September 04, 2019
A V-necked cardi remains one of my favourite things — the swotty schoolgirl I was hasn’t gone away
By all means call me boring — but this outfit makes me happy. Or, to be more precise, this cardigan. If it says back to school to you, well, that’s understandable. It’s totally class of whenever, albeit finessed by way of the pretty ribbon trim. This is early September after all.
What does it say about me that a V-necked cardigan remains one of my favourite things? That inside every front-row fashionista there hides a swotty schoolgirl who, back in the day, liked to dress more like a schoolboy? (Trousers, always trousers back then. A navy unadorned version of this cardi, nicked — sorry, borrowed — from my dad.) Perhaps not. But inside this one, certainly.
So even though I will be packing the first of three show-season suitcases tomorrow — it’s New York — and even though said valise will include a harlequin-patterned jacket and a jewel-encrusted emerald-silk shell top, among other outré affairs, nothing lies closer to my sartorial special place than a knit like this. Apart, perhaps, from the crisp white shirt I also wore in 1A.
Odd that at the time I felt a bit cross about my school uniform. Even odder that when I was in my twenties my recherche du temps perdu went farther for a while: I regularly wore a tie — as in a necktie. That stopped when I exited the loos at work and was asked if I had finished cleaning them.
I still have my collection of ties. A couple of mad kipper affairs. Some faux old-school stripes. I could never have worn my actual school tie, not only because it was horrible (navy and gold), but also because I may be weird, yet am not — I insist — that weird. Sometimes I look at my ties and think: “Mmm, maybe.” And then I think, “Maybe not,” and console myself by putting on a cardigan like this one.
It was the brand’s founder, Melanie Press, previously of labels such as Ralph Lauren and Marc Jacobs, who conjured up this holy grail. Overplaying it? Me? Of cardigans? Her vision? “I love a borrowed-from-the-boyfriend classic. There’s nothing more effortless than something we can snuggle into over all our fashionable stuff,” she says. Or, indeed, over our pseudo school uniform stuff. There are two equally covetable versions, one beige on beige, the other burgundy on grey (£290), and a black take to come next month.
Some of you will understand why this cardigan is as costly as it is. I know because I regularly hear from Times readers about how pleased they are to be introduced to small, responsible British brands, and because I also hear from those brands as to what a phenomenal — often game-changing — response they get from you as a result. These labels are charmingly wrong-footed by how many orders they receive, by how far afield those orders are flung (there’s a superlatively well-dressed reader in Singapore, to give one example) and by how orders start coming in minutes after an article goes online, even if that’s 1am UK time.
I know that others of you will find this price preposterous. This, I would posit, is because it has been all too easy since the introduction of the fast-fashion production model in the 1990s to lose sight of how much buying well, in terms of materials and working practices, costs. If we are serious about being more responsible consumers, we need to become better at understanding what buying consciously costs; better at spending more on less — far, far less. And actually, whether you like it or not, that more may well be far, far more.
A new book, Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothesby Dana Thomas, is a sobering read, especially for a fashion journalist whose inevitably hypocritical position is to advocate the aforementioned less/more equation while flagging up what’s new and affordable.
“In the United Kingdom in the 1980s,” Thomas writes, “one million worked in the textile industry; now only one hundred thousand do.” And “all the while apparel [fashion] and textile jobs globally nearly doubled from 34.2 million to 57.8 million”. Which brings us to the next part of the equation, the people doing the work in developing nations, of whom “fewer than 2 per cent . . . earn a living wage”. That’s before we get on to the environmental costs. Read my review of Thomas’s book in the paper this Saturday if you need further elucidation as to what the true notion of paying a high price might be.
I think fashion is too important a form of self-expression and self-empowerment, too great a source of joy and life-enhancement to be disavowed. We just need to become more sane about how we enact our embrace.
Instagram @annagmurphy
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/times2/anna-murphy-its-september-and-i-am-loving-my-woolly-cardigan-m7knvtr20
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