Mad, bad fashion

In the twenty-five years I’ve worked in glossy fashion magazines and ‘luxury lifestyle’, I’ve seen fashion go from an entertaining diversion that influenced how one got dressed in the morning, to a global phenomenon melding art, craft, cult, obsession and commerce into mass hysteria. It has almost nothing to do with what ordinary women wear anymore – in fact, if you love clothes, as I do, you will almost certainly dislike ‘high fashion'.

When I started my first job on Tatler magazine the It bag hadn’t been invented and ‘designer brands’ were not even a twinkle in Bernard Arnault’s eye. Of course, women of intelligence were interested in and sometimes revered the high priests and priestesses of fashion – Coco Chanel, Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent. But it wasn’t until the late Nineties that the ‘fashionista’ was born. Just as the ‘muso’, often male, sought out obscure, difficult, discordant bands to become expert on as a badge of pride and belonging, so this new breed of female fangirl put time and effort into sourcing obscure, difficult, discordant designers and wearing their often challengingly ugly clothes, thus proving membership of an exclusive club which ‘got’ fashion in a way the rest of us never could.

Over the years I’ve seen apologists for the sheer mind-blowing expense of ‘designer’ products point to the craftsmanship and time devoted to, for example, the production of an Hermès Birkin. I’ve read countless articles riffing on the said Birkin as if, instead of being a great clunking status symbol for the metaphysically insecure, it is somewhere between a life raft for poor little rich girls gone adrift and an objet d’art it is an honour and a privilege to own.

I’ve observed brands like Chanel, Dior, Gucci and Vuitton brand everything from sofas to sunglasses to skis to scent to maximise profits and a whole generation of gormless consumers around the world buy into the fake self-actualisation the brands claim to bestow. And at the height of the recession, I’ve seen bling replaced by so-called stealth wealth, as the world’s UHNWs grew nervous about advertising their conspicuous consumption.

I’ve watched as models get thinner, younger and more miserable, while a sexless, joyless, jolie laide aesthetic of jutting hip bones, vacant expressions and unflattering clothes dominates the fashion coverage of upmarket women’s magazines. I’ve been bemused and appalled by fashion shows featuring models who look like bruised and beaten sex workers, and I’ve switched off from the acres and acres of geeky catwalk reportage which accompanies Fashion Month every year.

You could say I am over fashion. So Karl Lagerfeld’s Chanel show for Paris Fashion Week, set in an invented supermarket full of Chanel-branded groceries, was not exactly the final nail in the coffin – more an objective confirmation that fashion really has lost the plot. It’s hard to imagine anything more offensively let them eat cake-ish than Lagerfeld’s supermarket. The global superrich in his FROW, eying up the collection with a view to placing bulk orders from one of their many homes in Russia, China or the Middle East, are not women who push trolleys round their local supermarket, wondering whether to stick to Sainsbury’s Value brand, or push the boat out and buy Taste the Difference.

To my mind it is insulting to make a playground or theme park out of ordinary people’s daily struggle to feed and care for their families. And for those hard-working professional women running a career and family who might conceivably have the funds to invest in a couple of good pieces of Chanel each year, the spectacle of models drifting aimlessly around a supermarket in designer sunglasses is almost as crassly out of touch.

Karl, now 80, may be a very great fashion designer but he is no social critic, as Culture Whisper discovered when we spoke to an insider at Chanel. ‘There is no message,’ she told us. ‘Karl wanted to create something provocative and special, but he knows about clothes, he doesn’t know about real life. He just wants to make people dream.’

In fact, Lagerfeld is a master of the contrarian, politically incorrect remark, which has, until now at least, only increased the mystique attached to his design genius and the decidedly BDSM fashion mistress he serves. ‘To do this job,’ he once said, ‘you must be able to accept injustice. If you want social justice, be a public servant. Fashion is ephemeral, dangerous and unfair.’

I don’t begrudge Lagerfeld his magnificently old-school approach; he is 80, after all. But he is being left behind by a new mood which might just steer the luxury fashion brand juggernaut into the 21^st century. The zeitgeist demands that fashion brands, like all other global brands, engage with civic responsibility, ethical, traceable production and the size of their environmental footprint – or risk losing the young, hip, albeit aspirant consumers that make them desirable in the first place.

