Alice-Azania Jarvis: 'There was a theatrical tearing sound – it was my new skirt'

In The Red

In all honesty, I shouldn't have been surprised. My skirt's little mishap was but the latest development in an already advanced day of such incidents; earlier I'd shut my fingers in the door, left the heating on, forgotten my change for the paper, and missed my bus (hence the coffee, which I only ever get when a period of prolonged bus-stop loitering is likely).

At any rate, this skirt-splitting incident was far from the first unfortunate chapter of my day, but it was, it's fair to say, the final straw. "I'VE JUST BOUGHT THE GODDAMN THING!" I bellowed, to no one in particular, before marching into work, self-consciously gripping the back of my skirt and meeting my colleagues' hellos with sullen silence.

An over-reaction, perhaps. Clearly, the skirt had been terribly made – or, if not terribly (after all it was rather lovely), then very cheaply made. And not that cheaply sold.

"What do you expect?" shrugged my boyfriend when I got home. "That's what you get on the high street." But really, it shouldn't be. I think it cost around £40, which I see as rather a lot of money. And anyway, how are we consumers supposed to reign in our spending when things like this happen? It's futile, surely?

As yet, I haven't taken it back. Seeing as I had to wear it for the rest of the day, I borrowed some safety pins and stitched it up, Liz Hurley-style. Somehow I can't quite face the prospect of convincing a store manager that my little experiment with customising was not, in fact, inspired by the Sex Pistols but an act of desperate necessity. Also, I don't have time.

And that, I suppose, is what these high-street giants are banking on when they sell such sub-standard items. That we, time-poor Britain, will fall for the sale rail without any chance of recourse. It's a shame – and not, I suspect, a situation that'll improve with the recession.

In the meantime, I'm abandoning the high street. Quite where I'll turn instead (I have yet to accumulate the bank balance to "invest" in more durable designer items), I'm not sure. As for Topshop, I think I'll leave it to the Yanks.