At least one of us was once accused of dressing like a 1970s DJ - which, upon consideration, we felt to be a step up from the usual description. So, it could well be said that fashion isn’t really and quite our thing.
Coach’s Stuart Vevers on sustainability in fashion: ’The change has to come from designers’
British designer credits a decade in New York with firing a ‘genuine passion’ for sustainability
This newfound insistence upon sustainability in fashion amuses us. For, of course, the entire point and purpose of fashion is to show who is in this season with the latest things and who is some regrettable oik still wearing something at least three weeks out of date. At the highest possible, most favourable, description the entire industry produces Veblen Goods.
Which is, of course, a problem when actual clothing - and designs - are now cheap as chips and getting cheaper by the week. Temu, Shein, Boohoo and the rest means that said oiks can be dressed in whatever at the same time as the cognoscenti. Which would never do, of course. Violating the main point of the game.
What is the point of catwalk shows, now that social media serves up fresh trends to everyone’s phone every day of the year? “[It] has to be about sustainability”, says Stuart Vevers, the British designer who has spent the last decade bringing fashion credibility and a new point of view to the once-staid American handbag brand Coach.
Fashion weeks hand the microphone of the cultural conversation to designers, and Vevers wants to use his airtime “to look at where sustainability can be scaled. Where we can scale is where we can have an impact.”
Thus the rules of the game must be changed. For if the base idea is the production of Veblen Goods then Veblen Goods there must be. So, now sustainability is in - a method of creating expensive things which people will buy because they are expensive and therefore “Look at Me!” as opposed to nice cotton t-shirts which just anyone can now have in abundance.
As someone once said about methods of eating asparagus (perhaps a Mitford?). Which one is used doesn’t matter, even firing it from miniature cannons into fellow diners’ mouths. But that there is a fashionable method which you don’t know about is vital. For that’s how the distinction between you and non-U is made.
Given the paucity of wildly wealthy economists out there it’s not true that a command of economic theory is a surefire way to make cash. But it is nice to see that The Theory of the Leisure Class is still relevant as a description of human behaviour 125 years later.