Clothes you can’t bear
I THINK it is time we had a little chat. By the level of frustration vented in the letters that arrive in this office, it is clear to me that it is time to point out the futility of challenging the ongoing love affair between youth and fashion.
It seems baby boomers are particularly upset about not being the focus of fashion, and rightly so, considering astronomical property prices in most cities mean they are the only ones with a disposable income to spend on clothes.
I am quite certain, however, that the baby boomers are not the first generation to face this problem. I’m sure the 50-year-old Parisian women of 1947 saw Christian Dior’s New Look with a tiny cinched waist and full skirt and deemed it unsuitable for them, and that the parents of baby boomers thought the same of miniskirts in the 1960s. (Those skirts were worn by Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton, who were as skinny as the girls modelling today, and much skinnier than supermodels of the ’90s such as Cindy Crawford, which points to the cyclical nature of trends rather than to a particular moral decay within the fashion industry.)
In fact, this enduring affair goes back further: consider Marie Antoinette, the teenage French queen who was lovingly adorned by her couturiers. In the early 1900s, designer Paul Poiret survived on patronage from the likes of celebrated actor Rejane and the attractive heiress Peggy Guggenheim. The actor Sarah Bernhardt was also fan, although she was over 60, which proves that wearing challenging fashion (Poiret was the man who dumped the petticoat and the corset) is not necessarily restricted by age, but by attitude.
Most designers create with their ideal body in mind, sometimes a young model or an older actor with a spooky tendency to avoid ageing at any (medical) cost. It has always been so and, thanks to the invention of Botox, I suspect it always will be. Fashion and its favoured nymphs push the boundaries of what we will wear, moving fashion forward, which is of course its sole purpose, while the rest of us play catch-up with our clothes. And there is a very big difference between fashion and clothes.
A good example of clothes is the Country Road top I wear when I push my infants around in the pram. It gives a nod to contemporary trends with the sleeves that blouse out at the elbow, but it’s not going to draw a sideways glance from perplexed onlookers. It’s safe and it was cheap. Which brings us to another hard truth: a false economy has been created thanks to a bottomless labour market in China, and clothes have become very cheap. But even if we ignore the shadow of sweatshops that looms over the low price tags, at some point we will have to consider whether it is reasonable to expect to pay less for a top than the cost of the petrol used to get it to the store.
But I digress. A good example of fashion is Hussein Chalayan, a designer who once turned skirts into coffee tables, used computer chips to undress women through the ages of fashion by turning a Victorian look into a flapper dress in seconds before an audience, and recently made a statement about the environment with a dress that lit up and played its own movie through the magic of LED technology. This is not the designer to please the women who write in to this publication and others complaining that they are over 30, have arms for arms rather than sticks and bottoms rather than pinheads, and can find nothing to wear.
Nor is Balenciaga’s Nicolas Ghesquiere, although there is plenty to wear from his latest collection if you like tight little peek-shouldered jackets in purple or pink, or jodhpur-like pants. My description really doesn’t do the pieces justice, but the point is Ghesquiere and John Galliano push the boundaries, often outrageously, and they garner the most attention as a result. Should the sports pages of a national newspaper devote stories to the local soccer team (the equivalent of clothes) over the Socceroos (the equivalent of fashion)?
Or think of fashion in terms of music, and fashion weeks as the industry equivalent of a dance music festival. It is unlikely there is going to be much on the program of those gatherings for you if you are middle-aged. You might struggle with the notion of your offspring paying good money to watch a man called a DJ spin records, and you may also very reasonably judge the fashions worn by skinny girls on the catwalks to be ridiculous. It’s important to remember it is not meant to be taken literally. And that, just as the DJ’s influence might filter down in a more palatable manner into the style of music you prefer, the trends shown on the catwalk will turn up in the clothes you wear.
We need designers to challenge the way we think about clothes and it’s quite right that the majority will find fashion confronting. We’d still be wearing corsets and petticoats if they didn’t.