A few years ago i never really cared for designer clothing, and i still can't stand anything thats covered in logos ect, but from the few designer pieces i own (including a Chloe dress) i've really started to notice how inferior high street clothing is in comparison. The materials always feel so cheap, the cuts always seem really unflattering. Im by no means a label slave (and by no means can i afford to be one) but i can certainly say i appreciate the fact that high end designer clothing is defiantly a good investment and i'd rather own one expensive designer dress than 30 odd from Primark.
So does anyone else choose to splash out on designer lables? Is it a quality thing, or do you just do it for the satisfaction of knowing what you're wearing cost a couple of hundred? Do you think its all stupidly over priced?
...
Most of you need tarting up with well made clothing.
Me? I'd look this good wearing a banana costume, as indeed I have. So I have no need of a jacket designed by art-school slaves working out of the Shoreditch sweatshops of 70-year old homosexual Germans.
I'm past all that now.
This, for me, is POTD
buy yourself a drink!
I have a M and S autograph shirt
I assume that counts
absolutely not.
Nope
don't care as long as it looks nice and fits right and didn't cost a fortune I am happy.
Only levis
I love levis.
Is that designer?
Well it has a label on it.
You can't really get designer labels for men really can you? Except suits and stuff I suppose.
You should check out
the Italian middle aged man in my office in his Versace jumper.
course you can
I've never owned a pair of levis
it's on my list of things to buy actually, vintage or new?
The older the better apparently.
But you know, they're all good. People collect them from the 40s and stuff and they go for thousands.
another vote for levis
they last for bloody ages
Jeans generally last for ages
it was their original purpose
Not really
There are a few places I prefer to shop, because I know the clothes from their are cut well and will last, but thats it
ooops
*there
I used to but not really anymore
oh, chloe and marnie and miu miu <3 <3
I'd love to have one or two pieces but I normally end up spending my money on 'stuff' instead, like books, OR 'going out'...
I try to buy stuff from very small labels, that have concessions in places like Top Shop - there are maybe three dresses I can imagine keeping for a very long time (which is rare for anything available on the high street).
Marni jewelry is so stunning
and im hoping to soon own a pair of amazing miu miu patent brogues
The most expensive piece of clothing I own
is from Next, and I hardly wear it.
So no.
I used to love my labels too
Then i went to college to study fashion and it made me hate it, i got my qualification but i dont think ill ever use it.
I know what you mean about the quality being of a higher standard with designer clothes, i have a few things i paid over the odds for. I may not wear them again but ill never throw them away. People often critisize the prices you pay but you're paying for the quality.
that's not always the case
though is it? I've had shoes that have fallen apart pretty damn quickly
I have a pair of Alexander McQueen shoes
They were pretty bloody expensive, i wore them all the time to places i really shouldnt have. I got in touch with the company for help mending them and they told me "these line of shoes are not to be worn in places like clubs, it's your own fault and we dont do repairs" Nice.
owch :(
How did they break?
The heel was totally worn
and some of the leather had scuffed
Here they are
http://tinyurl.com/6fowvu
Really hard to walk in!
Most of the chicks that rock those shoes..........
have a chauffeur to ferry them from yacht party to gallery opening!
I wear them to stuff like that too!
lol
Foam party to bottle opening!
:D
Well i've never been to a foam party
But i get your gist!
Did you ask
in the place you brought them from?
Liberty are very good for that - they fixed mine for free and were very sweet about doing it.
Yeah, it was a new store
the girls had no idea what to tell me, they just gave me the factory number and the number for the designer direct.
Thats always my argument
you may be able to find a pretty good rip-off in topshop, but i know id probably throw it away within a year or so, whether if i ever had a daughter i know i'd pass on my chloe dress etc to her
how much do such dresses cost?
umm chloe can be anywhere from £2000 to about £400
other designers are a little cheaper, it depends on what sort of dress it is... you could easily pay £200-£300 for a "day" dress but you'd be looking at way over £500 for a evening dress and over £1000 for some of the higher end designers (Chloe, Marc Jacobs, Cavalli etc.
aren't some of them
made by exactly the same people who are making stuff for Primark etc
No
H&M and Next all the way.
