Stitched Up

The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

By Tansy E. Hoskins

Pluto Press Fernwood Publishing

Copyright © 2014 Tansy E. Hoskins
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7453-3456-1

Contents

Introduction, 1,
1 Owning It, 14,
2 The Fashion Media, 33,
3 Buyology, 50,
4 Stitching It, 67,
5 A Bitter Harvest, 89,
6 Fashion and Size, 108,
7 Is Fashion Racist?, 128,
8 Resisting Fashion, 148,
9 Reforming Fashion, 166,
10 Revolutionising Fashion, 184,
Notes, 203,
Bibliography, 233,
Acknowledgements, 239,
About the Illustrator, 241,
Index, 242,

CHAPTER 1

Owning It

Linkenholt is a Hampshire village of meandering lanes lined by banks of daisies. Turkeys strut on manicured lawns and the village shop is run from the front room of a house. A bus only comes to the village if it is booked. The blacksmith can work for days without seeing another person and the story is still told of two sisters, now in their eighties, who cycled down the hill to a village dance where they met the two brothers who became their husbands.

In 2009, Linkenholt and its surrounding 2,000 acres were put up for sale. It was an unusual event that drew international attention – entire English villages do not often come on the market. The financial crisis cut Linkenholt’s price tag to £25 million – far less than its actual worth. The sale passed the destiny of the land and the people who live and work on it into the hands of one man. The villagers met their new ‘squire’ the day after the sale was completed. He held a pit roast, shook hands with everyone and, by all accounts, gave a good impression of himself. He has not, however, been seen there since and neither lives nearby nor drops in to shoot pheasant on the estate. The nearest clue to the wealth of this distant figure lies 11 miles away in Newbury – a large, glass-fronted shop with a red sign, which sells leggings, cheap jeans, sweatshirts and sequinned dresses. The shop is always busy. So are the other 2,500 branches of this chain that encircle the planet.

Stefan Persson inherited H&M from his father. The budget clothing chain has made him the eighth richest person in the world. Forbes.com has a ‘Real Time Billionaires’ calculator. Refreshing itself every five minutes, it calculates which of the world’s billionaires have just become even richer, based on the cost of a single share. It makes for compulsive viewing and, the last time I checked, Persson’s fortune stood at $26 billion. No one I met in Linkenholt shopped at H&M. They were, however, all aware that they paid rent to one of the world’s richest people and wryly acknowledged that he had probably bought Linkenholt with the ‘change from his back pocket’. That is not to say that anyone spoke badly of him – the village narrative was one of gratitude that Persson had, so far, preserved Linkenholt’s way of life.

There is a tension in Persson’s ownership of Linkenholt – the romanticised preservation of English village life by a man made rich as Croesus from selling disposable fashion. H&M clothes are made in factories from Tunisia to China. They are mass-produced, using valuable water and crop resources and cause appalling pollution. The company produces up to 50 collections every year and advertises them using faked photographs of perfect bodies. In 2010 21 Bangladeshi factory workers were killed in a fire whilst making H&M clothes. It seems that nothing could link the peaceful lanes of Linkenholt with this globalised chaos, but it does. Both are part of a business plan, devised within a capitalist system that allows vast resources to be concentrated in the hands of one person. This concentration of wealth and power recurs throughout the fashion world. The creativity and beauty of fashion is time and again channelled into the pockets of billionaire shareholders. But just how did selling t-shirts and hair clips make so many Forbes top-twenty billionaires?

The New Mrs Jones

Mass-market fashion is a new concept. While clothes have long been the playthings of the rich, the working classes lived for centuries with only the bare minimum on their backs. In 1844 Friedrich Engels, co-author of The Communist Manifesto, observed at first-hand the poverty in Britain’s slums: ‘the prevailing clothing consists of perfect rags often beyond all mending, or so patched that the original colour can no longer be detected. They wear … a suit of tatters.’ The Industrial Revolution introduced the factory production of materials such as cotton. Yet clothes continued to be made in unsanitary cottage industry workshops, characterised by very low wages and unsafe working conditions which resulted in high accident and death rates. By 1900 the clothing industry in Britain employed 1.25 million people and was the second largest employer of women and the fifth largest employer of men.

A pioneer of moving clothing production from home workshops to large, purpose-built factories was Meshe David Osinsky, a ‘not quite penniless’ Russian Jew who emigrated to Leeds in 1900 to escape the anti-Semitism of Tsarist Russia. Starting out as a door-to-door pedlar of shoe laces, Meshe David Osinsky became Montague Burton, owner of a shop selling ready-to-wear men’s suits for a just about affordable 11s. 9d. By 1909 Burton had four shops and owned a factory – Progress Mill in Leeds.

Five years later, at the outbreak of the First World War, Burton owned 14 shops. Men’s clothing production had been geared towards the mass production of limited styles and colours, which amounted to uniforms for working-class men. This converged with the need for actual uniforms when 5.5 million men were called up to fight.

