To chart the revolutionary effect shopping chain Zara has had on women, we have to go back to the start, or BZ (before Zara). It was a quaint time, a time before internet shopping, overnight deliveries and fashion so fast you have barely taken the tag off your top without it being totally last season. Ah, how simple life was back then.
It was also a time when those of us who couldn’t afford to dress themselves in Brown Thomas’s designer gear or Topshop’s elevated prices had limited options to choose from to get our fashion fix.
BZ, shopping itself was a segregated activity. On a quintessential Saturday in any given Irish city, hordes of women would navigate the main street with one common goal: to get that one perfect piece they had been dreaming about all week. The goal might have been universal, but shopping habits were not.
Where fortysomething women would weave their way through Dunnes Stores and have a meander in Monsoon, the giggling girls in their 20s would enviously browse through everything in Topshop and probe the sale racks in River Island. Professionals in their 30s would seek out suits in Debenhams and scrutinise the work-to-play dresses in Dorothy Perkins.
These groups of women would cross paths from time to time on their shopping routes, but apart from their love of finding a bargain – something that is instilled in many Irish women at birth – they had no common place to go.
That was until Spanish mega- retailer Zara – which was founded in 1975 by Amancio Ortega Gaona and Rosalía Mera – landed on Irish soil in 2003. Where once women could only lust after high-end pieces sported by Kate Moss on the runway, Zara was beginning to replicate that high-end fashion for a fraction of the cost.
This runway-to-reality fashion reverberated around the world.
Women in their 20s, 30s, 40s and older could now get everything they needed all under the same roof.
They got their bang-on-trend styles, they got their work-appropriate skirts and they got their heels reminiscent of the ones they saw on Eva Longoria. And the best part of it all? They got it for Continental prices (remember when clothing was far cheaper in Spain and France?).
There was finally a middle ground between the inaccessibility of designer and the dissatisfaction that the lower end of the main street shopping experience.
Shopping was no longer segregated by age, lifestyle and choice, because Zara brought it all together for us. And now? Well, as Louis Vuitton fashion director Daniel Piette put it, Zara is “possibly the most innovative and devastating retailer in the world”.
Although it spends very little on advertising (0.3 per cent of turnover, compared with the industry average of 4 per cent), Zara still resides at the top of the fashion food chain.
Maybe it is its 12,000 new designs each year or maybe it is its ability to take a garment from the development stages to the shop floor in a week that makes Zara so special. Whatever it is, we can’t get enough of it; it has revolutionised the way women dress.
