It’s still July and girls are already doing back to school shopping. What’s with that? If clothes only cost pennies, like gumballs, I think we’d see a lot of girls doing nothing else but shopping all day. Also, clothes are just a few pieces of thread. Why don’t they cost pennies? Is it just designer label bullshit that’s got these girls paying so much when it’s made in China for like two cents? I need smart people to chime in here…I’m vexed, perplexed, and undersexed. Marge
Hi Marge,
Other than body covering, clothes are meant to be attractors to the opposite sex. Culturally, this is played up to ridiculous extremes and crosses boundaries into all sorts of pyschological needs both invented by and used by marketers of every stripe. The cost of clothing has almost nothing to do with materials. It has to do with everything BUT labor and materials. In a word, it is fashion, and that includes almost every possible marketing scheme known to man.
Personally, I like the marketing that plays on the possibility of getting laid if you wear a certain brand or style of clothing and best of all, the advertising that suggests that people will hate you and you won’t get laid unless you buy a certain style or brand. Clothing is a play on ego and fears, and who could be more vulnerable than a school girl? Incidentally, the boys are just as vulnerable…
You like that kind of advertising? Surprising coming from such a sensitive man, unless you’re being ironic, in which case, hee. Being a girl, I have a different perspective…there was this meat market club craze party last night. After the party we went back to the house - just the girls, you know, chilling and talking at two in the morning…tripped out from dancing all night, and somebody was like, you know, where do clothes even come from? They come from the store. Duh, but where do they really come from? So someone said don’t clothes come from other countries, made by poor girls in factories? And here WE are ready to binge on over-priced back-to-school fashions. At this point I was like, “Whoa, this is too intense, I’m going to sleep.†Next day, I DID go binge shopping for back to school clothes. But I couldn’t forget that conversation, true or not. Girls working over there, girls spending over here, and some old, fat, weird guy with hairy shoulders…probably some middle-aged guy who drives a convertible and looks like my dad…is making all this money selling clothes he doesn’t make himself. So you know what I did? I went to a discount store instead of the mall. Got the same amount of brand name clothes for way, way less, and gave the difference to charity. Do you think this is a message other girls would identify with, or am I just special?
You are very special Marge. 
But don’t do it man! Buying the same clothes at cheaper prices doesn’t do anything, it just perpetuates the problem. You’re still buying into advertising…what you gotta do is boycot the fashion industry altogether. Don’t buy into it. If everyone stopped buying the stuff there would be no market and the industry would be fucked.
A
An excuse to shop. Given the vast quantities of completely unworn clothes in the wardrobes of people across the western world (male and female, but predominantly the latter) I’d say that much of the ‘satisfaction’ (i.e. short term material thrill that is forgotten about quickly and therefore needs to be replicated time and again) is derived from the shopping itself - the social aspect, the ability to flounce around in changing rooms pretending to be models. I’ve seen otherwise relatively insecure and introverted females turn into raging extroverts when shopping for clothes. But then, young females become about three times as noisy (per person) when in groups of more than two…
Marketing, distribution, wages of sales staff, mark up due to branding, mark up due to executive salaries, mark up for the sake of it because they know people will buy it, mark up for inflation, mark up for tax, mark up for customer stupidity. So, about 85% of a clothing items prices consist of unnecessary markups.
That, combined with insecurity and widespread stupidity. Same for males, but less often with regards to clothes.
I would have thought that surrounded by all those teenage girls you’d be oversexed…
Marge-
Not so far.
Hi Marge,
Yeah, I was being a little ironic, but I do like that sort of advertising. It allows me to guage just how arrogant the advertising industry is at a given time. Last christmas, seiko ran a series of ads suggesting that without a seiko watch from a certain collection, you were a complete loser. It was so blatant, I almost puked. The the tyuppie wannabes ran out and bought a seiko watch was even more telling. C’mon Marge, doesn’t the sports car with the blonde draped over the hood give you a tingle? Much more appealing than shopping for a frigging minivan for the family…
Don’t be screwing with consumerism by asking logical questions about need and want. The world economy would collapse in a New York minute.
And now you see that I can be cynical as well as ironic.
I think as a guy it’s pretty hard for me to comment on the specifics regarding female clothing; the whys and the wide-nots.
I think as a general rule though, I’ve always found clothing to me more about first impressions than any sort of lasting 70% cotton aura. I mean, clothes are like life, we all sell out to a certain degree.
The question is: Who can do it with style?
Thanks for the thoughtful, varied, colorful responses guys. Having you around is like having a closet full of handmade clothes that never go out of style.