Women were also put in uniform for the war effort and the women’s branch of the Board of Agriculture sold cheap clothes such as dungarees to women agricultural workers. In 1918 four million demobilised troops were given either a ‘demob.’ suit or a small clothing allowance. As a result, by 1925 Burton owned the largest clothing factory in Europe. In the 1920s working-class women could save up and buy ready-made clothes from chain stores, but most made their dresses from cheap materials using Paris-inspired patterns found in magazines like Mabs Fashions.

The Great Depression of the 1930s saw two million people out of work. The poor of Britain survived without coats and with holes in their shoes. Having just one set of clothing was commonplace. ‘How amazing,’ wrote the journalist H. V. Morton in 1933, ‘that in an age of electricity, of chromium, of trans-Atlantic flight and worldwide radio, the poor were still living like Saxon peasants’. At the same time, Hollywood was in its influential Golden Age and the resulting fashions caused J. B. Priestley to tut that among the better-off urban populations there were ‘factory girls looking like actresses’.

By 1939, Montague Burton owned 595 shops, including five on Oxford Street. The Second World War demanded more uniforms, but like a ‘giant tapeworm’ it also brought rationing, sent factory workers off to fight on the front-line and reduced clothing consumption. The clothing trade was given a wartime boost (and Burton’s was saved) by the government’s Utility scheme between 1941 and 1952.

A drop in living standards and news of the 1917 Russian Revolution had caused a wave of agitation and dissent. Fear of an uprising was intensified by the Second World War. As Britain’s allies fell one by one to the German army, the need to inspire people to fight for their country meant they had to be given a stake in society – in the Tory politician Quentin Hogg’s words: ‘We must give them reforms or they will give us revolution.’ The government, led by Neville Chamberlain, hoped the Utility scheme’s provision of good quality, cheap clothing would keep up morale. The reluctant Chamberlain, a believer in leaving markets to themselves, set out to control raw materials. By May 1940, the government was the sole importer of nearly 90 per cent of all raw materials, including wool.

Measures included the introduction of minimum production standards but also limited material use by restricting skirt lengths, sleeve widths, trouser turn-ups, and the use of elastic. The Board of Trade insisted it was not looking to become a ‘fashion dictator’ but only wanted to ensure that the best possible use was made of supplies. British Vogue approved and called Utility a mode of dressing ‘well suited to these times’.

In war-torn countries women were once again employed as munitions workers, bus conductors, front-line medical staff and labourers. They wore trousers and jumpers and tied their hair up in scarves. At the Californian Radio Plane Company, David Conover, a photo-journalist, met a worker named Norma Jean Baker. The resulting photographs for Yank Magazine were Marilyn Monroe’s first step towards stardom.

The war ended in 1945, but the hard times and rationing rumbled on. Central planning of cloth production ended, but price and quality controls continued. Utility clothing led commentators to write that the workers looked well dressed. One writer declared that ‘for the first time in history fashion (such as it was) derived from the proletariat, not from the privileged’.

This was a big change. Paris had traditionally been the fashion centre of the world. Styles started there, and then trickled down. The war had caused the loss of this sartorial guidance. When the Nazis occupied France, their plan was to move the entire Parisian fashion industry to Berlin or Vienna. Although they decided against this, they did almost completely destroy the ready-to-wear sector, which had been a largely Jewish industry. The loss of French exports had given manufactures in New York a window to establish themselves as an alternative centre for fashion creation. For much of the fashion industry, the war’s levelling of both the creation and wearing of fashion was disastrous. Where was the money in fashions that could not quickly be made unfashionable? How were the rich to be superior if egalitarianism eclipsed exclusivity?

The economic importance of the Paris fashion industry was summed up by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, an advisor to Louis XIV, who said: ‘Fashion is to Paris what the gold mines of Peru are to Spain.’ Determined to keep their goldmine open, in 1945 the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne organised a tour of the latest Paris-designed fashions through Copenhagen, Barcelona, London and New York entitled Le Théâtre de la Mode. To avoid causing offence to war-ravaged cities by showing off the luxurious designs, they were sold as a form of resistance – beautiful clothes made ‘with frozen fingers in their famished city’.

The endeavours of Paris to regain its dominance were embodied by a man who had spent the war designing clothes for the wives of Nazi officers and French collaborators – Christian Dior. He now turned his talent towards reinserting rigid hierarchies into fashion. In February 1947, Dior presented a collection which the media dubbed the ‘New Look’. In Dior’s words: ‘We were emerging from a period of war, of uniforms, of women soldiers built like boxers. I drew women-flowers, soft shoulders, flowering busts, fine waists like liana and wide skirts like corolla.’ Essentially, the New Look replaced ease of movement and physical strength with an ultra-conservative vision of femininity complete with corsets. The look matched the political agenda of returning women to home and hearth, the style’s forward thrust of the hips a sign that women were designed for childbearing. As 1.25 million women left industry, the message was clear: women no longer needed work wear.

