The Tides are Turning

Shoppers are wising up about all this fluff marketing after realizations that cheap clothes are still cheap clothes.  With poor sales numbers and reports of disappointed customers rolling in from all over, high street marketers best be brainstorming for the impending storm of consumer backlash ahead.   

The Observer talks to George Davies, the inspiration behind Next, George at Asda and Marks and Spencer’s Per Una range, about just how wrong celebrity lines are getting it.

Moss’s line would not be the first to fail to live up to its publicity.
Both Roland Mouret’s Gap range and Madonna’s H&M collections were
fast-tracked to ‘clearance’ within weeks of their launches. This, said
Davies, is why he would never invite a celebrity to produce a ‘capsule
label’ within his own range at Marks & Spencer.

‘I haven’t got time for this new fashion for celebrity culture in
the design world,’ he said. ‘These celebrity clothing lines are being
done for publicity. It’s all about how much hype can be got from the
launch.

‘Celebrities should keep to what they are good at, which
is walking down catwalks. It makes no difference that they love
clothes. I love driving Ferraris, but that doesn’t mean I could design
one, and I wouldn’t even try.’

Ouch.  Brutal but honest.  Davies doesn’t let up and continues his thrashing,

‘We’ve replaced the innovation and inventiveness of retail and
fashion with the marketing ploy of celebrity culture,’ he said.
‘Personality has gone out of the shopping and retail experience for the
customer.

‘What’s even worse is that customers are being treated
like cattle. Just because they’re putting up with it at the moment, it
doesn’t mean they will continue to take it if an alternative to the
high street comes along.’

He’s right.  This kind of marketing is inherently alienating.  The hype is the real product, the allure of the celebrity lifestyle, forever unattainable by the rank in file customer.   What ever happened to fashion being a platform for self expression and individualism?  High street is churning out what are essentially celebrity uniforms. 

I was really surprised to hear Lily Allen was jumping on the chain-store bandwagon, or coaxed into it somehow (I’d like to believe, anyways); especially as, just a year ago on her album, Alright Still (2006), she cheekily sang,

In the magazines they talk about weight loss,
If I buy those jeans I can look like Kate Moss,
Oh no it’s not the life I chose,
But I guess that’s the way that things go,

Now the singer’s going toe to toe with Moss in a different market, selling essentially the same thing she condemned less than a year ago?  Hope the clothes are as tongue in cheek as well; maybe she and Harvey will team up and ride the irony into the sunset.