Having come up empty-handed in my thrift store excursions, I found myself making the dreaded walk down to the nearest shopping mall. I was looking for material for my Halloween costume. As some of you may have noticed, I love a good dress up.
What was once exciting to a gaggle of young newly-independent girls has become a depressing, loathsome endeavour, and I dare say it's not just growing older. It seems the quality of the clothes is steadily declining. I'm quite sure the (fewer) stores that lined the first shopping malls in my town offered much higher quality products, with many of the items being manufactured from actual cotton.
Nowadays, I stand in the mall and suffocate as (I imagine) do the countless aquatic species we're killing - with needless, kitschy plastic. I keep wondering when exactly polyester, stretchy, flimsy outfits became the norm, and not the oddity. Yesterday evening having found little of use at the big expensive mall, I meandered to the local Chinese shop. Famed for stocking cheap, low-quality products, including clothes. Yet, to my disappointment, while the prices were slightly lower, the quality was mostly on par.
Big brand chains like Zara and H&M have come to rival these dubious emporiums that were once a byword for crap, cheap products. Of course, the big brands have retained their price tags, with many of them daring to new heights in light of the current economic wasteland.
Yet the products they offer are mostly plasticky, low-end products that are as bad for you as they are for the environment and that will undoubtedly degrade within 6 months.
The first time I encountered Irish retailer Primark was, I think, while traveling across the UK a few years back. I remember being excited at the prospect of cheap swimsuits as I was in desperate need of one. While I was living in Prague, the big, luminous Primark in the main square maintained a lure, as it offered cutesy products at low prices (almost as low as the quality, but it was a willing trade off).
Now, the retail company has opened a few stores across my own native Romania. The prices, as everywhere else, have sprung, whereas the quality has not.
The depressing side of that was that all the other supposedly fancier, more reputable stores have followed suit to the point where now, they all seem indistinguishable.
I found myself wondering what is the point? While in a pinch, a cheaper product can come in handy, why are we so willing to invest our hard-earned money in cheap crap that we'll replace come next season?
The rise of retail brands like Shein and Temu suggests an increased demand in low-quality cheap crap. Which inevitably leads us to the old counter-argument: why would you invest $50 in 5 low quality, short-term skirts when you can invest that in one or two products of higher quality and longer longevity?
Back home, a quick perusal of my wardrobe yielded plenty of material I can work with for my Halloween costume. Many of them are items I've worn for 6-7, in some cases even 10 or more years. Which suggests quality, though they weren't at the time purchased in posh, expensive stores. I can hardly imagine that being the case with today's products. Indeed, it seems a miracle they don't disintegrate as soon as you try them on.
Why?
What's the appeal? Are our lives so void that we feel obliged to fill them with this mass-produced, cheap crap? Do we simply feel we don't deserve better? Or is it a reflection of our actual measure of self-worth?
While we live in a generation of "yas queen"s and "girl boss" toxic positivity, our spending habits suggest otherwise. There used to be a time when one shopped for quality, when the lack of mass-production forced people to invest in higher quality, lasting materials.
It's how my own generation, in a post-Communist, pre-shopping mall era, was taught, and it wasn't so long ago. Nor was it (I believe) a bad lesson to be had.
Why would you throw your money on, or worse, dress yourself in toxic, low-quality, restrictive materials? With so many among us struggling to "define" their own fashion sense, we seem to have forgotten a very simple, common sense tenet: you don't get a second chance at a first impression. And dressing yourself in cheap, low-end shit tells volumes of your self-perception.
