The "Denise" Fash Comp!

I love fashion.  Back when I first left school and was determined to shaft family expectations by NOT going to university, I got a job which ended me up as the junior-est fashion buyer in a large pan-Pacific conglomerate which I shall not name because I need - really NEED - to tell you they were dicks. Major dicks.

Truly, they were such dicks that their relatively recent demise as a company was richly, richly, RICHLY deserved.

The fashion department back then, along with the rest of the company, was manned by all these imported creepy-arse "Men Who Talk to Your Tits", and if only they'd actually looked up and listened, we could have turned the whole sodding place around, easy-peasy.

Their first bad choice was they bought their fashion in New Zealand.  No, I'm serious! New Zealand fashion! Late '70s New Zealand fashion! Bahahaha! 

Man, that was a fuddy-duddy old-fogy industry. Back then, Our Helen...

 Our Helen today.

I just included this shot because I love it.

... worked as a resident fashion designer for one of these enormous Kiwi clothing companies and she was always going on about how it took over a year to get any of her designs into the shops because no one could ever make a decision, so by time she saw her clothes worn in the streets she was completely underwhelmed and over it. (When she finally moved her vastly-talented self to London, it was a matter of a month between coming up with something and seeing it in the streets, which was major exciting and inspirational and how fashion should be.)

Also, back then, New Zealand was a country which was union-protected up the whazoo and thus everything they manufactured was desperately EXPENSIVE.  So, with New Zealand '70s fashion we're talking about paying enormously high prices for the saddest, saddest clothes ever.

And this is what I wanted to turn around; could have so easily turned around, if only they'd listened.  THE DICKS!

When I took over, in my junior-est buyer capacity, the fashion department in the flagship store in downtown Suva, Fiji, was a graveyard.  No one ever came in.  With good reason. Not only were the clothes totally SAD, Fiji wages back then for local women were usually around F$26.00 a week and, despite this being our market, there was no dress in any of their stores throughout the Pacific for under F$92.00.

And then I started the buying.  And once my choices hit the Suva store, there was a most gratifying buzz on the streets and every lunchtime young office girls would hit the department in vast hordes. Naturally very interested, every lunchtime I'd also whizz down to lurk, pretending to be a fellow shopper but all the while watching and listening.

But they never ever bought. Sure, lots of excited squealing and racing off with the clothes to try them on, always visiting the changing room in pairs and I'd see the camera flash going off from behind the curtains. Or they'd be in there with note pads, blatantly sketching the designs and turning the clothes inside out to sketch the seams.  In my guise as fellow-shopper, I'd ask what they were doing and it turned out that everyone was either making my dresses themselves at home or else taking their sketches and photographs down to their favourite local seamstress and having the clothes copied there.  "She can make it for me for less than five bucks." they'd tell me. "You should do it too."

So it wasn't my choices that were the problem.  It was the prices!  Nothing under F$92.00, remember!

So I took this problem - sorry, my TITS took this problem - to fashion management and I explained that I wanted to buy clothing from any other place rather than New Zealand.  Lots of eye-rolling and "But we've always bought in New Zealand!" however I was determined and persuasive and, most importantly, bra-less, so finally they let my tits have their head and I was IN!

That was such an exciting time, exploring the world's fashion markets and researching and sending out for catalogues, and wallowing in clothes and fabric and design and yummy yummy stuff like that.

I decided on the Philippines as the best and cheapest place to buy so I ordered heaps and heaps of genuinely great clothing - paying less than F$1.00 a unit instead of the usual NZ$24.00 per unit - and my stuff quickly arrived at the Suva warehouse with each item, all up, including shipping, insurance, blah, blah, blah, costing in at about F$2.60, so I sent it off to the stores with the recommendation that the price be set at roughly F$8.00 per dress.

Exciting, huh!  Finally, my market could afford to buy! So the next day, with enormous expectations, feeling like it was Christmas morning, I went in for my lunchtime lurk and discovered the usual horde of office girls going through the racks of new clothes, and, amid exciting squealing, racing them off with their cameras and sketch pads.  Still!  And I looked at the price-tags and the cheapest items were F$92.00 per dress.

I was livid and my tits stormed their way into management offices and I told them what I thought in no uncertain terms.  "We are an expensive department store." my tits were told in withering and sneering tones "We simply don't sell cheap clothing!"

And that's the moment I decided that university was looking like a damn fine option and that I loved literature and history as much as fashion ... and so, on the spot, I handed in my resignation.

But I still love fashion and photograph fashionistas every place I visit, so the story above is just a lead-in for the brutal Fashion Competition I plan to post tomorrow.  Based entirely on photographs I've taken, we will decide which Asian city is the most exciting and fashion-forward of them all.