill by 1/3 the retail price of the items -- a massive tax benefit.
"I wouldn't necessarily make assumptions about this so long as the two women have similar clothing budgets."
I was assuming the two women had quite different clothing budgets. Basically, the myth that rich women don't shop at places like Old Navy is just that - a myth - because t-shirts have to come from somewhere, and the rich are so in part because they don't spend all their money on $500 t-shirts. As it seems we both agree, this is how so much new-looking cheap clothing arrives in thrift shops, or at consignment shops attempting to sell H&M used for at least the original price.
But at the same time, Old Navy customers are visibly poorer than the ones at J.Crew. I suppose we'd need numbers on who shops where, but you're right that the discourse on fast fashion is only relevant for those with the choice you and your husband have - between lots of cheaper stuff and fewer well-made clothes. Still, I don't think that's the entire audience for the conversation - there are plenty who sort-of-do, sort-of-don't have the option of Bergdorfs. For such people, the anti-fast-fashion discourse acts as a justification for spending-beyond-means that they'd wanted to do all along, but lacked an ethical-sounding justification for.
And... Your suggestion of what they should do with the clothes makes sense to me.
I'm not sure why any individual would be upset to see H&M on a homeless person (or, for that matter, would notice - is clothing ever recognizably H&M?), but it's a bit easier to understand from a brand's perspective why it would worry about a cheaper heap of its clothes somewhere for the taking.
Finally, one more point, because I haven't been long-winded enough.
This being Cheapness Studies, I think it's worth pointing out that one's 'clothing budget' is itself malleable. What does it mean to be able to afford to spend a certain amount? Assuming cheap(er) clothes, if treated as though their cost mattered, keep for years (as has been my experience, but I don't wear suits and word has it suits are a different issue), even wealthier shoppers might be better off buying few clothes, yes, but buying them at cheaper stores. The overall economy could suffer (more) if all went this route, but individuals would arguably benefit.
Assuming cheap(er) clothes, if treated as though their cost mattered, keep for years
It depends on what is required for such keeping. If I hand-wash my buttondown shirts and carefully iron them myself on the lowest setting necessary, they certainly last longer than if I take them to the dry cleaner, who machine washes and roughly presses them.* OTOH, such care requires more time and energy than I generally have to spend on laundry. (My husband is already fed up with my pile of delicates that I insist on air drying to maximize their lifespan, which means that periodically, every available space in a small apartment is festooned with undergarments and cotton-silk blend shirts. He believes that anything that cannot be put in the dryer must be dry-cleaned.)
Depending on the source of one's wealth, one might be a fortunate soul with both the funds to buy lots of clothing and the leisure to care for it oneself, but for most Americans there appears to be a tradeoff between the two (as with the tradeoff between the funds to go on long overseas vacations and being allowed that much time off, especially to travel in areas without Blackberry coverage).
* Incidentally, we recently switched to a dry cleaner who is slightly further away and slightly more expensive than our former one, out of sheer despair at the nearest cleaner's variations on incompetence. I think the zenith was reached when I asked to have a bra sewn into a halter dress, and it was returned to me with the bra sewn in upside down. If your tailor believes in anti-gravity breasts, you have problems.
Oh, I meant to add that my tax analysis may be missing on what they can deduct due to losses. I've only studied corporate taxation at the level of "Company X makes widgets" without having practiced it in real life, and I don't know if one must have proof of the loss in the form of destroyed goods in order to survive an audit of a tax return on which one has claimed losses. It's possible from an accounting perspective that they save more on taxes by claiming these as losses instead of as charitable donations.
PG,
None of what you describe was what I meant by taking better care of clothes - I can't imagine with all the leisure time in the world handwashing anything more than twice a year, if that. As far as I'm concerned, it all goes in the wash. Once again, it's hard to sort this out, because the issue seems perhaps less to be that we disagree than that we dress differently on account of doing different things with our lives. Nothing in being a PhD student (even a style-conscious one) requires wearing anything that must be dry-cleaned. Some other fields are, of course, different.
(As for the mystery well-off folks handwashing things, I believe these are what were once referred to as 'housewives' - I don't think independently wealthy men or single women would go this route.)
So, to get to what I did mean: basically, not treating $10 shirts like garbage on account of they only cost $5. So, not going running in the same (non-scandalous) tank tops you wear to work, changing out of a particular shirt before cooking dinner, not treating a small flaw in a garment as a sign that the thing can now be discarded and replaced. And, not treating H&M and Old Navy like the supermarket, i.e. not going twice a week for a new round. Does that make more sense?
Nothing in being a PhD student (even a style-conscious one) requires wearing anything that must be dry-cleaned.
This doesn't apply to the guys trying to go the tweed way already, unfortunately, though I suspect most grad students wearing a sports coat don't get the dry cleaned as often as they should.
Matt,
I live with a (well-dressed) male grad student, and we alternate who does laundry. All can easily be thrown in the washing machine. I'm not sure how one cares for tweed, but a) it's an option but not necessary for either gender, and b) as you correctly note, the disheveled-philosopher look means clothes being not-so-clean.
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