Fashion industry gives rise to a 'disposable culture'

The push to wear the latest clothes helps clutter our closets with old castoffs.

By Marilyn Gardner | Columnist

from the August 22, 2007 edition

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According to the thermometer and the calendar, it's still summer. But step into any clothing store in New England and the season quickly changes.

Mannequins are sheathed in black and gray, and racks groan under the weight of heavy wools. Just to be sure customers get the intended message – it's winter already! – the air conditioning is cranked up to high, sending arctic blasts through the store and making shoppers in shorts and sundresses shiver.

Baby, it's cold inside.

This kind of instant seasonal change has long been a staple of fashion merchandisers, with next season's clothes arriving earlier and earlier every year. Swimsuits and sweaters vie for retailers' space in July.

But to maximize both our confusion and our spending power, in recent years Seventh Avenue marketers have added another element: instant style changes. Stores such as Top Shop, H&M, and Zara provide a constant rotation of reasonably priced merchandise. The prevailing philosophy is: Here today, gone tomorrow. So fast is the turnaround that styles may be Out before many of us ever realized they were In. Even high-end designers are playing the game.

Call it fast fashion, and consider it either exciting or puzzling, depending on your perspective.

For customers who like to keep up with the latest trends – the shoppers the industry approvingly labels "fashion forward" – this constant turnover produces heady excitement. But what does that make those of us who prefer more stability and predictability in our closets? Are we "fashion backward"?

Men in particular are begging for mercy, pleading with manufacturers to bring back their favorite styles, according to the Wall Street Journal. Fast fashion is producing burnout.

As an antidote, a new line of clothes called Slowear, based in Italy, promises to keep its styles always available. Down with instant obsolescence. Up with staying power.

Yet even classic clothes have their traps. In the 1980s and '90s, the clever phrase "investment dressing" suggested that certain styles would last a long time. It also presumably made women feel less guilty about spending megabucks for a designer jacket or a suit. Even then, there were always new collections of investment-dressing clothes to deplete a shopper's bank account the next season. It wasn't fast fashion, but it was just as seductive an idea.

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