Lisa Armstrong
How to buy less... yet still be fashionable
gatha Lintott knows all about the fashion itch. A one-time model turned PR (for Tom Ford) turned merchandiser and buyer (for Burberry), she would spend her lunch hours darting in and out of boutiques.
Then she moved to South Devon. It’s not that there are no shops there – the lanes of Totnes are threaded with purveyors of crystals and healing remedies – but when you slip out of your accustomed groove, the whole rhythm of your life changes and, if you’re lucky, you gain an objectivity that helps you see everything with fresh eyes.
The pencil skirts and stilettos she’d worn every day at Tom Ford clearly had no place in a rural landscape. Even the Burberry clothes no longer made sense. She was working on a farm cultivating organic flowers. She didn’t need a trench coat, however understated.
“I realised how much of my old wardrobe was filler,” she says. “Endless T-shirts, skirts – items I’d buy on repeat, to scratch that itch.” She kept some special Tom Ford and Burberry pieces, “for inheritance purposes”, but got rid of the rest.
“It probably took me two years. I don’t think you can do a complete clear out in one go. There will be some items you don’t wear often but you love, so maybe you need to hang on to them.”
We’re in a fashionable café in London and what strikes me about her clothes – a denim one piece and microsuede ankle boots – is that they would look as perfectly at home in Devon as they do in SW1 or Paris, where she currently spends half her time (and yes, that means another wardrobe, but like the Devon one it’s tiny).
She’s honed the knack of looking individual and timeless while incorporating fashionable elements. “The ankle boots help, so does vintage,” she says. “Every season there’s a retro theme on the catwalks. Vintage is an affordable and environmentally friendly way to recreate it without wearing the same ‘must-have’ as everyone else. Most of the stylish women I know in Paris buy vintage.”
Six months ago she launched antibadstore. com, a website where everything is sustainably produced, eco-aware and fair-trade, or vintage (including a fire-red Versace trouser suit). There are currently
24 labels on the site, which sounds a lot, until you tot up the
350 on netaporter.com or the 850 on Asos.
It’s the tight edit that makes Antibad appealing. Instead of having to scroll through pages of denim, Antibad has one. Every item is either recycled, organic or manufactured from deadstock. There are hand knits, free from toxic chemicals; shoes made from recycled plastics or deadstock leather; and swimwear of recycled polyamide and fishing net.
If I lost you at the fishing net let me try to reel you back in. Everything on the site is desirable – the pale blue lace-up ankle boots and scoopback black swimsuit are waitlist worthy by any criteria.
Lintott does the research and buying herself – this is a tiny operation, funded by her and her boyfriend, the musician Ben Howard – but that gives it an authentic, personalised feel. She’s delighted to see bigger brands such as Arket and H&M moving on to her turf with eco-aware offerings: five years on from the Rana Plaza factory disaster in Bangladesh and several months after David Attenborough raised awareness globally of the impact of plastic waste on Blue Planet II, desire for change is growing.
Despite some negative experiences as a model (“You’re a teenager and your body changes but you’re made to feel that it shouldn’t and that your developing curves need to be controlled. There are some models who never go through puberty because they’re not eating properly”) and all those retail splurges when she worked as a buyer, she strongly believes the fashion industry can blaze a trail in changing the way we consume.
“The single event that started me on this road was when Burberry moved all its raincoat manufacturing back to the UK. That made me realise you can challenge the status quo.”