So What, Who Cares (vol 1, issue 7) Why we don't confuse fast fashion with smart fashion

The dream of the Nineties is alive in retail -- as in, it looks like the 1990s and the ledgers read like the manufacturing in the 1890s. Let's dive in.
*

Product managers at Zara are wholly unfamiliar with the YA book and 2008 film, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. The mass market clothing chain -- widely credited as the inventors of fast fashion thanks to a business model that reduces the supply-chain turnaround time from months to days -- had to yank a set of children's pajamas from stores after people pointed out that striped tops with yellow six-pointed stars did not, in fact, look like the Old West sheriff shirts but like Auschwitz prisoner uniforms.

So what? This is not the first time the Spanish chain has stepped in it with Gestapo imagery, leading some to wonder if perhaps a pitfall to speedy retail is a lack of review before pushing the next cheap frock to the masses. Alternately, this suggests that company culture at Zara is so repressive that muttering, "This child's garment looks like Nazi prisoner uniforms" is not encouraged.

Who cares? People who look at mass-market retail chains as proof of society's moral degeneracy; this gives them a nice break from objecting to brainless sexism on little girls' t-shirts. Other people who might care: Retailers, who are quietly studying how Zara's logistic set-up can absorb an oopsie without too much of a financial bath.

*
Retailers and fashion magazines continue to miss the point of normcore. The Gap's marketing campaign for the fall is to "dress normal," while doing normal activities like reclining on a bed in an adorable waxed-canvas moto jacket and black boots.

So what? The fall campaign comes about six months after fashion outlets noted, with some alarm, that a trend called #normcore was emerging organically from the streets, as opposed to being pushed by (fast) fashion outlet, and that normcore was aggressively anti-fashion. Fashion mags have responded by trying to co-opt normcore and set out the rules for doing it "right," which is both a hilarious way to miss the point and an adorably retro homage to the editorial spreads of 1992-93, when fashion editors attempted to tell people how to do grunge.

Who cares? Retailers. Sales increases -- which most publicly-held retailers use as proof that their business is robust -- have been anemic this year, and everyone's hoping for a strong Q4. More broadly, economists are keeping a nervous eye on Americans to see what will make them spend, since "this economy runs on consumer spending!" is turning out to be a shaky bet for sustained, cross-class American prosperity. If a weary nation of strapped consumers can embrace pleated khakis and clunky sneakers ... well, maybe happy times will be here again!

*

Fast fashion is something of an environmental nightmare and it costs you money in the long run. If you spend any time at all on Metafilter, someone will inevitably bring up Vimes' Theory of Boots, which goes like this:

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

Something similar happens with fast fashion: the clothing is deliberately designed and produced to be both cheap and ephemeral, so you end up buying a $5 t-shirt twelve times over five years, as opposed to buying a $40 t-shirt once and wearing it for five years. In addition to fiscal death by a thousand discount gladrags, there is the environmental impact to consider plus the sticky human rights issues like, "The sequins on your $25 party top were probably sewn on by a small child." But it's getting to be increasingly difficult to find retailers who aren't going for top-of-line luxury goods (pricey) or disposable fast fashion. Retailers counter that it doesn't pay to carve out a middle-class niche in these tight economic times.

So what? The fast fashion economy delivers a one-two punch to the middle class: First, it contributes to the growing phenomenon of the middle class consumer experience being squeezed out of existence. Second, it contributes to the phenomenon of American consumer-facing companies deciding it's not worth it to create middle-class jobs in this country, because doing so would hurt profit models.

Who cares? Approximately 99% of the U.S. population does, on some level. Nobody enjoys paying more money over the course of their lives only to end up with fewer and crappier things.

*
Today's pop culture note ... Kate Bush returned to the stage for the first time in 35 years, and apparently reminded a weary world what a weird and awesome thing conceptual rock opera can be. Go break out The Hounds of Love, listen to tracks 6-12, and thrill to the desperate energy in #9, "Jig of Life," which I hope I never forget.