THE FASHION INDUSTRY

Greymouth Evening Star, 18 December 1934, Page 3

THE FASHION INDUSTRY

BASIS OF MODERN WORLD. “One of the few industries which continue to resist the trade contraction tendencies of the times is the fashion industry. Indeed, the market is apparently expanding, and those who study it surmise that saturation point is so far away as not yet to be in sight,” says “Time and Tide.” “It may be the new realisation of the profound economic significance of fashion in an age of mass production and mass markets, and of the dependence of nations, and even civilisation, on the acceleration at all costs of economic activity, which has lately moved the Moscow oligarchs to decree the publication of a Russian fashion magazine, the first of its kind in the U.S.S.R. (foreign magazines of this class have, however, enjoyed a fairly extensive circulation), provoking the grim Italian Duce to include in a recent speech a serious admission that fashion is more, powerful than any dictator, and that a regime which seeks to repress or to dictate fashion (the reference was to the Nazi dictatorship) is only making itself ridiculous. “The important thing to remember is that we confront here “an exceedingly interesting manifestation of the potentialities of wealth latent in two of the strongest and most universal of human instincts —vanity (which in women at least is even more closely allied to the desire for self than for race survival) and gregariousness. To wish to he beautiful is most natural, to find it unthinkable to look different from one’s herd is an even more deep-ly-rooted part of mankind’s psychological make-up. “Taking these two fundamental instincts as its basic material and directing upon them the enormous propaganda apparatus ready to be swung into use to serve political or economic purposes, the gigantic commercial machine of to-day may, in fact he said to have succeeded in creating a new type of human being.

“At least it has induced in the females of the civilised portions of the globe considerable lopsided development both of emotion and of habit. The interesting thing about (his particular instance of mal-dcvelopment is that the economics of the business have now reached a point when to reduce women to emotional health and sanity would be to threaten such commercial equilibrium as the world still possesses.

“Cast out fashion, and curb the mass propaganda directed towards making millions of women what the Americans call ‘beauty-conscious,” and you doom giant industries and whole provinces to death, you destroy a whole vast complex of economic activities, you abolish one of the greatest of all markets, you unbalance national budgets, and you shake the whole fabric of our machine civilisation.

“It is not often realised that fashion, which demands silk, both natural and artificial, is largely responsible for providing the Japanese with the funds which they have devoted to the conquest of Manchuria and the building up of a war machine which they hope will assure them the mastery of Asia. COMPELS BUYING.’ “If one includes clothing, one finds that fashion and its immense range of subsidiaries comes close to being the biggest business in any industrial country. In Britain and the United States it leads, in space and value, the

advertising list, out-distancing motorcars and patent medicines. The amount spent on clothing would not be a fraction of what it is except for fashion, which encourages and even compels buying. “Nor would clothes be so cheap and attractive if it were not for the mighty volume of sales, which constantly bring down prices: for the more you can sell of a thing the cheaper it can be produced, and the more energy and money goes into the neverceasing struggle to devise new machines and methods to produce even more cheaply, and so spread the market even wider. “It has been calculated that there are seven thousand different kinds of beauty preparations on the market today, and that fifty million pounds’ worth are sold in the British market every year; and that the thirteen million women in this island between the ages of 15 and 60 use 60,000,000 lipsticks a year. “Even if these figures are only approximately correct, the glimpse which they give the makers of modern Russia (who model their industrial technique on America’s) of what a fashion industry in all its diverse manifestations means in terms of machines and jobs, of new internal markets created, and of foreign sales (British factories are now exporting nearly ten million pounds’ worth of beauty preparations a year), must have had much to do with that decision to begin a fashion propaganda in the U.S.S.R.” “It is scarcely to be supposed that Mussolini was personally pained by the prospect of seeing German womankind rendered unattractive by Nazi objections to lipstick, 'silk stockings, and other appurtenances of the modern young woman.

“But Italy does some trade with Germany in the fashion field; and any success attending an anti-fashion and anti-cosmetic campaign in the great German market might have damaging repercussions on the immense Italian artificial silk industry, on the important Italian dye production (very necessary for Avar purposes), on retail trade, and on employment generally. “Mussolini himself is a late convert to the idea of the overlordship of fashion. In his early and middle phases he attempted to oust French fashion influences and to build up characteristic Italian fashions. There were official designs of approved gowns. The concensus of opinion among the younger women of the regime was that they were terrible. The Fascist chief gradually ceased to demand plainness and austerity in the women of Fascist Italy. “Possibly his eldest daughter, who is herself a fashion-plate, had something to do with his education in this matter. In any case, his economic advisers would eventually have worn him down; for they could show him, in statistical tables, that by merely encouraging fashion culture he could do more to stimulate Italian industry than by all his exhausting activities and aggressive exhortations directed towards the popularisation of Italianmade motor-cycles.”