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FASHION’S BRAVE NEW WORLD The LOSERS, the WINNERS... and how to FUTURE-PROOF YOUR DRESS CODE
A high street in turmoil and much-loved British brands toppling, while online niche brands boom… The pandemic has shifted the £32 billion fashion industry on its axis. So who are the winners and losers? And what will shopping look like in the future? Lisa Armstrong investigates
In the depths of lockdown, with every event that ever brought a smile to anyone’s face cancelled and millions dejectedly contemplating a future where even going out to the pub, let alone somewhere you could properly dress up, seemed fraught with logistical can’t-be-bothereds, a ray of light appeared in the shape of 6,000 fuchsia sequins.
Lo, Amanda Holden, one of the few celebrities to emerge from this sorry time we call 2020 with grace and humour (who knew?), cheered us up when we most needed it by posting self-parodying clips of herself taking out her wheelie bin dressed in a curve-hugging, suction-packed pink dress. I’m guesstimating the number of sequins by the way, but I’m certain of the impact. For those who were sinking into a deep rut of slankets and feral follicles, Holden showed the true purpose of clothes (beyond preventing us from getting arrested when we go out): to cheer ourselves up. Never mind the whining about being confined to their palatial prisons that so many of her peers gifted us with in lockdown, Holden showed a way to pull ourselves together without delivering a single sermon.
The meme #glamforyourbinman became hugely popular, if slightly gender-presumptuous, and helped show a confused nation that even in a pandemic, it’s OK to smile and occasionally look on the bright side. This is an important message when so much is gloomy and may just set us on a new sartorial course, where we learn to value dressing up properly again. There are signs we’re doing this already. Rishi Sunak’s Eat Out to Help Out initiative prompted a wave of people determined to make an effort, even for Nando’s. For August, at least, #mondayisthenewsaturday became a new style category. For the first time in months, heels and handbags were taken from shelves and dusted off. And since this is 2020, invariably these sorties were recorded on Instagram or Tiktok. (Yes, Tiktok, where dance routines triumph, has emerged king of lockand down social media. The platform, launched in China four years ago, now boasts more than 800 million active users.)
Lest this all sound like a barrel of laughs, let’s not forget, for all the memes and victory rolls (in the middle of everything we had commemorations for VE Day), for all the ‘aahhh, doesn’t Beatrice look lovely?’ moments (the Princess’s choice of a 1962 Hartnell design from Granny’s wardrobe for her wedding dress made both her, and vintage clothing, two more lockdown success stories), that this has probably been the worst time in history to be in the business of selling clothes. The British Fashion Council predicts a third of the names on the London Fashion Week schedule may never recover.
Even during the Blitz – an eight-month onslaught with which lockdown was initially compared until we realised how ridiculous we sounded, since being cooped up with Deliveroo and Joe Wicks wasn’t the same as having your home bombed – people went out dressed up. We, on the other hand, stayed at home and dressed down. Some of us didn’t dress at all. The high street, already suffering, went into freefall on 24 March.
At the time of writing, Marks & Spencer is set to cut 7,000 jobs over the next three months. John Lewis & Partners is closing eight of its 50 stores, placing 1,300 jobs at risk – and, in an indication of things to come, is talking of turning them into residential properties. Ted Baker, once a high-street swashbuckler, is axing 25 per cent of its staff – some 500 jobs. TM Lewin, Monsoon, Cath Kidston, Oliver Sweeney, Debenhams, Laura Ashley, Victoria’s Secret, Aldo footwear, Oasis, Warehouse and Jigsaw were all in various stages of administration – more will follow. Many of those on life support or quietly being euthanised are household British names.
This is deeply unsettling. But even more bleakly, many small companies that functioned in as exemplary a way as can be managed in an industry where cashflow is always an issue, are at risk. And how depressing will high streets be when up to 40 per cent of shops have closed? Even at the more luxury end, Bond Street and Madison Avenue are under threat, and shopping malls could be history.
