What a difference a month makes. From September 28 to October 6, Paris thrilled to the spectacle of their annual fashion week showing clothes for Spring/Summer 2027. Many stars were there; even the ‘radical’ ones, such as Dua Lipa at Chanel. Naomi Campbell got around on a Lime bike – followed by a bodyguard minding her £85,000 handbag on a second one, an image which sums up the hypocritical elitism of the occasion beautifully.
Paris Fashion Week overlapped slightly with the first peaceful protests in the French capital about such issues as teacher shortages. Luckily, it was over by the time the situation grew to embrace diversity and inclusion by adding vandals and looters to the merry throng over the weekend of 17 October, spreading beyond Paris to other French cities. Looters smashed their way into many of the shops selling clothes by designers who had recently shown on the runway. Shops selling cigarettes and smartphones were the most targeted but no bookshops, surprisingly, considering the thirst of the rioters for learning.
For many decades – since the 1960s – fashion has liked to position itself as anti-Establishment. When this was Mary Quant bringing in the swinging mini skirt, this stance was tolerable; just a bit of fun, with young people taking a delight in showing off their bodies in their brief shining prime. But by the time the 1980s rolled around, we had the likes of the Cheltenham Ladies College-educated Katharine Hamnett, whose slogan T-shirts (everything from ‘WORLDWIDE NUCLEAR BAN NOW’ to ‘USE A CONDOM’) assumed to educate we slack-jawed hoi polloi.
Hamnett’s big moment came in 1984 when she met Mrs Thatcher (apparently hated by her fellow young fashion designers ‘for everything she had done to the UK’) at a Downing Street reception to celebrate the first ever London Fashion Week wearing her own T-shirt design with the slogan ’58% DON’T WANT PERSHING’ blaring from it, referring to the alleged reluctance of the British people to house American missiles here. The photographers went wild, but I wasn’t impressed, being from the Fran Lebowitz school of thought on sloganeer clothing: ‘If people don’t want to listen to you, what makes you think they want to hear from your sweater?’
Hamnett was dating my second husband’s best mate at the time and when we got asked to dinner at her huge house, she tried to make me less obviously hostile by saying in a rather lady-of-the manor manner ‘The young poor dress so much better than the young rich.’ I shot back naughtily ‘That’s because they can’t afford your clothes.’ (I’m not the best at ripostes in the flesh, but I still chuckle about this one 40 years later.)
I’m 67 now and Hamnett is 79, but she’s still churning out the monstrosities; in 2017 she produced a ‘CANCEL BREXIT’ T-shirt and in 2019 a ‘SECOND REFERENDUM NOW’, showing a respect for giving the vote to the working classes thoroughly in keeping with her high-born background. Inevitably, she joined the Green Party last year and launched a T-shirt collection with its lovely leader. £30 will see you choosing from ‘JOIN THE GREEN, VOTE HOPE’ and ‘I HEART ZACK’. (It’s to be hoped that they have a bit of stretch, as we ladies never know when our knockers may suddenly miraculously enlarge, especially in the presence of the Green’s Glorious Leader.) In 2024 she had herself filmed wearing a ‘DISGUSTED TO BE BRITISH’ T-shirt and putting her CBE in a rubbish bin, opining ‘I’m disgusted to be British for our role in Gaza!’
For many decades – since the 1960s – fashion has liked to position itself as anti-Establishment
But Hamnett seems a saint compared to John Galliano, who, in a Paris bar in 2011 uttered 45 Jewish slurs in the space of 30 minutes, topping them with (as if we hadn’t guessed) ‘I love Hitler.’ Sacked by Dior, he was thoroughly rehabilitated and re-employed by 2014, when at the British Fashion Awards, he presented the Outstanding Achievement Award to the Editor in Chief of American Vogue Anna Wintour, who wore his first design for Maison Martin Margiela – ‘an unambiguous blessing’ indeed, as the New York Times had it.
More silly than sinister was the late Vivienne Westwood, that die-hard punk who held on to her Damehood and a lot more besides. Westwood was money-mad anti-capitalist and a keen fan of offshore companies until the Greens, who she supported for a time, pulled her up on it. Incapable of proclaiming on a subject without giving herself special dispensation towards it, she also liked to preach about ‘sustainable fashion’ while producing nine collections a year compared to the average of two, and made unpaid interns work more than 40 hours a week. ‘I wasn’t pure enough for them,’ she spat about the Greens in her online diary, before switching her support to the anti-Farage candidate in the upcoming Thanet South election. It obviously worked, as Nigel Askew polled a majestic 126 votes. The wayward Westwood was soon to be found cheerleading for those other lost causes, Jeremy Corbyn and Julian Assange.
The hypocritical horror continues; in the most recent Paris Fashion Week, the regrettably named designing duo Matieres Fecales called their collection ‘The One Per Cent’ for the Oxfam report which claimed that 1 per cent of the richest people in the world hold almost half of the wealth. The finale saw black models carrying realistic effigies of white men blindfolded with dollar bills – in the Place de la République, the same square where police fired teargas at hundreds of rioters less than a month later.
Back in 1970, in his essay ‘Radical Chic’ Tom Wolfe critiqued the self-immolating aspect of rich liberals getting into bed with those who would destroy them. We see it again now, with the added ick of one group of rich people picking on another group rich people, hoping it will keep them safe, described splendidly by Winston Churchill of a rather more serious situation many years ago; ‘An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.’
But there’s something especially annoying about fashion pretending to be socially conscious. Maybe because (unlike the music and film industries) it was built on sweatshops and still is; an Italian friend once had a job as a teenager which involved sewing ‘FATTO IN ITALIA’ labels into clothes made in China, in order to charge thousands of pounds rather than a tenner for them. In order for fashion to survive, people have to get rid of perfectly good clothes and get new ones. If fashion was serious about destroying capitalism, it would start by destroying itself. No matter how designers may mewl about rebellion, the looters of the luxury boutiques of Paris and Milan have no illusions about what side the feeble freaks of fashion are on.
Comments