Oh please let it be true. Susannah Frankel writes for The Independent, New model army: Why fashion has fallen out of love with its A-list clotheshorses:

The symbiotic relationship between fashion and celebrity, as seen everywhere from the red carpet to an increasingly sophisticated print media, has been the most ubiquitous and, it almost goes without saying, money-spinning phenomenon of the era. That is, until now.

This time last year – and as presciently as ever – the Prada Group sent out a press release to accompany the launch of its new women’s wear campaign for Miu Miu stating, in the opening paragraph, that it marked “the return of the model as opposed to the celebrity” to fashion’s most hallowed frontline. Shot by the super-fashionable duo Mert Alas and Marcus Pigott, the images established just that, featuring an array of painstakingly sought-out new models remarkable for their fresh personalities and entirely unrecognisable faces.

In February this year – in a move that was equally unprecedented – Marc Jacobs very publicly rid his catwalk show’s front row of the formerly requisite A-list contingent, telling the influential American Vogue website Style.com that his love affair with celebrity was over.

“It generated so much press [but] at a certain point it was like, ‘Did anybody actually watch the show?’ “

Snooki proudly sporting Coach

And remember, Marc Jacobs has the likes of Madonna in his front row. But in this new era increasingly dominated by reality TV, the newest crop of ‘celebrities’ aren’t always as aspirational. Access Hollywood asks Is Snooki a Pawn in the Gucci/Coach Bag War?

According to The New York Observer’s Simon Doonan (via Celebuzz),  Snooki is a pawn in a reported raging style war - with the weapon of choice being supple fine leather..Doonan claims that various fashion houses are engaging in “preemptive product placement” or “unbranding,” by sending Snooki new purses from their competitors’ collection…He adds, “The bottom line? Nobody in fashion wants to co-brand with Snooki.”

Back to Stengle quoting Karl Lagerfeld on his decision to use professional yet anonymous models:

… ”Why? Because I love them. They have the right look and class.” Ah, class … and with this in mind, he adds, “Their overexposure in ‘people’ magazines also makes it that one may be a little tired of celebrities and the red carpet.”

Ah yes, the now ubiquitous red carpet. With the wall of brands behind it. When even a nobody like me can all too easily find herself on one, you know it ain’t that special anymore.

Stengle writes an eloquent historical summation of the rise of the celebrity/fashion phenomenon:

It wasn’t until the Eighties – significantly the decade in which designer fashion first identified the potential of its power – that the relationship between fashion and celebrity began to gather momentum, and the seeds were planted for the behemoth it has become today. Giorgio Armani dressed Richard Gere in American Gigolo, and the response was such that the great Italian designer soon ensured that the front rows of his twice-yearly men’s and women’s wear shows were as star-studded as his jewelled evening gowns. Gianni Versace was quick to enter the fray. Speculation was rife as to just how much either designer was prepared to pay anyone, from Sofia Loren to George Michael to attend their shows, resplendent, it almost goes without saying, in Armani or Versace designs.

Versace, in particular, went on to invest huge amounts of capital in advertising campaigns shot by big names such as Irving Penn, Bruce Weber and Richard Avedon that featured everyone from Elton John to Madonna (yes, her again) and from Jon Bon Jovi to Lisa Marie Presley. If ever designer muscle was fully flexed, it was here. The fact that the label had the weight to employ not only the world’s most feted photographers but also so many of its most famous stars was a potent formula that few – before or since – could ever match. By the late Nineties, it was rumoured that Nicole Kidman was being paid no less than $2m simply to wear Christian Dior to significant social occasions.

It was also during this period that fashion magazines began featuring celebrities as opposed to models on their covers on a regular basis – and it was doubtless quite a coup when, for the December 1998 issue of American Vogue, Anna Wintour landed Hillary Clinton for that purpose.

