Has it ever happened to you to suddenly realise you’ve become old, so old in fact that you have started making the sort of remarks that, when you were 14, you would have considered abhorrently old fashioned and even hyper-conservative?
It happened to me this morning while looking at the Fashion Night Out site and in particular while watching the ad in support of this event.
Imagine that a million years ago – because that’s how old I think I am – the same language used in this ad was actually used for globally relevant causes, such as AIDS, cancer, poverty, domestic violence and endangered animal species.
The sort of “Did you know…?” question was usually followed by frightening numbers of ill or dead people and was accompanied by disturbing footage. Things have changed, though, in the gloriously fun times we are living in, and the “save the world” semantics have suddenly reversed into a “save capitalism” message.
I honestly wasn’t sure if I wanted to laugh or cry after seeing the advert, surely I didn’t want to rush out and buy buy buy. In the clip, fashion is advertised as “the second-largest sector of industry in New York City”, with over 800 fashion company headquarters employing 175,000 people. What the ad doesn’t say is how many of these people are pretentiously overpaid PR agents and how many spend not 8 but 18 hours of their day actually making clothes and accessories.
In fact most of the people who actually make the garments we all wear are probably located in Asia or Eastern Europe and we are obviously not going to save any jobs by joining the shopping follies on one particular day of the year (isn't it already enough to start your Christmas shopping on 2nd October and finish it on 24th December, then starting to buy things again during the end of the year/January sales?). Besides rather than saving the job of an overpaid PR agent, I would like to see people working in particular factories getting better working conditions and wages.
There is also another basic problem: fashion is an important industry not only in New York, it used to be a fundamental industry also in Italy, where it was destroyed by cheap and low quality clothes made in other countries, or in France. So we shouldn’t be really campaigning for reckless shopping but for high quality shopping and educating people to buying better garments every once in a while and not buying a T-shirt or a pair of shoes every week.
It is indeed this habit that has alienated consumers all over the world in the first place: clothes and accessories are cheaper than food nowadays, and while you can easily buy a T-shirt from €3 in a High Street chain all over Europe, the same amount of money won’t buy you much in a European supermarket. Pity you can’t eat a T-shirt.
To buy better garments or to be able to do some serious shopping consumers must have enough money, a thing that doesn’t happen too often considering how many people lost their jobs in the last few months, how many workers are fighting to keep theirs and how many young people are struggling to find one.
It sounds therefore rather silly just to say “shop to save people’s life”. I would expect people working in the fashion industry to do something else then for other workers: in Italy there is a huge crisis for what regards the local schools since the government cut funds destined to public education, I wonder why Armani & Co do not go on a strike then to save Italian teachers or factory workers. I can’t see why a teacher or a factory worker should got out on 10th September and “save” a person working in the fashion industry.
Honestly, I don’t think I like anything about Fashion Night Out, from the cringing subtitle, “A Global Celebration of Fashion” (as if it weren’t enough having umpteenth fashion weeks organised all over the world, all claiming to be celebrating fashion), to the hypocritical "feel good" initiatives such as selling T-shirts and gadgets to fund different projects all over the world to donating used/new clothes to the NYC AIDS Fund.
Reckless spending doesn’t save people’s lives. Yet there is ONE reason why I would get out of the house on 10th September: having the chance of meeting celebrities/fashion designers/prominent fashion media people – as the ads cleverly promise you – and beat them to a bloody pulp. That could be even more enjoyable and satisfying than getting another pair of shoes.
http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/35188425001?isVid=1&publisherID=17216871001
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