Dragon lady Deborah Meaden has resolved not to buy any new clothes, shoes or handbags this year.
Her Dragons’ Den fans will have to get used to her appearing in the series possibly wearing the same outfit twice. Sad face emoji.
She’s but one celebrity fashionably espousing the new philosophy of conserving the world’s resources, saving the planet and setting a good example to the rest of us with less money and weaker will, who’ve been inoculated with the acquisitive gene and become addicted to the instant gratification of that phenomenon of our times, cheap, fast fashion. Number one on every list of current leisure activities is ‘shopping’.
I confess it freely – I’m a pathological shopper. In my lifetime, society’s moved from the shop-boy on the shop bike delivering personally chosen items ‘on approval’ maybe three times a year, to the heady combination of instant armchair access online to unlimited choice, affordable prices and next day delivery. It’s a temptation well-nigh irresistible – if you choose to ignore the fact that many of the goods are produced by the overworked and underpaid in faraway places. No wonder dwindling footfall in High Street stores is leaving them in financial meltdown.
To me, however, there’s no pleasure so satisfying as a good riffle through proper shop rails in search of the one perfect item that in quality, style and fit, seems to have my name on it. Yet, truth to tell, ‘the thrill of the new’ is a transient joy. How soon the novelty wears off and becomes ‘this old thing’.
I belong to a generation of wastrels, born into a postwar era of growing prosperity and genuine unawareness of the damage we were doing to the environment. Now we can neither ignore nor deny the selfish plunder of the earth’s resources for our own comfort and profit. Almost too late in the day a new Puritanism is evolving. ‘Ethical awareness’ is the phrase du jour. We must all reform, subscribe or perish. As Antarctica melts and Australia burns, what personal contribution can we make to saving the planet?
Fashion disciples currently preach the gospel of ‘buy less, recycle, pass it on, visit vintage and charity shops’, a concept enthusiastically embraced by many, particularly the young and cash-strapped to whom it’s a novel idea. We, longer in the tooth, carry the folk memory still of ‘make do and mend’ and the ‘hand-me-down’. (A contemporary of mine wrote recently of the near-ancestral One White Frock which was taken in, let out, shortened or lengthened, depending on which sister grew in or out of it.) While theoretically I applaud these counsels of moral rectitude, I’m conscience-stricken by my inability to part with anything. I don’t need to visit a charity shop. I could open one.
A casual audit of five decades of stuff, both inherited and acquired, weighs heavily on my mind and even more heavily on the rails of several wardrobes. It’s not that I mean to keep things forever. It’s just that I never get round to getting rid of them – and besides, there are extenuating circumstances. There’s the fat wardrobe and the thin wardrobe, to cater for fluctuating weight, the special occasion wardrobe for a social life I no longer have. There’s the winter stuff, the summer stuff, the ‘what was I thinking of?!’ sartorial errors and four decades of vintage, my own, my mother’s American dresses and a tsunami of shoes, ranging in size from 4 ½ to 6, all of which I swear, fitted in the shop – also some near-duplicates because I’d forgotten I bought the originals.
Fashion is cyclical. Presently, shops are full of flower-sprigged ‘Little House on the Prairie’ dresses, last worn in the 70s with curtains of ironed hair. Ditto, pussycat-bow blouses (pure Margaret Thatcher,) mini-skirts, culottes, kaftans, flares and block-heeled boots. Had ‘em all. Still have ‘em. With the benefit of hindsight, the Biba catsuit with 22 buttons wasn’t the wisest choice for a party in a Donegal cottage with no lock on the toilet door.
As I say, “Keep a thing long enough…”
Let economy be your watchword.
‘Charity’ begins at home.