After the rise… the fall:

Within five years, however, the effect of such originally ambitious intentions had been watered down beyond all recognition. Testamant to this was the appearance of the alleged TV “stars” Amanda Holden, Hermione Norris, Tamzin Outhwaite and Ulrika Jonsson on the cover of the November 2002 issue of British Vogue, a decision that moved some high-minded commentators – and Sir Roy Strong, the flamboyant former director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, in particular – to bemoan a celebration of the “trash-ocracy” in British culture. This was hardly “aspirational”, the thinking went, and that, surely, was the point of such glossy titles.

Yes, the ‘trash-ocracy’ is the opposite of aspirational. And not what middle class suburban moms aspire to with their handbag purchases.

The luxury fashion industry took a sharp blow following Financial Crisis ‘08 not because the rich stopped buying (they just slowed down a little bit) but because the people that were acting like they were rich, the ones cleverly squeezing the most they could out of that much, much narrower disposable income margin, panicked in the tumble. When you’re all of a sudden underwater on that McMansion, (you know, the one who’s value could only go up) you might give pause to blowing four figures on a handbag or the latest ‘it shoe’ you can only wear if you valet park.

From members only discount luxury site, gilt.com

Reuters gives an excellent analysis:

The world’s wealthiest consumers kept their taste for expensive goods through a global downturn, but their more middle-class compatriots still striving for the good life may take years to return, if ever.

Sales of luxury goods, such as designer clothes, fine jewelry and high-end handbags, slipped last year as conspicuous consumption fell out of fashion in the recession.

They explain the difference between ‘wealthy’ and ‘aspirational:’

Many in the industry view buyers of luxury goods in two different camps: those who are truly wealthy and those who sometimes shop like they are.

“The wealthy haven’t really changed their shopping patterns other than frequency,” said investment banker William Susman, chief operating officer of boutique firm Financo Inc. “It’s that aspirational shopper that we think has really shifted.”

Milton Pedraza, CEO of the Luxury Institute, said “aspirants” are generally shoppers with an average household income of about $150,000 to $300,000. They helped prop up the industry during the economic boom of the previous decade, many by living beyond their means. They cut back suddenly and dramatically after the financial crisis erupted in late 2008.

He said they will only come back fully once unemployment reaches 5 percent, a level he admitted could take five years.

And I’ll bet that 5 year figure is an optimistic one that does not factor in the possibility that the worst isn’t over and we might very well be on the verge of a double dip.

Still, some executives believe there has been a permanent change in the consumer psyche.

“It will be interesting to see five years from now what people say they don’t do anymore, or what they do differently as shoppers,” said Susan Lyne, CEO of Gilt Groupe, which operates a members-only website selling deeply discounted high-end goods. “I’d bet you it will be fairly profound.”

“You can talk to any hundred people on the street and they will tell you they think differently about buying full-price because they’ve seen so many opportunities to buy at a discount,” she said.

The steep markdowns seen in 2008 and 2009 caused many consumers to question the intrinsic value of certain pricey goods, said Coach Chief Executive Lew Frankfort. Now they look for better quality at a better price, he said.

“Consumers are smart and they have long memories,” Frankfort said. “I’m of the view that things have changed forever.”

The customers that can actually afford to pay full price to cover the overhead of glamorous showrooms on high rent streets staffed with armies of sophisticated sales associates (and security guards) are dwindling in comparison to those desperately striving for the appearance of such status. Not to mention the fact that even a lot of those who are flush prefer a bargain… that’s how many of them ended up wealthy in the first place.

All of this is part of the ongoing fallout as schrapnel from the ‘08 meltdown delivered some critical cracks in the hype chimera of the branded luxury logo industry.

“In fashion, one minute you’re in… and the next minute, you’re OUT.” Stephen Foley writes, Why American Apparel is Going out of Fashion:

It is impossible to say if there is a straight line from the salacious gossip – usually culled from the sensational lawsuits that the company attracts – to the financial peril in which American Apparel finds itself, but this much is clear: it is no longer the hottest place to shop. An equally bright and breezy foreign interloper, Uniqlo, is expanding fast on its home turf; H&M and Zara are buzzing with bargain-hunting fashionistas, hip to styles that change in those stores faster than they ever change at an American Apparel.

