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.”

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.

Photo found at Trendhunter.com, believed to be from a Michael Kors campaign

For several months I’ve been collecting articles about the luxury industry’s contraction and resulting mandate for a new strategy if they’re to survive. Sameer Reddy writes for Newsweek, Luxury’s Image Problem: Having Lots of Fancy Toys is Suddenly Not So Chic:

Until now, the luxury world has represented an ideal lifestyle that the masses aspired to achieve. The models in advertising campaigns for companies like Michael Kors and Jimmy Choo are perpetually stepping off private jets or lounging poolside in five-inch stilettos.

The luxury industry will still represent an ideal lifestyle that the masses will aspire to achieve, it will just have to adjust to the new ideal.

But the economic meltdown has left luxury with an image problem. Signifiers of social status are suddenly out of fashion…

The old signifiers are out of fashion. What will be the new ones? (more…)

From the Wall Street Journal, 12/26/08

In all the doom and gloom reports of retail sales, finally some data specifically about apparel. This is from an Associated Press story in my local paper, Retailers slash prices to entice holiday shoppers:

According to preliminary data from SpendingPulse — a division of MasterCard Advisors that tracks total sales paid for by credit card, checks and cash — retail sales fell between 5.5 percent and 8 percent during the holiday season compared with last year. Excluding auto and gas sales, they fell 2 percent to 4 percent, according to SpendingPulse.

Sales of women’s clothing dropped nearly 23 percent while men’s clothing sales slipped more than 14 percent. Footwear sales fell 13.5 percent. Sales of electronics and appliances fell even more drastically, dropping almost 27 percent.

Usually business headlines freak out over 5% declines and such. A 23% or 35% drop is truly catastrophic to business plans and balance sheets. And remember that this is just an average; meaning some stores didn’t do quite as bad, and a small handful (like Urban Outfitters) are up. But this also means that a lot of stores had larger drops in sales. Many retailers in dire trouble had to go through Christmas if for no other reason than to move what inventory they could. Come late January, early February, expect to see a string of bankruptcies. Who will be left standing?

Over the past two decades as thrifting has lost it’s stigma and vintage has gained in popularity and acceptance, the demand for used clothing has increased. Trouble is, while the volume of discarded apparel has mushroomed, the percentage of desirable or even usable garments have dropped dramatically in a direct correspondence with the overall decline in quality standards of manufacture.

While everyone likes to feel good about clearing their closets of clutter, the sanctimonious eco green feeling one gets by donating the detritus of fast fashion trend-wear is fast becoming more myth than reality. Turns out we’re buying more junk than ever, and very little of it is worthy of a second life. (And I’d argue, precious little of it worthy of being manufactured in the first place.) In an earlier post I discussed how the change in the simple supply/demand equation of thrift shopping is leading to a spike in prices. I’ve seen this personally in just the past few weeks when I went into sticker shock in two thrift stores in town that, I kid you not, have doubled or tripled their prices. $8 for screen printed fitted tees that came from generic mall stores in the first place? I can get them on sale NEW for that.

The following figures are for the UK, but I imagine the trend is similar in the US. Hannah Fletcher writes for the Times UK, Disposable fashion: for sale, hardly worn, two million tonnes of clothes

In the past five years, with the rise of “value retailers” such as Primark, H&M and TK Maxx, and supermarket fashion ranges, the price of clothing in the UK has plummeted by up to 25 per cent. At the same time, the amount of clothes we buy has increased by almost 40 per cent to more than two million tonnes a year.

That’s right, more stuff for less money! Two million tons in the UK alone!

textiles have become the fastest-growing waste product in the UK. About 74 per cent of those two million tonnes of clothes we buy each year end up in landfills, rotting slowly (or not at all) in a mass of polyester, viscose and acrylic blends.

74% in the landfill. And only a fraction of what doesn’t end up in landfills actually makes it to those used clothing shops, here or anywhere else.

A negligible 1.7 per cent of our annual clothing purchases will end up being sold second-hand in Britain, and on average charity shop sales account for just 10 per cent of a charity’s income.

