Cost-of-living takes shine off ‘revenge Christmas’ for sequinned-up fashion retailers

The shop racks are weighed down by velvet. It’s the fabric of Christmas, which fashion retailers are hoping we will be going all-in on this year.

After all, the last two Christmases were weird and sad. This is meant to be the comeback Christmas, the season of the sequin. So why does everything seem so muted?

We know the answer, but we also don’t, which is to say that we have become so accustomed to the concept of known unknowns – so used to the sensation of a rug being pulled – that economic unpredictability no longer strikes us as overly strange.

It does appear to have registered, however. November’s consumer sentiment index published by the Irish League of Credit Unions identified a pullback in spending plans this month amid “an increasingly uncertain environment”.

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Closer to the point-of-sale, social media and subscriber email boxes now overflow with fevered sales announcements

This, according to economist Austin Hughes, seemed to owe more to rising levels of caution than an increase in immediate cash constraints.

Consumers were actually found to be less negative than before about their own current financial circumstances – not by much, but still. Christmas has not been cancelled, but it will be a “careful” one, he said.

[ Retail sales fall sharply as cost-of-living crisis bites ]

Retailers will be thrilled to hear it. Careful spending, that’s what they like. Restrained, reasonable outlays, that’s all they ask.

Enter the festive advertisers on a mission to either make us forget our sense of “feel-poor” or, conversely, remind us of it, together with the insistence that they alone have the solution.

Among clothing retailers, TK Maxx has gone heaviest on this route with its “Christmas nailed for less” campaign, the story of a woman told she “shouldn’t have spent so much” on her marvellous gifts.

She denies she did as she went to TK Maxx, obviously, then spends the rest of her 30 seconds wandering a candy-caned, snow-dusted town being showered with high-fives for her 2022-appropriate strain of generosity.

Across the price spectrum, festive fashion advertisers in the self-gifting space are doubling down on the cliché of cosmic spells that will make us feel – and, more importantly, look – Christmassy, if only we believe in them.

At the fast-fashion end, H&M has placed a sequin top with a pointedly specified €22.99 price tag in its “unwrap the magic” campaign, starring actor Chloe Sevigny – it’s the “go on, brighten up your mood with this one tiny indulgence” approach.

With its customers more insulated from household budget pressures, Brown Thomas isn’t in the game of mentioning prices, though its “out of this world Christmas” ad uses a similar before-and-after mechanism to H&M, with a party drone delivering an unsolicited gift box to a glum model.

Once opened, it glows with vague intent, then instantly transforms her from unmoving trench-coat wearer to diamanté-clad dancer with the shimmery make-up to match.

Closer to the point-of-sale, social media and subscriber email boxes now overflow with fevered sales announcements on the basis that in life there are three certainties: death, taxes and Black Friday promotions.

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According to AIB, clothing ranks first for spending among Irish consumers on Black Friday, with some €5,700 spent every minute on clothes alone in 2021 – a 261 per cent increase in value compared to a normal day.

This equates to more than 97,000 transactions on clothing websites – approximately one every second – or more than three times the level seen on other days.

All I can say is that I do my best.

The timing is logical, of course, as it is still possible to buy OPP (other people’s presents) right up to the falling shutters on Christmas Eve, whereas in a typical, non-plague year, seasonal socialising starts in mid-November at exactly the same time that Dublin City Council decides to resurface all the roads.

This December should be the month when no phones are necessary for location tracking – simply follow the trail of beads shed from glistening dresses that are 100 per cent not for life, just Christmas.

The office party, one of the lesser casualties of the pandemic, is back. This is supposed to be our “revenge Christmas”, the one when we put the Greek alphabet behind us and do some damage.

[ Christmas will be ‘careful’ but not cancelled as consumer sentiment drops again ]

Except it’s not quite, and clothes chains in the low-to-mid-market have realised it. Even if their stock flies out, they will be hurt by the knowledge that they can’t put up their prices to reflect their own increased supply chain, material, energy and currency-related costs.

George Weston, chief executive of Associated British Foods, the owner of Primark/Penneys, has been blunt on this. Primark’s profit margins will drop from 9.8 per cent to below 8 per cent, he warned shareholders, because there is “not much point” in attempting to impose higher prices on shoppers who can’t afford them.

The price of having a good time has shot up, with restaurant food and taxi fares among the costs on which it is all too easy to leak more money than intended

Certain ecommerce brands, notably Boohoo and ASOS, are so fond of discounting, they’re virtually in perma-sale mode anyway. This inevitably makes Black Friday price-slashing less of a novelty and less persuasive a tactic in anxious times.

A surge in inflation rates is an insidious thing. Some households have been struggling all year to cope with soaring energy bills and food prices.

Others are still in the disconcerting phoney war phase – they’ve heard about the cost-of-living crisis, they might be feeling it already, but they’re not sure how deep their own wounds will be.

With inflation set to be about 8 per cent this year, up from 2.4 per cent in 2021, scope for discretionary spending has undoubtedly tightened. Six in every 10 people surveyed for the consumer sentiment index said they have less to spend this Christmas compared to last, up from about four in 10 who said the same in 2020 and 2021.

The price of having a good time has shot up, with restaurant food and taxi fares among the costs on which it is all too easy to leak more money than intended.

As for the clothes, the classic if unserious theory that hemlines are low in times of economic gloom and high in times of economic exuberance has been out of date for decades.

These days, it is more of an inverse relationship, with hemlines currently rocketing up as the world economy teeters on the brink of recession.

Instead, it is when retailers start talking about “day-to-night” outfits and “wardrobe repeaters” that they reveal just how much consumers are holding back. The velvet might be lovely, the sparkly stuff seductive, but the marketing is exhausting and addictive and ubiquitous – much like Christmas itself.