A fickle hipster clientele has moved on to other things? Never woulda believed it.

From Gawker.com

Foley cites Gawker media as AA’s thorn in their side. American Apparel’s PR department is no match for Gawker’s solicitation of the real story from former employees.

In regard to the recent article about Grooming, it is 100% true. Not only do they have it on paper, they also have a team from “corporate” who come to the stores just to see what we’re wearing. Just a couple weeks ago, a posse of power tripping nineteen year olds came in (literally everyone from this corporate fantasy land is a maximum age of 20) and made me go to the bathroom and wash my makeup off (and by makeup I mean a splash of liquid eyeliner and mascara and nothing at all hooker inspired). And then they scolded me for not being on the sales floor. Also, whenever we get considered for raises/promotions, we’re required to have our photos sent in for approval. My co-worker was recently denied a spot as Manager because she didn’t fit the company image. I have no idea why we continue to work there. And more importantly how are none of us involved in a lawsuit?

And it goes on and on, a litany of examples of an entire company of individuals riding the crest of last decade’s trend waves (and competing with each other to see who could do blow with the boss) with no clue how to evolve the brand into a post boom zeitgeist.

But the financial troubles go deeper. In-store sales are still running down 10 per cent, while the rest of the high street has tiptoed out of recession, suggesting a bigger malaise among shoppers.

Worse, the company jacked up its debt levels to fund its expansion just as the slowdown hit, and its failure to get back into profit means it will almost certainly breach promises to its lenders at the end of this month. London-based investor Lion Capital bailed the company out with a loan a little over a year ago; as it totters under the weight of $91.4m (£64.6m) in debt, Lion will have to decide if it wants to turn that debt into a share of the company, or put American Apparel into bankruptcy.

This is a company that has been built on the personality and creativity of Dov Charney. If his power is waning, there are plenty of critics who will declare that this is no bad thing.

I suppose I’d better invest in that lifetime supply of thigh high socks pretty soon. (the only thing I buy there. If I could find them anywhere else I would.)

Denise Dorrance comic

In America we tend to hold on tightly to this myth of a ‘classless society.’ Talk of status and reaching for it is taboo; rarely will an individual list ’signaling status to others’ as motivation for purchasing a luxury good (yeah sure, it’s allll about the quality…). British epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson isn’t afraid to broach the class issue, and explains the fashion/status connection pretty clearly in his interview with Brooke Jarvis:

Louis Vuitton, classic status symbol

Status competition causes problems all the way up; we’re all very sensitive to how we’re judged. Think about Robert Frank’s books Luxury Fever or Falling Behind, or the great French sociologist Bourdieu—they show how much of consumption is about status competition. People spend thousands of pounds on a handbag with the right labels to make statements about themselves. In more unequal countries, people are more likely to get into debt. They save less of their income and spend more. They work much longer hours—the most unequal countries work perhaps nine weeks longer in a year.

If you grow up in an unequal society, your actual experience of human relationships is different. Your idea of human nature changes. If you grow up in a consumerist society, you think of human beings as self-interested. In fact, consumerism is so powerful because we’re so highly social. It’s not that we actually have an overwhelming desire to accumulate property, it’s that we’re concerned with how we’re seen all the time. So actually, we’re misunderstanding consumerism. It’s not material self-interest, it’s that we’re so sensitive. We experience ourselves through each other’s eyes—and that’s the reason for the labels and the clothes and the cars.

“We experience ourselves through each other’s eyes.” We are conscious about how others perceive us, especially strangers who have no other point of reference other than our outward appearance.

This is about the psychosocial effects of inequality—the impact of living with anxiety about our feelings of superiority or inferiority. It’s not the inferior housing that gives you heart disease, it’s the stress, the hopelessness, the anxiety, the depression you feel around that. The psychosocial effects of inequality affect the quality of human relationships. Because we are social beings, it’s the social environment and social relationships that are the most important stressors.

