How the pandemic shaped what we wear
Cheap clothes used to be a thoughtless click away. With the pandemic reducing the fashion industry to tatters, how can local designers survive – and will we ever dress up again? Michelle Duff writes.
Before the pandemic, Saffron Kingan would bore her friends to tears. A self-confessed sustainability geek, she loves fashion but has always been meticulous with her purchases – frequenting local designers, or making her own. In the op shop, she’s the one staggering to the changing room under an armful of fabric, or twisting a scarf into a bracelet.
“I practice trying things on upside down and back to front just as par for the course,” says the Porirua stay- at-home parent. “When I talk to friends I’m just like ‘have you tried putting your arm through a different hole? Have you tried adding pockets?’ I just feel like if I’m not paying for it someone else is, and it’s not responsible.”
Since lockdown, Kingan has noticed a shift. Instead of seeing eyes glaze over, she’s having friends hit her up for advice on how to dress sustainably. She’s seen the online conversation change, too. “I think much more people have noticed that if you buy a $10 T-shirt you’re not going to get much wear out of it, it will fall apart. People used to be like ‘I’ve worn this once on Instagram I can’t wear it again,’ now it’s more like ‘how can I wear this in another way?’”
How many nights have you sat by the light of the laptop screen, scrolling through endless pages of clothes? T-shirts of unknown origin. Jeans, boots. A cart full of items for the price of a Karen Walker shirt, shipped to New Zealand for free? Yes, please!
It’s hard to know when I started feeling ashamed of buying clothes from UK online clothing behemoth ASOS, but I think it was around the time of the sequinned dress. It cost around $60. When I walked, the discs shed like sparkly breadcrumbs. In what hellscape of a factory had they been sewn?
During the pandemic, global fashion sales plummeted as physical shopping became a wistful memory. With demand down, factories that massproduced clothes in places like Bangladesh and Vietnam were shuttered. International brands began to topple; Topshop, J Crew, Brooks Brothers.
Meanwhile, at the luxury end of the industry, the Fashion Week circus – media, buyers, and designers flying a carbon-plagued loop around the globe – began to seem grotesque, lavish excess revealed in a harsher light by enforced lockdowns. In New Zealand, it was cancelled altogether.
In May, even ASOS introduced a $50 charge to ship to New Zealand. Could Covid-19 be ushering in the end of an era?
Mindless spending on fashion has become a hallmark of the past decade. As international brands pumped out cut-price clothes, local designers began looking offshore for cheaper manufacturers to compete. High-end designers who once produced two annual collections found themselves pressured into four, then six. These were knocked off at speed by high street chains, and so the cycle continued. “We’ve known for a really long time that no-one could keep working like this, but who was going to stop first?” says Emily MillerSharma, general manager of Auckland fashion label Ruby. “With the problem being so huge and so entrenched over time you don’t know where to start, and it was overwhelming.’
During the nationwide lockdown in March and
April, shopping slowed. The country’s monthly spend on clothing, as judged by electronic card transactions, dropped by 88 per cent, from an average of $315 million the year before to $35 million in April. Some of this was suctioned up by online shopping, with sales up 19 per cent in the three months from March. But many retailers weren’t ready for the shift.
Ruby was not immune. The label was forced to close two of its stores, in Dunedin and Takapuna, and make eight of its 78 staff redundant. Just 300 metres away from Ruby’s flagship store on Ponsonby Rd, fellow New Zealand designer Ingrid Starnes boarded up its stores, pulled out of the Commercial Bay retail space and shrunk to an online made-to-order brand.
Knowing her customers would be stuck at home with idle hands, Miller-Sharma – who has made her own clothes since her early teens – decided to teach them how to sew. Her Zoom sewing classes quickly became popular, with first-time sewers joining the more experienced.
‘‘It was so cool, I loved it. I got out my scissors and would draw these little diagrams and hold them up to the camera,’’ she says. ‘‘We had some regulars, some people who used to sew in intermediate school. The thing with learning how to sew is you learn in a really visceral way how hard it is... you can see how much production goes into something.’’
