alone. But interestingly this still accounted for only 5.7 per cent of our budget. In July 2001 sales of clothing and footwear in the UK were up on the previous year by a huge 12 per cent, the highest annual rate of growth since the mid-1970s.
But in real terms the price of clothes had fallen dramatically (and, I might add, chaotically). This is the point at which the dark side of the fast-fashion alchemy kicks in. Between 1996 and 2000 clothing prices fell each year, and in the epoch-defining year of high sales, 2001, they fell by 6 per cent63. The analysts could almost hear a giant balloon deflating. A study by City analyst Mark Hudson from Price waterhouse Coopers, tracking Next Direct’s catalogue between 1995 and 2005, confirms that something very weird happened: prices had actually dropped 40 per cent79 over that time. In the four years from 2003 to 2007 average prices in retail fashion fell by 10 per cent.
A 1998 study found that between 1982 and 1995 the amount of time a motor-vehicle worker had to put in to earn enough to purchase a suit fell from twenty-five64 hours to eighteen. Consumers did not require a formula to pinpoint what was happening: we were simply spending less and buying more.
ENTER THE DISCOUNTERS
Fast fashion taught us to prioritise speed. Its influence in most of our wardrobes is undeniable, but it was not the whole story. The real alchemy – turning base fabrics into golden trends that both the consumer and the financial markets went crazy for – only occurred when fast fashion was allied to the lowest price points in history. While the foreign fast-fashion giants – Gap, H&M and Zara – will doubtless have staked some sort of claim in your closet, in 2002 their total market share was still just under 5 per cent65. The biggest invasion of planet fashion, with the biggest reverberations, belonged to the so-called ‘value’ retailers, also known as ‘discounters’.
Those leading the charge – Matalan, Peacock’s and New Look – were known for their ‘aggressive pricing strategies66, selling at 30–50 per cent below’ the prices of the good old mid-market. But none of them had quite the clout of Primark. Primark originated in Ireland, and growing up there I was familiar with it in its other guise as Penneys, the go-to outlet for school socks and vests. I can safely say I would never have believed that twenty years later it would be earning plaudits in glossy magazines for its military jackets and polkadot dresses. The discount retail chain, whose parent company Associated British Foods provides us with cupboard staples such as Ryvita, Kingsmill and Ovaltine, arrived in the UK in 1974, but it has remained something of an enigma. Little is known about its septuagenarian founder, Arthur Ryan67, who stepped down in 2009 after forty years, except that he instilled in the company a belief that all products must make his legendary 12.5 per cent profit margin. According to an article in the Irish newspaper the Sunday Business Post, Ryan was supposedly once approached by a factory owner with a product costing £5 that would sell for £10. Ryan reportedly told him he was not interested unless he came back with a product that cost £3 and could be sold for £7: ‘I don’t care68 how you go about it – just do it,’ he reputedly said. When a journalist69 from the Scotsman tried to verify the story, Primark denied it. ‘His view would70 almost be counter-intuitive,’ a former employee told the Sunday Times in 2007. ‘He would look at a product line that was selling well at £5 and cut the price to £3 because it would sell even more.’
Primark was to the discounters what Zara was to fast-fashion retailers – a trailblazer that showed the profits that could be made, and an organisation to emulate. The opening of its flagship London store in May 2007 was followed by mammoth stores in Manchester and Bristol. The discounters persuaded us to trump all other values with a single myopically focused question: ‘But is it really, really cheap?’ From then on, that was all the consumer wanted to know.
By 2006 value retailers represented the fastest-growing part of the retail pie: retail analysts Verdict prophesied71 that by the end of the year, for every £4 spent on fashion, £1 would go to a value retailer. Of course this came true, and just eighteen months later industry bible Drapers breathlessly reported that ‘Primark has moved72 a step closer to toppling Marks & Spencer from the top spot in clothing market share, after its volume share leapt to 10.1 per cent.’ Who wouldn’t want a piece of that? After the high-street retailers adopted this approach, it was only a matter of time before some strange new entrants began to get in on the act.
FROM FROZEN PEAS TO FASHION FIXES: HOW THE SUPERMARKETS GOT IN ON THE ACT
If I hadn’t anticipated that my friends and colleagues would one day be fawning over products from a subsidiary of Associated British Food, I was even less prepared for the fashion revolution that would see us throwing in cashmere twinsets on top of frozen peas in our supermarket trolleys. But any market doing obscenely well by leveraging pressure down the supply chain will eventually attract the attention of the British supermarkets. In 2003 Tesco began its quest to take a bigger slice of the non-food retail pie, including fashion. It had secured a licensing deal with the phenomenally successful US global brand-management company Cherokee73, that would exclusively supply ‘family apparel’ – a rather strange, catch-all term – to Tesco. Since clothes attract bigger margins than groceries, it’s no surprise that in quick succession three of the Big Four (Tesco, Asda and Sainsburys) entered the fashion arena. By 2005 supermarkets held 19 per cent of the fashion market. In October 2010 Tesco confirmed its intention to become the world’s biggest fashion brand, launching its first standalone fashion store (without the frozen peas) for its clothing brand Florence & Fred. It chose to test the waters for this venture into discount fashion in the historic city of Prague.
You can see how it worked. The grocers applied the same ruthless pragmatism to fashion as they had to food, engaging in a series of loss leaders and price wars which changed the landscape of planet fashion beyond recognition. In the great supermarket wars of 2003, when Tesco and Asda were vying to outdo each other74 with 1,000 products, fashion was key: Asda’s George jeans were being sold for £6; tailored women’s trousers plummeted from £9 to £7; skirts from £7 to £5; jackets from £14 to £12. If you pause for a minute, does that remotely add up? Granted, a cheap-as-chips jacket will be a fairly straightforward piece, but consider the detail: the buttons, the seams, the pockets, the level of embellishment. If it was at its true price you’d expect it to be made of cardboard. Ditto the Asda wedding dress, launched in November 2007 at £60. The rewards for the multiples (supermarkets) for leaping out of their comfort zone of food and into our wardrobes proved to be huge: Asda’s George brand is worth £2 billion a year, making it one of the company’s biggest assets. By 2009 Tesco, the undisputed heavyweight of multiple retailing, was making nearly £6,000 a minute75, every single day.
PRIMARNI, THE TOAST OF THE FASHIONISTAS
The combination of fast and cheap fashion was like catnip to consumers, and we fell completely under its sway. But there wasn’t a lot of critical thinking or engagement going on in the style press or the wider media either. In fact the value retailers were aided and abetted in their quest for domination of the UK fashion market by a compliant fashion media that was as titillated by the conflation of fast and cheap as everyone else. The ‘wow’ prices and directional styling of pieces retailing for £3 to £4 were given reassuring tags, ‘Primarni!’ and ‘Pradamark!’ (the latter works less well, I think). They helped to destigmatise fashion pieces that were as cheap as chips. It became rather cool to trot about in worthless, disposable fashion.
A watershed