If we’ve learnt anything in the Time of Covid, it’s that a bit of grooming – what our grandparents called making the best of ourselves – makes everything that bit more enjoyable, or at least bearable. For the first few weeks there seemed to be two options: stay in your pyjamas all day or stay in your leggings. Brands that excelled at producing either – from the behemoths such as Lululemon, where online sales rose 70 per cent at the start of lockdown, before falling back a bit as other brands capitalised on the new
appetite for athleisure, to independents such as Olivia von Halle, which saw sales of some posh PJ sets soar by 380 per cent. Manchester-based Boohoo put its focus on (yet) more tracksuits and saw such a huge spike in demand for its jogging sets that overall turnover rose 45 per cent year on year.
Not everyone wanted to live in leggings. As panic about the virus eased, increasingly we discovered, à la Holden, that scrubbing up made the daily slog of scrubbing pans and homeschooling a bit more enjoyable. A week or so into lockdown the penny dropped: there was something to dress up for. That screen on your laptop. Tom Ford’s tips in The New York Times on how to position your camera and light yourself for maximum flattery went viral. Not saving things for best became a recurrent theme as many ‘shopped their own wardrobes’ and dug out their blingiest jewellery and waftiest feather stoles for Saturday-night virtual quizzes. Square necklines, clavicle-grazing earrings, hair bows and scarves and puffy sleeves all became bona fide trends, ignited not by the traditional catalysts of catwalk, celebrity or influencer (all of which have been lockdown losers), but by the dimensions of those rectangular boxes on Zoom and other videocall platforms.
Even tiny acts such as massaging in an inexpensive face oil turned out to be valuable when it came to setting the tone for the day every morning – skincare has been another winner over the past five months. Larissa Jensen, vice president and beauty industry analyst with The NPD Group, confirmed that for the first time, skincare sales have eclipsed makeup. ‘People began spending their old commute times on building their skincare routines,’ says Brandy Hoffman, co-founder of Volition Beauty. Whether that pattern continues, the industry has seen seismic changes. Compulsory face masks mean that lipstick, a traditional winner in hard times, has been eclipsed by brow and eye products.
Fashion businesses could only look on in envy at the opportunities awaiting the beauty industry. The less-than-one-percent super-rich may still have been spending, but the underlying story, as one designer put it to me, was ‘fash-ageddon’. Almost no one was shopping new, either because they were worried about job security or that it made them seem superficial, or because they had nowhere to go. Shopping your own wardrobe is good for the environment, but it doesn’t create the £32 billion industry that UK fashion had. A Royal Ascot competition – encouraging fans of the peacock parade to dress up, post a picture on Instagram and watch the event from their sofas – generated 5,000 entries, but for the millinery, occasionwear and tailoring companies that have always flourished, the outlook still seemed beyond bleak. Without the weddings, sporting fixtures and numerous garden parties that dot the British summer, they were like Ant without Dec – as were high-street chains without Glastonbury and all the other festivals that necessitate the mass consumption of hot pants and flower crowns. If you wanted to spook yourself about the unsustainable model on which the fast end of fashion is based, all you had to do from July onwards was stand in one of the chains by the endless sale rails while tumbleweed drifted past. It turns out those ‘must-haves’ were, for many of us, a no.
And yet, there have been specks of activity. Boden sold some 9,000 occasionwear items by June, a surprisingly healthy number for a category it might have expected to tank. Its Victoria dress, a printed, belted midi, originally £130, accounted for 700 sales. When Boden polled its customers to find out why they were shopping for occasionwear without any occasions on the calendar, the unanimous response was that joyful-looking clothes were indeed bringing joy. Me + Em’s online activity was up on this time last year. On the debit side, its London stores were closed. Meanwhile the British couturier Giles Deacon reported a healthy order book and his trademark elaborate gowns and accessories, ever the portable beneficiary of turbulent times, won big.
From the experimental costume pieces on new sites such as motley-london.com to bigticket ‘milestone’ rings and Rolexes, jewellery sales were up. Co-op Legal Services reported a 42 per cent rise in divorce enquiries during the first two months of lockdown, yet romance boomed, with couples who
barely knew each other moving in together during quarantine and finding themselves proposing marriage. Fenton & Co – a disruptive, direct-to-consumer, ethical jewellery brand that’s turning the staid model of going into a high-street chain store and being offered a glass of warm champagne on its head – saw its best months on record through lockdown as more and more people got engaged. The closure of so many jewellery retailers proved a fillip for the digital-only brand, helping it end June on a high with four times the sales of the same month last year. All of this was achieved from 30-yearold co-founder Laura Lambert’s flat in west London. ‘I started the company in my sitting room 18 months ago, so moving back there during lockdown wasn’t such a big sacrifice,’ she says. ‘The biggest change was making sure we communicated in the right way, directly with our customers.’
