It is not every coffee shop walk in and find a Damien Hirst on the wall.
What is next noticed is the vast open space various stalls. Clothes, music, books, and coffee and food.
Coffee was excellent, as was the food.
I had my eye on a cake, but had gone when I tried again.
The magazines on offer, some interesting, too many glossy trash. I suggested a few titles they may wish to stock, Standart, Drift, Om Nom, Caboodle.
Lower Marsh, hidden behind Waterloo Station, is one of those up and coming places that has not yet arrived, but well worth exploring.
Lower Marsh has a street food market in the week, Saturday a craft market.
It was on the craft market whilst looking for a coffee shop I found JesSpoke.
In London a couple of weeks ago on a cold misty day in London, I encountered Four Corners serving coffee from a van outside Waterloo Station. Or at least they were serving coffee, when I found them they were packing up.
They suggested I try their coffee shop in Lower Marsh.
It was on my way to find their coffee shop in Lower Marsh that I came across Jessica Moscrop with her stall JesSpoke, her own designs.
She was looking stunning dressed with one of her own designs.
I had a chat, would have stayed longer, but it was raining and I had a coffee shop to find.
I regret I did not stay longer, ask her about her designs, and the materials used. I would recommend organic cotton and lambswool, both are soft to the touch and organic cotton far better for the environment.
The problem is we are drowning in consumer junk, pointless consumerism. typified by M&S plastering their shop windows with Must Have.
Stuff stays in our possession all of six months, a brief respite en route from extraction and manufacture, to incineration or landfill.
In The Winner Stands Alone, Paulo Coelho has a brilliant critique of fast fashion.
It is all about image, be it wearing the latest fashion or consuming a can of coke. We think we are in control of our own destiny, but we are not, we are being manipulated by con men.
Fashion. Whatever can people be thinking? Do they think fashion is something that changes according to the season of the year? Did they really come from all corners of the world to show off their dresses, their jewellery and their collection of shoes? They don’t understand. ‘Fashion’ is merely a way of saying: ‘I belong to your world. I’m wearing the same uniform as your army, so don’t shoot.’
Ever since groups of men and women first started living together in caves, fashion has been the only language everyone can understand, even complete strangers. ‘We dress in the same way. I belong to your tribe. Let’s gang up on the weaklings as a way of surviving.’
But some people believe that ‘fashion’ is everything. Every six months, they spend a fortune changing some tiny detail in order to keep up their membership of the very exclusive tribe of the rich. If they were to visit Silicon Valley, where the billionaires of the IT industry wear plastic watches and beat-up jeans, they would understand that the world has changed; everyone now seems to belong to the same social class; no one cares any more about the size of a diamond or the make of a tie or a leather briefcase. In fact, ties and leather briefcases don’t even exist in that part of the world; nearby, however, is Hollywood, a relatively more powerful machine – albeit in decline – which still manages to convince the innocent to believe in haute-couture dresses, emerald necklaces and stretch limos. And since this is what still appears in all the magazines, who would dare destroy a billion-dollar industry involving advertisements, the sale of useless objects, the invention of entirely unnecessary new trends, and the creation of identical face creams all bearing different labels?
How perverse! Just when everything seems to be in order and as families gather round the table to have supper, the phantom of the Superclass appears, selling impossible dreams: luxury, beauty, power. And the family falls apart.
The father works overtime to be able to buy his son the latest trainers because if his son doesn’t have a pair, he’ll be ostracised at school. The wife weeps in silence because her friends have designer clothes and she has no money. Their adolescent children, instead of learning the real values of faith and hope, dream only of becoming singers or movie stars. Girls in provincial towns lose any real sense of themselves and start to think of going to the big city, prepared to do anything, absolutely anything, to get a particular piece of jewellery. A world that should be directed towards justice begins instead to focus on material things, which, in six months’ time, will be worthless and have to be replaced, and that is how the whole circus ensures that the despicable creatures gathered together in Cannes remain at the top of the heap.
What are people buying into, what are they paying a high price for? It is not the designer on the label as the design will have been by a young designer who wants out to set up his or her own label. It will have not even have been made by the company, it will have come from some Third World sweatshop, a dollar or less at the factory gate, one hundred dollars or more retail. All that people are paying for is the label, the brand name.
Not to be confused with buying real luxury, quality, for example a Montegrappa pen made by craftsmen, for when we buy something of quality, we tend to cherish it and keep it for life.
We need to move to Slow Fashion, emphasis on quality and style, clothes and other possessions we value, look after. The exact opposite of fast fashion, jumping to the diktat of fashionistas, cheap crap from sweatshops. Cheap crap that is worn a couple of times then thrown away.
On display at JesSpoke was as I would find on the autonomous street market in Athens, quality, and far better than the overpriced tat on the occasional craft market on Guildford High Street and at the markets at Farnham Maltings.
It was a miserable day, Lower Marsh empty, and no one appeared to be doing very well.
We don’t get paid much for our clothes, and we need to compete with China and Bangladesh… If we pay everyone £10 or £6 then we will make a loss. — Fashion Square Ltd
Shocking report this evening on Channel Four Dispatches, Undercover: Britain’s Cheap Clothes, on fast fashion sourced by leading brand names from sweatshops in Leicester – New Look, River island, Boohoo and Missguided – workers paid less than half the minimum wage.
