Fashion

If it’s a test of a good documentary series that it takes us deep into an unknown, even unimaginable world, then Inside Missguided: Made in Manchester passes with flying colours — especially for the more middle-aged viewer. Missguided, it turns out, is a fast-fashion company, which means that it spots what celebrities are wearing online and then designs, makes and sells much cheaper versions within days — all while indignantly denying the outrageous charge that ‘we just rip off other people’s designs’. The target market apparently consists of young women obsessed with Instagram and Love Island. And so, on the whole, does the staff, who have names like Treasure, Zee and Karolina, and are keen for us to understand how excited they are at all times.

If you study History of Art, people generally assume you’re a nice, conscientious, plummy-voiced girl. Sometimes, people are right. It is the only subject I can think of that requires a student to describe what is already printed on the exam sheet. ‘In the foreground of the picture is a tree — in full leaf! — and on the horizon, a tower.’ It feels a little basic. But with art history podcasts description is everything. And to do it well is a real art in itself. The presenters of the Art Newspaper’s The Week in Art podcast were superb last week in their exploration of a portrait by William Hogarth.

I think I probably qualify as the oldest fashion editor in the world, because in spite of my advanced age I am still writing about clothes (in the Oldie). This gives me one USP: it means that I was actually around — even wearing them myself — when the revolutionary fashion ideas that are now the stuff of museum exhibitions were being invented. Next month the Mary Quant exhibition opens at the V&A, and sure enough I have been asked to talk about those giddy times for a video that will be shown at the museum. I was 16 in the autumn of 1955 when Quant’s shop, Bazaar, first shocked the passers-by in the King’s Road, Chelsea, with its startling window displays. One of these featured a black-and-white gingham skirt.

Joy Villa shot to infamy in 2017 by donning a Make America Great Again dress. She set eyeballs rolling again last year with her pro-life fetus-in-the-womb outfit. How could she top that, you ask? Why, by dressing as the border wall of course! Her outfit included a barbed wire necklace, a Pink Floyd-inspired border wall gown and a MAGA handbag (handMAG?), and was designed by Desi Lee Allinger-Nelson. Cockburn caught up with Villa last night in New York to find out the gossip from the ceremony. ‘On the red carpet, I was getting a lot of side-eye from celebrities, which I kind of expected,’ she said. ‘Camila Cabello smiled at me, and Lele Pons, the YouTuber was really nice, she came up and was like “I love your dress, I’m in gold and you’re in silver!

Strange to think when you visit the Christian Dior show at the V&A that his time as designer was so very short. From the first show in 1947 when he brought the war to an end — at least in terms of clothes — with the New Look, to his sudden death at the age of 52 was just a decade. But in that brief time he brought about a revolution in fashion, creating some of the most beautiful dresses ever made for women, with a line that was wholly his own. It was both architectural and natural: the skirt of his celebrated Bar suit was based on the corolla of a flower. He was a creative genius, but also brilliant at PR and commercially astute, as you would be if you’d lived through the interesting times he had.

On 10 September 1973 the 1930s Kensington High Street department store formerly known as Derry & Toms reopened as Big Biba. It sold the dress designer Barbara Hulanicki’s distinctive look in furniture, paints and wallpaper, sports equipment and food, as well as her familiar fast fashion. If you had to define that aesthetic then, you’d have said it was campy and kitschy. But above all you’d have said it was deco, an increasingly familiar word for the between-wars moderne style in everything from buildings to jewellery. Derry & Toms itself was a 1933 moderne temple of commerce, slathered in stylised ironwork and bas-reliefs.

‘They did not look like women, or at least a stranger new to the district might easily have been misled by their appearance, as they stood together in a group, by the pit’s mouth.’ As opening sentences go this is a cracker, but few modern readers of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s That Lass O’Lowrie’s get far beyond it because the novel’s characters speak in a Lancashire dialect that makes Mark Twain’s Huck Finn sound like a Harvard preppy. In real life, though, it wasn’t the Lancashire pit girls’ lingo that put contemporaries off so much as their costume.

In 2004 Mexican art historians made a sensational discovery in Frida Kahlo’s bathroom. Inside this space, sealed since the 1950s, was an enormous archive of documents, photographs and personal possessions. This hoard forms the basis of Frida Kahlo: Making Herself Up, an exhibition at the V&A. Oscar Wilde once remarked that ‘one should either be a work of art or wear a work of art’. Kahlo opted for both, and she didn’t stop there. Though she was a Marxist who numbered Trotsky among her many lovers, she also channelled the role of saint and martyr. She was neater than Francis Bacon, whose studio-floor detritus has also been subjected to zealous forensic analysis — but the clutter Kahlo left behind her was similarly eclectic.

One of the prettiest pieces in the V&A exhibition Fashioned from Nature is a man’s cream waistcoat, silk and linen, produced in France before the revolution, in the days when men could give women a run for their money in flamboyant dress. It’s embroidered with macaque monkeys of quite extraordinary verisimilitude, with fruit trees sprouting all the way up the buttons. And what we know is that they were derived from the Comte de Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, of 1749–88.

One of the best things about Beehives, Bobs and Blow-dries — yep, an exhibition about hairdressing — is the reaction of visitors. Some are getting on a bit and their pangs of recognition as they pass 1970s straightening tongs or Carmen heated rollers are evident. One woman exclaimed, as she passed a Ronson hairdryer with its shower-cap hood, ‘Ooh, they were good, they were. We’ve only just got rid of my mum’s.’ A hairdresser called Keith from Wakefield observed of the Beatles era that it was a worrying time to begin with: ‘Nothing happened for about two or three months. Nobody came. We thought we’d lost our business. But it turned out that the men were just growing their hair. They came back when it was shoulder length.

Erté was destined for the imperial navy. Failing that, the army. His father and uncle had been navy men. There were painters and sculptors on his mother’s side, but they were thought very frivolous. Romain de Tirtoff (‘Erté’ came from the French pronunciation of his initials) was born in 1892 at the St Petersburg Naval School where his father Pyotr was inspector. When he was a little boy, his aunt bought him a set of wooden soldiers. Instinctively, he hated war, violence and, above all, uniforms. He burst into tears and threw the box out of the window. What he liked best was to play with his mother’s old perfume bottles, which he dressed in scraps of lace to make ballerinas.