Something’s happened to high street clothes. I can’t be the only person that has noticed. In the past decade or 15 years, small details that used to be common have become scarce: darts, pockets, proper seams. Shoulders hang strangely and more complex cuts, such as bias cuts, are a rarity. Buttons dangle loosely, as if the items they’re cursorily attached to aren’t worth hanging on to, which they probably aren’t, as most materials are cheap and synthetic, bobbling and fading easily. Everything just feels so ... rushed.
No surprises there, perhaps. It’s exactly where you’d expect fast fashion to have ended up. Go to any charity shop these days and it’s a graveyard of unloved, unpretty items from H&M, Primark and Zara, discarded almost as soon as they were bought. Those customers who do bother to use shops’ take-back schemes, which are designed to “close the loop” and ensure less waste, mostly have no idea where their returned items are going. By tagging clothes, the Changing Markets Foundation followed a skirt handed in to H&M in London’s Oxford Street in 2022, and found that it travelled 15,467 miles around the world, through a processing facility in the United Arab Emirates, only to be dumped in Bamako, Mali, five months later.
