Even Philip Green doffed his hat to Zara. ‘Genius54. What the fashion industry is all about,’ he said in an interview with Retail Week magazine. ‘When Madonna gave a series of concerts in Spain,’ noted business expert Robin Dymond on his blog Scrum, Agile and Lean Methods, ‘teenage girls were wearing at her last performance the outfit she wore for her first concert.’ Although I was amazed that looking like Madonna was still a kudos-raising activity for teenagers in Spain, I got the point. He saw another direct translation for an older market: ‘When Spain’s Crown Prince Felipe55 and Letizia Ortiz Rocasolano announced their engagement in 2003, the bride-to-be wore a stylish white pant suit. Within a few weeks, hundreds of European women were wearing something similar.’
Other pretenders to the high-street throne got the message. Esprit and Mango tried the same approach: short lead times and multiple seasons, along with reduced delivery times – these could be as little as forty-eight hours56. What was definitely out of fashion was holding onto lots of stock, or indeed any stock.
As consumers we rapidly changed our priorities. Long-standing skills of buying clothing, such as assessing for quality or looking at labels, were junked in favour of getting our hands on what was new as we adjusted to the Zara-like thrill of swapping two wardrobe seasons a year (and the delayed gratification of waiting to embrace those two seasons) for upwards of twenty. While the world’s mainline Fashion Weeks continue the charade of spring/summer and autumn/winter seasons, in real terms they are now about as relevant to contemporary life as learning Gregorian plainsong.
Zara’s policy was what we might call a game-changer. While it won plaudits in the financial press and saw its share price rocket – a share offer to the public in 2001 was over-subscribed twenty-six times, raising 2.1 billion euros57 – brands such as M&S, with relatively pedestrian stock turns that were at least twenty days slower58, and often with lead times of six months, found themselves getting a lot of stick for being plodding and dowdy. Inevitably there were casualties as fashion brands that had long been mainstays of the high street were thrown into a do-or-die situation. Many of these represented the middle market – not too cheap, not too fast, but truly affordable clothing where standards of quality and longevity were still in evidence. Those brands scrambled to try either to up their fashionability (Next, for example, attempted to be clearer about its style and direction), or slashed their prices to try to compete.
In retrospect, the criticism of previously cherished middle-market brands just before the millennium was exceptionally harsh. Laura Ashley, Next and Monsoon were all accused of misreading ‘the all-important female fashion market’ as they urgently attempted to ‘restructure their offer’. M&S famously came in for years of ridicule, not least at the company’s own AGMs, which took on a theatrical quality. In 1999 Teresa Vanneck-Surplice, a private shareholder, waved a pair of a rival chain’s knickers at then M&S Chairman Brian Baldock. ‘Your underwear’s59 got boring!’ she said, adding, ‘I may be fifty-two but I like my underwear sexy.’ To the delight of the assembled media, Vanneck Surplice proved a similarly dynamic complainant during 2007’s AGM, when she told Stuart Rose (by that time Executive Chairman) that she was still unhappy with M&S’s offerings, which was why she was dressed head to foot in Primark. (‘It won’t last60,’ responded Rose with splendid ambiguity.) To varying degrees the crime of the middle market was that it was no longer deemed fashionable. Next to the neon-lit, sequin-strewn running track that fast fashion streaked up and down, the middle market was frankly an embarrassment. So while the Dutch-owned C&A appeared as one of the top ten UK clothing retailers in 1999, just a year later it announced it was closing all of its British stores.
In 2000 you wouldn’t have found me mourning the middle market. I was far too busy adding to my collection of jeans and shoes. But now I’m pausing for a brief moment of regret. Yes, it’s a case of you-don’t-know-what-you’ve-got-till-it’s-gone, but the middle market was, with a great deal of hindsight, the best way to avoid sucking all of the health out of the fashion industry, including a loss of control over the supply chain. It was the most sustainable, mainstream way of ensuring affordable fashion.
OUT OF CONTROL: THE RUNAWAY STYLE TRAIN
I don’t want to compound the air of regret, but if only it had stopped there. Fast fashion had its merits – it certainly brought excitement. The jury’s out on whether you can have responsible fast fashion (it certainly doesn’t sound very sexy), but what if it had stayed true to Jane Shepherdson’s original idea, to make better, more fashionable clothes at affordable prices? Naturally there would have been some deficit environmentally – every time you make something there’s an impact – but we would have stood a chance of minimising the negative effects.
Inevitably the signs of this revolution – the bulging wardrobes and the women staggering around with multiple store bags – attracted attention in non-fashionista circles. By the late 1990s economists and business analysts, alerted by the superleague profits of previously workaday stores, were taking a closer look. What on earth, they wondered, was going on? It was the equivalent of hearing the strains of a prolonged and increasingly wild party until you feel compelled to get out of bed and see the action for yourself. And it was some party: a story of spectacular growth made more captivating to analysts because historically the clothing sector in the UK had always been a bit of a damp squib, but it was now displaying incredible figures. From 1900 to 1938 things were glacially slow, then became even worse with the Second World War, when clothes were subject to rationing61. Only from 1975 did the British public finally begin casting offsome of its make-do-and-mend attitude to fashion, as the UK market swelled to reach an unprecedented size by 1999. The UK Fashion Report for 1998–99 proclaimed the UK clothing and footwear industry to be worth £26 billion62 (up from £11.7 billion in 1983). There was more to come. In 2009 it was worth an amazing £46.05 billion, and accounted for 5.3 per cent of all consumer spending.
I call this seismic shift in making, selling and buying fashion the alchemy of fast fashion. Alchemy, the medieval forerunner of chemistry, launched many practitioners on the ultimately fruitless quest to turn base metal into gold. Fast-fashion alchemy has done something similar, turning basic fabrics and a frill-free supply chain into a Balenciaga-alike fashion fix. Just like alchemy, there’s an unquantifiable mystical element to this dark art, because the stellar fiscal achievements of fast fashion took place at a time when clothing prices were actually falling. This is worth spelling out. We were clearly purchasing a lot of wardrobe fodder. In 1990 we cumulatively spent £23 billion on clothes and shoes – the lion’s share, almost £19 billion, on clothes; trends dictated that a large proportion of this will have gone on boot-cut jeans and some on the tyrannical reign of the babydoll dress. We achieved all of this with just 4.5 per cent of our household budget (in the 1960s we spent far less on our wardrobes, but they accounted for 10 per cent of our budget). By 1998