As Stella McCartney put it, ‘It seems to me that fashion is the last industry on the planet to address ethics. That’s something I hate about my industry. Sometimes you get the idea that all these designers are up on their high horses looking down on mere mortals, saying, “F_uck it, it’s fur, it’s beautiful darling!” Those people are out of touch.’

Kate Ancketill is the CEO of retail foresight consultancy GDR Creative Intelligence. ‘We’ve just covered a trend called 'Provenance as a Sales Tool',’ she tells me. ‘It references case studies like fashion website Zady.com in the US which makes all its suppliers sign contracts promising products were handmade locally, and Fairphone in the Netherlands which uses conflict free minerals in the production of a new smartphone.

‘The working conditions of the real human beings who made the product are the marketing story. This isn't peripheral. It's rapidly becoming a key requirement for brands marketing to millenials.’

Vogue’s Conde Nast College of Fashion and Design takes the trend seriously enough to set it as a subject for Twitter debate, asking, ‘Where an item of clothing comes from now plays a crucial role in fashion marketing. How do you think this impacts the consumer?’

Where once Stella McCartney’s insistence on avoiding leather and fur seemed niche and even a little pretentious, mainstream examples of ethical fashion now abound. They range from the Ethical Fashion Initiative, a program run by Simone Cipriani under the auspices of the United Nations and the World Trade Organisation which loops African craftswomen into the luxury supply chain, to the Ethical Fashion Show in Berlin in January this year. Just as telling is the way the absence of black faces on the world’s catwalks is now reported as an example of blatant racism, where before it would have been ignored, and the delight that met fashion designer Carrie Hammer’s use of a model in a wheelchair for her New York Fashion Week show in February.

Susie Bubble, whose 222,000 followers on Twitter make her one of the world’s most influential fashion bloggers, recently posted an interview with Orsola de Castro – founder of upcycling label From Somewhere, and curator of British Fashion Council’s eco fashion initiative Esthetica. ‘As a consummate fashion enthusiast and staunch defender of the positives of the industry,’ wrote Susie, ‘it doesn’t feel cool or clever to pretend that fashion is nothing but a bundle of laughs – that everything is fabulous and anything that isn’t can be swept under the carpet.’ And she went on to quote de Castro, who argued ‘Fashion developed a language which made the word “sustainable” and “artisan” sound dirty. Fashion is the only world where being “worthy” is a negative thing. Things are changing now. Values have shifted and now to stand for something is a good thing. The fashion industry is fantastically predictable in its cyclical nature. When it is political, fashion works very well – look at the women in the French Revolution or during the suffragette period. Inevitably, for the next generation of fashion, this will come around again.’

Perhaps you’re cynical about how any of this breast-beating about the means of fashion’s production can possibly make a difference to the buying habits of theladies in Chanel’s FROW. Well, brand analysts call it the halo effect. When young, hip consumers in East London or Greenwich Village aspire to a brand like Burberry, it gains an aura of cool that in turn makes it desirable to the world’s superrich. Burberry, Chanel, Dior, Hermes and Gucci have already bought heavily into a creed of heritage, tradition, artisanship and quality which has everything in common with hipster authenticity (think hand-reared bicycles and limited-edition loaves). To retain that millennial audience, the fashion houses must now engage with their ethical concerns.

And fashion can be a force for good – as the FT's thoughtful fashion editor Vanessa Freidman wrote this month in her coverage of the Showcase of Ukraine Fashion Talent. Was it 'an example of fashion’s self-absorption and lack of sensitivity when it comes to the thorny issues of the world?' she asked. Not at all. The show constituted an 'act of defiance' – because 'with a needle, thread and some material, you can start a business'.

Like football, fashion has gone from beautiful game to a crass, corrupt, exploitative commercial enterprise in which talent (RIP L'Wren Scott) is often crushed. It doesn't have to be that way – but no-one seems to have told Karl.