How many pairs of tights fit in a drawer?

'Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening'.

Coco Chanel 1883-1971

The local news is that the big Zara fashion store has pulled out of the Almería high street. The same company owns Pull & Bear who said this week that they, too, are closing their local store forthwith. This is all very sad (especially since, after twenty years of dithering, El Corte Inglés finally announced this week that they aren’t going to put a superstore in the provincial capital after all). Indeed, the main street, known as El Paseo de Almería, is increasingly bare, with even the banks which have lined it for the past couple of decades speedily merging and closing branches (and, needless to add, dismissing staff).

Zara and its sisters – Zara Home, Massimo Dutti, Pull & Bear, Bershka, Oysho, Uterqüe, Lefties and Stradivarius are increasingly moving their business online. Less employees, lower costs and easier to run. The man behind the company (Wiki) that owns the different fashion chains (plus a gigantic real estate portfolio) is known for being the sometimes wealthiest man in the world (October 2015) – he’s currently sixth – and also as the wealthiest man in Spain, with 58,685 million euros reportedly stashed under the mattress. The second wealthiest person in Spain is his daughter Sandra (Wiki) with 5,700 million euros to her name. The Mercadona owner Juan Roig is third.

The Spanish are a bit ambivalent about Amancio Ortega. He makes his money with hard work (having started out at 14 sewing in a clothes store in La Coruña) and good accounting skills. His clothes are made in third world sweat factories and his taxes are said to be cleverly handled (oh, to be a millionaire!). He does, however, feed something back to the public in the shape of occasional philanthropic donations to hospitals.

But, is it healthy to be so wealthy? A man who makes more in an hour than the rest of us in a lifetime and yet lives quietly with his second wife in an apartment in La Coruña?

A major part of that wealth comes from demand for his products. We love to shop in his stores (or virtually on his web-pages). We will happily pay more for his branded products.

Another Spanish clothing manufacturer of interest (at least to Business over Tapas), located at the other end of the spectrum, is called Minimalism. It’s described as ‘…the Spanish brand that opposes the textile industry: clothing without logos, "made to last", with organic fabrics and transparent costs'. The dowdy but well-made clothes are prepared in Guimaraes, Portugal (rather than Bangladesh). They say: ‘Don’t buy what you don’t need’.

Their webpage (in English) is here.  

Coco Chanel probably wouldn’t have liked them.