Hilary Alexander speaks in a Daily Telegraph video about the new collection by Comme des Garcons for H&M which arrives in UK stores tomorrow.
What strikes me about the shots of the young Japanese girls who stood in line for 12 hours in what I assume is the Tokyo store, is how they know how to shop - grab as much of everything you can and sort out what you want later. This is the key to shopping in a sale or sample sale. If you leave it on the rack, it will be gone when you come back.
Wednesday 12 November 2008
What to do when you get inside a shop
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This reminds me of in the "Running of the Brides" sale that used to happen at the original location of Filene's Basement in Boston. This was an annual bridal gown sale where the store sold thousands of designer wedding gowns for less than $500 each. Teams of women would show up, usually the bride, her mother and several girlfriends in matching team t-shirts. When the doors opened at 7:00am a scrum consisting of hundreds of crazy women would run into the store and grab as many gowns as each could carry. The racks would be stripped bare in less than 10 minutes, and size or style didn’t matter because the rest of the day would be spent trading and bartering with your fellow shoppers for the dress you really want. And of course all of the TV stations showed up to cover the frenzy.
Shopping in Japan is really interesting. Women under thirty tend to have awkward credit card debts and no savings because they shop as often as they breathe. I stopped by a boutique that carried (what I thought were niche) labels like Ilaria Nistri, Rick Owens, Ann Demeulemeester, etc and even though the place was in the middle of nowhere there were women just grabbing things off the racks..... evidently new stocks had just come in.
I can only imagine the chaos.
That is also how one shops at the better charity bazaars (church, synagogue, hospital etc). If one does not arrive a couple of hours early, not much chance of scoring a cachmere coat for $20 in any size, as they are scooped up in piles.
But I wouldn't want to live in a culture where single women under 30 have unwieldy credit card debts and no savings due to shopping addiction. Where would they put all those clothes in tiny Japanese houses in flats with few cupboards? I have friends in cities such as Paris who always look smart with relatively few garments.
Confession time. At 9.05 am this morning I was at the Glasgow branch of H&M - where several items of the edited range (compared with London) had already sold out. But I got some beautifully cut shirts (plain and polka-dot) and cardigans in cotton and wool. Plus one very "Comme" jacket. The big finds of the day, though, were in the men's dept. I got a beautifully tailored suit in two different sizes: after swapping the trousers one of them fits my 16-year-old son and the other fits 54-year-old me (and is the "new" and oh-so-flattering 7/8 length). Plus plain, classic shirts for me, my son and my husband, and a trench-coat and boat-necked jumper for me.
I don't normally wear the same clothes as my son or husband, by the way, but these are exceptional.
What a satisfying day!
Also managed to get a little bit of work done in between sprees…
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