Is it really time to reach for Designer Labels again?

In a recent issue of the Daily Mail, Naomi Greenaway wrote “Last Thursday, just as I was leaving the house for a business appointment, my cleaner arrived - wearing exactly the same dress as I was. A £15 H&M special. She was about to scrub the loo. I was heading off to do an interview.”
Her headline asked “When you find your cleaner wearing the same outfit as you, isn't it time to reach for designer labels again?”

Here at Make it and Mend it, we believe the answer to that is NO! Don’t get me wrong, this does not mean that we're anti designer clothing. Far from it. We just believe that there is a time and a place for it. Apart from a cringeworthy display of snobbery, Naomi is encouraging people to spend money that they don’t have. We're in the midst of a recession and many people are out of work and struggling to pay their mortgages and household bills, so clothes are unfortunately way down the list of priorities for most people.

To give her credit, Naomi does apologise for sounding like a snob, but, she argues “I'm done with fashion communism. I don't want to live in a world where everyone wears the same cut-price outfit like Chinese peasants in Chairman Mao jackets.”

Which I think most of us would agree with. We like to be individual, but she does rather destroy this argument when she goes on to say:
“But now everyone from your granny to your cleaner is wearing it, too - and I'd rather go out naked, thanks”.

Not only is she being ageist, classist, but later in the article fattist as well:
“We like our clothes to reflect who we are, but when they're also a reflection of the fat woman on the train, the annoying teenager and the cleaner, it creates an uncomfortable dissonance.”

Putting the debate about snobbery aside, within this diatribe there were a couple grains of importance and truth – she does make a fair point about cheap clothing not being cheap when we buy in the ridiculous bulk that some people do, but I think the most important point is - do we all have to look the same?

Naomi claims that “Unlike good old-fashioned snobbery, where subtlety is key, this inverse snobbery about what you pay for clothes and shoes is constantly rubbed in our faces. It's all about buying cheap and bragging about it. That's all very well, but as thousands of other women and I are discovering, it means running into scores of women dressed the same as you.”

It seems she fears that we are all becoming clones. She maintains the only answer to this is to designer-shop our way out of this, but is this answer? Ok you may be getting a better quality of clothing, but you'll still find others wearing the same as you. You will just become a better 'class' of clone.

We firmly believe that this is not the only answer. There are many ways of maintaining an individual style without becoming a clone.

With a little thought, creativity and possibly the use of a needle, you can create and adapt an amazing individually styled wardrobe. It is not about how much you spend, it is about how you wear it and how you put it together. Gok Wan’s programme on Channel 4 demonstrates this brilliantly. Gok is the champion of the high street chic. But he takes a basic item and fashions it into something that looks original and fabulously expensive; week after week winning the catwalk vote against designer labels at ten times the price.

And people are wising up to this. Sales of sewing machines are rising rapidly. Sewing courses are springing up all over the country. There really is no need to go out looking like a clone or to spend your month’s mortgage on a pair of shoes.

Naomi's article suggests that a desire to go designer shopping is more about a need to be noticed than buying quality.

“Research shows that when women shop, it is not necessarily related to how much money they have to spend but what is going on in their minds,” says KarenPine. Author of Sheconomics . She claims that people shop “to cheer themselves up, when their boyfriends have dumped them, when they are not getting on with their husbands, when they've had a bad day. The thinking is ‘I work damned hard, I deserve a reward'.”

Unfortunately it is these emotional triggers that are exploited to sell unsuitable products that waste our money.

Shopping for unnecessary products taps into our need to be validated by others.
“Ever since I bought the Choo beauties a few months ago, I'd been waiting for the perfect moment to show them off - and relishing the purrs of approval they were bound to garner from my female friends” says Naomi Greenaway.

This says more about her possible lack of self-esteem than it does about the shoes themselves. It is about the Jimmy Choos enabling her to become the envy of her friend.

But horror of horrors:
“ ..when I wore them at dinner last week, no one noticed them, they were so bowled over by my other friend's lumps of canvas and cork which cost less than a bottle of wine.”

Sadly this is something we have all experienced – being upstaged by our friends. Let’s face it. How many of us get to be the princess in the school play? But what it does highlight is that even spending a fortune on a pair of shoes does not mark us out from the crowd, or make us feel ‘different’. We don’t need to spend money to feel good about ourselves.

