Consuming Interest
And Cried A Sale ! A Sale !
By LESLIE ADRIAN BEFORE we have barely had time to recover from the Christmas brandy, let alone pay the poulterer's bill, the shops will be starting their January sales (The House of Fraser, indeed, got off the mark last Monday), and determined women will be sitting up wild-eyed all night to catch the best of the bargains. The battleaxes you see waiting in the sales queues are certainly no advertisement for their way of choosing their clothes, and I have often wondered what, if any- thing, there was to be said for going sales shop- ping. So this year I have been picking the brains of a friend in the dress trade to find out where all these unrepeatable offers really come from.
Behind all this chaos at the counters, she tells me, there lies a basic need of the rag trade to unload white elephants and to recoup money laid out on what is now old stock. The whole trade is involved—not just the retail shops; genuine bargains do occur, it seems, but not in the way most people think.
Just what, if you are a woman hell-bent for bargains, can you expect? First, there's the merchandise that's hung fire badly in the store. Three or four fashion seasons—about eighteen months to two years-is the time usually allowed between taking delivery of new goods and selling off in a half-yearly sale. (Some London West End stores eut down this time and may be selling off last year's goods.) There is an art in displaying them in untidy heaps as if they are being prac- tically thrown away--though actually they need only be marked down by a few shillings to make a sale.
Secondly, there's the battered and bruised goods. Dresses without their belts, blouses which have shed their buttons, jerseys with lipstick stains—all these will be genuine bargains as far as they go. There may be more choice bargains in quality clothes that are soiled after a spell in the window—but then you have to add the cost of cleaning to the bargain price and to subject the clothes to all the well-known hazards of dry- cleaning (which I shall be talking about in a week or two). Gloves, belts, scarves—there's always plenty of choice of what the fashion writers call 'little accessories'; though no one has a very good chance of matching colours exactly in the free-for-all round the sales counter.
Even reputable stores do buy in lines of seconds at this time of year. Sometimes these seconds are of high quality : goods which nearly but not quite reached the top standard demanded by the brand names. But my fashion friend said, too, that they are quite often throw-outs which are sold off in cheap lots. And then the panel of a dress may be upside down or a sleeve put in back to front or a jacket and skirt made of a different material.
Stockings don't often get a chance to shop- soil, so these, too, are mostly seconds—they may be very good, but seconds are, after all, sold all the year round by a good many stores. When it comes to shoes, it is usually style and sizing that bring shoes into the sales—the extra-large sizes can always be found somewhere in a sale, but in styles so hideous that even the largest- footed customer should think three times before Planting her plates in them. What about furs? Mink coats at half-price, beaver lamb coats under L12—fantastic reduc- tions. Fantastic is just what some of them are --fantastic swindles. For fur is the most dan- gerous of all sale merchandise. Unscrupulous dealers trade off old furs in sales: which means furs that crackle (too dry and likely to split at the seams), furs that feel sticky (doctored furs given a special treatment to make the skins tem- Porarily supple) and heavy furs (new furs are much lighter than furs which are three or four Years old). And worst of all, there are the furs which are very out-of-date in style—it is no good thinking you can have it remodelled and still have a bargain, since remodelling a fur often costs half as much as the original price. From all this I was beginning to conclude that it was not worth any woman's while to go tn any sale ever. But my friend assures me that this is not so.
This Year the long, hot Indian summer left the coat departments full as late as the end Jf November, and this is the second bad season they've had; so sale coats are cheap and plentiful. TaPestrY, which has appeared in all kinds of furnishing fabrics and clothes and accessories, hasn't gone as well as was expected; all this will have to be cleared, as it is too obvious for the Shops to hang on to it for another year. (I wonder I f the reason for this could be that the original aPPeal of tapestry, in what children call the olden daYs, was that it was brilliantly coloured; per- haPs in imitating the faded, antique look the Manufacturers have left out the main point of ti:_e stuff) Remnants in fabric halls are genuinely eneaPer, and a good buy if you know beforehand at length of fabric makes what and don't buy enough to do half a skirt or one and three- quarter armchairs. , The untouchables for women should be the Inng-iacketed suits which were supposed to be the incoming fashion—they have sold very badly, and if Paris changes direction in January they be a dead loss. Hats, too, are a poor buy, since the hat trade is quick off the mark with new styles; and cashmeres in nasty colours are not worth even half their exorbitant original price. Raincoats, underclothes and corsets, too, deserve a Inng, hard look, I am told. Rainwear is apparently due for a big New Look in the spring; cut-price underwear is probably the same quality as objects which are normally sold at the cheaper price in other stores—and possibly good Marks and Spencer's is a much better buy than marked- down Snooks and Snooks. As for corsets, where do those appalling piles of peach-coloured horrors come from, complete with laces and boning enough for a whale? However fat you are, there must be better ways of holding yourself in than picking an untried harness from an indiscriminate heap.
There is one other kind of bargain that is genuine—as far as it goes. The shops often put .one or two good garments in the windows at unrealistically low prices to draw people in. Whoever gets those few garments—and there may be only one of each kind—really is getting some- thing good on the cheap. And that, I suppose, is why the women keep their all-night vigil.
While I was talking to nry rag-trade friend, I asked her about the new American clothes soon to be in the shops; and she confirmed my sus- picion that attacks on their 'finish' were mainly the work of jealous British manufacturers. We were both rendered almost speechless by the quotations from some fashion writers and dress houses that American clothes couldn't compete with the 'high quality of finish on British goods.' When almost every day someone says to me, 'Can't you write something about the ,aty buttons come off new dresses—about the bad finishing on hems—about the badly finished seams on this coat?' And the Spectator's most valued secretary wears a suit—a British suit—in which the jacket and skirt are made of very slightly different materials. She didn't buy it in a sale, either.
Reporting recently on the Record Clubs, which sell long-playing classical recordings at rather lower prices than the recording companies, I noted that the clubs were forcing the companies to reduce their prices. Those who have had record tokens for Christmas will be pleased to hear that three or four of the companies have already intro- duced cheaper recordings at around 21s. rather than the usual 35s. or more.
EMI have now entered the field with a twelve- inch LP series called HMV Concert Classics. None of these recordings has been issued in this country before, they come in coloured sleeves, though with a paper rather than a polythene envelope, and they cost 22s. 6d. EMI say that, ssith the help of a substantial financial contribu- tion from themselves and of artists willing to offer their services at lower rates than usual, they hope to encourage more people to enjoy classical music. Whatever the reason—a word of thanks to the clubs would not be amiss—a series at this price is welcome. The first six recordings include Beethoven's 5th and 9th Symphonies by the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra under Carl Schuricht.
Previous page
