What's the matter with the clothes industry?
A couple of months ago a trust fund my parents put away for me matured, and I was richer to the tune of 2,100 pounds or so (about $3,700). One of the first things I did, of course, was buy the Mac I am writing this on. Gradually more and more of it got spent (a lot of it on computer books) and now only about 300 pounds of it remains. It's my mother's birthday on Monday, and usually I buy her books. This year, I wanted to buy her something different, and I have been looking around at the skirts in the shops. But it is almost impossible to find something that is neither unsuitable nor too expensive. My mother is not Muslim, so the rules concerning our women do not apply to her. But I wanted to buy her a classic long skirt, which was neither see-through, nor too short, nor too tight. I looked in a number of shops in Kingston: Talbots, Laura Ashley, Monsoon, and a few of the places in Bentall's which is a department store with a lot of outside vendors including Jaeger, Phase Eight, French Connection, and loads of others. And I came away disappointed. I had been looking at a nice long blue skirt in Phase Eight, which costs about 75 pounds (about $133), which they may consider reasonable but I consider it extortionate. A Jaeger skirt, which was admittedly beautiful, costs well over 100 pounds; and the situation is similar in Talbot's. Worse, some of the clothing I checked out turned out to have been made in China - so the people who made it got a pittance, no doubt. I refuse to pay 80 pounds for something made in this way when I do not have to.
Actually, skirts are much thinner on the ground nowadays compared to even ten years ago when I left boarding school for my mixed sixth-form college. Then it was quite common to see girls in nice long skirts, even 16-year-olds. Nowadays, although you still see them, it is far less common, especially among younger women, and women are showing much more of themselves than they did even then. One even sees teachers wearing clothes they wouldn't have dreamed of wearing when I was at school, in front of the children! And whether the difficulty in obtaining a nice skirt came before or after women stopped wearing them as much as they used to, I've no idea. All I know is, it's difficult to find a nice skirt to buy my Mum for her birthday. I think I'll buy her a book, after all.