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You would think, wouldn't you, that a city with the best fashion colleges in the world, the most creative designers in the world and the most vibrant street fashion in the world would be able to host a fashion week that it could be proud of.
And it does — but for how much longer? The future of London Fashion Week hangs in the balance.
Dark forces are threatening to squeeze it from six days to a meagre four.
On one side, the Council of Fashion Designers of America wants to push New York Fashion Week back by seven days so that their designers have more time to prepare. On the other, the organisers of Milan and Paris Fashion Weeks refuse to shift their dates back correspondingly. The result? A London event so thin that, if it were a model, it would be banned.
Some say it is the fault of the Americans, whose flaccid eight-day schedule could easily be condensed into six were it not for the power of its designers — or, specifically, their advertising clout. Some say it is the Italians, who refuse to budge because it suits them not to. And some say it is the British Fashion Council, whose 25th anniversary was honoured by a glittering reception at Downing Street last night.
There are those critics who believe that the BFC should be fighting harder for London's cause, others who think it is a lost cause because in financial terms we simply aren't as powerful as the other cities.
Whatever transpires at today's summit meeting between leading figures from the heads of the respective design councils, it is certainly a dent to London's ego that it should even have to consider being curtailed.
This is the city that gave the world John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Christopher Bailey, Hussein Chalayan, Stella McCartney and Vivienne Westwood: why should its wings be clipped? And what hope has the next generation of designers of being seen on a global platform if London Fashion Week is shortened by a third? Inevitably, a third fewer designers will gain a slot on the schedule.
Believe it or not, the fashion industry is the second largest employer in the UK — worth a total of £40 billion. Yet still it is treated as some kind of niche market. The press isn't always supportive; at times it seems so fiercely critical that industry insiders despair. This doesn't happen in other countries, because other countries don't have the same love/hate relationship with fashion.
At its very core, Britain is distrustful of anything too creative. We don't like people to be too different — it scares us — and fashion people, on the surface at least, are too different, in their silly, expensive clothes that reek of vanity and foolishness.
From the letters I have received from readers, and the feedback I have received from employers over the years, I can't help but conclude that some women — and men — view fashion as downright evil, a malevolent force that will suck out their souls like some designer-clad Dementor.
Little wonder that in Britain fashion isn't taken seriously as an art form: it is more likely to be laughed at than revered. It took Sex and the City, an American TV show, to convince British newspapers that fashion was worth giving space to, and that was only because a bunch of male editors woke up one day and realised that women did, in fact, have money to spend, and that most of us wanted to spend it on £300 shoes.
Unlike the French and Italians, who happily save up for a designer item that they believe to be of superlative quality, the British tend to think that catwalk clothes are a rip-off, although they are quite happy to buy something copied from Luella Bartley for £25 on the high street. Our high-street fashion is the best in the world, but it owes no small debt to the British designers whose work it copies shamelessly. Happily, in recent years the high street has taken on a far more supportive role: witness Topshop's support of New Generation designers at London Fashion Week, or New Look's collaboration with Giles Deacon. But this is not mere altruism: of course, there is something in it for them.
What beggars belief is that, at a time when London Fashion Week is under threat, there are politicians like London Assembly Member Dee Doocey, someone who knows less about the fashion industry than a house fly, calling for London's Mayor to take away a £4.2 million, three-year grant from the BFC because it failed to ban size zero models from appearing at London Fashion Week. That the event is under fire from other cities is predictable: that it is under fire from someone representing our own is depressing beyond belief.
Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the fashion industry knows that issuing models with health certificates is completely unworkable. There is also the not insignificant fact that the models on London's catwalks are like Beth Ditto compared to the models in Milan and Paris. But Milan and Paris wouldn't sabotage their own fashion weeks by allowing some two-bit politician to raise her profile in the media by jumping on a bandwagon she doesn't fully understand.
The reason catwalk models are so thin is not because British designers say so. If British designers were that powerful, London Fashion Week wouldn't be facing the scheduling issues it is now. Catwalk models are thin because the big international designers dictate it by restricting their clothing samples to a certain size. Nobody names these designers for the simple reason that they need their money.
It's all about the money — and money is always power. Look at the esteem in which Christian Dior (designed by a Brit, incidentally) is held by the French government. The president's wife, Carla Bruni Sarkozy, dressed for her state visit to the UK in head-to-toe Dior not on a whim but because such publicity is good for Dior, ergo good for the French economy. I can't imagine the same thing happening here. Sarah Brown might get away with wearing a bit of LK Bennett but if she wore Giles Deacon, she would probably be lynched.
There are a lot of things I don't understand about Britain's strange and twisted relationship with fashion but here is one thing that I do. Regardless of whether the Mayor deprives London Fashion Week of a £4.2 million grant, regardless of whether London Fashion Week runs for four days instead of six, it will still survive.
In the international fashion firmament, we have always been the underdog. We thrive on it. Government support will come and go, but London's creativity is constant, unassailable and unique.
Reader views (1)
What a load of balderdash all this Fashion business is. All a man needs is a jacket and a pair of trousers. All a woman needs is some "glamorous" underwear and a dress!
To hell with all this fashion !!!
- Alan Niblett, Bromley, London, UK, 16/09/2008 10:09
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