Aside from being a cheapskate I've also become more conscious over the past year or two of the enormous environmental and humanitarian impact of so-called "fast fashion" - lots of people tend to associate the term with yer cheaper online retailers like Asos and Boohoo (which are in themselves horrendous for that), but it also applies to the more high-end High Street retailers including some mentioned here, I'm afraid - Uniqlo, & Other Stories and their ilk (both of which I like, and have shopped at in the past).
Lots of garments will actually have been made in the same factories but then are sold at differing price points depending on the retailer, which in some ways makes the pricier ones worse as they're taking a bigger margin while the workers are paid the same piffling amount/have to work under the same shitty conditions.
For most of my adult life I've been kidding myself that the more mid-tier high street brands like Stories and Uniqlo must be at least less evil than yer Primarks, but I've had my eyes opened in the last year or so.
However even with such excellent reasons as the humanitarian and environmental implications of the high street, I find it hard to move to chazza shopping; I tend to have quite specific things in mind when I shop. In my mid-20s, I would order maybe five different iterations of a midi dress (or whatever) in order to pick the "right" one, and return the others. You can't be that specific with chazza shopping, in my experience, you have to be open to pot luck.
I realise that the solution to this is eBay shopping, but the inability to return something if it turns out to be an appalling fit or to smell of piss rather puts me off. Also my routine eBay experience is that I get gazumped in the final 2 seconds, causing me to think, FUCKIT, JUST GO BACK TO THE EVIL SHOPS.
Gorgeous dresses,
Goblin. Clearly Toast is the way to go, if I can but swallow the price tag.
I'm interested in people's experiences with clothes during this weird year, and how they might have changed. I work in a female-dominated media environment where reasonably fashionable presentation is basically required, and this was the first spring/summer where I didn't spaff at least some money needlessly on a few updates to my wardrobe to keep in nodding distance of current trends. Not only was this a saving in money, but it was a very unusual opportunity for me as a still relatively young woman to get off the keeping-up-with-the-joneses fashion whirligig that we're all socialised into to some extent, and I really gloried in it. However as the year has worn on I have found myself missing the fun side of fashion, and (as above) feeling at an impasse as to what to do to treat myself to a thing or two when chazzers have been shut. What clothing purchases I
have made in this year have been almost entirely functional -- I treated myself to a genuinely good outdoorsy rain jacket after making do with a crap one for years, and replaced my clapped-out walking shoes.
