David and Anonymous,
You have both spotted a rather large hole in my project, which my therapist recently described as a 'cop out'. When I told her that I was travelling to Hong Kong to get some items of clothing copied (non-branded naturally), she suggested that if I were truly to divorce myself from branded status anxiety, I should be able to wear whatever I please without concern for others' reactions. You are right, in some circles, it is currently fashionable to wear non-branded gear. I'm not sure if that is a reaction to branded consumerism or a transitory fad for minimalism. Probably a bit of both. I do know that you can currently pay £100 for a pair of plimsolls that look just like mine (£4.99), only with a YSL logo inside; truly there will always be a clothes labels that can help you achieve an inexpensive look for the price of small house.
But hey, one step at a time.... I'm getting round to wearing sack cloths and plastic bag shoes in my next book.
'If I lost all my money and could only afford to buy trainers for a fiver, would this experiment be so revolutionary?'
In one sense no; this project is clearly the dilemma of someone who can actually afford to buy the stuff in the first place. However, I would say that ability to pay for non-essential goods, in the UK at least, has become irrelevant since credit has become so easy to obtain. Consumer credit in the UK now totals £211.6bn, and the average amount owed per person (excluding mortgages) is £9,000. This would suggest to me that the desire to own things and having the resources to pay for them are now bear little relation to one another. I always come back to the experience of the playground when I was in my early teens; all the working class kids at my school had the best trainers, footballs, computer games, whereas my middle class friends and I were far less branded. It is clear to me that our short term material desires are no longer constrained by finance, and we are in an almighty black hole of debt as a result. Could this be that we are manipulated to consume beyond our resources, or are we all simply very bad at home economics?
6 Comments:
The consumer debt mountain is certainly responsible for fuelling the consumer frenzy, which probably start in the very late nineties and peak around 2002-2003 and has perhaps faltered a little since then with retail suffering, rapidly rising bankruptcies, accumulating unemployment.
If you think back to our grandparent's generation thrift and frugality were the dominant way of living. The baby boomers brought a massive materialism to society, which has probably got worse with Generation X/Y.
However, the Boomers seemed to strike it lucky by growing up with a period of rabidly growing prosperity the like of which may never be seen again in the UK. They had living wage jobs for life, received the full benefits the generous welfare state, free education, and had the option of buying a council property for a peppercorn price or else had their mortgage paid effort-free by high 70s and 80s inflation. When Thatcher sold off the council houses, allowed aggressive American style lenders into a deregulated market causing house prices to fly into orbit, again the boomers won big
.
Small wonder even blue-collar families could put three modern Ford cars on the drive, have big tellies, consumer goods, and holiday abroad. As a generation, the boomers were - comparatively speaking - rolling in disposable income. Women when out to work, initially not merely to cover the bills in a sweat as happens today, but to improve 'living standards' of the family (AKA buying more and more and more flashier stuff).
Generation X/Y grew up in this culture. Back where I grew up if your Dad did something skilled-working class or lower middle class you lived in a big airy semi or detached house. If you were poor your family lived in a reasonably spacious council house. Kids from council estates were always good to know as they always had satellite, VCRs (with all the latest pirate releases) and big hi-fis in there homes years before anyone else. If your Dad was an officer in the armed forces, a senior manager for M&S, or ran a small works on the local industrial estate you lived in a huge detached house with big double garage and large gardens. Some Mums worked, some didn't, but if they did work it was usually something part-time and not too strenuous.
Now in much of the South of England - especially the South East - if you young or youngish you'd need to have a well above average salary to afford to live in an ex-council house. Your partner would need a full-time, serious, high-stress job as well just to cover the costs. Having a kid would seem pipedream if you wanted one, as you're already maxed out. As many companies have downsized, deskilled and offshored over the last decade younger workers have less chance of landing a good job anyway. So many of my uni peers failed to land 'graduate' jobs and started in positions they could have wound up in with A-levels. So, all in all, there's a big chance as the baby boomers kids now aged 20-32 will struggle, as a whole, to attain the same standard of living in many respects as the 'poor kid's families' I knew growing up.
A lot of Generation X/Yers are waking up to this reality but a large number feel they have AN ABSOLUTE RIGHT to the kind of lifestyles their parents enjoyed and are using debt to make up the shortfall between reality and their desires. Worse, they are probably far more brand-orientated than their parents and want everything their parents had PLUS all the funky branded fashions, cool homes with magazine-like interiors, ipods, technowidgets, and slimline mobiles. A massive inflation of needs.
We need to wake up - our parents lived in a period of unprecedented growth in opportunity, while the kids live with a McDonaldisaed job market, globalisation where workers have to compete with low-paid workers in far off lands, student and consumer debt enslavement, a dishonest inflation measure that cuts our pay each year, no social housing and huge house prices. Overall we're poorer - much, much poorer, and plummeting prices on DVD players, iPods and Primark sweatshop clothes do not alter that reality..
As more young people become debt-slaves to the bank and end up bankrupt a lot of people are going to realise their heroic 'consumer confidence' in support of Gordon Brown's thin-air debt economy has done them no favours at all.
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David
this is a fantastic comment. I'd like to talk to you privately about the comments in regards to the book. Can you possibly send me your contcat details to neil@neilboorman.com.
I AM SURROUNDED BY FRIENDS THAT BUY SURF STUFF ROXY, GUL,QUICKSILVER ALL UP TO THEIR YING YANGS IN DEBT. I AM SURE THEY WILL HAVE TO BUY BIGGER TOPS SOON SO THAT THEY CAN GET THE BIGGEST LOGOS ON THEM THEY ARE NEARIN 40 AND QUITE FRANKLY LOOK LIKE MUTTON DRESSED AS LAMB
don't mean to be a downer, cause it seems like you're on a personal journey and everything and i do respect that. but are brands the real enemy here? because it really does sound like you're actually angry with all of modernity.
I can sympathise with what you have said, i gave up red meat ten years ago, and now only eat chicken fish and vegetables, i gave up all crap and fast food out of my life by 1999, and haven't worn labels for about ten years either, then everybody else has started the same thing, organic food this, and non brands that, i never needed a therapist, i have just made a descision and rolled with it, why are people so weak? It's not the end of the world, you can wear labelled clothes from the high street, as long as they arn't a brand, what does it matter? you can look good, and no one knows where your clothes come from. I used to wear scruffy clothes, then thought actually, british labels from the high st shouldn't matter, not everywhere in the world is there gonna be a H&M, and if there is-so what? I like to look good, but the difference is, it's for myself, not no-one else, not for a group, or a trend, but what i choose to wear. Corporations try to repress people with all thier advertising, but you know what? You can ignore them. I have had a mobile phone for eight years, which is really bad and goes against what i have just said, but i have not had branded phones, i have always stayed on pay as you go, so i am not giving my money away for nothing, and i only really use it to text my friends, i turn it off, and leave it at home when i feel like it. Is this just me? I think everyone is soft, and doesn't have any drive or determinism anymore. Lets make descitions for ourself, and not be lead by a advertisement. We are a free country after all, we don;t have to buy these things that we call a neccesity. -Matthew Johnston
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