disposable fashion?

Ok I think that Maggie Alderson is great and she has a column in the age good weekend magazine here in Australia so for the benefit of you overseas ppl or anyone who missed it I thought that it was such a good one this week that I am popping it here for you to read (its not on the age website yet otherwise I could just paste a link!). I like it cos it is full of most of the things that I have been thinking about/been bothered about recently...

'Opportunity knocks' Maggie Alderson 28th July 2007

Yesterday, while sitting on a train, I had an entirely new experience: I was bored by a fashion magazine. This has never happened to me before and I didn't quite know where to file it in my head.
In normal circs, a good fashion magazine can send me into quite a swoon over the aesthetic possibilities of life and even bad ones are fun, because I can be enjoyably cross with them. What happened to me yesterday though as I leafed through the glossy pages could really be summed up by the word "whatever...”
At first I couldn’t understand what was going on. Was I ill? Depressed? Jaded? Then I turned over to find myself yet another page crowded with still-life pictures of clothes and accessories and their price tags. That was when I realised that I am just overwhelmingly bored with Buy This!, Get This! And You Must Have This! As the majority of a magazine’s content.
Of course the whole point of fashion mages is to reflect the perpetual forward motion of that industry, based entirely as it is on the ascendance of the new. It’s just that in the old days those new trends and moods were translated in magazines as conceptual ideas, which stretched the mind and delighted the eye – not just as a non-stop shopping list.
So if that is what fashion magazines are these days, I decided, then maybe they are no longer for me. That was quite a lowering thought.
Cut to later on the same day and I was online reading a profile of Jane Shepherdson, formerly the brand director of the ultimate low-price, high-style chain store Topshop, as enthusiastically frequented by Kate Moss (who also designs a range for it), Madonna, Gwyneth Paltrow, Claudia Schiffer, Beyoncé and even Michael Jackson. It’s a UK-based business, but under Ms Shepherdson’s control it became an era-defining fashion force that has shaped the current state of retail worldwide: buy the latest look ultra cheap, buy loads of it, wear it a few times, chuck it away.
Fashion shopping like this is disposable consumption at its most obscene and has led directly to the current state of magazines as glorified catalogues. Indeed there is a whole new genre of mags now that are nothing more than glossy shopping lists. They make us feel a little bit queasy – and I think they must have started to have similar effect on Jane Shepherdson.
She no longer works for Topshop. She resigned last year in circumstances that have never been fully explained, but were clearly not related to results. The brand was making annual profits of $300 million when she left.
So I was very interested to read what one the cleverest women in world retail is doing next- and it rather blew my mind. She is going to work as an unpaid consultant to the charity Oxfam, advising them how to take their chain of op shops to another level. Wow.
Why is she doing this? Because she has reached the same uncomfortable conclusion as many shoppers: that this kind of frenzied fashion shopping is ethically and environmentally insupportable. She believes people are starting to find it “a bit boring” to open their wardrobes and find them full of “cheap rubbish”. And she also confirms what we all know in our bargain-loving hearts is true: if clothes are crazily cheap in the shop, “someone, somewhere down the line is paying”.
So while the details of what this retail guru is going to do with Oxfam are still to be revealed, we know it will be based on fair trade, organic fabrics and recycling second-hand clothes. And it will also be cool.
Shepherdson’s Pauline conversion to ethical fashion is the most compelling and encouraging indication I have seen yet that we are on the brink of a huge shift in consumer attitudes.
Other retailers – and fashion magazine editors – should take serious note.