Another Rock & Roll Swindle

Another strategy for not spending money is to browse somewhere that doesn't have anything that interests you. I did this on Saturday, when we decided to drive into the city and wander Newbury Street for an hour or so around dinnertime. Some stores were already closed, which helps, and the ones that were open tend to offer fashions that are not to my taste.

I discovered that British import AllSaints Spitalfields had opened in the former Pottery Barn space (sorry, city dwellers, if you want to ogle PB's wares in person, you'll now have to trek out to a mall in Natick or Burlington). I had read that the New York AllSaints opened last week (on Broadway in Soho, naturally), and I knew from A Proper Bostonian that work on the Boston store was progressing, but I didn't know that it too had opened.

I went in out of curiosity, just wanting to get a look at the stuff, not expecting to find anything I liked, and in that respect the store met my (lack of) expectations. It's certainly a cool-looking space, dimly lit and with rows of antique sewing machines lined up in the windows. Inside the floors are rough boards, and there are ram skulls (the brand's logo) everywhere.

As for the clothes, they are all components of a very specific rock & roll aesthetic, and I didn't see much that would fit in with my current style. 25 years ago I would have gone nuts for this stuff, except that it's pricey now, and even in 1985 dollars it would have been well beyond my means. But regardless of cost, these clothes are meant for the young, and I'm no longer in that category.

Denim is in the range of $130 to $150, boots (all carefully pre-distressed) around $250, certainly cheaper than John Varvatos's main line (which is what I was most reminded of when looking at these clothes), but still expensive enough that the average person would likely have to think twice about a purchase.

Still, I imagine there will be plenty of tourists and parentally-supported students, unable to find this iteration of prefab cool for sale wherever they come from, who will snap up what AllSaints is selling, while the starving artists and musicians will continue to find their own versions of these looks in local thrift stores.

For this kind of money, I also wonder how durable this stuff might be (in both the literal and stylistic senses of the word). Stores like H&M and Zara and even Old Navy, for better or worse, have gotten shoppers used to the idea of fast fashion: you can buy something very cheaply, wear it a few times, then get rid of it. But the clothes at AllSaints, while priced too high to fit into this construct, don't suggest that they will last more than a couple of seasons, and even if they do, they will probably be horribly out of fashion by then.

I did see one item that caught my eye, a simple black mackintosh-style coat with a black-and-cream plaid lining. It was very smart-looking in its minimalism, and I could see getting some use out of it, but for $275 I could certainly find something comparable for less, and I wouldn't need it until fall anyway, so even thinking about looking for something similar can wait.