Nothing to wear: Why things got too much
"10% discount on purchases from $ 250, 15% - from 350 dollars and 40% - from 500 dollars! "," Minus 50% for a new collection and an additional minus 30% for the old ones, a bonus - free delivery! "- if you see such messages with enviable regularity over the past couple of weeks it means that we already know that “black Friday” starts today, and right after - cyber monday, two main days a year for shopaholics. The more actively we are told that we buy more and more, the more willingly we carry money into our pockets small and large retail dealers. Or not?
Amancio Ortega, founder and owner of Inditex, whose pool of brands includes Zara, Massimo Dutti, Oysho and others, this year became the richest person on the planet with a fortune of 79.7 billion dollars. It seems to me that you can’t think of a better start to the column about excessive consumption. Ortega made a fortune on an uncomplicated scheme: selling low-cost clothing, the design of which imitates catwalk trends, updating collections approximately every two weeks (in fact, Zara adds new positions in general every week). All these facts force us to endure a disappointing verdict - we live in a world where there are so many things, and every day their number is added. On the one hand, now our choices are almost endless - choose what you prefer. On the other hand, when there are too many options, we get lost, confuse the really desired and imposed from the outside and eventually we leave with the purchase and the feeling of frustration, worrying whether we made the right choice.
During a large-scale holiday of fierce consumerism, popularly referred to as “Black Friday,” discounts in stores fall to 80%. The tradition, which has been firmly established in the USA since 1966, has spread around the world over time, and now about actions in honor of Black Friday proudly announce some Vegas shopping center in Russia, which has never celebrated Thanksgiving Day, with which " Friday ", in fact, is directly related. The National Retail Federation makes annual calculations of how much people spend on purchases on this day, and since 2005 this figure has steadily increased. Even the crisis of 2008 did not become a reason to deny myself new clothes - people continued to buy, wallowing in loans for homes and cars. In general, in such a psychology there is nothing supernatural - any opportunity to buy something is perceived by us as a good bargain, even if the thing will not be used even once. And even the actions like “No Shopping Day”, initiated by Canadian advertiser Ted Dave in 1992 as a counter attack to “Black Friday” (curiously, it is held on the same Friday), do not seem to evoke massive enthusiasm. And does this make sense?
The hitch is that the only possibility to deprive oneself of all sorts of "extra" expenses and not to fall out of society at the same time is to arrive at this idea independently and consciously. Not as a protest to the culture of excessive consumption, but by understanding how many things (any) you need to feel comfortable. Sometimes it seems true that in order to implement all this in practice, excellent willpower is required. When everything around screams “buy me”, it also assures that it’s impossible to live without this particular thing, it’s hard to control yourself. Of course, all of this is partly the cost of the industrial boom, and with an eye to the history of our country, there is also access.
Many of the generation of the current 20-year-olds, the most tasty morsel of modern corporations and advertisers, do not know what it is to have one pair of shoes for an outlet and one for every day, changing them to new ones only for reasons of seasonality. People who grew up in the 2000s, when purchasing power was strong enough, and companies cheerfully threw one product after another into the market, are easily caught on a consumer hook. The emergence of second, cheaper lines of expensive designer brands and work with licenses, super-fast growth of the mass market, logomania - all this led to the fact that buying clothes became like a bulimic attack, and the principle “the more, the better” became propagated, directly or indirectly, by consumption pattern. People buy more - brands respond by increasing and accelerating production. Vicious circle.
It's funny that now for the fashion industry the problem of inadequate abundance of things is such a monster, which she herself gave birth to, and now she thinks how to kill him (or, at least, she pretends). I remember the first news that people were tired of things, appeared shortly after the release of the report of the K-Hole trend forecasting agency Youth Mode: A Report on Freedom, which proclaims the triumph of normcor as a new consumer culture. The idea to make the wardrobe as unified as possible was liked by many. So much so that a couple of months later, the very essence of the normcor was distorted so that they began to call it the main trend of the year, and fashion brands - to produce "regular blank T-shirts" at a price of 300 euros. But already then an important thought was formulated: you can hang around the latest mast-havami and look conditionally fashionable, or you can get dressed in things from the supermarket and also be fashionable, look cool and feel great.
And if at first this tendency was rather the voice of the people, now those who are responsible to some extent for the endless rotation of things, that is, the designers themselves, act as an accusatory mouthpiece. Raf Simons will complain that fashion has become too widespread, then Alber Elbaz will deliver a speech that there are too many things in the industry - brands, collections, things. They are echoed even by those who are in fashion relatively recently and, in theory, should not even get tired of the system. The freshly appointed creative director of Balenciaga Demna Gvasalia, whose first job was the house of Maison Martin Margiela in 2009, speaks of numerous pre-collections: “To be honest, I don’t think that the market needs so much clothing. I feel that we need something change, find new mechanisms of work, because a lot of money is also spent on the production of all these unnecessary clothes. " And Briton Jonathan Anderson, who founded his brand seven years ago, believes that “we consume too much, and this does not benefit society”.
In such words of people responsible, in general, for what we want more than we actually need, one would consider hypocrisy, but in reality the message is different. The consumption model of a progressive society should consist in a simple concept: buy less, choose carefully. The uncontrolled dumping of goods into the basket and the painful disposal of unnecessary or quickly useless things a couple of months later is an alarming symptom.
And let's be honest, impulsive shopping often brings satisfaction only in the few minutes that we pay at the checkout. As for the fashion industry, it seems that it has already begun to respond to unconscious signals from society. Brands, one by one, close their second lines, leaving the most profitable (remember at least the story of Donna Karan and Marc by Marc Jacobs), because they understand that people are tired of things that are produced in inadequate quantities.
Ryan Howell, a professor of psychology at the University of California at San Francisco, says that the propensity for rash purchases is partly inherent in our genetic memory: during hunting and gathering, when people saw something they wanted, they took it, even if in the subject there was no special need, simply because the opportunity to meet him on his way again could not turn up.
When we find something that seems to be a good bargain, instincts accumulate and force us to make a purchase. Marketing tricks and the leitmotif about “meet clothes” sat down in the cortex steadily add fuel to the fire. Abstraction from external factors does not always mean taking the situation under control, therefore it is much more effective to work out your own strategy. For example, promise yourself to take at least a couple of days (better weeks) to think about before buying. Or the next time to buy not an acrylic Zara jumper for 999 rubles, but a sweater of a small designer brand, which, perhaps, costs 10 times more expensive, but it will last exactly longer. Not to rush to the most obvious must-haves of the season (it seems that this concept itself has already become a move), especially in the performance of the mass market.
And here's a joke for last. There is one young German artist, Simon Freund, who generally loves to exploit the topic of excessive consumption in every way, for example, exposing on his website a selection of the minimum set of things for life, from white socks to a photo frame, all of which have excellent design. So, recently, Simon showed his new project - chairs made from packages of famous brands such as Acne, Supreme and others. The author says this is his such act of denouncing consumerism. The irony is that Simone is already falling asleep with questions about how such chairs can be bought, the demand is incredible. The strength of the brand, what can you do.
Photo: Cos, Zara, La Garconne
