So chic on Instagram, so hideous in real life
THE dress looked really nice on my Instagram feed, sandwiched between a post from World of Interiors and a picture of a friend poolside in Greece. It was from a company called OnceAngel and showed a slender, tanned blonde girl in a midi dress described as a ‘colorblock cotton and linen long loose dress’.
The bodice appeared to be stitched in a heavy red and white threaded oriental pattern. I showed it to a friend sitting beside me and we agreed it would be just the thing to take on holiday to Croatia in a few weeks (now looking like another fantasy).
The clue should have been in the price of £27 – flagged as being 41 per cent off.
Of course, I should have had more sense. Me, editor of Vogue for 25 years and a journalist for far longer, should have realised that you get what you pay for. Which in this case was an item of unrecognisable hideousness.
Far from the moss linen skirt and pink cotton sleeves advertised, a package arrived with a crumpled-up dress made of an indescribable artificial fabric the colour of hospital linoleum with a sickly peach-coloured sleeve. The bodice was in the same fabric with a flat ugly print. However cheap it might have been, it couldn’t match how cheap it looked.
Hoping against hope that it might look better on, I slipped into it but if anything it looked even worse. The fabric was sticky against my skin, the skirt hanging in limp creases and the sleeves droopy batwings with elasticated wrists.
I felt immensely foolish. How could I, who knows all the tricks of the trade, have fallen for a simple Instagram photo with a stylish gloss?
Worse, I was no doubt boosting the coffers of a company employing the kind of workshop practices that fast fashion companies have been pilloried for, playing my part in encouraging appalling sweatshop conditions that we don’t have to look to China and the Far East to discover. They’re here at home, in some of our cities hit hard by Covid-19.
The returns address supplied with the dress was Walsall in the West Midlands, but on the OnceAngel website, t he detai l ed returns policy which gave the firm a veneer of respectability, stated people should email before sending anything back. I duly did so, saying the dress was in defiance of the Trade Descriptions Act and I was returning it pronto. Immediately an email pinged back with a Chinese character in the subject box instructing me to return it to: Receiver: XuBao Address: Panyu District, Shunyifang Avenue East 25, Warehouse No 20. City: GuangZhou State: GuangDong Country: China This story doesn’t reflect well on anyone, but particularly me. I should have known t hat t he embroidered linen dress I imagined I was buying would cost more than the price asked.
If I’d bothered to look at the website, I would have had second thoughts when I saw the threepack of pastel ‘ f ashion l ace socks’, bizarrely photographed next to a small soft-toy rabbit, featured on the ‘new in’ section. Not exactly chic.
And I would hopefully have spotted that a jump suit I had also been tempted by from an Instagram ad from a differently named seller was also on there for a ludicrously low price.
If someone like me can fall for such brazen rip-offs – even knowi ng the i mportance of i ssues around ethical workplaces and the need for environmental and sustainability checks in the fashion industry – it just shows that cleaning up the business has a long way to go. And that even old pros like me can fall victim to the sugar rush of a cheap online hit.
However cheap it might have been, it couldn’t match how cheap it looked