The hidden cost of a £1 BIKINI ... and other wear-it-once bargains
WALK into a coffee shop with £5 and you will be doing well to walk out with two hot drinks, let alone change.
But take that £5 into the world of fashion, and it’s an altogether different situation. You could, for instance, pick up five of the new £1 black bikinis from online retailer Missguided, one of a plethora of websites offering High Street fashion at rock-bottom prices.
The item in question — a flimsy string affair, in black — is available in sizes 4 to 24, but in a marketing ploy the retailer is only selling 1,000 of the sets each day.
‘Introducing the £1 bikini, a one-off item to celebrate ten years of empowering women to look and feel good without breaking the bank,’ declared the retailer. ‘It cost us more to produce than £1 and we’ve absorbed the costs so we can offer it at an incredible price as a gift to you, our babes.’
Sadly for Missguided, the response was less gratitude, more horror.
‘Wow, a £1 bikini. That is wrong on so many levels,’ wrote one Twitter user, while over on Instagram, the brand’s post ( with accompanying picture of model wearing the bikini) was greeted by a barrage of criticism.
‘While I’m sure a £1 bikini is tempting, it encourages overconsumption which has been proven harmful to the planet. In addition, there’s no way this is ethically produced at that price. Where are your clothes being made? What are the conditions under which your workers are labouring? Please inform your customers of the true cost,’ said one commenter. ‘Absolutely no shame,’ wrote another. Perhaps predictably at that price, the limited edition bikini keeps selling out — but there’s no shortage of cut-price alternatives for the hordes of young women looking to emulate the stars of Love Island. (Missguided partnered with the ITV show last year, while rival bargain store I Saw It First is this year’s retail sponsor.)
AHuge industry caters to millennials looking for a ‘fast fashion’ fix. In the click of a button, a trend-conscious young woman can buy a garment that will arrive within days, and pay so little she can happily wear it only once.
A search of such online retailers this week — Boohoo, Missguided, Pretty Little Thing, Shein, even established names such as H&M and New Look — revealed dresses costing as little as £4, camisole tops for £2.99 and a pair of flipflops costing 90p.
There is also a growing outcry about the environmental cost of a celebrity- driven ( even Taylor Swift has worn Missguided) throwaway fashion culture.
For in all likelihood, many of those £1 bikinis and £4 dresses will end up discarded at the back of the wardrobe or in the bin after just a handful of outings.
Meanwhile a new crop of digital brands, who use Instagram and Facebook as their shopfront and churn out clothes as fast as they can, are accelerating the fast fashion cycle.
Orsola de Castro is the cofounder of Fashion Revolution, a global campaign to promote more transparent and sustainable fashion. She says: ‘A £1 bikini is just the strongest visualisation of when an industry is promising something it’s not delivering. It almost feels like a slap in the face to me, it’s tempting people to do something quite bad for the environment, and doing it openly.’
The environmental costs that Orsola talks about have been well documented, notably when the House of Commons environmental audit committee published a report, Fixing Fashion: Clothing Consumption And Sustainability, in February. The committee’s
recommendations based on that report included introducing a ‘fast fashion tax’ of 1p per item to help fund recycling of the mountain of cheap clothing thrown away every year. It is no small irony that on Monday — just as the £1 bikini was launching — the government rejected those recommendations.
In 2016, British consumers purchased more than 1.1 million tonnes of clothing — up from 950,000 in 2012. Women have four times as many clothes in their wardrobes today as they did in 1980.
One survey found 33 per cent of women consider clothes ‘ old’ after a couple of wears, so it should come as no surprise to find around 350,000 tonnes of clothes, with an estimated value of £140 million, are said to go into landfill in the uK each year.
While clothing comes sixth on the list of household spending, it’s fourth in terms of its impact on the environment — below housing, transport and food.
experts say it’s an environmental and ethical minefield. The total carbon footprint of clothing in use in the uK was 26.2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2016 — up from 24 million tonnes in 2012 — and if the trend continues it is feared the industry could account for a quarter of the world’s carbon budget by 2050.
