长沙USDT兑换选择|【唯一TG:@heimifeng8】|长沙USDT支付渠道✨谷歌搜索留痕排名,史上最强SEO技术,20年谷歌SEO经验大佬✨Fashion struggles as warm weather dents sales... and retailer share prices
Sandra Halliday Published
October 10, 2025
Two reports looking at September’s consumer spending and retail sales came out on Tuesday and they showed that fashion sales were fairly anaemic, but beauty fared much better.
The reports added to the weight of evidence showing the warm autumn is impacting fashion sales. The weather has already driven the share prices of prominent clothing retailers down.
First, the regular monthly report from Barclays that looks at overall consumer spend using payment cards. The company said spending grew 4.2% year on year in September.
This lagged the 6.3% inflation rate, but was at least higher than the 2.8% growth figure in August. And total spending was helped by late summer sunshine that boosted in-store visits.
But the picture painted is far from one of consumers in a spend-happy frame of mind. Barclays reported consumers telling it they were becoming increasingly aware of ‘shrinkflation’, were sceptical of the offers available via loyalty schemes, and were also noticing more examples of “surge pricing” for products and services during peak times, or when demand is higher.
With all that on their minds, it's no surprise that clothing stores’ sales last month were fairly unimpressive. In September, they were down 0.2% on the year, after August’s 0.7% fall.
Discount stores did better (+1.5%) following a lacklustre August (-0.2%). But pharmacy, health & beauty stores enjoyed a 6.9% September boost, the highest since January. This was possibly thanks to the ‘lipstick effect’, where consumers prioritise small luxuries during periods of economic uncertainty.
Both fashion and beauty might have been helped by bars, pubs & clubs having a positive month, (rising 6.1% compared to 2.8% last month) and by travel continuing its double-digit growth (+13.2%).
But 44% of Britons said they’re planning to reduce discretionary spending over the next couple of months to save money for the festive period. That comes as 40% of consumers say they expect this coming Christmas period will be more expensive than last year with 20% spreading the cost by starting their festive shopping early.
Weather impact
Meanwhile, the second monthly report on Tuesday was from the British Retail Consortium/KPMG and looked specifically at retail sales.
The BRC reported a rise in sales of 2.7%, again a figure well below the rate of inflation and yet another sign of falling volumes.
Food sales increased 7.4% in the three months to September but non-food sales fell 1.2%. Non-food sales in stores increased 0.3%, but online, they fell 3.6%. All of those figures (except the food number) were worse than the 12-month averages.
Helen Dickinson, BRC Chief Executive, said big-ticket items performed poorly “as consumers limited spending in the face of higher housing, rental and fuel costs” and the ‘Indian summer’ also meant sales of autumnal clothing, knitwear and coats, “have yet to materialise”.
And Paul Martin, UK Head of Retail, KPMG, highlighted the strength of beauty but also how “a growing number of categories including clothing, fell into negative territory over September as the unseasonal warm weather delayed trips to the shops to stock up on winter wardrobe purchases”.
Share prices fall
The situation facing clothing retailers is dire at present as large parts of the UK bask in an unprecedented warm autumn, although the weather is due to normalise within a few days.
So far this week, hundreds of millions of pounds have been wiped off the value of stock exchange-listed fashion retailers purely because of the perceived impact of sunshine on autumn sales.
On Monday, shares of M&S, Next, Frasers Group, JD Sports, Dr Martens, and Primark’s owner ABF all fell, some by as much as 4% on speculation over seasonal weakness.