Most of my clothes are from H&M
minus jeans.
i don't care for the mainstream
Cos youre an alter-native,
innit?
yeah man
i just wear hemp
I would care could i afford to!
Expensive clothes are a real weakness of mine - unfortunately I have shit all money. I try to compromise by buying relatively few items and getting mid-range stuff, eg. the cheap range of kurt geiger.
I "read" vogue, (ie. I look at the pictures) religiously. One day, one day, I will waste all of my money on Prada and Miu Miu.
Try looking at the net-a-porter.com sale
or www.yoox.com. if you don't mind buying previous season stuff the prices are fairly reasonable.
net-a-porter has some great designs
I recently bought a lovely Nina Ricci dress from there. Very expensive though!
never looked at yoox before
lots of stuff on there is in my price range, thankyou! Quite difficult to really see what stuff looks like, but that's the same pretty much everywhere on the internet.
a girl i know got some red chloe doc martin style shoes
for about $200 from yoox.com once. You have to trawl through a LOT of crap, but theres some real gems there.
Only trainers.
I wouldn't wear an unbranded pair, or one by a cheesy crap one. I prefer cheaper jeans, i'd never spend more than £25 on a pair, but shoes, underwear, tshirts, shirts, i'm not that bothered, i'll just get the cheapest ones that look okay.
Panther trainers?
How did Gola turn from ultimate gyp brand to selling in proper shops for decent money?
i used to get Pepe trainers.
god they were shit. Then there was the suede Ascot boots. Then some Puma's that had a twisty thing instead of laces.
puma disc
Not really 'labels'
but I feel much better in Fred Perry/Lacoste/Lyle&Scot polos and stuff rather than the cheaper stuff.
High street shops suck
Designer labels suck.
Vintage clothes stores ftw- cheaper, looks better, fits better (whats with high street trousers especially), plus they're the indier-than-thou choice of merit.
they're not really cheaper, though.
at least not in the places i've looked. Plus, the shops are usually manned by massively-cool amazingly good-looking people who look down their noses. Then there's the having a gut and them not looking good problem.
Ever been to 1-2-3 Vintage?
Lol.
I know what you mean about some vintage shops though. But I prefer that air of detached, better-than-you cool to the air of sagging dullness that infects the high street, any day.
fits better?!
guys who buy all their clothes from vintage stores always look like they're wearing a size too small.
Definitely fits me better
high street trousers tend to work via the logic that longer legs = fatter legs.
Might be true with mens wear
but finding vintage clothing to fit a girl who's 5"11 with a pretty boyish figure is nearly impossible.
And that is why
Lauren is more fun to shop with than you.
;)
i am HELL to shop with
Start wanting to wear
baggy men's 2 piece suits. Then vintage clothes shopping will be easy.
See, no vintage clothes will fit me!
Of course, it depends on your figure, but I've read that clothes used to be made far less for comfort back then, so they're much tighter in certain places, (eg. armpits) - this has certainly seemed true for the stuff I've tried on.
I find loads of good stuff in vintage shops
unfortunately most has the fit of a bin bag.
I.
Love.
Wearing.
Jack.
Wills.
Not.
not one bit
I get all my clothes out of a dustbin.
^ this is true
and it shows
You know what label I keep on seeing around recently?
'Bench'. And I'm always just a bit like: "Bench? Wtf? Why do you have a t-shirt bigging up benches?"
Have you considered a career in stand-up comedy?
Fleetingly
why?
This is a subject close to my heart
not because I have oodles of money to splurge on designer stuff but because my other half is a designer and we run a label together
Odd thing is that there are so many guys (especially) who shun the whole designer/fashion thing as being vain and facile and just buy at H&M and Next or whatever
but H&M and Next are the equivalent of Coldplay and U2
by that I mean that if you are a designer you are doing today what will end up in the high street in 2 to 3 years time
in the betweentime it will filter into diesel or Kookai or wherever
by the time it ends up in H&M it's been sanitised, standardised, reduced in cut and quality and farmed out to china/turkey/sri lanka to be made as cheaply as possible to be brought to you on the back of a madonna ad campaign or what have you
the point is that so many so-called alternative minded people take the view that fashion is straight forward commerce and don't even give consideration for those who actually consider the discipline just as much of an art form as painting or music or theatre etc
I see what you're saying
but I care about the music I listen to a lot more than I care about what I wear.
