While filming The Great British Sewing BeePresenter and clothing entrepreneur Patrick Grant needed a pair of black socks.
The production team bought a pair from the Marks & Spencer shop near where the popular BBC show was filmed. Grant said: “They went to everyone’s favorite store, which used to sell on quality and value, and bought me their Autograph socks, which are supposed to be their best socks.”
“And when I put these socks on, I thought… Are people wearing these on their feet now? They felt like tights. They were thin and kind of synthetic and saggy and fucking awful.”
He added: “The jumpers I bought at Marks & Spencer in the 80s, I still have a few of them. They are brilliant. And the sweaters you’re buying now that cost £30 at Marks & Spencer are total crap. They are not the same.”
M&S reported a rise in profits last year and regained its place as the UK’s leading women’s fashion retailer for the first time in four years. Women’s party wear sales increased 49% in October 2023 and knitwear sales increased 23% compared to the same month last year; The retailer’s trend and fashion collections are credited with bringing about the turnaround. M&S has also appointed a new head of menswear design, who will take up the role in June.
But the criticism from Grant, who runs textile manufacturer Cookson & Clegg and Savile Row tailor Norton & Sons and is also a judge on the hit BBC One show, will be stinging. A spokesman for the retailer said: “At M&S our clothes are well made and designed to last. We use materials that have been carefully selected. That’s why we are leaders when it comes to quality and customer appreciation.”
Grant, who was speaking at an event to promote his new book, Less: Stop buying so much junk, didn’t limit his criticism to M&S. “This has happened in clothes, in shoes and in the houses in which we live. Our houses are built with shit because people can make more money.
“Does this make our lives better? Is that nonsense? Clothes haven’t gotten cheaper, they’ve just gotten worse. In the process, we have eliminated five and a half million jobs by doing these things well, and that has resulted in the complete death of communities.”
The 52-year-old recognizes that the cost of living crisis has made cheap clothing even more attractive to many people. Speaking at Waterstones bookshop in Leeds, he said: “It’s a challenge to say to someone: you need to buy a more expensive item that will make you feel better.” It’s really difficult… because many, many people are really feeling it at the moment bad.”
But he added: “The sad thing is, the cheaper the clothes we buy, the more likely it is that money will go past anyone you think is nice and end up in the pockets of someone you think is a bastard would hold.”
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Grant said experienced designers like his colleague Great British Sewing Bee Judge Esme Young would struggle if they started in the UK today against a backdrop of fast fashion. “Fashion is now a $3 trillion industry that mostly just produces absolute crap for a tiny price, and it doesn’t stand a chance,” he said, adding that companies like fast-fashion retailer Shein produce thousands of designs selling for just a few pounds had “swamped and destroyed the opportunity for creativity and craftsmanship to flourish as it did in the 1960s”.
“Esme couldn’t have done today what she did back then,” Grant said. “Vivienne Westwood probably couldn’t do it, Alexander McQueen would probably have found it difficult.
“If people are paying £2.50 for a piece of clothing, what chance does someone who tries to create something incredible and spends six months not just ripping off other people but reading and thinking and being a cultural leader and to absorb what the hell is?” What’s happening in the world that reflects that?
“That’s what fashion can do, but it has almost no chance because of the wave of crap that just drowns it out.”