You don’t need a Financial Times subscription to tell you that the global economy is looking a bit jumpy right now. Just take a browse at the online clothes shopping landscape. Pretty Little Thing (PLT), the infamous fast fashion brands known for selling clubbing attire at bargain basement prices, has rebranded.
Previously known for selling clubbing attire at bargain basement prices, it has pivoted to flogging “elevated fashion essentials”.
Gone is the all-pink logo and packaging. In its place a palette of greige, sage, taupe and watered-down burgundy. The hyper-realistic winged unicorn hasn’t been taken out back and shot, thankfully, but he has been flattened into a heraldic-style line drawing reminiscent of the Burberry Equestrian Knight Design.
The new logo also looks like an amalgam of various designer brands that use an interlocking monogram as a calling card. In PLT’s own words they are “pay[ing] homage to the craftsmanship of luxury house emblems”.
It’s the fashion equivalent of an influencer getting her lip filler dissolved and getting some low lights. It’s also a recession indicator. Bland colours and less ornamentation are cheaper to produce and lend themselves to a more drab yet functional wardrobe.
PLT’s target audience’s tastes may have changed, but how much is that due to Gen Z and Alpha growing up into a rubbish economy? Wearing £5 dresses to the club and 99p bikinis on your holiday is out, sure. Because no one can afford to go out on the town every weekend and jet off to Ibiza, Mykonos, ‘insert island destination of your choosing here’ four times a year.
Instead, a strange sexed-up business attire look is proliferating in spit of young people turning their noses up at offices, let alone office wardrobes. Clothes show off way too much cleavage and leg for an actual workplace, but allude to being busy and employable when unemployment hovers at 6.1 per cent in London.
Fashion has always been a bellwether for the financial markets, and while the Hemline Index may not be entirely accurate, this is a brand makeover for the cost-of-living crisis.
Even actual heritage brands are raiding the archives for the authentic (read: emotive) pull to help them survive when people’s spending is seriously curtailed. PLT does not not have much of a legacy to draw upon, having only been founded in 2012. Instead it has to rely on visual cues about what normal people imagine wealthier style to be. Apparently that’s a lot of scraped-back buns or blowouts, paired with the kind of glowing skin only a facialist on speed-dial could realistically achieve. Or the Clean Girl Aesthetic as it’s known on TikTok.
‘Feel poor, dress wealthy’, seems to be the message. Like a cargo cult for manifesting affluence. Everyone wants to dress like a billionaire’s wife, apparently. And with Jeff Bezos’s fiancée wearing a lacy bustier under a blazer to the Trump inauguration, PLT is here to help you achieve budget style on an actual budget.
Unfortunately, this quiet luxury vibe also tends towards the look of the politically conservative. Along with sounding economic alarm bells, some fashion watchers are warning that this pivot to modest ecru two-pieces and basic ballgowns heralds the hard turn towards the right in politics. Modest(ish) clothes and a harkening back to a bygone era of glamor certainly carries a whiff of “traditional values” about it.
From what we know so far, this clean up is only in an aesthetic sense
Boohoo, PLT’s parent company, has been facing its own internal power struggle. The rebrand is also meant to signal the intentions of multimillionaire PLT founder Umar Kamani, who stepped down as CEO of his brand in April 2023 — only to return 18 months later, claiming that the brand had lost its way without him. “What I’ve tried to do is to clean everything up and redefine ourselves,” Kamani told Drapers.
From what we know so far, this clean up is only in an aesthetic sense. While PLT’s prices are now up in the £30 to £70 range for dresses, a marked increase, it doesn’t appear to be reflected in the quality of the materials and fit, nor has there been increased transparency in the supply chain.
A 2020 investigation from the Sunday Times found that garment workers in fellow fast fashion brand Boohoo’s UK factories were paid just £3.50 an hour. In the years that have followed, there were protests at PLT fashion shows, and people have become increasingly vocal about encouraging each other to move away from fast fashion outlets and purchase second-hand or from independent brands.
So far, the PLT rebrand seems entirely surface level. Whether cash-strapped buyers will be buying it remains to be seen.