Coco Rocha in Jean Paul Gautlier's Spring 2010 show. Does she look 'fat' to you?

Oversupply for limited demand means the fashion industry need only pay lip service to the idea of more healthy models. In reality, a size 4 is too ‘fat’ for even a celebrity model like Coco Rocha. Guy Trebay reports for the NY Times:

Back in the days when fashion was a more restricted industry and the pool of talent limited, models were groomed and expected to have longer careers, making a transition as they aged and filled out from catwalks to catalogs.

Now, Mr. Scully said, the sheer number of aspirants is so great that a span of five years (or 10 seasons) is almost enough to qualify a model for a gold watch.

So uproar notwithstanding, there are still hundreds, even thousands of teenagers eager to starve their not yet filled out bodies to have a chance to live the glamorous dream. How useful are a girl’s objections to these demands going to be when she can be replaced in the blink of an eye?

But Coco Rocha has carved enough of a place for herself to speak out and be heard:

“I’m not in demand for the shows anymore,” said the model, who has worked for Marc Jacobs, Prada, Chanel, Dior, Jean Paul Gaultier and Louis Vuitton, among many others.

“I’ve been told to lose weight when I was really skinny,” said Ms. Rocha, who recently added a new line item to her résumé: correspondent for Modelinia.com, the Web site for the model-obsessed.

“You know what, I’ve stopped caring,” Ms. Rocha said. “If I want a hamburger, I’m going to have one. No 21-year-old should be worrying about whether she fits a sample size.”

And no lanky 14-year-old should be pressured to starve herself, to cadge prescription drugs like Adderall or to take up smoking as an appetite suppressant.

“Girls are told they’re not skinny enough, or they hear, ‘She’s old, she’s boring, we’ve had her, she’s not tiny anymore,’ ” Ms. Rocha said. “A lot of people don’t take into account the vulnerability of these young girls.” And the latest crop of models is not made up of “adults or even sort-of adults,” she insisted. “They are children. Point closed.”

But let’s see if anything changes.

Kate Moss at Chanel

In the mass publicity frenzy that Fashion Weeks have become, reports on front row celebrity appearances had become just a typical part of the hype machine. And perhaps that’s the problem. Cathy Horyn dares to pierce the veil and share the real behind the scenes dynamics in the New York Times’ Muscling In on the Front Row:

“It’s such an underworld in a way, the celebrity wrangling,” said Vanessa Bismarck, a New York-based fashion publicist whose firm, BPCM, represents labels like Preen and Azzaro. She was referring to the deals, trades and exclusive contracts — first-class airfare, hotel rooms for friends, per diems, designer boutique shopping sprees — that miraculously clear a path to the front row for a busy actress. This is especially the case in Paris and Milan, where budgets and appetites for celebrities are that much bigger.

“Their managers and agents realize fashion shows are a money-making opportunity,” said Roger Padilha, whose firm MAO Public Relations represents a number of fashion brands. “If you see an A-list star at a show, that’s because she’s making $100,000 on the deal.”

No small wonder runway show costs have entered the stratosphere. Can anyone say ‘overhead?’

Yet this season, because of the economy and a general souring on celebrity, many designers are taking a budget approach to V.I.P.’s, paying only for a guest’s outfit for the show and maybe grooming and car-service expenses. A publicist for several New York designers said his clients had been approached by actresses in Los Angeles willing to grace their front rows — provided travel expenses were covered. The designers said no thanks. “Nobody has the money,” the publicist said.

But these big name designers backed by big name corporate conglomerates could get their hands on said money… if the return on investment were there. Apparently that seems to be waning.

Maybe the blunt mercantile aspects of celebrity — your frock for my recognizable face — have turned off the taste-makers. On Wednesday, Mr. Jacobs’s business partner, Robert Duffy, told Style.com that no celebrities were being invited to the designer’s show on Monday, a reversal of years of packing rappers in with famous artists and actors. Mr. Duffy said that “the celebrity thing” had become a bore.