Dozens of books and articles have been written on how this was what women wanted and how ultimately the women of the world chose to adopt the New Look. But to claim this is to ignore both the political climate of the era and the role of the powerful fashion system. In the tradition of fashion promotion, the styles received heavy coverage through a sophisticated network of media, including magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle, Seventeen and Women’s Wear Daily. The New Look had its own newspaper advertisements, publicists sent free clothes to influential women to wear and be photographed in, and department stores and shops promoted the style to encourage women to buy entire new wardrobes.

Dior and the New Look were funded by France’s richest and most influential industrialist, Marcel Boussac. Known as the ‘King of Cotton’, Boussac backed Dior with an unprecedented 60 million French francs. It is no coincidence that the skirts of the New Look required 16 yards of fabric, a huge amount compared to the resourceful styles of the early 1940s. Boussac was determined that the fabric-heavy skirts of Dior’s New Look would revitalise not just the Paris fashion industry but also the textile market.

After a decade of death and deprivation, the desire to go from Cinders to Cinderella was real. Amongst people without food, jobs or housing, however, the New Look was not popular. ‘40,000 francs for a dress, and our children have no milk’ was one shout that went up when Dior’s creations made their debut in French shops. It was not just that the style depended on reams of luxurious, expensive fabrics; there was also an emphasis on ornate accessories and jewellery which aimed at marking out the haves from the have-nots. There were organised protests against the style across North America, and in Britain the Labour government was asked to legislate against the long, wasteful skirts. ‘I don’t know whether to try to scrounge a lot of [clothing] coupons and sell off my clothes or just appear dowdy,’ wrote one working-class woman in 1947.

In Britain, the New Look and Utility clothing coexisted for several years, with the Paris style pared down to fit rationing requirements. After the war, British retailers and manufactures lobbied for the abolition of the Utility scheme, while trade unions campaigned for its retention. This difference of opinion over the provision of cheap, good quality clothing showed the disintegration of the wartime alliance between government, capital and labour. The war over, society was once again polarising. Crudely put, Utility versus the New Look represents a political crossroads: For whose benefit should society be run?

In 1937, George Orwell had written of the mass production of clothing toning down the surface differences between classes. But while rationing had reduced the worst ravages of poverty, the New Look reversed this trend and put working-class women back at the bottom of the fashion pile. As the New Look took over, sartorial post-war class lines were firmly redrawn. Big business and the rich benefited while women and working people lost out.

By the 1950s, Britain’s Apparel & Fashion Industry Association (AFIA) was monitoring an industry transformed. Planned mass production worked at maximum speed using minimum labour; it was scientific, mechanised and employed trained managers and technicians. The capability now existed to mass-produce fashion not just for men but also for women. All that was needed was for women to have the money to shop and the possibilities would be endless.

The post-war capitalist boom, which lasted from 1948 to 1970, was the result of continuing Cold War high arms expenditure and consensus amongst governments that the state must play a firm economic role in industry and social welfare. As the unemployment rate fell to 3 per cent in the United States and 1.5 per cent in Britain, women were drawn back into work. The number of married working women rose dramatically and overtook the number of working single women. This figure rose steadily until, by the 1980s, more than half of married women were in paid work.

From the start of the twentieth century, Britain saw the advent of an independent ‘teenage culture’. In the 1950s this had developed into distinct youth cultures in Britain and the United States, but not in France. As a result, the 1960s ‘Youth Quake’ (a term coined by Vogue‘s editor, Diana Vreeland) saw the centre of fashion gravity shift temporarily from Paris to London. Brigitte Bardot told Chanel that couture was ‘for grannies’; and the mini-skirt arrived. Although the ‘Swinging Sixties’ challenged the old guard, the infamous decade did not bring about fashion democracy. Rather than becoming egalitarian, fashion changed its currency. Previously the grandes dames with their money and social standing had been the focus of the fashion industry, now it was the turn of the mass youth.

It was a case of fashion following the wealth line. This was the opinion of the influential fashion commentator Tobe Coller Davis. She pointed out that in 1929 the top 1 per cent of families in the United States had controlled 20 per cent of the country’s wealth, but by 1953 this had dropped to less than 8 per cent. Other senior figures in American department stores took the same view: ‘I’d rather sell 5,000 units of something for $10 than one thing for $500,’ stated a buyer who left the high-end store Saks Fifth Avenue to work at the more downmarket Sears. Stanley Marcus, owner of the Neiman Marcus department store, summed up the shift: ‘We are geared to sell to the oilman, but even more, to the oilman’s secretary.’

The realisation that there was money to be made by selling clothes to more than just the top income bracket changed the industry’s game plan. Manufacturing had been transformed, people had more disposable income than ever before and women were working in unprecedented numbers. Coller Davis called this challenge the New Mrs Jones: ‘a flock numbering over 30 million women; she doesn’t command one income of, say, $4000, but a Niagara of incomes of nearly one hundred billion dollars. If ever there were was a market, this is it.’

(Continues…)Excerpted from Stitched Up by Tansy E. Hoskins. Copyright © 2014 Tansy E. Hoskins. Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press Fernwood Publishing.
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