Tonight:
4°c
Even during a prosperous year, I have often felt that Paris Fashion Week, with its champagne parties, dark-windowed limos and fashion editors wasting thousands on handbags, teetered on the absurd. But this year it was like watching Louis XIV's court gorge themselves while the rest of the country starved.
I would have thought that at least a few designers could have shown some sympathy for the thousands of people now losing their jobs or homes. Instead, collective silence. A few fashion writers mentioned the Wall Street carnage, but flippantly: one compared the pillars of capitalism tumbling to fashion exploring “new geometry” (this about the Dries Van Noten show last Wednesday).
If the designers can't commiserate, perhaps they could at least come down to earth and display clothes that are a tiny bit more functional, things you could actually wear? No. Instead, Ungaro showed peacock-tailed skirts; Nina Ricci showed metallic robes; Lacroix an excess of ribbons and bows; and Dior something devastatingly politically incorrect called “Tribal Chic”.
John Galliano's black “tribal” model wore an orange mini-skirt: half a dozen African villages could live off the price of it for several years. The African drums rolled and Dita Von Teese and Harvey Weinstein went backstage to bow at Galliano's tiny feet.
This insensitivity gets more louche as times goes on. In the lean years after the Second World War, Christian Dior launched his New Look with a nod to the scarcity that had preceded it. His dresses were beautiful but he often said he designed them bearing in mind the hardship people had suffered. They were not outrageously expensive and they could be copied by local dressmakers.
Galliano and his clients neither know nor care about deprivation: their head girl is Carla Bruni Sarkozy. “The truth is, the downturn won't affect people like us,” a fashionista friend of mine told me grandly over an expensive dinner.
But it will filter down to them eventually. The advertising industry is one of the first to suffer in a downturn and even if the glossies are paying now for their editors live it up at the Bristol and the Ritz, that won't last. So my message to all those fashionistas living high on the hog and the designers drawing for the few hundred people worldwide who can buy their monstrosities is this: watch your step.
After all, Lehman Brothers executives never thought it could happen to them, either.
Reader views (1)
Most of these designers make hardly any profit from the actual clothes, they're mainly a loss-leader for the vast profits they make on scent. And the "secret" lines they do for the wealthy oil-rich arab ladies. I'll be happy when teenage girls stop thinking that a £1000 handbag is de rigeur. Most of them are ugly, too
- Lmd, London, 05/10/2008 01:21
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