Dress to distress
* Launch your own clothes range
* Make chic really cheap
* Achieve must-have status
* As trends change, throw it all away
Fashion dictates. Like a sartorial Hitler, you either agree to its terms or are punished with public humiliation. No one can pinpoint the precise moment when clothes stopped being practical cover-ups from cold and shame and became the next weapon for environmental Armageddon. But it happened. Suddenly, you stopped donning fig leaves and began wearing clothes that accentuated your gender and identity. Sadly, clothing became the layer by which social or economic standing is graded. Fashion is so prolific, so fundamental, that society can hardly keep track of what is ‘in’ or ‘out’ but must follow nevertheless – blindly, in most cases.
Careers have been made but more have been broken by fashion. You are going to design clothing with the cachet of Cartier but at Primark prices. Your range will be ruinously heinous to ecology, but few will know and less will care. On launch day the queues will stretch three times around the block and Kate Moss, every kooky designer’s wet dream and perhaps the most lusted-after fashion muse in the world, will be a huge fan of your fabulously chic line. In these heady days of over-consumption, making people buy what they don’t need is the only game in town.
Kate Moss’s Topshop range may have profited one of Britain’s richest men, Sir Philip Green (who is worth nearly £5 billion), but last year it was revealed that the Asian workers who were manufacturing it were being paid less than £4 a day in Mauritanian factories. It certainly sounds like a money-spinner. Since Kate’s look makes and breaks trends, replicating her style is an obvious must, but your range will differ in subtle but significant ways. It will be made from the finest cotton around. Cotton is the world’s ‘dirtiest’ crop, using 16 per cent of all the world’s insecticides, more than any other crop. And your batch will be sourced direct from the dirtiest fields of all, Uzbekistan, which, you are reliably informed, proudly boast some of the most toxicated cotton fields on the planet. Here, almost 1 kilogram of hazardous pesticides are applied for every few acres of cotton. The fibres for a single T-shirt demand an estimated 150 grams of pesticide to cultivate. In these damp fields the use of Aldicarb, a powerful nerve agent, and one of the most toxic pesticides ever created, is ubiquitous. Endosulfan – effortlessly capable of inducing coma, seizures, convulsions, and death among cotton farmers – will also be liberally used to further your fabulous range.
Naturally, your clothing must be cheap if you want it to sell. Over the last twenty years, the cost of high-street clothes has plunged, with many items costed at less than £20. To facilitate your low price tags, the cotton is flown from Uzbekistan to Delhi, destined for textile factories in the Shahpur Jat area of the city. Here child workers, some as young as ten, work in conditions as close to slavery as conceivably possible. They are paid as little as 50 pence a day for 14-hour shifts, to produce clothing for Western wardrobes. If their productivity wanes through fatigue or sickness, their gang masters can fine them or place the youngsters in manacles. Child’s play.
You’re starting off your fashion empire with a modest range of four items: tea-dress, close-cut cigarette pants, a boyfriend blazer and a strictly limited edition over-sized clutch bag (made from unsourced leather from the back of an African crocodile). Your brand – called Shades of Green (SoG) – could be described as retro-style with a twist of modernity. The cut is flattering, the style classic, the colour varying shades of green to reflect your (dubious but unchallenged) eco-credentials. Think Moschino meets with Matalan. Savvy, sassy, chic and cheap. Bloody cheap.
One in every £4 spent on clothes in Britain goes on fashion, and if your label is going to affect the planet, then idiots must be able to afford it. A few buyers of course will know that cheap clothes come at a price, so be careful to obfuscate and sub-contract your supply line so that it is almost untraceable. Even your official book-keeping should be little more than a trail of smoke and mirrors. Undercover reporters will be alert for a whiff of slave labour so you must be careful to employ only the poorest of the poor, those who cannot risk their fragile livelihood in the name of exposure.
Of course, you’ll require a celebrity model to wear the damn clothes. Moss’s agent has not returned your calls so you settle on 22-year-old Agyness Deyn, British Fashion Awards model of the year and all-round purveyor of ethical wear. You call her agent, then her PR team, and send a sparkling brochure which features the phrase ‘eco-chic’ seventeen times and urges the need for a new age of enlightenment among shoppers. ‘Look at the colour,’ you say breathlessly on the phone, ‘they are all green. Green. Geddit? These clothes were made specifically with the planet in mind,’ you add. And you are not fibbing. Deyn, if she knows what’s good for her, will undoubtedly say yep.