Sales of blue-chip ‘investments’ such as Birkin and Chanel 2.55 bags rose the moment shops reopened, particularly in
Asia. Swimwear also did unexpectedly well – Hunza G’s sales are up 40 per cent from 2019 – as Brits redirected the money they’d saved from cancelled holidays to holiday clothes, leading to a spike in resortwear and Instaand siesta-friendly frocks from tiny brands such as Sleeper.
Many of the small players proved to be among the most nimble. Take 31-year-old Rosanna and her 35-year-old sister Christie Wollenberg, the duo behind Otiumberg, a source of stylishly understated jewellery. Being denied access to the new London Bridge showroom they’d signed the lease on in January, or the models they used for their images, the sisters settled for more homely means of engagement. They began offering style consultations via Facetime, Zoom or Whatsapp, and started photographing new collections on themselves. In the same way that the 1990s saw the rise and fall of supermodels, 2020 may see a shift away from professional models as more and more brands are forced to photograph friends and cusputs tomers during lockdown, drawing a positive response from the public. ‘We’ve always been quite reticent about putting ourselves at the forefront of the brand,’ says Rosanna. ‘But lockdown reminded us how much customers like to see the people behind the label. Business increased 130 per cent on this time a year ago. The really lovely thing is how much repeat business we get – and the emails we’ve had from our engravers to thank us for the work.’
Many luxury labels, both great (Burberry), medium (Anya Hindmarch, Brora) and smaller (Philip Treacy, Plümo, Emma Willis London) chose to communicate via action rather than press release (PRS were another victim), pivoting to making PPE for frontline workers and, later, face coverings for the public. Mask-making probably didn’t save any label financially, especially since so many of them donated a chunk of sales to Nhs-related charities, but it raised their visibility, showing how quickly they could enact change – and should create a halo legacy for them in the future. ‘Many customers will remember the brands that behaved well and those that didn’t,’ says retail expert Mary Portas.
Is she right? Things change fast, even for the big beasts. Hermès, a seemingly bulletproof slice of luxury, saw sales soar when it reopened its stores in China after their lockdown, only to see revenue fall 42 per cent in the second quarter of 2020. Unheard of. Prada is down 40 per cent – but it’s far worse for many others.
Boohoo, riding high on its June turnover surge, was, just weeks later, brought to an all-time low when it was swept up in a scandal about British sweatshops. The brand, which claimed it had no idea some of its subcontracted workers were paid as little as £3.50 an hour, was accused of deliberately turning a blind eye to exploitation. Other labels, finally daring to hope there was light at the end of the tunnel, cautiously reopening their shops and found them smashed up as some Black Lives Matter protests in the US turned violent. Brands including upmarket Australian boho brand Zimmermann, Anthropologie, Reformation, L’oréal Paris, Celine, Condé Nast US, Salvatore Ferragamo and many more found themselves in an ethical tangle as they posted black squares on Instagram and were accused of performative allyship (ie token gesturing) plus their own forms of racism.
Navigating our way out of this won’t be easy, when it’s hard even to predict something as relatively simple as ‘What do I – and people like me – want to wear in six months’ time?’ As Cefinn founder Samantha Cameron it, ‘On a basic level, I’m still trying to work out whether I should be designing more casual clothes for people working from home in 2021, or more occasionwear because we’re going to be spending every weekend going to weddings and anniversaries that were cancelled in 2020.’
Those aren’t the only events on hold. Catwalks shows – and all the extravagant waste that comes with them – were cancelled. Some giants such as Gucci, Michael Kors and Saint Laurent have vowed to rethink the bloated show schedule and change the selfharming delivery system that sees sales begin early in the season, creating an unsustainable pricing system that’s largely predicated on discounting. Others, such as Chanel, insist the show(s) must go on, and on. And while Dior, Valentino and Prada all did imaginative online presentations, hardly anyone thinks the digital fashion show has been cracked yet. The truth is, when it comes to lockdown’s triumphs and disasters, the grand reckoning has only just begun.
Pivoting to PPE didn’t save any brand financially, but it should create a halo legacy