How fashion fooled the world by Ann Black*

They say pop will eat itself. If fashion ever ate anything, it would probably do the same. 

Like an addict, the industry keeps consuming the same thing over and over again, hoping this time the thrill will last. But it never does. Once a line hits the runway it’s already obsolete, ready to be ground down and served up all over again. Like an addict, fashion lies, cheats and is really only concerned with itself. Once it finds a new addiction – a new model, muse, or designer – it only wants more of the same. Once you’ve hung around with it for a while, it can get, well, kind of boring.

I work closely with the fashion industry in Australia. But I’m not going to tell you my real name. Not because I’m scared the hipsters might come to my door and do something nasty. But because I’m afraid they’ll stop doling out my pay cheques. Yeah, I’m one of them. Sorry about that. But think of this as a confession, an airing of dirty size-zero laundry, a report from the velvet trenches. I’ll admit it: 

I am a self-loathing ashionista and I’m biting the hand that feeds me.

Fashion is neurotic. It’s this way because wrapped up at the heart of it lies a paradox. Fashion is all about newness, but these days there are very few genuinely new ideas to be had. No matter how outrageous the label, each collection must consist of the same basic things: frocks, separates, accessories. Occasionally a new variation will arise – the playsuit or harem pants – until consumers realise (slowly, usually) how hideous they make everyone look, at which point they’ll be quietly shelved for a few years before they come round once more. Again displayed as utterly new, unique, boundary-breaking, zeitgeist-making. 

Yes, silhouettes change and colours morph over time. But here too, novelty is a sham. The 1970s plundered the 19th century, the 1980s looked to the 1940s (ask your grandma – those power shoulder pads were nothing new), the 1990s nicked stuff from the 1970s, and since the turn of the millennium we’ve churned through 1980s and now we’re back to the 1990s again. Plus there’s the rotating, same-same triumvirate of nautical looks (sailor hats, blue and white stripes, anchor motifs), safari (animal print, ridiculous Out of Africa costumes) and chinoiserie (giving Chinese factory workers a chance to produce simulacra of their country’s rich heritage for Western high streets).

The whole industry is really just going round and round in ever-decreasing circles. But they’re hoping if they move fast enough you’ll be sucked in just the same. Perhaps we in the media should be doing a better job at calling them out, but, as I say, they pay my wages and – through big budget ad campaigns – my company’s bills, too. They also fill our wardrobes. 

You didn’t really think we could afford Christian Louboutin heels and Balenciaga dresses on journalists’ wages. did you? Whatever fashion is about, we’re about too. But at the same time we’re bored, listless, looking for novelty (you try and write your 26th completely unrealistic story about why it’s OK to wear shorts to the office or your millionth expose on new pastels for summer and see how you feel). Which is why, like our fashion industry colleagues, we’ll grab on to just about anything exciting that comes along – especially if it seems dangerous, provocative, mad or potentially illegal. Since mainstream fashion’s stash of new ideas burnt out decades ago, everything original comes from outsiders – the weirder and more messed up the better.

But the cutting edge is called that for a reason. 

It hurts and it often leaves its victims slashed and bloody in the process. Fashion has always had a thing for self-destruction. Witness its morbid fascination with brilliant but doomed chanteuse Amy Winehouse. In 2007, Karl Lagerfeld made her his muse for his December Chanel show. Even when it was clear the damaged singer was in freefall, fashion was still knocking at her door. Her posthumous line for Fred Perry has already gone on sale. At a photo shoot before her death a writer for Harper’s Bazaar described her as “unsteady… barely intelligible” but the (fashion) show went on. Fashion’s chief purveyors are famously unstable. 

Sometimes tragically so – the hanging suicide of designer Alexander McQueen and self-administered poisoning of stylist Isabella Blow are at the saddest, most extreme, end of the spectrum. 

