In late October, the
Balmain H&M Collection came out!
I was surprised
with the price tags. The price tags of the bejewelled party dresses and
pearl-encrusted jackets were too high for their target high-street customers,
£400 for a dress is just simply to high for a high street retail.
When the
collection went on sale, shoppers from Seoul to Paris camped overnight to buy
items from the new collection. Today, opportunist traders are reselling the
already expensive pieces for four times face value.
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| Reiss Coat £1,295 |
Balmainia is just
the most extreme example of a hyperinflation that has happened all over the
high street. High-street prices are no longer recognisable as high-street
prices. At Reiss, the shearling clemi coat –
fully lined, with suede trim, very this-season Louis Vuitton – is priced at
£1,295. At Topshop, the Brunswick black velvet cut out dress –
made in Britain, with elegant beaded and sequinned thistle embroidery – is
£895, and already sold out in most of the sizes.
When I look at
the other side of the spectrum – Gucci, probably one of the hottest catwalk
brands around the world right now is is currently on a cheaper sale price at £300 for a new-season skirt on
Net-a-Porter.
What’s is
happening to the fashion world.
This has been a golden age for high-street fashion, but now we are paying
the price. Literally. Twenty years ago, Bond Street did fashion, and Oxford
Street just did clothes. The trickle-down effect of catwalk trends was
unsophisticated. The high-street shopper faced a bleak choice between a
crew-neck sweater in the colour of the season, which could pass as a nod to
fashion, or an appallingly badly made straight rip-off of a catwalk look
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| the Brunswick black velvet cut out dress - Topshop |
What’s changed?
In my opinion,
two things changed. First, the internet transformed the demands of the mass
fashion consumer, making them wildly more sophisticated in knowledge and taste.
Second, fashion designers discovered, to their surprise, that when a label
became more accessible, this enhanced a brand’s status rather than devaluing
it.
The era of
designer-to-high-street collaborations – which began two decades ago with
Designers at Debenhams and may or may not have reached its peak in Balmain x
H&M – raised both the status of the high street and the bar for shoppers’
expectations.
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| Balmain H&M Collection |
