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.