The sewing classes fit with Ruby’s existing philosophy. Miller-Sharma is co-founder of Mindful Fashion NZ, a collective born in 2019 to link designers and the textile industry, create more local manufacturing, reduce carbon and minimise waste. Ruby has created sewing apprenticeships, has an online tool where customers can swap clothes, and provides statistics for the overseas factories it works with, down to the number of women working in each and the age of the youngest staff member.
This week, in a first for a New Zealand designer, Ruby is launching a collection of patterns, Liam Patterns. Its first lookbook, What have I Got, has a playful aesthetic featuring whimsical blouses, structured pantsuits, and ruffle-sleeved wrap dresses.
This innovation is not without risk, but Sharma says it’s worth it. ‘‘For us as a company we used to feel fearful talking about working in a more sustainable way because we didn’t want to be exposed for not being perfect. But what are you gonna do, just not do it? You’ve just got to take that leap, so let’s just crack on and do it.’’
Customers were becoming increasingly aware of where their clothes were made before lockdown, Sharma says. ‘‘In the past four years, the questions we’ve been asked by our customers are more detailed and nuanced. It used to be, ‘Are your clothes made in New Zealand?’ Now, it’s ‘How do you know the dyes you’ve been using and the wastewater is being treated properly?’
What level of auditing do your factories have?’ It’s really W exciting and shows a shift in culture.’’ here being environmentally friendly used to be considered a nice add-on, it’s now becoming key for business. While sustainability has always been the driving force for former New Zealand footballer and AllBirds founder Tim Brown, he says they didn’t initially know if it would sell shoes.
Brown and designer Joey Zwillinger created their first shoes from castor bean oil and merino wool. Since they were dubbed the ‘‘world’s most comfortable shoe,’’ by Time magazine in 2016 they’ve become a successful global brand, with trainers using fibres from wool, eucalyptus trees, and sugarcane.
‘‘When we founded Allbirds nearly five years ago we had the thesis that people didn’t want to buy sustainable products, they wanted great ones,’’ he says. Now, he thinks any tension between sustainability and making money is a false one.
‘‘We have come to understand that a product can’t truly be great unless it is sustainable... and not being sustainable might actually prohibit business making money in the future, or even existing at all.’’
He’s hopeful the pandemic will be a catalyst for change. ‘‘We can’t return back to the way things were, otherwise we will have no chance of avoiding a disastrous outcome for our species in the coming decades. 2020’s challenges have driven home an understanding that the health of our planet, communities, and ourselves are all interconnected.’’
It is hard to know if this apparent fashion slowdown will last. The spending which dropped during the first lockdown in March quickly rose to pre-Covid levels by July, with $333m spent that month alone. MarketView research shows clothing sales are now almost back to normal, down just 2 per cent from this time last year, and online sales up 33 per cent.
But designer Kate Sylvester said she had noticed a real shift in the mindset of New Zealand shoppers, with more pledging to support local designers and labels. This, and online sales, have meant her business has been able to stay afloat. Sylvester, also a co-founder of Mindful Fashion, has also changed the way she operates. While she will still do four collections she plans to spread them over the year, with clothes that can be worn throughout the seasons. The company has started an upcycling programme to workshop how to re-use offcuts and excess stock, and an online marketplace for customers to re-sell secondhand Kate Sylvester garments.
‘‘I would be mortified and horrified if I thought anyone was buying a Kate Sylvester dress for one season. My customers buy clothes to wear for years and years and years. The real evil is fast fashion, that’s the model that needs to be wiped off the planet.
‘‘A real positive that’s come out of this insane year is that it’s really made everyone stop and question how we do things, and that’s been a huge issue in our industry.’’
Sylvester still thinks there’s a place for New Zealand Fashion Week, with the buzz of the shows good for the local industry and customers even without international media and buyers. ‘‘I’d happily put on a show for just New Zealanders.’’ Fashion Week founder Pieter Stewart said it would return in 2021, just in a different iteration. ‘‘We’ve always filmed everything, but we are going to need to think of ways of digitally amplifying things. I think it will tighten up more, and have a slightly different focus.’’
But what does this all matter, if we’re just going to be schlepping around in trackies for the rest of our lives? The New York Times’ piece ‘‘Sweatpants Forever’’ catalogued the turn to more casual clothing since lockdowns