You must invite all the top fashion editors to a private viewing, where they will be offered mind-bending amounts of chemically reared pink champagne, very much non-organic salmon crudités and told to place orders for whatever they want from the imminent Shades of Green selection. It is a shameless ploy. Quite literally, you intend to buy their kind words. But the real coup de grâce is the launch party. Such bashes can crush or create a range before it goes public. A swinging, glittering affair crammed with the right faces is sufficient to ensure success. You have chosen The Hospital Club, a West End private-members club which is sufficiently elitist to conjure the illusion of self-importance and whose frequent guests include environmental ambassador Sienna Miller, who admits she cannot forgo flying but intends to take fewer baths.
Make sure to phone your paparazzi pals and run them through the guest list. Mention a stellar cast of A-listers, even if they’re unlikely to turn up. Other essential guests are Katie Grand, editor-in-chief of the triannual Pop magazine; Alexandra Shulman, editor of Vogue; Rod Stanley, editor of Dazed and Confused, and its fashion editor, Katie Shillingford. Give high society a look-in by ensuring that Tatler editor Geordie Greig is chauffeured to the Hospital. Man-of-the-moment DJ Mark Ronson will be asked to lay some sounds. And don’t overlook the goody bag. Sufficiently ostentatious, it can sell a party on its own. Aim to rival the gift bag dished out at the Oscars: scarlet lipsticks linked to the development of the blood disorder lupus, and £150 vials of parfum, man-made luxury fragrances proven to be toxic to the central nervous system. The crowning gift is blood-diamond jewellery, sourced from the Côte d’Ivoire. This batch of diamonds helped to fund intractable conflicts and resulted in millions of deaths. Not surprising then that blood diamonds are banned. Investigations in 2007 found that many of the main UK jewellery retailers, including Cartier, Graff Diamonds, Fraser Hart, John Lewis and House of Fraser refused to provide any information on their diamond policy, with most companies having to be contacted several times.
With the first goody bags greedily received, you are already checking your phone in the hope that a high-street fashion chain or branded luxury wholesaler has contacted you with an opening bid to stock Shades of Green. Enter Primark. Three years ago it was rated the least ethical place to buy clothes and although it has since vastly improved, its grip on the bargain-hunting public exerts a powerful draw. Once Primark has made contact, it is time for that longstanding fashion-industry staple: the stunt, the final piece in the jigsaw. During the opening of her range, Moss modelled her clothes in the window of Topshop, and now Deyn will be asked to do the same in Primark’s flagship store on Oxford Street. The difference will be the green body paint she will be sporting. With the launch timed for 6 a.m, unorderly queues begin to form the evening before. Contact the news desk of the Evening Standard and report scuffles between those eager to lay hands on Shades of Green. Pandemonium turns to panic as news leaks that there are just ninety-nine of each line available. Before most of the population arrives at work, a Shades of Green tea-dress flashes up on eBay for £700. The consumer clamour threatens to spiral out of control when the Standard reports a blazer literally ripped from the back of a young girl in Soho.
Amid ongoing hype, you launch the next edition of the range a month later, this time in a slightly different shade of olive-green. Deyn appears in full Shades of Green regalia on television shows T4 and Friday Night with Jonathan Ross. Your range is now the most sought-after in Western Europe. By late 2009, SoG is the most must-have clothing collection on the planet. You decide to launch a second label and contact your friends in Delhi and those in Uzbekistan who may still be alive. Your public needs new, cheap offerings. All those who bought the first range have thrown the items away, and you hope they have ended up on a rubbish tip or landfill site. Yet in many ways there will be no end: your clothes will live for ever. The synthetic fabrics you wove into your poisoned cotton will not decompose, and this happy cocktail of chemicals will leach into the surrounding soil for many years to come.
* Mass-produced cheap clothes continue to dominate high-street fashion like never before. In a society where cost is all that matters, no questions are asked. Certain.
* Demand for luxury goods and ostentation grows as part of a large anti-environment counter-look. Likely.
* (Non -)ironical T-shirts saying ‘People vs Global Warming’ and ‘Frankie says Fry’ become must-have garments of the hot summer of 2010. Probable.
* Supermodels caught wearing slave-labour items from Uzbek fields. Media outrage, but the range sells out in record time. Likely.
* Less becomes more. Naturalism hits the high street and young men clad only in sardonic bowler hats and carrying empty briefcases becomes the cuttingedge look of July 2014. Probably.
Likelihood of eco-fashion dominating high street by 2015: 56%