yep
but imagine if for example Coldplay and U2 CDs were £2 each
but let's say Arcade Fire CDs were £50 each
I think you'd probably care a lot less about music in that market
and it looks like an odd analogy but massive global megabrands like H&M really screw the market so it ends up this way with clothes
All I meant was
I'm motivated to find new music but see clothes shopping as a chore so I opt for convenience.
Plus, I don't earn much money and spend too much of it on other things.
that's totally fair enough
I was just having a little rant about how for some reason people who view MacDonalds or Starbucks as totems of the sedative of global consumerism and have no interest in the yawn inducing, brain numbing output of most major label artists seem to think H&M is so great when they're doing the same thing with clothes
nothing personal
I wasn't taking it personally! :)
I do see exactly what you're saying!
surely
high street brands will be aiming for a different market than high-end brands?
Also, how do they screw the market?
Thanks!
High street brands just rip off designers
Top Shop have actually had a successful lawsuit filed against them against Chloe for copying designs. It's not fair on those who work so hard to design outfits for fashion houses to have their work copied, and produced using inferior fabrics and production techniques.
is it not
just making fashion accessible to the masses? Or to people that may not be able to afford high fashion clothes? Surely putting together specific items of clothing (irrespective of their origin) is about self expression and is an art form in itself.
*filed against them by Chloe
also
imitation is the highest form of flattery. The kind of people that would buy from Tophsop or Primark are not the kind of people who would buy from Marc Jacobs or Chloe. In fact that's kind of the point, they can't afford it.
Until large fashion houses make high fashion cheaper, they are going to have to accept that in a competitive market place people are going to come in and do it for them.
As early adopters of fashion you have to be prepared to pay a premium for the novelty of having the clothes first. And the same goes for early/late majority, you may pay less but you have to abide the lead time until you can buy the clothes.
when does imitation become theft though?
and as for
"Until large fashion houses make high fashion cheaper, they are going to have to accept that in a competitive market place people are going to come in and do it for them."
I deal with that a bit below
and why does cheap = good?
cheap just equals worse quality and more consumption and forces the existence of sweatshops and child labour in the cotton fields of Kazahkstan
cheap
means affordable.
Let's take H&M as an example
they employ around 130 designers and pay them a decent-ish wage but they have no creative control
All the decisions at H&M are made by buyers and accountants
economically speaking roughly half of those 130 designers would be able to make just as much money (and a few of them a LOT more) by starting their own brands.
They would also be able to have creative control, introduce different working practices etc - the kind of thing that moves an industry forward and keeps it fresh
instead they are discouraged from striking out on their own in a number of subtle and odd ways e.g. a friend of mine who is a menswear designer at H&M and who could easily start up his own successful brand is kind of spirited away on 'research trips' to Japan or Hawaii everytime it's Stockholm fashion week
That's from the inside out
From the outside in it's more about economies of scale and the vast difference between ordering 3000 kilometres of fabric (if you're H&M) and ordering 200metres if you're a smaller designer for example
add to that the fact that a LOT of items in H&M are sold at a LOSS on purpose in order to grow the brand and market-share. Aggressive marketing in the same manner as starbucks etc
how are independent designers and traders supposed to compete?
even many of the more famous designer labels are struggling to make ends meet or are only making profits from accessories and perfumes
none of this is exclusive to fashion of course - the same could be said of any industry from restaurants to football clubs
it's just that the general public tend to view the designer brands as the enemy and embrace the high-street in a kind of reverse of how they view this issue in other industries
that's really interesting
to get an insider's perspective.
I don't understand how you mean that independent designers and traders will compete. Is this in terms of price of end product and proft margin?
all of the above
the high street stores and their labels have their own distribution network so they essentially sell to themselves at a competitive rate and they occupy the prime retail space in the town
let's say I, as an independent designer, sell my clothes to a boutique. In order to sell I have to take a lower profit margin as it is more expensive for me to produce my clothes (both due to economies of scale and higher production costs in terms of materials) and I sell at my price.
