"WHERE THERE'S MUCK, THERE'S BRASS"

Henry Conway dissects the British High Street.

Picture the scene.  A gaggle of ordinary girls planning their big night out, a lascivious need for styles they have seen in magazines and on blogs , and nothing but the latest trends will do.  They have a thirst to buy, and Oxford Street’s finest will be taking their cash during their lunchbreak, so they can wear their shiny new things out that very night.  If the clothes get trashed, no problem, it is a weekly occurrence.  Sound familiar?  It happens every Friday, up and down the country. As we approach the end of the naughties, nothing could be more quintessentially British than buying for the big night out.

Britian’s high streets are without doubt the best in the world.  The sheer range and turn around of style is the product of an insatiable appetite for having the latest, the brightest, the best trends you can get your hands on – all for bargain prices.  It effects every echelon of British society, from schoolgirls spending their pocketmoney on at top for a tenner, to the fashion editors at Vogue mixing their Hennes with their Hermes.  It is in British Fashion’s DNA.  It makes our high street globally enviable, and big business, but to the detriment of the rest of the fashion world?

Fast Fashion is a marvel of slick operations practice and business.  The old adage of ‘where there’s muck, there’s brass’ is never truer when faced with rows of poly-silk batwing tops that expect to hang around on the shop floor for only a few days – it has made Sir Philip Green a very wealthy man.  Not that I am decrying it – the French editors over for London Fashion Week always ask the PR representatives herding them from show to show if there is time to pop into Topshop to stock up on (cheap) key items.  Topshop and the like are very well loved.

In business terms, fast fashion is an extraordinary model that gets slicker and slicker by the year.  The ability to take a look off the world’s catwalks (designed for delivery of a quality product half a year down the line) and have copies ready to buy in a few weeks is, in business terms, a real feat.  Efficient printing, mass production values that allows translation of styles in a few days, access to cheap labour and a hungry easily bored customer base all come together to provide a force for retail that many other areas of product manufacture simply can’t touch.  These methods of ‘quick response’, combined with visual merchandising and big advertising budgets, sate this appetite for throw-away fashion, but the more it becomes the norm, and the easier it is to get turn around styles, the more impatient the customer becomes.

My personal approach to dressing has always been one that likes to mix and match, with an emphasis on key investment buying (mainly British brands like Pringle, Burberry and Aquascutum), topped up with the odd bit Uniqlo, Reiss and Gap, and with a heavy dose of vintage.  Never, EVER Primark however – this is one area where anyone with fashion running in their veins can draw the line.  Such cost cutting always comes at a price, and ethically, I cannot support it.  This is the dark side of the industry, and industry it is – industrial fashion, machined, not charming witty or beautiful. Fast turn around and incredibly low prices that we now accept as standard cannot be sustainable without a human cost, or a cost to the immaculate reputation of British design.

Indeed, where quality suffers, so does design.  Having ideas ripped off straight away can be devastating to a new designer with a reputation to build.  If you are a label with a strong following, individual looks and styles will be bought into by your customer base as they follow you, but if you are a new designer, it can be a nightmare to have your best ideas copied and regurgitated by base level and mid level high street shops that instantly make your work seem less special.  This is only in extreme cases, and I do think quality and sheer talent will win through, but it does make the struggle even more so.  The fashion mavericks of the upcoming teens will have a lot more to battle against than the mavericks of the 1980s.  The copyright bill that the US tried to introduce, the ‘Design Piracy Prohibition Act’, which would give designers a three year grace period in which to protect their designs and allow easier lawsuits against out and out copying (with fines of roughly $250,000 a design), fell after 3 years of legislation.  A new similar bill is being introduced, but this will take some time.  For now, European legislation is better than the US, but there is so much more to be done.  As with all intellectual copyright, and legal arguments involving creatives, lines are always finely drawn.

Though we may not have the rarefied reputation of Paris, or the drive for excessive quality of Milan (just how much snakeskin can one city use), the Brits main problem is redressing a global view on the availability of quality in British Fashion.  We do have wonderful talent, well supported by a number of popular brands by way of diffusion lines and scholarships, giving those of us with less deep pockets a chance to enjoy good design at a third of the price, and an ability for younger designers to stay afloat, but more can be done.  Rather than getting elitist about big fashion chains, a collusion between designer and high street is our best way forward from this situation, but one in which talent is given the dias on which to preach from – cheap has the upper hand at the moment, and it is not doing Britain any favours.

Read more in the new issue of SuperSuper

Words by: Henry Conway

Article by supersupertv