But then there’s Donatella Versace’s well-publicised, long-running drug addiction;

 Naomi Campbell’s thuggish antics; photographer Terry Richardson’s alleged, less than professional dealings with his young models. All are still working though: in fashion-think, criminals are always cool. Sure there’s the occasional hypocritical slapping of wrists: John Galliano was fired from Christian Dior after video footage of him abusing two women he thought were Jewish and drunkenly declaring “I love Hitler” surfaced on the TV news. But was it the anti-Semitism or the fact it got leaked that finally tipped logo overlords LVMH over the edge? Kate Moss was dropped by Chanel, H&M and Burberry after her 2005 drug scandal. But, she’s still the third best-paid model in the world, raking in $13.5 million a year. 

Even without the tabloid ifestyle, Moss herself has always courted outrage. Her waifish frame ushered in the era of painfully thin models in the mid 1990s, and 15 years later it’s still going strong. Given fashion’s yen for reinvention, it might seem odd that the super-skinny ideal has stuck around so long. I’m certainly ready for it to end. 

Every fashion shoot I’ve been on, I divide my time between hating myself for treating the 14 or 15-yearold models like very lean) pieces of meat and figuring out ways to cover up bony clavicles, knobbly knees, fragile-looking forearms. 

Eating disorders are so widespread no one even notices them anymore. 

Some time ago, I issued a potter’s guide to bulimics and anorexics for my photographers and stylists so they’d know who to turn away. Look for hairy arms, pinched lips, mood swings and brittle nails, I said, and unnaturally plump cheeks caused by acidic vomit irritating the inside of the mouth. But I still sometimes get pictures of girls whose thighs are smaller than their knees. They’re standard issue these days.  

To sell clothes to adult women, fashion looks to pre-pubescents. 

There’s an old episode of Absolutely Fabulous where Patsy says something like, “If the models get any younger they’ll be throwing foetuses down the runway.” These days, that seems more like prophecy than comedy. Vogue and Elle were recently called out for sexploitation after using a 10-yearold model in their editorial shoots. 

Photos of Thylane Blondeau have her heavily made-up, dressed in vampish clothing, posing as a seductress, a femme fatale. British Prime Minister David Cameron has publicly denounced the photos, and yes it’s shocking – that’s exactly what fashion wants. But in truth, Thylane isn’t that much younger than most girls in the modelling world. Give her 10 or so years and she’ll be over the hill. 

But childhood isn’t the only place fashion stalks those with flat chests and freakishly long legs. The newest ‘It Girl’ of the modelling world is actually a man – 19-year-old Andrej Pejic – whose androgynous looks have seen him walk in shows for Givenchy and Jean Paul Gaultier. His topless cover for Dossier magazine was censored by Barnes & Noble “in case customers confuse him for a woman”. Which you’d think was the whole point. Andrej is pretty: he was even voted number 98 in FHM’s 100 Sexiest Women in the World poll this year. And he seems like a nice bloke (he’s from my hometown, so I might be biased).

But along with kiddie models like Thylane and regular catwalk waifs, he represents something I’ve always found sinister about the industry that pays my wages. The ongoing campaign to demonise traditional womanly features – breasts, bottoms, thighs. So far as fashion’s concerned, curves are gross and not very profitable. Obesity, as Karl Lagerfeld, the industry’s ever-shrinking, ghoulish godfather, so politely points out, is a social issue: “In France there are, I think, less than one per cent of people who are too skinny,” he says. “There are nearly 30 per cent of young people who are too fat. So let’s take care of the zillions of the too-fat before we talk about the percentage that’s left.” But what he fails to mention is how extreme skinniness is what his industry runs on. It’s the ultimate drug, knocking life into merchandising, retail and branding. Pumping money into the veins of haute couture, if not food into the bellies of its adherents.

Fashion is meant to sell clothes. Clothes are bought in stores on racks, hanging from coat hangers or – increasingly – on the internet, displayed flat against white studio backgrounds. What matters here is not looking good on a person, but looking good on a hanger. 

When people do have to enter the equation, in places like catwalk shows and editorial shoots, it makes sense to hire the human equivalent of those clothes hangers. Pre-pubescents, teens who’ve dodged puberty through starvation and (occasionally) skinny men all fit the bill perfectly.Yes, fashion is meant to sell clothes. 