The usual response, we did not know, if we had known we would have dealt with it.
When fast fashion forces down the price it pays, when a factory owner says he cannot produce at the price unless he pays his workers only £3 an hour, then of course these brands are culpable.
In one of the sweatshops, supplying Boohoo and Missguided, it was a potential death trap.
The brands rake in vast profits on the back of exploited workers.
The people who buy into fast fashion, wear once then throw away, are also culpable.
In addition to exploiting workers, it is damaging the environment.
It does not have to be, instead of fast fashion, zombies buying into the latest fad, we can have slow fashion, quality, sustainable production, minimum impact, ethical, paying producers and workers a fair price, clothes we value.
Though you will look long and hard to find fashion shops that support slow fashion, other than simply pay lip service.
Two that spring to mind, The Fair Shop and Nia Boutique.
The Fair Shop
The Fair Shop in Brighton, on the road leading down to the seafront from Brighton Station. Not the best location, a better location would be in North Laine.
![20160529_160024[1]](https://keithpp.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/20160529_1600241.jpg?w=599&h=449)
Nia Boutique
The Fair Shop
I came across The Fair Shop walking down to the seafront on a trip to Brighton.
Sustainable fashion, slow fashion, minimum impact, ethical, paying producers a fair price, clothes we value.
One range in The Fair Shop, was from a group of women in Malawi.
Fashion is one of the most damaging industries on the planet, from cotton that is one of the most polluting and water intensive crops grown, to the hazardous chemicals used to processes and die the cotton, to the sweatshop labour used to make the clothes, through to disposal clothes, worn once and then thrown away.
But it does not have to be.
The Fair Shop in Brighton is an example that shows it does not have to be, as does Nia Boutique in Protaras in Cyprus.
Nia Boutique as seen through the looking glass.
Nia Boutique
Slow fashion is low impact, sustainable, style.
Fast fashion is sweatshops, disposable, fashion.
Nia Boutique is slow fashion, ethical.
Located next to an excellent coffee shop, Miyu, it is in the open air, as one would find on a Greek island.
On hand is the designer herself, Sophie.
Nia Boutique is located overlooking Fig Tree Bay.
citrus.
shoes
Last Sunday was the opening night of citrus.
But as luck would have it, my flight was late.
citrus. is proving popular with Russian girls who are happy to spend money on quality but not on tourist tat.
citrus. An upmarket boutique in centre of Protaras, opposite Vrissiana Beach Hotel.
M&S CEO Marc Bolland and Joanna Lumley at The Old Truman Brewery in Brick Lane, London for the launch of new campaign 'Shwopping'.
I listened with growing incredulity to the M&S breathtaking crass hypocrisy and exercise in greenwash on You and Yours BBC Radio 4 this lunchtime.
M&S are shedding crocodile tears at the amount of clothes that are dumped every year in landfill. A billion items of clothing they claim. Their solution is that we take all our unwanted clothes to M&S for recycling, and no doubt replace with new clothes whilst we are there.
Cut out the middle man, take your clothes direct to a charity shop.
Support slow fashion, not fast fast; dress for style, not fashion; buy quality, not rubbish.
Is it necessary to replace what is in a wardrobe every few months with new clothes?
In M&S their food is over-packaged. I suggest we return all our packaging to M&S.
M&S charge 5p for a plastic carrier bag. Read carefully the small print: Only 1p goes to an environmental charity. This a cynical ploy to milk the customer and to distract from their over-packaging.
Why no paper bags in M&S for our loose fruit and vegetables? The bags can then be recycled or composted.
The stuff we buy spends less than six months in our homes before it continues on its one-way linear trip to landfill or incinerator.
M&S compared the recycling of clothes through their stores with the successful recycling of glass bottles! When was the last time anyone took a glass bottle back? We recycle glass, not bottles!
Yes, we need to reduce our waste and energy consumption. We do so by reducing consumption and increasing recycling, not by taking our unwanted clothes to M&S and whilst we are there replacing old for new.
When you donate to charity shops, choose the smaller charities who do not throw away after a couple of weeks what you have taken the trouble to donate. Avoid Oxfam and British Heart Foundation who rip off customers with the prices they charge. Another reason to avoid Oxfam is that they are the partners in this greenwash scheme with M&S to encourage increased consumption.
Are people really this gullible that they fall for a cynical exercise in greenwash?
Shwoping is a slick marketing campaign to encourage easily led fools to empty their wardrobes and run off down to M&S to buy more clothes. Green it is not.
A green campaign, which shwopping claims to be, would encourage slow fashion, to buy quality, to value our clothes, not throw them away.
Shwoping is not sustainable fashion.
‘Slow fashion’ was coined by Kate Fletcher. It has evolved from slow food, is part of the slow movement.
– Do we recycle enough of our clothes?
– Disposable clothes
– Oxfam rips off its customers (yet again)
– M&S launches ‘shwopping’ scheme
– Joanna Lumley joins M&S to launch shwopping
– Joanna Lumley launches Marks & Spencer’s Shwopping campaign
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