This week, the British multinational Debenhams was reduced to a website. The liquidation of the department store chain saw it become the latest victim of the changing fashion world, taking away thousands of livelihoods in the process.
But, when it first arrived on the high street, Debenhams and other large-scale retailers like it were dubious but irresistible businesses of their day, much like the ruling e-commerce conglomerates of ours. Émile Zola’s 1883 novel about a fictional Parisian department store, Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Paradise) captures the ruthless business as it undercuts specialist shopkeepers and made-to-order craftspeople.
Now, that dynamic repeats once more, but it is the former predator who is the prey. Brick-and-mortar retailers are now being swallowed up by e-commerce brands. The demise of Debenhams has prompted nostalgia for department stores of the past—but what can it tell us about the future of fashion?
Debenhams’ past is not so different from its present. From its origins as a London draper’s shop in 1778, Debenham & Freebody had become a sizeable retail and wholesale business with three department stores by 1872. That year, it released its Fashion Book, a mail-order catalogue that offered remote shoppers the chance to purchase products from the entirety of their stock for the first time. Anticipating online shopping by over a century, its pages provided customers with the convenient option to shop at any time from the comfort of their own homes. With the help of the post office, the catalogue offered an international delivery service so shoppers could have orders delivered all over the British empire, from Doncaster to Delhi. There was even the opportunity to acquire “goods on approval” and return them for a full refund.
Early department stores were among the first fashion retailers to specialise in the communication of misleading, or outright fabricated, messages about manufacturing. They would claim that all stock was made within in-house workrooms. But such smoke and mirrors obscured department stores’ outsourcing of “sweated” labour to the poor, as uncovered by the Victorian social reformer Henry Mayhew. His reports, published in serialised form as London Labour and London Poor, included stories of needle workers working for scant pay in shocking living conditions, leaving some reliant on prostitution to supplement their income. The garments they produced, however, were often sold at high prices to wealthy consumers who had no idea about their origins. At one such workplace, Mayhew observes one needlewoman saying to another: “I daresay the lady who this dress is for knows nothing about how it is made. She pays a very high price.”
Viewed centuries later, our shopping habits then do not seem so modern. The online shopping website functions as a repurposed “Fashion Book” of sorts, where purchases are also selected from pages of abstract visual representations. It isn’t such a stretch to compare the experiences of Victorian mail-order patrons and those of today’s clickers in cyberspace. Perhaps our predecessors too felt the keen disappointment that comes when the visual representation of a garment, purchased from behind a screen, seems to have been lost in material translation (or merely lost in the post).
But more importantly, what remain too are the smoke and mirrors about where our clothes really get made—and the working conditions of those who toil over them. Mayhew was disturbed by the realities of the Victorian sweatshop. Now, such labour has been merely been taken offshore or concealed through subcontracting, as seen by the 2013 collapse of Rana Plaza garment factory and the revelations about Boohoo’s factories in Leicester (revealing, too, that exploitation is still happening on home turf). Fast fashion e-commerce brands have beaten the department store at their old game, offering consumers more products at minimal prices while their workers lose out.
Still, fast fashion retailers are only one side of the story. The demise of Debenhams could also be attributed to an alternative force: the rise of conscious consumerism and increasing awareness of the unsustainable reality of fashion. True, consumers continue to prioritise the convenience of remote shopping. But there is also a growing public desire to bridge the gap between the garments we buy and the places, people and processes behind their production. A study has shown that 70 per cent of Britons and Europeans believe it is important for brands to share detailed information about the wages and working conditions of their employees. Meeting these demands for transparency may be difficult for large-scale corporate retailers, with their principle interest in profit. Instead, it is smaller, independent brands that are rebuilding relationships between consumers and manufacturers and finding alternative, ethical forms of production.
So perhaps things will come full circle. The approaches of these new independent businesses echo those of the Victorian tailors and dressmakers who were pushed out by the department store. The recent demise of Debenhams undoubtedly reflects the challenges faced by today’s struggling high street, and, most worryingly of all, its diminishing workforce. But it also signals the changing concerns of consumers. Like the cyclical concept of fashion itself, the future of how we purchase our clothes appears to be predicated on the past. So it would be wise to reflect on the lessons, good and bad, to be learned from our fashion retail predecessors.