“The rise of discount clothing and a culture of discarding have led to a clear reduction in the quality of many donated textiles,” says David Moir of the Association of Charity Shops. “This has put some pressure on donated stock for sale.”

“We have noticed more and more cheap clothes coming in but we can’t sell them in the shops,” agrees Rob McNeill, a spokesman for Oxfam. “Who would buy a second-hand Primark T-shirt for a quid when there’s a Primark down the road selling them new and probably cheaper? We can’t compete.”

Instead, Oxfam sends the clothes up to its recycling centre, Wastesaver, in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, where a team of 45 women sorts through 120 tonnes a week. Their manager, Tony Clarke, says that their weekly record is 160 tonnes: “We’re pushing for 24-hour sorting lines. We get more than we can possibly process.”

And as the percentage of usable, valuable clothing from this donation stream decreases, it becomes less and less viable to even sort through it:

The Salvation Army Trading Company, an arm of the charity that deals solely in second-hand clothing exports, operates almost a third of the textile banks in the UK and collects some 75 million items - 34,000 tonnes - of clothing a year. All this is sent to Eastern Europe. None of it is sorted.

The most positive ecological impact in the apparel industry is the only one they refuse to entertain: just buy less stuff. This is completely ant ethical to their business models, and we’re seeing evidence of this in blinding technicolor as the financial meltdown has caused a contraction in consumption and the fashion industry is imploding.

“I had a wonderful e-mail from an American supermodel,” says Dr Julian Allwood, a lecturer at the Institute of Manufacturing and co-ordinator of the Institute’s Sustainable Manufacturing Group. “As a British male academic, it was the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me.”

She offered to fly him to New York to discuss what could be done about sustainable clothing. After much soul-searching he declined the offer and advised her, instead, simply to stop changing her clothes.

We need new role models. As much as I cringe at how much fashion consumption is influenced by celebrities, it’s a reality.

“Female celebrities need to demonstrate that it’s possible to be happy while wearing the same thing,” he says. “It’s where we were 20 years ago. Lives weren’t ruined by lack of clothes. It’s a habit that we could break.

“If we spent exactly double the amount of money on each garment and bought exactly half as many garments, nobody would be impoverished by that.”

Except, of course, the vast network of retailers and mall property owners who are dropping like flies.

Alex Williams writes for the Fashion and Style section of the NY Times, We’re Going to Party Like it’s 1929:

“The thing about the recession is, it takes the pressure off,” said Mr. Monn, 45. “It allows you to strip away all the stuff that’s not important and focus on what is: friends, family, togetherness.”

A few weeks into the financial blow up, I wrote a post titled It’s Now Cool to Cut Back - the Consumer Crunch Comes as a Relief? and as the crisis deepens, I’m finding more evidence of the same phenomenon. But as the hyperconsumer capitalist paradigm that’s dominated our global economy for decades continues to unravel, there’s a lot of hand wringing amongst economists. They point out - quite accurately I might add - that an economy like ours that is based on consumer spending can all too easily head into a downward spiral when the individual actions of consumers cutting back leads to a collective result of more layoffs which leads to less money for consumers to spend… you get the picture. It’s called the paradox of thrift and Paul Krugman explains it better than I.

Lisa Belkin writes, Buying Less, Giving More:

I am saddened and sobered by the troubled economy. I understand that each purchase not made this season threatens the job of someone who would be producing or selling that purchase. And for too many families there was nothing left in the budget to trim, so its not just extra presents that are going, but food and rent and gas.

But as one who will be battening the hatches and pruning back holiday spending this year, there is something about it that feels right, as well. Isn’t this careful and sober place — where we buy what we need, with a small nicety on the side — where we should have been all along?

And a reader named Laura posted this reply:

I totally agree. I have been getting a weird satisfaction from reaching deeper into my closet for things I had forgotten, taking shoes to the shoe repair instead of replacing them, cooking instead of getting takeout. It even feels kind of familiar, since I think we all lived this way years ago, before the Wall Street boom years began in the late ’80s. Big bonuses led to lifestyles that were not sensible, and clearly not sustainable.