Pine goes on to say in her book “It soon became obvious to me that most women's financial problems were either the result of, or complicated by, their underlying attitude to money, alongside a variety of personal issues or self-limiting beliefs”.

It's unfortunate that the term “retail therapy” has become common parlance and is frequently used by TV and women's magazines in an upbeat, even sisterly way to make us feel it's ok to carry on shopping, without any thought to paying the bills and what other psychological issues we might be trying to cover up.

It's time we started to redress the balance and highlight the fact that we don’t need to continually spend vast amounts of money on our wardrobes. The occasional splurge is great and picking a up a designer bargain is sheer heaven, but in between times, it should be more about how you wear your clothes rather than how much you spend. Creating something out of nothing and an individual style will give you a far bigger and a longer lasting boost to your ego than a trip to Prada ever will. Especially as there is no nasty after taste when the bill comes in.

My final response to Naomi is that she should think about what is motivating her in her desire to be different and why she feels that she has to spend so much money to validate her existence. Making, styling and altering would make her feel much better about herself than the quick fix shopping trip. My advice, girls, would be - Save the money on the Jimmy Choos and buy a sewing machine!
(Hilary)

Do we have the skills for frugal fashion?

I read a very interesting piece by Angelique Chrisafis in the Guardian this morning, about wartime, ration-book fashion in Paris.

The French capital is hosting an exhibition at the Jean Moulin Museum to celebrate the ingenious ways French women, under the Nazi Occupation, managed to stay fashionable, using all manner of materials from scraps of cellophane, to bits of straw and from pieces of wood to fabric from old sofas. The platform shoes in the photograph were fashioned out of blocks of wood and pieces of canvas. As hot water was scarce, a new fashion was created when les femmes de Paris took to wearing turbans (made from paper or straw) to disguise their dirty locks.

The article quotes one of the show's organisers, Fabienne Falluel the fasion historian: "Women knew how to sew, and in that dark period they still took ideas from magazines and the street, but they made the pieces themselves. Today people don't necessarily know how to sew - we're still in a culture of consumption where the instinct is to buy, not make. But you'll see, people will soon start learning." I do hope you're right Fabienne.

There has always been a small (and recently growing) section of the population that possesses the skill of sewing and takes pleasure from making clothes and using unusual and interesting materials to do so. The sad fact remains that this is a significantly smaller proportion of the populace than was the case during the War, or even 20 to 30 years ago.

The disappearance or reduction of the domestic sciences from school curricula must account for some of this loss of skill. But if people really wanted to learn to sew they could have learned from mothers and grandmothers. The fact that they haven't, lies with Mde Falluel's point that we are living in a culture of consumption.

I grew up knowing how to sew. My mother was a good role model and I was taught at school. As a teenager, I made most of my own clothes and could follow a pattern with ease. Until I had a go at making a simple summer shift dress last year, I had not touched a sewing machine in 25 years.

Why is this? Lack of time maybe? - but had I really wanted (or needed) to do it I could have made time. There was a period in my life when I was a heavy spender on fashion and happy to pay for designer names, so there was no place in my life then for something run up on the old Singer. Most importantly and enduringly since, clothes simply cost too little to justify the time and effort to make them yourself. As a result many of us have acquired the behaviour of buy and wear for a season then chuck it away and buy new. At least my years of designer indulgence provided some classics that stood the test of time, but mostly the trend has been away from classics to disposable chic. Wear today, bin tomorrow. In such a climate of consumption there is no place for sewing. Creativity is reserved for mixing bought pieces together, not for fashion resourcefulness.

Is Mme Falluel right in saying we will start learning? Yes I believe she is. Making your own clothes is not just about thrift. There is also the creativity that goes into not just the making, but in the unique combination of fabric and pattern that makes your garment unlike any other. There is also the huge sense of pride and personal achievement that goes into wearing something you have created yourself. Careful fitting and adjustment of the pattern means there is also the means to ensure your garment fits you like a glove.

Looking at the craft-based blogosphere with the explosion of people show-casing their handiwork and the ever-increasing number selling their creations on sites like Etsy, indicates that we are seeing the start of a revolution. The recent dramatic increase in sales of sewing machines and haberdashery items backs this up.

Let's hope we will never face a need as great as the ladies of 1940s Paris, but that we will in future be able to apply a similar level of resourcefulness and skill to the creation of our own unique and stylish clothes.