I was therefore bowled over on reading an article by Giles Coren in The Times on this very subject. He is one of my favourite columnists - his restaurant reviews are often laugh-out-loud and his recent book 'How to Eat Out' is excellent. He is, I think, one of the most outspoken voices of his generation with a very fine turn of phrase, and a worthy son of the late Alan Coren. This article, despite being behind a paywall, has generated a deluge of comments, almost all in support of his analysis. In my view it is a brilliant indictment of the 'fashion business' as well as being an exemplar of an opinion piece.
His skill as a journalist is the one of the reasons Im a subscriber to the online version of The Times. I cannot recommend his work enough - so if that's enough plugging, I hope he would forgive any possible breach of copyright if I reproduce most of his article : I hope you enjoy it -
"What a week of rotten, simpering awfulness"
Well, thank God London Fashion Week is over for another season. Ye Gods, what a procession of vain lunacy and simpering dimness. What a mockery of all that is modest and decent. What a hideous picture of female priorities and preoccupations. What a nuclear explosion of vomitous superficiality, custom-made and hand-finished to blast the public perception of women back to the Stone Age.
It sickens me at the best of times to see those poor, emaciated girls staggering down the runway with their stomachs rumbling and their eyes sunken in from misery and hunger and boredom, their breath humming like dog food from the ketosis, and their bony ankles rolling over on shoes designed by woman-hating fops with silly hair and meaningless Sanskrit tattoos, whose every stitch is a blow struck at the gender they despise because they were not born into it, men who will end up suicides — because they always do — or shot dead or rasping abuse at Jews in late-night Paris bars, but in the meantime fill their days with the construction of supernaturally ugly garments that vast marketing operations will hypnotise women all over the world into thinking they want to buy (and the clothes are ugly — my wife has two kinds of outfit in her wardrobe, “nice” and “fashionable”, the twain neither meet nor even know the other is alive, so if she comes out for dinner looking a total fright, I know she is wearing serious kit that is bang on the moment, and if she comes out looking beautiful, I know she has just thrown on any old thing).
And in the front row, watching these poor, exploited anorexic women, mouths open, eyes aflame with cupidity, pictured on the front row of all the papers, every single goddamn day of London Fashion Week, the dregs of society’s shallowest echelon, gawping down the runway towards the cameras: pop singers, actors, TV presenters, footballers’ wives, the cast of Downton Abbey, Sienna Miller, Harry Styles, Alexa Chung, Kate Moss with her brutish pout and lobotomy eyes sitting with the rabbit-faced Jagger girl, Daisy Lowe, Sadie, Pixie, Suki . . . all dressed up like shiny bag-ladies in the things they get given for free that do not fit and look like crap anyway but will persuade people like you to buy them with money you do not have, for fear of missing out.
All of them, all these idiots, are complicit in proliferating the onanistic culture of disposability — this ludicrous fantasy that clothes should be thrown away and replaced every few months, though they have not worn out — that makes the big fashion houses and their gruesome commercial partners rich beyond your nightmares and leads directly, directly, to the exploitation of child workers in the developing world and the deaths of hundreds of impoverished souls every time their miserable factories collapse.
It is not initially at the top end that the damage is done: the eye-watering cost of “pieces” and concomitantly small number of consumers means that the social, environmental and human costs are relatively low (that small top tier was fashion’s only market for most of human history — albeit turning over more slowly, by the century at first, then by the decade, by the year, and now by the month, by the week . . .) but at the bottom end, where the emaciated values and grand fickleness of high fashion filter down to people who cannot afford more than a couple of quid a garment, that is where the damage is done.
That is where Primark and Matalan and Bonmarché come in, providing bog-cheap fashion for people with very little money who still want to throw away their clothes six times a year and start again, just like Gwyneth and Cara and Poppy, which means the clothes must be produced at labour costs beneath what is humanly decent, or even possible. Which means Bangladesh, children, hundreds dead or thousands, as at Rana Plaza in April this year. Fashion is a pretty face with a sick and rotten heart.
The British fashion industry will argue that LFW creates jobs. But so does war. So does cancer.
The fashion junkies will scream, “But London Fashion Week is a great spectacle!” And for whom do you suppose this spectacle is put on? It is sure as hell not for you. Here is The Times fashion editor, Laura Craik (whom I no more blame for the fashion industry, I should point out, than I blame Ann Treneman for our crappy government or myself for the awfulness of most restaurants) explaining in Wednesday’s paper why this is “London’s moment” for fashion: “Partly it’s because wealthy consumers are ever more obsessed with the new: that elite band of Russian, Chinese and Middle Eastern customers who can drop £2,000 on a dress . . . they want clothes that make a statement, and they find them in London.”
How does that make you feel? Does it make you feel proud that we can glean a few quid by putting on a show for the molls of foreign gangsters? That Russian, Chinese and Saudi “businessmen” who have made their fortunes raping the natural resources of their lawless homelands, exploiting their prehistoric employment legislation and revelling in the money-making opportunities afforded by their dismal human rights records, can send their wives to Britain — when they are bored with their moaning and want more time with their mistresses and catamites — on the pretext that it’s a good place to buy dresses? Beautiful, expensive, “statement” dresses, that are these women’s only compensation for the sad, powerless, cosseted and miserable lives into which their determination to marry a rich man has delivered them?
For make no mistake, those are the people all this is for. These sad, anorexic girls hobbling up and down the catwalks under the gaze of airhead actresses and middle-aged writers and celebrities who should know better than to “team” (hateful new verb of the fashion kakistocracy) biker boots with a miniskirt and show off their ancient knees . . . it is for the foreign criminals who own our country now but do not live in it, who buy up our loveliest houses in our loveliest London squares and then leave them to appreciate on the market while festering in the flesh, with nothing but a lonely Filipina maid standing guard, staring timidly out of a top-floor window, phone in hand, ready to call the private armed response firm if a security light comes on.
London Fashion Week is the grease on the cogs of the global machine that ensures that rich foreign money gets spent on pointless things and Third World paupers keep on dying. And it is the fault of women.
This is how women are destroying the world. Men may be doing it with nerve gas and complex financial instruments, but women are doing it with fashion. After all, they do not dress for us. They dress for each other. They are always saying so. And to create the endless supply of clothes that women need to show each other how nice their clothes are today, the global catastrophe of fashion must be perpetuated.
It may be true that if women ruled the world there would be no wars. But if men ruled the world, there would be no fashion. And the outcome for the greater part of humanity would be very much the same.
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