What women should really be spending their money on
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When the press turned on Anya Hindmarch’s “I’m Not a Plastic Bag” the criticism focused on the fact that the bags were not ethically produced. This rather missed the point of what was really wrong with them – that they were used not as shopping bags but as substitute handbags.
The original idea must have been to use them instead of a plastic bag when needed. That makes perfect sense. But if you use the thing itself as a handbag and fill it up with notebooks, make-up, wallets, Tube passes and the like, and you then go to the supermarket and buy a basket full of food (however organic) you are still going to need to take a plastic bag to put it in.
So the buying of the bags wasn’t about greenness and it wasn’t about utility. It was about the way women identify with brands. Buying one of the bags made you look like a do-gooder – and given the way they had been cleverly released in limited numbers to the fashion world before the masses got a look-in, it made you feel glamorous, too.
A similar story unfolded at Topshop last week. The weird scramble for clothes sort of designed by Kate Moss told us nothing about how nice the clothes might be, but a lot about the power of the Kate Moss brand. So much does the average woman think that owning a bit of Kate’s fairy dust will add to her level of happiness that thousands of us (and not just teenagers) were prepared to queue for eight hours in London and to camp out overnight in Birmingham to get it.
I find all this worrying. First, because it’s depressing to see adults behaving in quite such a teenage way – surely by the time people hit their late twenties they should have better things to do than queue overnight for things they don’t need. Second, because this shopping idiocy is – with a few exceptions – a woman thing. Can you imagine a man queueing for eight hours to buy a pair of trousers designed by David Beckham? Of course not. And third, because it is such a shocking waste of money.
To get a sense of the scale of the money we waste in the shops consider this: 63% of women told a survey that they have bought clothes they have never worn; 56% say they have bought shoes and 42% toiletries they have never used. Worst of all, nearly 8% of them say they have never worn the most expensive thing they have bought.
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We buy £13,000 of clothes we never wear over a lifetime. Now compare that huge waste with this: 50% of British women have made no arrangements for their pensions at all.
The glamour of owning Kate Moss kit has turned out to be fleeting. Much of it is now languishing on eBay (where bidding is far from frantic) and that which is not will last a season, if worn at all. The most anyone will have got from the scrum will have been a brief sense of triumph.
With 100 years of feminism behind us I’d feel a lot better if we could just grasp the basic truth that happiness doesn’t come from hotpants and that the money spent on fruitlessly hoping it will would be much better spent paying off credit card debts and setting up pensions. It is not a given that forgoing tat for financial stability will make you happy, but I’m pretty sure that it can offer the kind of long-term peace of mind a hemp “it” bag never will.
First published in The Sunday Times 6th May 2007
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