…Now, like a worn rut in a road, the whole business of celebrity seems so well established as to be old and familiar, and in fashion, hopelessly preoccupied with the new, that makes it worthy of contempt.

Stars, too, find a front-row appearance less of a thrill. They see little reason to put up with the swarming photographers and inane questions from pouncing gossip reporters. Some celebrities strive for loftier images. “Angelina Jolie doesn’t go to the shows,” Ms. Schmeidler observed. “She goes to Haiti.”

Bling is out, social responsibility is way more fashionable?

Which brings us back to Snooki and the “Jersey Shore” bunch.

Inevitably they will be invited to a fashion show, just as surely as Lindsay Lohan, who only a few years ago was a desired “get” for the front row, will be told by someone’s publicist that there is no place for her now. She’s old business.

“one minute you’re in, and the next minute… you’re out.”

Which brings us back to Snooki and the “Jersey Shore” bunch.

“Oh, you know you’re going to see them at something,” Mr. Kors said of the “Jersey” cast. The fashion world scorns anything — camp taste, bad hair — until suddenly it’s in its interest to approve them, and then the idea is genius.

Alexander McQueen from Kinho.com

The fashion world has always been one of knock offs and derivatives, today they just happen at an accelerated pace. But in the Post Industrial Revolution world of designers as artists, there have always been a handful that serve as the true channels of zeitgeist that pretty much everyone else riffs off of. Alexander McQueen was such a genius, and the fashion world is painfully aware of the empty hole left by his suicide.

But it’s Stephano Tonchi, editor of T, the New York Times Style magazine, that had the courage to pierce through the veils of insular industry hype and call out the fashion system itself, the system that has been overtaken by corporate conglomerates that are now the only option for high end but envelope pushing designers to finance their endeavors by turning themselves into a brand and squeezing out ever increasing amounts of product.

The following was taken from New York Magazine’s blog, The Cut:

“I think it is just the tip of the iceberg…We all know that this is a very critical moment in fashion, and that basically he is the first victim of what is a conflict between creativity and business. Today to be a fashion designer, you have to be a superman or superwoman. You have to have nerves of steel. You have to be so strong. And if you are a little bit weak, if you have psychological problems or weakness, you end up like him.” When McQueen began in fashion, designers worked on two or three collections a year, said Tonchi. “Now you have to be a business manager, a marketer. It’s, what? Eight, ten, fifteen collections a year. Men’s, women’s, couture, diffusion. Then they want accessories. Then they want watches. Then they want jewelry. It’s a machine, and I think that killed him.”

Tonchi also comments on McQueen’s move from working on his own to Givenchy (owned by the LVMH conglomerate) and then to the Gucci Group:

“He is really someone who has been chewed by the system,” said Tonchi. “I think all these different bosses are part of the pressure that we are putting on our designers. And also the pressure on creators of topping what they have done before. But not once a year: Every three months, every six months you have to be better than what you have been. You always must feel like you’re running behind.”

Fashion’s transformation into a big business, Tonchi said, reminds him of the end of the Hollywood studio system in the forties and fifties. “Do you remember how many people were getting killed by the job?” he asked. “The Marilyn Monroes, the James Deans. It was the same kind of self-destruction complex that brings you to kill yourself or do something so stupid as suicide.”

Anger at suicide is a common reaction, but Tonchi said he was coming more from a place of concern about what the industry is doing to the people who work in it. “We cannot look at the poor Alexander McQueen, abused child or abuser of substance,” he said. “I think you have to put it in a larger context in terms of the fashion system. He’s just one of the little cogs that got squeezed.”

the Ports 1961 seating chart from Vanity Fair article

Ever wondered how design houses decide who sits where at the high profile fashion shows? Vanity Fair takes us behind the scenes to the agencies that handle these complicated logistics:

“As a general rule, the hierarchy of where editors sit specifically within each section comes down to two factors: how supportive that person has been to the brand—meaning just how often he or she includes Ports 1961 in a story—and the publication’s circulation. “The bigger the circulation, the better your seat,” Iacovelli says.

