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Dress code
QUICK REVIEW Levels of certainty
about the future Think about your
town/city. Predict what you think will/
won't change in the next five years:
The traffic is bound to get worse,
but they might ban cars from the
centre. Work in pairs. Compare your
predictions.
Speaking, Reading and
Vocabulary
Work in pairs. Do you ever buy
clothes and accessories with
designer labels? Why?/Why not?
Why do you think they are important
to so many people?
a Read the article. Choose the best
summary sentence for parts A and B.
There are two sentences you do not
need.
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1 There is evidence to suggest that
people buy designer labels to
increase their status rather than
because they particularly like them.
2 Designer clothes started for the rich
but are now available in ordinary
shops.
3 Research confirms wearing designer
labels gives you advantages in life.
4 Fashion designers are now mainly
targeting young people.
b Read the article again. Answer
these questions.
1 How and where did designer
labels begin?
2 How did people react to designer
labels being sold at H&M?
3 What was the Tilburg University
research trying to find out?
4 What was the conclusion
of the research?
5 Why does the article refer
to peacocks?
c Work in pairs. Compare
answers. Then look at the
underlined sentences in the
article. Do you agree with
them? Why?/Why not?
••
Vocabulary back referencing
Skills Reading: a fashion article;
Listening: interviews about style
I
ou' e label e
I
1
he designer, Charles Frederick Worth (1825-95), was the first to sew labels
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T into the clothes that he created. Because of this and his international
2
fame, Worth is generally considered to be the father of fashion design, which
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started in the late 1 gth century. Before then, making clothes was mainly
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done by anonymous dressmakers whose clothes were influenced
by what people were wearing at the French royal court. Worth,
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originally from England, moved to France in 1846, where he enjoyed
considerable success with the nobility. Since then, there have been
even greater successes for other designers, such as Chanel and Armani
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and those appealing to the younger, trendier market, for example,
Tommy Hilfiger. Currently the fashion industry relies more on mass-
market sales than on exclusive designs. Some well-known designers
have even teamed up with international high street shops who want to
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add a luxury product to their range. For example, the London branch
of H&M, a clothing company from Stockholm, has started selling
cut-price clothes by high-fashion designers. Recently, hundreds of
people queued outside for up to 12 hours to buy clothes designed
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1
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by Lanvin! Some camped °there overnight, even though at
the time England was experiencing an extremely cold winter. Is this
devotion to labelled goods really worth all the trouble?
An article in The Economist suggests labelled clothes really do
benefit the wearers. 1t quotes research from Tilburg University, in the
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Netherlands, which explains that such clothes bring status and even
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job recommendations, but only when the label is visible! The university's
first research experiment involved photos of a man wearing a polo shirt. The
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photos were digitally altered so that one shirt had no logo, another had a
luxury-designer logo and 6the third had a non-luxury logo. On a five-point
1
scale for status, the luxury designer logo rated 3.5, no logo rated 2.91 and the
non-luxury logo came last, rated 2.84. It seems it may be better to have no logo
at all than to have the wrong logo! In another experiment, people watched one
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of two videos of a job interview of the same man. In one, his shirt had a luxury
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logo on it, in the other it didn't. The man with the logo was rated more suitable
for the job and even received a recommendation for a 9% higher salary! The
research concluded that like a peacock's tail, designer labels are seen as signs
of superior status: 'the peacock with the best tail gets all the girls'. But whereas
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a peacock can't fake his tail, it seems humans can fake their status by using
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designer labels. And by doing so, the way we assess each other's status may
be seriously wrong!