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Spring may have barely sprung but the world of fashion is already thinking about next autumn. It’s enough to make your head spin! No sooner have you got your wardrobe sorted with this season’s trends then we are looking ahead to what is next on the horizon. Rather than ignoring the merry-go-round we seem to be jumping on board and even demanding to go faster! Is fast fashion making us impatient?
Impatience seems to be a side effect of the digital generation; we want everything fast, and for the most part we get it. You can access information from anywhere at any time, shop from your phone around the clock and speak face-to-face with relatives on the other side of the world. But are we already beginning to take this for granted? It was not that long ago that accessing the internet meant no one else in the house could use the phone and you had to wait for a dial-up connection, but now even a low signal on your phone can cause blind fury.
This impatience seems to extend to our approach to fashion; we want the newest trends and we want them now. The catwalk collections have always been designed for a season ahead but now almost as soon as it hits the catwalks you can see the designs appearing on celebrities. Bloggers recreate the looks and no sooner than you can say ‘broadband’ then the images are all over our Instagram feed and we want a piece of the action too.
Emilio Pucci, Louis Vuitton, Tom Ford AW15
The accessibility of today’s fashion is making us want our style fixes almost immediately, we aren’t prepared to wait because if we delay everyone else will already be on to something new. I recently made an overseas purchase of some jumpers during a particularly cold Sunday a few weeks ago. Naively I clicked standard delivery which said 7-28 days shipping but, spoilt by the next day delivery efficiency of ASOS and Boohoo, I assumed that 28 days was the worst possible case scenario and estimated that my parcel would arrive in about a week and a half. When after a week the status still read as ‘processing order’ I became less optimistic. Three weeks later after much checking of the order status and many moans to my couldn’t-have-been-less-concerned-about-this husband along the lines of “what kind of ridiculous delivery policy is this? I won’t even need jumpers by the time they arrive” (a bit unrealistic if past British summers are anything to go by) the parcel finally arrived. Unfortunately the items didn’t live up to expectations and had to be returned. Instead I ordered some jumpers from Boohoo at 8pm on a Friday. They arrived by 9am the next day.
It would be fair to say that patience is probably not a particular personality trait of mine but when it comes to fashion I think many people will agree that we want our fashion fast and we aren’t prepared to wait. I have learned an important lesson from this experience; I am not cut out for overseas shopping, it’s next day delivery for my shopping fixes from now on.
Images courtesy of Vogue.co.uk
By Samantha Vandersteen