Objective reviews, for sure. *cough*

Following up an earlier post…

Trendy retailers might be hastily hiding their garbage, but disgruntled former employees continue to expose them to the public relations nightmare as the habit of destroying clearance merchandise rather than mark it down too far or donate it to a ‘less than aspirational’ clientele lights up the blogosphere. Jezebel.com cuts right to the chase about the interface between hyperconsumerism and our current fashion system:

But what the problems boil down to is this: for a very long time, the retail economy in the first world has been flooded with product. Inventory was allowed to outstrip demand, because margins were so high that waste became tolerable. (Consumption was rising anyway, because of easy credit and planned obsolescence.) This is true both of disposable clothing chains whose business model counts on an endless cycle of new stuff, and high-end stores whose end-of-season 60% off “sales” don’t even start to bite into wholesale, anyway. In a worthless economy like that, where products that are understood both by their sellers and their buyers to be fundamentally without value are moved around the world to make some already rich men even richer, epic levels of waste are not even an unintended consequence. They’re a design feature.

And over at Alternet, Liliana Segura features interviews with former Anthropologie employees describing the practice:

I was on stock and we were clearing out a bunch of sale items that hadn’t sold. I asked the manager what I should do with the clothing and she said “destroy it.” Destroy it? I asked. Shouldn’t we donate it? ‘No,’ the manager replied, ‘we are only allowed to donate certain items. Corporate policy is to destroy everything else.’

I didn’t have a choice so I did it. Perfectly good shirts, sweaters and pants got ripped, torn and generally wrecked. It was really depressing! Another associate told me they destroy furniture too — almost everything that doesn’t sell. We couldn’t figure out why. Later on another manager told me that Anthro does it to maintain their brand integrity. They don’t want their brands at discount stores or anywhere that would cheapen the brand. Nothing is too common and they want to keep it that way.

NY Times reporter Jim Dwyer who first exposed the story continues to follow the trail with a story profiling an organization set up to provide retailers a systematic way to donate leftovers to the needy. Those who run the clothing bank offer a lot of insight into their suppliers, in particular the role that our familiar friend, aspiration, plays in the fashion retail game:

The reasons are complex. No business wants to compete with its own garbage, or risk having people show up at a store seeking refunds on clothes that were never sold. “That’s why many retailers will damage unsold garments,” said Luis Jimenez, the director of the Clothing Bank, which is now operated for the city by Peter Young Housing, Industries and Treatment.

Some businesses do not want their goods worn by poor people. Ed Foy, the founder of eFashionSolutions.com, said that brands invest billions of dollars in their images, using models and athletes, which makes them cautious about where donated leftovers might end up. “They want us to see that the people wearing their brands are the people we aspire to be,” said Mr. Foy, a board member of the Clothing Bank. “They want to know, ‘Who’s wearing the clothing and how can that hurt my brand?’ ”

From the outset, the Clothing Bank tried to address the business concerns, Mr. Jimenez said. The warehouse is secure, lowering the chances that the donated clothes would be stolen and resold; only not-for-profit groups receive the distributions, so that, for example, no individual can collect a pallet full of Dress Barn merchandise. Donations are tax-deductible. If a donor wants labels removed, they are cut out by volunteers, including inmates on work release from the Lincoln Correctional Facility in Harlem.

But even that isn’t enough for many brand managers, the luxury ones in particular. Dwyer continues his coverage:

New York City officials destroyed tons of new, unworn clothing and footwear last year that had been seized in raids on counterfeit label operations, abandoning a practice of giving knockoff garments to groups that help the needy.

…

A spokesman for the Police Department said that no one asked for the knockoffs in 2009 — an explanation that was bewildering to the operators of the clothing bank, who run a warehouse that supplies clothing to needy New Yorkers. They said they had made many requests.

“It would be hard to justify taking a truckload of perfectly good clothes and incinerating them, but that’s what’s happening,” said William Montana, a commercial real estate adviser who is on the board of the clothing bank. “The people who had control over giving us that stuff had been really good to us. Now the pipeline has dried up.

