Why a £5 top would have cost £20 in the 1990s

It’s 1996, and your teenage self is getting ready in her bedroom, listening to Take That and congratulating herself on the cute little red top she bought at Miss Selfridge earlier that day. She’d had her eye on it for weeks, and had finally saved enough from her Saturday job to be able to afford it. Can your midlife self remember what it cost? Take a guess. £1.99? £7.99? £20?

When second-hand clothing retailer Holly Watkins posted this very question on Instagram, she was surprised at the response. After finding a red satin Miss Selfridge top from the Nineties with its original price tag still intact, she decided to launch a poll to ask her 39,000 followers what they thought it cost. Out of over 800 votes, 55 per cent of them guessed it would have retailed for £7.99. Only four per cent guessed the correct price – an eye-watering £20.

But is it eye-watering? Or have we simply forgotten how much clothes used to cost? Worse, have we forgotten what they should cost, if the people who produce them are to be paid fairly?

After revealing the price of the Miss Selfridge red top, Watkins posted a selection of similar red tops that are available to buy today, including a £10 top from H&M, a £5 halterneck top from Urban Outfitters and a near-identical top from Shein, priced £3.46. “What does this tell us?” she added. “That while everything else has gone up since the 90s, clothing has got cheaper?”

Her post quickly gained 2,804 ‘likes’, while comments came thick and fast. “What in the Proustian rush?” asked the broadcaster Lauren Laverne. “If something was cheaper 30 years ago, you know someone somewhere is getting shafted,” noted one user. “I’m not at all surprised, but it’s quite shocking how little we value clothing now,” added Jane Shepherdson, who, as the retail guru behind Topshop’s huge success throughout the early 2000s, is perfectly placed to comment.

Speaking from her boutique, One Scoop Store, in London, Watkins, 42, admits she was blown away by the number of comments on her post. As someone who’s been buying and selling clothes since the age of 14 (in 1995, she bought a sheepskin coat for 20p, sold it on for £25 and was hooked), she has a bird’s eye view of how drastically high street prices have changed, thanks largely to fast fashion. “It’s a race to the bottom,” she says. “These brands need people to buy more and more – and for that, it has to be cheap. I even feel this pressure in the second-hand space. To attract customers, you have to be affordable.”

Watkins says that while she often finds dead stock with tags still attached, it’s not often that the prices are still intact, although she does remember recently finding a pair of 90s Levi’s jeans with a price tag of £60. “It’s definitely fast fashion that has driven down prices. I only wish the same thing had happened to the housing market.”

Given the current nostalgia towards Nineties music, TV and film, it stands to reason that Nineties-era fashion is equally being revered as hailing from a golden period, the conclusion being that everything has gone to hell in a handcart ever since. But take off the rose-tinted glasses, and we’re still left with some very stark truths.

The first is that retailers have become more aggressive in chasing profits. In the Nineties, the intake margin (the measurement of the difference between the costs of goods and their initial selling price) on clothing was much lower, meaning that the customer was buying a better value item, though not necessarily a cheaper one. Where retailers once aimed for margins of 50 per cent, now up to 80 per cent is considered the norm. This results in fewer products being bought at full price, which in turn leads to more markdowns. The end result of this is that more clothes go to landfill.

According to Tamsin Blanchard, director at Estethica, a creative agency devoted to shaping the future of fashion through a circular lens, the fact that we think £20 is a lot for a top shows two things. “The first is that everyone seems to be struggling financially. The second is how far we have devalued our clothing, and lost all connection with how things are made – the people who make them, the materials our clothes are made from and their emotional value. Mass-market clothing prices have not kept pace with inflation because clothing manufacture has been offshored and manufactured in places where labour is cheap, and where workers – mainly women – don’t have the same rights to fight against long hours and low pay.”

“We certainly place a lower value on clothes now, so that we can buy more of them,” agrees Jane Shepherdson CBE, a woman once dubbed the most influential woman on the British high street, who followed her Topshop role with an eight-year stint at Whistles (2008-2016) and has chaired luxury rental platform My Wardrobe HQ since 2019. “Fabrics used are the cheapest, and clothes are inevitably now made in countries with the lowest standard of living, while [retailers] probably pay the women making the clothes as little as they can get away with. It’s all part of our throwaway culture.”

An ardent advocate for sustainability, Shepherdson now buys as little as she can, preferring to rent or buy second-hand. “We currently buy 60 per cent more clothes than we did 20 years ago,” she notes. “I guess the race to the bottom by certain retailers, and their encouragement through social media to buy in volume – for example, haul videos – has led to where we are now.”

Which leads us to the second stark truth, which is that our shopping habits have changed dramatically. “We’re conditioned to consume all the time,” notes Watkins. “In the Nineties, we didn’t have nearly as much stuff. We had a couple of ‘going out’ tops, and we wore them in different ways. Social media has been a huge factor in changing the way people shop. It makes them feel they need new things all the time. In the Nineties, we weren’t being photographed every night – the camera was only whipped out for special occasions, so there was no shame in wearing the same items on repeat.”

While many vintage clothing dealers are sniffy about selling high street clothes, Watkins is unapologetic. “I want to try to make people value the high street. If somebody’s bought a really nice, sold-out Zara dress, it still has value. They might personally be sick of it, but someone else won’t be. Also, there’s a perception that all fast fashion falls apart straight away – it doesn’t. The secondhand space is quite dangerous in the way that some people are really against reselling fast fashion. But it’s still a great thing to do. You’re still saving it from landfill. If we can give any kind of clothing a longer life, surely that’s better for everyone.”

Which is precisely what she’s doing with her £20 Miss Selfridge top. According to the Bank of England’s inflation calculator, which uses Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation data from the Office of National Statistics, it would cost the equivalent of £40 now, a price at which younger consumers would definitely balk. Was £20 a fair price to pay in the Nineties? It was certainly fairer for whoever made it than the £3.46 price of a Shein one. Watkin points out that according to its label, the top was made in the UK, as were so many products in the Nineties. “I do think that when manufacturing shifted to China, it was the beginning of the end,” she says.

As for what our clothes should actually cost, the answer is surely “whatever we can comfortably afford to pay for them”. Nor should said cost be at the expense of those who made them: a fair price should always mean a fair wage. Given the true cost of our clothes is hidden, it’s a question of common sense. As Blanchard notes: “If an item of clothing was priced transparently, it would include the cost of fabric – if it’s cotton, that means the cost of growing the crop and wages for the farmer as well as the spinner, the weaver, the dyer, the transportation to the fabric mill – plus the labour cost of the cutting and sewing; the quality control, factory overheads and energy used; the buttons, trims and zips; more transportation; the cost of packaging, and then the retailers’ mark-up to pay for their overheads, advertising and employees. How can £20 possibly cover all of these resources and processes?”

Which is a detailed way of saying that if it seems too cheap, it probably is.