“Where we should have been all along.” So why weren’t we? Because it didn’t serve the interest of the global corporate powers and the ‘masters of the universe’ in the financial industry who were individually making tens of billions a year off the unsustainable system they created?

I remember years ago how Naomi Klein’s No Logo really crystallized and articulated the intuitions and suspicions I’d had about the fashion industry and the seedy underbelly of exploitation beneath the gloss of heavily promoted brand imagery. But the counter culture of anti-corporate protests at the time seemed in vain. And upon entering academia (and being told that Naomi Klein wasn’t ‘real’ research since she didn’t publish in the obscure textile and apparel journals that no one in the actual fashion industry ever paid attention to), looking deeper into issues of sustainability in the fashion - the ultimate oxymoron - and coming quickly to the conclusion that the root of the problem was excessive consumption…the answer seemed to always be “but that’s what our entire economy is based on” as if that were the end of the discussion. Well, what if our entire economy is based on erroneous leadership that is leading us off a cliff? I expected an eventual ecological crisis, but I didn’t expect the system to self-destruct of it’s own inherent contradictions prior to then.

So it looks like we’re in the middle of ‘a painful, but necessary adjustment.’ Note that the following quote comes not from fringe counterculture activists, but from deep inside the conservative financial establishment. Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, Stephen S. Roach writes in Dying of Consumption:

The current consumption plunge is without precedent in the modern era.

The good news is that lines should be short for today’s “first shopping day” of the holiday season. The bad news is more daunting: rising unemployment, weakening incomes, falling home values, a declining stock market, record household debt and a horrific credit crunch. But there is a deeper, potentially positive, meaning to all this: Consumers are now abandoning the asset-dependent spending and saving strategies they embraced during the bubbles of the past dozen years and moving back to more prudent income-based lifestyles.

This is a painful but necessary adjustment. Since the mid-1990s, vigorous growth in American consumption has consistently outstripped subpar gains in household income. This led to a steady decline in personal saving.

The United States needs a very different set of policies to cope with its post-bubble economy. It would be a serious mistake to enact tax cuts aimed at increasing already excessive consumption. Americans need to save. They don’t need another flat-screen TV made in China.

A critical distinction must be made between providing assistance for the innocent victims of recession and misplaced policies aimed at perpetuating an unsustainable consumption binge. Crises are the ultimate in painful learning experiences. The United States cannot afford to squander this opportunity. Runaway consumption must now give way to a renewal of saving and investment. That’s the best hope for economic recovery and for America’s longer-term economic prosperity.

image and caption from gulliver.cc - Fibber McGee and Molly radio show from the 40s and 50s

Two years ago the experts declared that America was not ready to elect a black President. Last week they were proven wrong. Two years ago another set of experts on the economy, retailing, marketing and fashion assured us that America’s consumer economy was sound and strong, and that it would only keep growing. The fashion trend cycle was accelerating, cheap chic and disposable fashion ruled and new malls were opening and old ones upgrading left and right. As I studied the fashion industry from and ecological perspective - in particular the ever increasing volume of clothing created and disposed of and the culture that mandated racing on the hamster wheel of work and debt to keep up - I often wondered what would happen if people just. stopped. shopping. Or even just cut back on the stuff they were wasting. But two years ago the only other voices I could find echoing mine were on the fringe and most saw this as an inevitable - yet far off - consequence of an ecological crisis. (Many, myself included, would argue that we already are in an ecological crisis, however it is one that is not yet being felt by consumers.)

And now here we are, nearing the end of 2008 and what are we seeing in the mainstream media? “Retail sales collapse” and the “Buying binge slams to a halt.” The headlines just keep getting more dramatic, and the numbers more dire.

from this afternoon’s NY Times report on the latest drop in the Dow,

Analysts said they expected the bleeding to continue through the holiday season.

