BLINDED BY LABELS?
A bad bargain is dear at a farthing, ‘they’ say. It is also a saying I regularly use as an excuse to splurge on something without having to explain to my non-fashion friends why it was worth every single penny (even if they are not interested in fashion, they somehow know all the prices?!). Truth is though, that saying is not always right.
For instance, I once bought a t-shirt from some mister Wang – with the perfect fit that is – that already showed pills after washing it (by hand! (in cold water!!)) twice. I mean, what the fluff? A little hole in one sleeve I got for free. (Now someone once told me the quality of the T by Alexander Wang t-shirts changed after they moved their production elsewhere, which happened right before I bought one.)
And so I went to COS, their man section to be exact. Despite the fact that I sometimes score one that passes away miraculously fast, those t-shirts last for years. And years (and shhh they are only 25 euros).
Still, occasionally I like to browse through the new collections of that same mister Wang.
What I am trying to say is that anyone – and with that I mean the ones being slightly obsessed with fashion – who tries to claim that they do not get just the tiniest bit more excited from buying designer than high street is a liar. Or is is merely me, getting blinded by the big guns every now and then?
Do not get me wrong, sometimes it obviously has to do with the quality of the product or the design…
But take some of the new shoe- and bag collection of Saint Laurent. The ankle boots could almost not get any simpler and yet they – as an appreciator of all things simple – make my heart melt. The price tag though is a whole another story, that does not make my heart melt, it makes my credit card want to melt. If it could think, it would want to melt.
Or the well known Céline shopper. No offense to anyone who paid for it and yes I LOVE it too (duh, I love all things Céline, almost all), but you are obviously not paying for the design, since it is not the most complicated bag ever. Ok, maybe a bit for the super buttery soft leather, but the bigger percentage of the amount it goes for is for marketing (in other words, we are paying for the logo, right?).
And of course we are always paying at least a little for the logo, whether it is something affordable or extremely expensive, but I have come to realize that the boundaries for what I am easily willing to pay for a bag or a pair of shoes are slowly fading. Not good!
I also realized that when I am on the hunt for something new to fill up the empty spaces in my wardrobe, the first thing I do is open all those big gunned online stores (think Net-a-Porter, Luisa Via Roma, The Corner, etc.) And then I have this friend who owns a lot of awesome clothes and when I ask her where is this cool shirt from? The answer is almost always H&M. Or Monki. Or Weekday. Or COS. Or Zara. Damnit!
So the other day, when I gave Zara another chance, I literally threw two pairs of shoes – one style, two colors – in my digital shopping cart. I swear it all happened in the blink of an eye. And they are gooood (good things come in bulk)!!
Question remains…am I sometimes blinded by the labels? Maybe I am, maybe a lot of us are, maybe we are not. Are you? I guess for me it is all about finding the right balance between getting something accessible and indulging in something desirable.
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