In 2015 the global fashion industry produced more CO2 emissions than international flights and maritime shipping combined, according to the Institution of Mechanical engineers.
Cotton is a thirsty crop, draining water resources, while polyester, made from oil-based polymers, has twice its carbon footprint.
Then there is the hugely damaging impact of plastic on marine life.
The Daily Mail has led the way in highlighting the scourge of global plastic pollution with its Turn The Tide On Plastic campaign, and it’s a sad fact that billions of polluting particles are being flushed into our waterways every time we do a wash.
Then, of course, there is the human cost of workers around the globe working in terrible conditions, often paid a pittance to make the cheap clothes worn by many.
Two years ago, Channel 4’s Dispatches programme exposed a cheap clothing scandal in which factory bosses in Leicester said they were in direct competition
with Bangladesh and China. An undercover reporter was paid less than half the national living wage in three factories (£3 an hour in one) to pack and press dresses for High Street stores. Nevertheless, the fast fashion trend has, to date, proved a business winner. Earlier this year, Boohoo unveiled a sharp rise in profit and revenue for the year. The firm saw overall revenue rocket by 48 per cent to £856.9 million in the year to February 28, while pre-tax profit jumped 38 per cent to £59.9 million. Of its bikini, Missguided, which has said it had a ‘ challenging year’, stressed the garment cost more than £1 to make and it had ‘absorbed’ costs to be able to offer the item as a gift. ‘There has been no compromise with this bikini — it is sourced to the same high standards as all of our other products,’ it said. Tim Cooper, professor of sustainable design and consumption at Nottingham Trent University, said some brands — such as ASOS — were showing a greater interest in addressing the issues. But of fast fashion: ‘ They are throwaway garments for young people who don’t want to be on Facebook in the same item twice, clothes for going out are becoming throwaway items.’
And the future? ‘We can carry on pouring clothes into landfill, but we will pay the price in due course in one way or another,’ he says. ‘The Government should intervene in this discussion.’
ENvirONMENTAl
audit committee chair Mary Creagh MP said she was heartened by the backlash against the budget swimwear. ‘i think this shows the era of fast fashion is coming to an end, and not before time. The backlash shows that the ecoconscious shopper is realising that bikinis that cost less than their morning coffee are going to end up costing us the Earth.’
‘We heard a lot from brands [on the committee] about the steps that they were taking to reduce their environmental and social impact, but this shows it’s business as usual in the fashion world and people are getting very rich, very quickly online from business products that are fundamentally wrong.
‘The £5 dress, the £2 T-shirt, the £1 bikini — the question is how much is the person making it getting paid, how much is the fabric being used costing and what is the real environmental cost of that item?
‘i think people are now saying they have had enough and tha t an entire generation of consumers are turning their backs on fast fashion.’
Boohoo, which owns PrettylittleThing, said: ‘ We are committed to continuing to drive improvements and take our environmental responsibilities extremely seriously.’
Boohoo has a number of sustainability initiatives in place.
Primark said: ‘ We sell our products at lower prices because we make a lower profit margin, buy in bulk, and keep our costs down.
‘Everyone should have access to good quality fashionable clothing at a price they can afford. Not everyone can afford expensive clothing. Our products are made in factories where care and respect is given to workers’ rights and the environment.’ H& M has reduced the CO2 emissions from its operations by 11 per cent. it is aiming to ensure all packaging used on clothes is made of 100 per cent recycled or sustainably sourced materials by 2030. New look declined to comment. Missguided has also joined the Ethical Trading initiative.
Nitin Passi, the CEO and founder of Missguided, said in written evidence to the House of Commons’ environmental audit committee: ‘ While we are a “fast fashion” retailer, we do not operate at the discount end of the market.’
And: ‘Most of our ranges — over 75 per cent — have a full-price of between £10 and £35.’
Shein and i Saw it First were approached for comment.