Cultural Passions by Elizabeth Wilson

Author:Elizabeth Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Figures 5 & 6: Clone dressing.

The high street itself as a retail venue has become increasingly uniform. It is sometimes difficult to remember whether one is in Oxford or Oxford Street, Stafford or Stanford, California, for the same chain stores are everywhere to be seen, and for that matter Nanjing Road more closely resembles Bond Street or Fifth Avenue than it resembles Shanghai in the 1930s, let alone in the 1970s.

This is not simply a national but a global development. Simona Segre Reinach has demonstrated how important the global fashion industry is and how it affects the appearance of men and women on city streets all over the world. The production and consumption of fashion are still an urban phenomenon, although actual production may also take place in the countryside. She describes the collaboration between Chinese clothing producers and Italian firms and how this, she suggests, has led to a new fashion culture emerging. On the one hand: ‘to refer to the Shanghai lifestyle implies evoking the spirit of the new and distinctive type of capitalism that characterizes communist China, one aspect of which is an attitude towards copying that differs from the western attitude’. This is part of the new emerging fashion culture,

the culture of instant or fast fashion, born of the globalization of trends, of a global concept of production and domestic marketing; quick and easy brands capable of answering the needs of a new consumer who is fickle and changeable, and quite different from those desires prompted by life-styles and the democratization of luxury.

This new fashion system is contrasted with the two previous systems: of haute couture – exclusivity – which represented high bourgeois taste; and the post-1945 system of prêt-à-porter – the good style of the diffusion line. Both systems, the second in particular, catered to a world in which, superficially at least, conceptions of ‘lifestyles’ were beginning to replace the more rigid divisions of class. Both haute couture and prêt-à-porter nevertheless paid obeisance to quality and the desire for clothes that would ‘last’.

Today, no one wants clothes that ‘last’ any more. As recently as a generation ago there were still young men who boasted that they were wearing the bespoke suits their fathers had had made for them in the 1940s. Now, it is difficult for the great Jermyn Street firms even to recruit the bespoke tailors of tomorrow.

Instead, Segre suggests, we inhabit very temporary identities and ‘fast fashion’ caters to these. She also says a great deal more about the many complex relationships of Sino-Italian fashion production. She describes a new fashion world in which fake brands and the real thing are hardly distinguishable (and what does that mean anyway?), in which Italian firms export ‘market stall’ fashions to China and Chinese brands are produced and made ‘as if in Italy’; where unknown, new, small brands arise as an antidote to the blandness of the Gap model and where the new retailers, such as H&M and Urban Outfitters, offer a huge variety of fast fashion styles.

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