This has been an explosive time for fashion.
There were the shows, of course, and the spring collections racing into the shops, but I’m talking about the sheer volume of damaging exposure.
In no particular order, there’s The Model Agency, a fly-on-the-wall series currently showing on Channel 4; Great British Hairdresser, on E4; and John Galliano’s meltdown, resulting in his dismissal from Dior and fast-track to rehab.
All these stories from the front line of the business are connected because they remind us that fashion is not just a huge industry, and source of joy for millions, but, in some instances, a freak show. Not freak show in the Lady Gaga sense of the word — freak show as in twisted, ugly, out of control and not something you’d want your daughter anywhere near.
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Just to be clear — the majority of fashion people are lovely, hard-working human beings. But there are aspects of the industry that continue to creep us out (model clients insisting on girls with 31in hips, agencies “nurturing” girls from the age of 14, catwalk models staggering in shoes they can’t walk in and clothes they can’t breathe in), and there are people in the fashion world whose relationship with reality is warped to the point where the fun (despite our appetite for eccentricity) gets lost. Zoolander, hilarious. The Devil Wears Prada, funny. But turn the spotlight on some aspects of real-life fashion and it doesn’t look so fabulous.
Presumably Channel 4 commissioned The Model Agency because it wanted lots of bitch fights, tears and size-zero girls being told to lose weight. What it has got is much more boring yet, strangely, more disturbing: a lot of cold-eyed people pretending to be nice, and actually believing they are being nice, while treating very young girls like rapidly degrading commodities.
Meanwhile the star hairdresser James Brown, supervising the search for the next big stylist in Great British Hairdresser, makes the Child Catcher look cosy. In one episode, the contestants were encouraged to express their personalities in haircuts using real models with real hair.
When a few created flattering, shaggy dos, Brown descended on them like a velociraptor, challenging them to chop and shave and unleash their inner psycho — because making the girls look good is the kind of cop-out that makes a fashion maverick’s blood boil. Post lobotomy was what he was looking for; Frankenstein’s monster on acid; Girl Interrupted who somehow got hold of the wallpaper paste. Only those who signed up to the freak show were invited to stay.
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You may remember, years ago, Vivienne Westwood being wheeled onto a chat show, with some of her designs, for the audience to laugh at.
It was a sad, low point in the culture, now consigned to the dark ages before we became sophisticated fashion connoisseurs. Since then the pendulum has swung all the way in the opposite direction: now we are so in thrall to fashion’s alternative reality that the freak element has been allowed to multiply and mutate unchecked. We gape open-mouthed, nod and accept that if the weirder shores of fashion seem alien (I give you Galliano’s camp/grotesque turn at the end of his last couture show, a sure sign that all was not well if you live in the real world), it is not for us to question.
Maybe we needed to be reminded that extraordinary, daring, shocking are all legitimate fashion aspirations — for people and clothes — but freaks in a freak show? No. And we don’t have to pretend otherwise.