But these days they’re almost beside the point. The grand design houses are multi-million dollar operations and a large chunk of their revenue comes not from clothing, but assorted brand extensions: perfume lines, handbags, licensing deals. In a way, the clothes are just a front. The people who wear them are walking, talking brand ambassadors, meant to inspire the rest of us who can’t afford $10,000 for a one-season frock to instead drop our cash on branded scents, accessories, TV shows, credit cards. The industry doesn’t want fatties for ambassadors. That’s why average-sized women can’t find prêt-à-porter clothes that fit. They were never meant for them. 

And that’s why fashion needs scandal, it needs column inches, it needs attention. It sells dreams rather than clothes. Sometimes it sells nightmares. 

Thus Galliano’s Hitler-loving scandal (nothing so cutting-edge as fascism) is just as good for the industry as its occasional – and grotesquely ironic – flirtation with regular-sized women. 

Fashion loves a freak. When Vogue Italia recently put three plus-sized models on its cover it wasn’t staking a claim for the female of the species, it was saying: “Hey, look at these weirdos! Please buy multiple copies and cover us extensively in the fashion media! Look how avant garde we are!”  

Vogue might not be running quite as scared as the rest of the traditional print media (though its circulation figures are starting to decline in some territories), but it’s a bastion of fashion’s old guard. Emphasis on ‘old’. The new black in terms of fashion media comes not from big publishing houses, but bloggers like Tavi Gevinson (a 15-year-old) and street-style photographers such as The Sartorialist’s Scott Schuman. 

These are the folk filling the front rows of fashion shows right now. They’re something new to play with. And while they might have started off subverting fashion’s strict hierarchy, these days they’re part of the pecking order.

With fashion’s new focus on street style, ‘recessionistas’ and mixing designer threads with chain-store buys, the wider industry – those slaving away beyond the MilanParis-New York axis – is under greater scrutiny. What happens in the world of haute couture happens on the high street. As Meryl Streep’s thinly veiled Anna Wintour parody, Miranda Priestly, says in The Devil Wears Prada: “You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select that lumpy blue sweater… but what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue. It’s not turquoise. It’s not lapis. It’s actually cerulean. And you’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002 Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns… and then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.”  

But it’s not just colourways filtering down from on high. It’s ethics, too. The fashion world’s dark underbelly – found in sweatshops with poor working conditions, non-unionised labour, child workers and pitiful pay – is all too easy to see, but few bother to look. And don’t think those ‘Made in Germany’ or ‘Made in America’ labels get you off the hook. Sweatshops exist pretty much everywhere. And the labels are just as easy to sew on overseas. You can buy big reels of them in the backstreets of Hong Kong. On buying trips, we used to joke that there must be factories in Shenzhen called ‘Germany’, ‘France’ and ‘USA’.   

Fast-fashion brands rip off young designers’ work – America’s Forever 21 alone has been sued over 50 times for stealing the work of others and passing it off as its own. And retail workers at chains like American Apparel complain of sexual harassment, exploitation and other assorted dodgy practices. It’s a grim picture for an industry that worships beauty. But there you have it. High, low, inbetween – all levels of fashion have skeletons in the closet. And only some of them are the ones draped in silk and high-stepping down the runways. 

Sometimes I find fashion’s wilful ignorance funny. My favourite fashion anecdote to tell outsiders – one I’m sure sums up the whole thing on some vast, metaphorical level – takes place in my hometown. 

Every Autumn, Melbourne hosts the L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival.  The weather here is famously changeable, especially in those ‘transeasonal’ days. Sometimes the festival is freezing, sometimes it’s blazing hot. Most events are held in the city’s Docklands area – originally a marshland, then a staging ground for portside industries like cargo handling, tanneries and abattoirs before being revamped as an inner-city yuppie lifestyle zone. And when the weather’s hot it still reeks of dead fish. During Fashion Week, thousands of models, journalists, designers and buyers troop through and I’ve never heard one of them complain about the smell. Even when their eyes are nearly watering and the occasional fly buzzes past. 

They’re too busy being fabulous to notice the decay around them. Too intent on chasing the next ‘it’ thing to realise that what they’re doing stinks. 

I’m one of them, so I can’t exactly wash my hands of the whole thing. But I can tell you, there’s something rotten with the state of fashion.  

*Ann Black is the pseudonym of a fashion insider with more than ten years of experience in the industry.