It is not so much the styling and colour, but the price of the £5 dress – reduced this week to just £4 – which attracts thousands of the thriving retailer’s 5 million UK customers to add it to their online shopping bag, click and pay.
Products and prices like these have driven Boohoo’s profits to a record £59.9m, bucking the trend of struggling high street fashion stores across the country.
Made in the UK, at factories in Leicester and Manchester, the £5 dress epitomises a fast fashion industry that pumps hundreds of new collections on to the market in short time at pocket money prices, with social media celebrity endorsement to boost high consumer demand. On average, such dresses and other products are discarded by consumers after five weeks.
Missguided, an online rival to Boohoo, which also sources products from Leicester, took the low pricing even further this week by promoting a £1 bikini, which proved so popular with customers that the website crashed.
But behind the price tag there is an environmental and social cost not contained on the label of such products. “The hidden price tag is the cost people in the supply chain and the environment itself pays,” said Sass Brown, a lecturer at the Manchester Fashion Institute. “The price is just too good to be true.”
A report by MPs into the fashion industry put it bluntly: in terms of environmental degradation, the textile industry creates 1.2bn tonnes of CO2 a year, more than international aviation and shipping combined, consumes lake-sized volumes of water, and creates chemical and plastic pollution – as much as 35% of microplastics found in the ocean come from synthetic clothing.