“We’re not done,” said Stacey Widlitz, a retail analyst at Pali Research. “This is just the beginning. Retailers are saying they’ve never seen this kind of shift in consumer behavior in this short a period of time.”

Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital, said the retail numbers were evidence that America’s years-long spending bender had ended. He said the bankruptcy filing of Circuit City, which remains operating, helped to signal a permanent shift in the service economy and said other companies would fail before the economic crisis abated.

“The old expression, ‘Shop till you drop’ — we did it,” he said.

Below are excerpts from four recent articles in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Take note of the following themes:

1. Retail sales have ‘fallen off a cliff.’
2. Consumers are waking up and looking at their overstuffed closets, realizing how much money they’ve spent, and feeling embarrassed and guilty about it.
3. Carefree spending has virtually stopped, and consumers are questioning every purchase and asking ‘do I really need this?’
4. Conspicuous consumption suddenly seems crass and saving money and getting things for cheap is now cool.
5. There has been a sudden, yet fundamental shift in the psychology of spending (see above) and since common knowledge no longer predicts any sort of immediate recovery, it looks like ‘the way people have been shopping is now over.’

From the Economist’s American Retailing section, Left on the Shelf:

The unthinkable has happened. American consumers are losing their urge to shop.

Note how it’s not that they have just stopped shopping, but that they have lost the urge that drives it. (more…)

For a long time in rambling late night discussions I’ve been declaring to my DIY fashion friends that not only would it become cooler in ever widening social circles to be thrifty (we’ve been proudly announcing ‘I found it in the trash!’ for years now) but that, unfortunately, the competition would become every stiffer for those treasure finds. A bummer for those (like me) who’ve been able to live off the cheap, abundant consumer discards, but great news for my DIY fashion friends whose growing businesses are focused on teaching people to refashion. And wouldn’t you know that I stumbled an article today that provide the data to back me up.

gottagetthegoods.com

Business of Fashion’s daily digest (worth checking every day) led me to Alan Scher Zagier’s Associated Press article in the Hartford Courant, As Economy Worsens, Business Surges at Thrift Shops.

Consumers “can’t change the price of gas. They can’t change the price of food. They can’t make the stock market go up again,” said Adele Meyer, executive director of the National Association of Resale & Thrift Shops. “But they can control the price of clothes and furniture by being a savvy shopper.”

While conventional retailers are seeing precipitous drops in sales, Zagier provides data showing sales increases at secondhand clothing stores up 15%, 35%, even 50%. Interestingly enough, the sharpest increases in sales are not in the poor neighborhoods (they were probably shopping there anyway) but in the middle upper class neighborhoods. He quotes the CEO of Savers saying that 30% of their clientele have incomes of over $100,000 a year, and a full 75% are college educated with and average income of $50-$65K.

The fact that demand for the thousands of tons of virgin clothing (so much of which is junk) being manufactured and shipped is going down is certainly good for the planet’s limited natural resources. The downside? Thrift store treasures are about to get a lot harder to find and a lot more expensive. Why? Well, this whole phenomenon of being able to hunt and find fabulous things for pennies on the dollar of their original price was completely dependent on the American habit of overproduction and overconsumption. But when consumers en masse drastically cut back consumption (as in, say, the midst of the worst economic crisis since the depression…) then that will be felt down the line as the supply chain of thrift dries up. Zagier writes:

The Salvation Army reports a dangerous decline in donations. Just as consumers are now more likely to buy secondhand goods, they are also less likely to get rid of their used clothing or furniture.

“We rely heavily on consumer culture,” said spokeswoman Melissa Temme. “People are finding that the couch can last a little longer. The suit, while it may not be perfect for this year’s fashion, is fine.”

Money earned at its thrift stores helps fund the agency’s adult rehabilitation program. So while administrators are thrilled at the growing revenue, they also fear an inventory shortage.

“At some point it’s going to come to a head,” Temme said. “If donations continue to stay down, we’re going to lack items to sell.”