The boutique will then normally sell this item at retail for 2.5 times the wholesale price
thus making it very expensive for the consumer and the designer
i see
I suppose it's a catch 22 situtuation really, the more people buy high street the more expensive it is for independent retailers have to pay, which means the prices goes up and consumers are driven back to the high street. Hmm, it's all a bit rubbish really isn't it.
EXACTLY!
and the high street know this and so they AGRESSIVELY sell at a loss in order to increase their market share
then they make their money on the stock exchange by having such prominent branding
then they reduce the quality of their stock in order to make profits
this is precisely why there are 8,9 and 10 year olds in the cotton fields of Uzbekistan instead of at school
read this
http://www.ejfoundation.org/page145.html
that's why it's affordable
that seems really interesting
I actually studied Fashion and Textile Retailing at uni, and also work at Verdict a retailing business information company, but it's not often that we deal with independents so it's really interesting to find out more.
well, it's good to keep your eyes open
I'm not saying that all designers are saints and all major retailers are the devil of course I just find it continually odd that a large number of people seem to exempt places like Next and H&M from their general disgust or distaste of aggressive consumer capitalism
but now I must leave this discussion and finish organising our next fashion show
:)
What about the really famous labels?
What are they the equivalent of?
Pink floyd
I like this post!
Not much else to say, just, I totally agree with this.
i've always tried to affect an interest in high fashion and designer labels
mostly because some of my friends do the whole fashionista buying few but designer/vintage clothes thing so well. they look great. i just don't think i actually care about fashion that much. i just happily walk around looking a bit shoreditch and silly and tatty most of the time. e.g. today = dark grey leggings, high tops and oversized x-files t-shirt. LOL. i don't rly buy high street either. i beg, borrow and e-bay, mostly.
I would love to buy more designer clothes
but alas my shitty wage does not allow this. Therefore I buy a fair amount on Primark, Topshop and H&M. If possible though I trawl for bargains (I found a Vera by Vera Wang dress in TK Maxx for £17!!!), I also try and buy higher-end high street e.g. Whistles and Reiss as there is practically no difference in quality between these brands or a high-end diffusion brand.
I sometimes worry that I spend too much time thinking about clothes, but I do love them so I think it's ok.
No
I don't care where it comes from if I like it sufficiently. Plus designer labels are just exploiting slave workers even more than high street retailers.
absolutely not
most of my clothes are vintage
i own a few luella bartley and APC items, but on the whole i can't usually afford to buy designer. i have an amazing amount of shoes by kurt keiger and carvela if that counts.
i try to avoid high street stuff as much as possible but am often tempted by the topshop boutique range.
i find
that i prefer designer labels to the high street tat one can acquire for peanuts. however, since peanuts is all i earn, i am forced to buy shit.
however, i do enjoy a good designer label, particularly since they've been made with the kind of effort only poverty-stricken sweatshop workers with an ak47 pointed at their backs can muster. we need to introduce such a system into british schools and jobs.
Not really.............
at least not the typical aspirational style designer labels.
I've been heavily involved with skateboarding, surfing and snowboarding for years so I have a lot of time for the likes of Stussy, X-Large and Volcom (which I own a hell of a lot of), but that's 'streetwear' and somewhat more affordable.
I definitely feel a certain degree of loyalty to the likes of Levi's to the extent where I probably wouldn't buy jeans from another manufacturer, Vans and a few other labels.
For snowboarding outerwear I rate 686 and am happy to pay top wack for it, because it's just the best. Rip Curl for wetsuits and err....yeah.
Other than that I buy a lot of second hand stuff and get interesting bits and pieces from eBay.
A mix of old and new, labels and cheapy H&M/Gap stuff, that'w what it's about, right kids?
it's not stupidly overpriced
some clothes are so beautiful that they're worth it. i can't afford it though, so most of my clothes are second hand. i like looking at people wearing designer clothes for free, in Vogue.
if people who hate designers read actual fashion magazines, they would have a completely different view of what genuinely beautiful clothes, and people, look like.