London – H&M x Balmain fever gripped London on Thursday, with shoppers
eager to snap up a Balmain bargain that would otherwise be out of their
budget.
When a pearly jacket dress costs 300 pounds, instead of 3000 pounds, one
can understand the never-ending queues which snaked around Oxford Street
causing early morning pedestrian madness. An embellished shift on sale for
190 pounds was certainly worth a 6 hour wait, if not the logo t-shirts for
25 pounds.
It is of no surprise, of course, that many items were already on eBay a few
hours after the launch, although the original prices were nowhere to be
seen with a general inflation of 300 percent affecting any re-saleable
items that left the store. But not everybody has time to queue for fast
fashion, and the prices were still a bargain compared to anything on sale
in the Balmain boutique just up the road.
Outside H&M on Regent Street a police car was conspicuously parked on the
pavement with officers attempting to calm the awaiting crowd. Some had
started queuing outside the high street brand’s flagship store at 10pm on
Wednesday in the hope of bagging a bargain.
Shopper Nilima Shah from London told a journalist she joined the queue of
approximately 200 people at 5am on Thursday morning but only managed to
purchase a ring. By the time she got inside the rails were empty: ‘I waited
that long and didn’t get any clothes. All that was left was a ring!’
H&M’s annual collaborations, which sell a limited run of designer pieces at
high street prices, have become well-known for attracting fervent shoppers,
but the Balmain launch was the Regent Street store’s busiest yet.
But it wasn’t just in London where the most anticipated collaboration of
the year saw people queue from 10pm the night before. Shoppers in an H&M
store in Turkey caused a frenzied riot as the doors to the store opened.
Desperate to get their hands on the garments, shoppers were seen charging
through the store in a manic and erratic fashion in videos posted on
YouTube. Some made a dash straight for the rails to grab what they could,
some ran off in different directions to snag a purchase – and others were
left scrambling to scoop up what they could from the floor.
In Seoul, South Korea, images of shoppers camping out in sleeping bags the
night were a far cry from the images of the stampede of shoppers breaking
through the doors at H&M in Florence, Italy.
Worldwide fever for the collaboration was evident at the end of the day on
Thursday, when eBay was full of new listings from a host of different
countries from those who were lucky enough to find the rails fully stocked
upon arrival. Most stores had sold out just mere hours after the launch.
The website too saw so much traffic it shut down just minutes after the
online sale started.
One anonymous shoppers told the Daily Mail of her in-store experience: ‘It
was a fashion jungle and I’ve never seen grown adults behave like it in my
life.’ It quickly descended into chaos within the first five minutes.
Everyone was just grabbing anything and had huge piles of clothes in just
about any size. They had actual people modeling the clothes instead of
mannequins so people couldn’t rip them off.”
Some things you can’t put a price on.