NOTICED: LESS OF MORE, MORE OF LESS
Even Madonna is into fast fashion at H&M
Because of the subprime mortgage crisis, spending less has become the name of the game, but does that mean that everything else we buy has to be subprime too? In my view, what makes something a steal or splurge isn’t simply determined by the price tag. Less can be worth more if it’s better. When it comes to grocery shopping, for instance, many of us will already happily pay more for better, cleaner food – even we can afford less of it – than “save” on a mountain of fast food, no matter how cheap it is.
Which is why I find myself increasingly perplexed that when it comes to how we outfit our homes and our closets, we continue to buy more crap instead of less.
If you believe the talk, this recession is all about a major shift in consumer priorities. But walk into a Winners, Costco or Wal-Mart (where the lines at the cash are even longer since the slowdown), and the choking mass of subprime merchandise disguised as an opportunity should be read as a big, fat warning sign.
As I have personally discovered, those “cashmere” cardigans lumped on sell-off tables for $69 may look like a deal, until you wear one once. Because it’s made from the short, cast-off “cashmere” kibbles and bits on a factory floor somewhere in China, the pilled, misshapen lump bears about as much resemblance to a three-ply Scottish cashmere as a dinner roll.
Sure, a really good cashmere sweater from a proper continental mill could cost you eight times that, but as those who haunt vintage stores for old-fashioned-quality cashmere know, it’s also an investment that can be handed down for generations. Hooked as we have been on this crashed fantasy that we could somehow have everything for nothing, we seem to have forgotten the essential principle that things are usually cheap for a reason.
They are also cheap in the way your grandmother would have described them. What makes them so miraculously affordable is that just like the new, foreclosed hinterlands of subprime homes, they are essentially worthless.
Which is why I am proposing a radical new austerity measure. Instead of throwing our money away on the immediate gratification of something for next to nothing, how about investing the same attention to quality in what we choose to wear and furnish our homes with as what we choose to eat?
Okay, it’s radical, but it’s hardly a new idea. In fact, it’s rather an old-fashioned one. It acknowledges some essential truths we appear to have been in denial about (and which denial has undoubtedly contributed to the sorry state of our economy): Yes, Virginia, there really is such a thing as quality; better goods have more inherent value; and like it or not, you do tend to get what you pay for.
Instead of having crammed closets like mine, and nothing to wear, with my action plan we would have a few really good pieces in which we looked smart for any occasion.
Rather than picking up six pairs of the polka-dotted pumps with the funny heel in every pastel colour that, amazingly, are marked down by 80 per cent, wouldn’t it be wiser to save our pennies for one beautifully made pair we will actually enjoy wearing?
Our grandmothers certainly thought so. But then, they were raised to expect more out of everything they purchased, and turn up their noses at anything too cheap.
Speaking of those nagging grandmothers, how many subprime sweaters and stiff pairs of shoes do we need in our wardrobes anyway? As the obsession with “storage solutions” demonstrates, we are all but drowning in the sea of “bargains” we already own.
What’s more, as the current crisis reveals – and we’ve learned when it comes to food – there are social costs to our consuming choices. By refusing to pay what it really costs to make anything properly, let alone here in North America, we have successfully shopped ourselves out of work, while delivering the coup de grace to the dying art of craftsmanship.
It may be yet another sign of the times, but it is also our fault that the workers at Waterford Wedgwood, trained in the fine art of crystal making in Ireland for generations, will now be permanently out of work. Meanwhile, our kitchen cupboards can hardly close for all the throwaway dreck from the dollar store.
Maybe the problem is our childish refusal to see subprime for what it really is. If only we listened to our grandmothers, less could be a lot more.