Those of us who remember the 1980s Halcyon days of abundant, dirt cheap vintage from the 40s and 50s already are aware of how those choice pieces became next to impossible to find in thrift stores as donors realized they could get money for these and wholesalers struck under and over the table deals with vintage dealers to pull the donated stuff off the top before it ever hit the racks we visited. Expect that trend to only accelerate and spread more towards recent ‘vintage’ and consignment shops. Also expect to pay more for these pieces when you do find them. So my friends, stock up now!

The upside? Expect to see the refashioned phenomenon bursting onto the scene. Just like vintage, it’s been underground for years, but now as it becomes harder and harder to get your hands on the finite sources of vintage clothing, and fewer people can afford to buy piles of new mall and boutique clothes, what’s left but to re-work the pieces that have potential, but have been passed up in the thrift world because for whatever reason they are just not wearable as is.

Sooner or later, looks like I’m going to have to take my sewing machine out of the closet again!

Fashion savvy or not, it has been impossible not to notice that the premium denim market has exploded over the course of the last decade. If you do pay attention to fashion editorials and advertising, it would almost seem that it’s taken over the market. Of course, we all know that what magazine editors feature is hardly representative of the general population (then it wouldn’t be aspirational) but the statistics below taken from a WWD article by Joanna Ramney on the down-market move in denim were far more skewed than I thought:

Bastos emphasized the mass sector, or jeans priced under $40, represents the largest segment of the U.S. jeans market, based on units, or 87 percent, according to 2007 figures. Jeans between $40 and $59.99 represent 7 percent of all units sold, and those costing $60 or more amounted to 5 percent. Of the higher tier, only 1.3 percent were jeans priced $100 and above.

That’s right, only 1.3 percent of the volume of denim sold is in the premium $100+ category, the category that gets what, 90% of the editorial coverage? A full 87% of the jeans sold are under $40. That’s less than even a $62 Gap jean.

Let’s also consider all the excitement about ‘going green’ with organic cotton jeans. Choosing to manufacture in organic cotton is a good thing. Let’s give a generous estimate and say that 10% of the premium market is organic (the only organic denim I’ve seen so far falls in the $100+ category). Do the math and that amounts to .013% of the volume of jeans being manufactured and sold are ‘green.’ That’s less than 2 pairs in a thousand. Smug greenwashed editorials notwithstanding, the industry is far from going green. And the numbers suggest that shoppers are no longer ‘purchasing up’ into the premium category - organic or not - but are ‘moving down market’ instead:

The dip in sales not only reflects consumers buying fewer pairs, but also a shift to buying lower-priced styles, as shopping habits shift in response to disposable incomes being pinched by higher gasoline, energy and food costs.

“The luxury and higher-end brands are going to find the next few months to be difficult because the aspirational customer now thinks twice about purchasing up,” said Mary Brett Whitfield, senior vice president with retail consultancy TNS Retail Forward in Columbus, Ohio.

Whitfield said consumers are moving down market for jeans. People who were premium jeans shoppers have turned to mainstream department stores for their denim, while middle-income customers who earlier shopped at department and specialty stores have moved to mass merchants and national chains such as Wal-Mart, Target, J.C. Penney and Kohl’s.

While organic denim makes for appealing, guilt assuaging editorials that allow you to feel good about fashion saving the planet by… buying and reading a magazine, it will be interesting to see if and how the coverage tip-toes around the truly green option that scares the premium pants off the fashion moguls -  buy fewer clothes!

Think about the impact it could (and is) having when even half of the shoppers out there make that ‘cautious pause’ in the dressing room, at the register, or before getting in the car to head to the store in the first place. What kind of impact would a 20% reduction in purchases have? The first thing that would happen would be more markdowns and more chains going bankrupt. Buyers are already tightening their inventories (ordering less) and trying to carry only the most irresistible items. So many of the vendors pumping out truckloads of unremarkable, ill designed, poorly fitting, lame clothes might go out of business as well. Tough for those losing their jobs, but better for the planet when all of those raw materials, water,  and electricity of production, the plastic of packaging and the fuel of transporting doesn’t get consumed in the first place.