…
Many major fashion brands have their headquarters in New York City, and Mr. Bloomberg has made prosecution of trademark infringement a priority for his administration. The companies also take actions in civil court against the pirates, an expensive process, to protect the designers’ names.

“These are people who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, some of them millions, to get counterfeit goods off the street,” said Robert Tucker, a lawyer with the firm of Tucker and Lafiti, whose fashion clients include Chrome Hearts, Steve Madden, Zac Posen and Ed Hardy. “Everyone wants to feed and clothe the homeless. But how are you going to spend all this money and then put it back on the street?”

From the outset, the Clothing Bank tried to address the business concerns, Mr. Jimenez said. The warehouse is secure, lowering the chances that the donated clothes would be stolen and resold; only not-for-profit groups receive the distributions, so that, for example, no individual can collect a pallet full of Dress Barn merchandise. Donations are tax-deductible. If a donor wants labels removed, they are cut out by volunteers, including inmates on work release from the Lincoln Correctional Facility in Harlem.

from Hypebeast.com: Comme des Garcons launch at Tokyo H & M

Why would trendy fashion for the masses palace H & M deliberately ruin mountains of brand new, perfectly wearable garments rather than mark them down or give them to people who really needed them? Jim Dwyer of the NY Times reports:

At the back entrance on 35th Street, awaiting trash haulers, were bags of garments that appear to have never been worn. And to make sure that they never would be worn or sold, someone had slashed most of them with box cutters or razors, a familiar sight outside H & M’s back door.

The Guardian UK picked up the story, too:

Inside the bags were gloves with the fingers cut off, socks, patent leather shoes with the instep cut up, and warm men’s jackets slashed across the body and arms. “It was a very frigid night, and there were bags upon bags of warm winter clothing not 50 feet away from where a homeless man slept on cardboard boxes,” she said.

…Paradoxically, five blocks away from the H&M store is a group called New York Cares, which mobilises support for the community by co-ordinating volunteers wanting to help homeless and poor families in the city. It holds an annual drive that distributes 70,000 secondhand winter coats to needy individuals.

The group points out that nine in 10 homeless adults need to replace their winter coat each year because they have no place to store it during the summer.

But neither article dares to venture near the ugly underlying truth that the reason H & M doesn’t give those coats to the people right outside who need them - or even mark them down to a level affordable by the working poor - is because those aren’t the people it wants its look to be associated with!

It’s a class thing. While H & M is talked about in fashion circles as cheap, disposable clothing, the fact remains that $25 tee shirts and $69.90 jackets are what the middle - or even upper middle - class can afford. Heck, I don’t even consider it something I can afford full price!

But this middle class will pay $49.90 for a really low quality pair of pants… that look a whole lot like elite contemporary fashion brands that cost 3 - 20 times as much. H & M offers the middle class a chance to participate in the fantasy of the designer fashion lifestyle and how do you think that customer is going to react when she sees the blouse she paid $39.90 for 6 weeks later on the streetperson she passes or the clerk selling her a sandwich?

And believe me that H & M isn’t the only hype dependent retailer doing this. A friend used to manage at Abercrombie and Fitch several years back and she said they, too, destroyed clothing rather than mark it down to where it could fall into the wrong hands.

Why wouldn’t a retailer want to at least recover 25% of the retail price rather than toss it? Because they don’t want to train customers to wait for the sales. The whole system is based on urgency and scarcity - better buy that hot item now before its gone. The belief that (insert latest fly by night trend here) is the thing to have would be challenged by customers pawing through the 75% off remains of last month’s ‘it’ trend and deeming it just as useful to them and a much better buy.

H & M might have gotten busted and I’m sure their current ‘no comment’ is buying time whilst the PR team scrambles to do damage control and come up with some corporate responsibility drek and token donation to a needy cause. But rest assured, the toss and destroy practice will continue, this time under tighter wraps.