Gemma Cartwright writes...
My first experience of Primark was in about 1995 on a family trip to Newport, Gwent. I was looking for a pair of black sandals for a school disco and my mom remembered a cheap shop that she used to frequent when she lived in Wales in the late 70s. Ten minutes and £12 later and I was the proud owner of a pair of strappy suede shoes and a new 'secret' shopping destination. The daughter of a true bargain hunter, I loved Primark instantly. But it wasn't until I moved to London and discovered the massive Primark in Hammersmith in 2001 that I really became obsessed...
Even back then, only six years ago, it was considered a bit uncool to shop at Primark. But I was a fashion student living on a shoestring budget, and the lure of cheap clothes was too much. If you'd have told me back then, when I was investing in £10 shirt dresses, £8 chunky cardigans and more £1 knickers than you can shake a stick at that in a few years time I'd be proudly confessing my dress was £10 from 'Primarni' (or 'Pradamark'), or that Primark clothes would be gracing the pages of glossy magazines as frequently as the weekly gossip rags, I wouldn't have believed you.
But it happened. In a very short space of time the brand seemed to move from the fashion fringes to every high street in the UK. Suddenly it became the place to find budget fashion that reflected current trends. Key pieces like the £12 military jacket, the £10 gold sequinned shrug (and later the £18 mini dress) and the £10 polka dot shirt dress were such big sellers that people were flogging them at a mark-up on eBay. At one point, the dress was going for upwards of £80.
When the huge Oxford Street branch of Primark opened, hundreds queued outside (see pic above) causing the kind of hysteria usually saved for boyband concerts and football matches (and, in the world of fashion, the Kate Moss at Topshop launch). All this for a shop that was going to remain open for the indefinite future! There were no special offers, no first-day discounts, and plenty of other Primarks already open in and around London, but the build-up to the big opening was so highly anticipated that (mainly) women flocked there in huge numbers just to be first in the new store.
Of course, bargain shopping comes at a price, and there is bound to be a point where the bubble will burst. Already we're experiencing such a Primark obsession that it's impossible to walk down the street without spotting someone wearing the same thing as you. In our office alone two of us have the same coat, two have the same top, two the same boots and three of us are obsessed with the woolen tights. The £6 printed overnight bags are half-decapitating people on the tube / train / bus every morning in huge numbers. Everyone seems to own at least one pair of their £6 ballet flats, and on holiday I took three Primark bikinis and spotted at least one other women wearing each one. You don't shop at Primark to be an individual. It's all about mainstream trends and throwaway fashion, and they save on costs by producing things in huge numbers, meaning you're bound to spot another girl in your new favourite dress on a night out.
Then, of course, come the ethics. We all know that to produce a t-shirt for £1.50 or a pair of pajamas for £3 that somewhere along the line there's a poor machinist being paid very little to run up hundreds of them. Like most big brands, Primark insist their workers are paid fairly and that their bulk production keeps costs down and nothing else. But there are still reports that claim that workers in factories that supply Primark and its rivals are paid as little as £16 a month. That's less than one sequinned dress per person, folks, and that's not enough to live on.
Of course, regardless of whether these reports are true or not, the argument is that if these people are willing to work for that money, we're not doing anything wrong by buying the clothes. If we want to, we can bury our heads firmly in the sand and say that, if we didn't buy them, the factories would close down and there'd be no jobs at all.
Regardless of the ethics or the price, my issue with Primark now is that I overindulged a bit too much during the height of its popularity in the last few seasons. Recently I realised that every time anyone asked me where I'd bought something, the response was "Primark". It's the reason for my stuffed wardrobe, my overflowing undies drawer and my frightening credit card statements. It may be a cheap shop, but when you go in there and buy five dresses and six tops, you're spending just as much as if you save your pennies to invest in something that won't fall apart after two wears. Because that's the other thing to bear in mind - with cheap prices comes cheap construction. Hems come undone, buttons fall off and zips get stuck. Throwaway fashion is not made to last. It's the price you pay...literally!
So how do you feel about Primark? Do you love it or do you loathe it? Is it your first stop or your last call? Is the jumble sale feel and the huge queues a turn off, or is it worth it for the bargains? Let us know what you think of Primark, and what your best buys have been!