CRAIG BROWN: Good news for scruffs like me – we’re in fashion
Decades ago, I worked at the glossy monthly magazine Tatler. My job — which largely consisted of writing amusing captions and punning headlines for party photographs — took at most two hours a month, but I was employed for eight days a month, so I had plenty of time on my hands.
I found the comings and goings at the fashion department particularly diverting. Skinny models arrived clutching folders, and then had to stand by while people from the fashion and art departments flicked impassively through their photographs, brutal customs officers at the barriers to the world of glamour.
Equally fascinating were the fashion designers themselves. These men and women, with names familiar from their own designer labels, would pop their heads round the door from time to time, in order to schmooze and be schmoozed by the fashion editors.
Models on the catwalk at the recent Prada show in Milan wore clothes made from a paper-based fabric that comes pre-creased and crumpled
What surprised me most about them was that, when it came to clothes, they seldom practised what they preached. They never seemed to go to any effort. Not for them the absurdly expensive clothes they urged other people to wear. Instead, like priests in civvies, they opted for scuzzy T-shirts and hand-me-down denims.
From my detached position, I felt they weren’t playing the game. It was like spotting a butcher tucking into a lentil bake, or a peacock at closing time at a stately home nipping behind a bush and emerging as a thrush, or an astronaut changing out of his spacesuit into leisurewear the moment he closes the rocket door.
Is it not a bit hypocritical to make a fortune selling expensive, and often ludicrous, clothes to your customers while opting to wear any old stuff yourself?
Forty years on, there are at last signs that the fashion world is beginning to come clean.
Models on the catwalk at the recent Prada show in Milan wore clothes made from a paper-based fabric that comes pre-creased and crumpled. This meant they all looked as though they’d been on a long country ramble.
To show this shabby effect was intentional — rather than the result of a last-minute rush to a charity shop — the catwalk was covered in brown paper, while the front-row benches, where the boot-faced ‘A’‑list of film stars and fashion editors sit, were topped with corrugated cardboard.
‘The clothes are about simplicity,’ explained Miuccia Prada after the show, ‘No embellishment but traces of living — clothes shaped by humanity.’
‘Shaped by humanity’ will surely come to be seen as one of the great euphemisms of our time, a get-out clause for scruffs the world over.
To show this shabby effect was intentional — rather than the result of a last-minute rush to a charity shop — the catwalk was covered in brown paper
Chastised by headmasters for ink stains on their jackets, and mud on their trousers, schoolboys will now be able to say, ‘But, sir — I’ve been shaped by humanity!’
Shane MacGowan, Albert Steptoe, Dennis the Menace, Jeremy Clarkson, Stan Ogden, Boris Johnson, Just William, Worzel Gummidge, Jeremy Corbyn, Leo Tolstoy, Wayne and Waynetta Slob, the Gallagher brothers: all of them ‘shaped by humanity’.
I, too, have been shaped by humanity, and not only shaped by it but scuffed and scuzzed by it, too. Most of my clothes, except, of course, for socks and pants, are second-hand, or ‘vintage’ as it’s now called.
In our house, we have never owned an iron, let alone an ironing board. A cartoon in Private Eye some years ago depicted a line of clean-cut men in smart suits and ties alongside a single man with a two-day beard and unkempt hair, wearing an old pair of pyjamas. A supervisor puts his head around the door, and asks ‘Which one of you is the freelance?’
Having always been freelance, I identify with that man. Why change out of your pyjamas when there’s no need?
I sometimes think King Charles III’s double-breasted suits look a touch too spick-and-span
On the other hand, it would be a shame if all designers went the way of Prada. I sometimes think King Charles III’s double-breasted suits look a touch too spick-and-span. Paradoxically, he is too well-dressed to be well-dressed.
But at least he makes an effort. If he were to appear at his first State Opening of Parliament as King not in his formal robes and crown but in an anorak and a beanie, it just wouldn’t be the same.
Those of us who prefer to live as scruffs need others to dress up, or else there is no point in our little rebellions. And if the top fashion designers can’t be relied upon to set us an example, then who on earth can?
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