ARTS
Fashion
Wet and dry
John Thackara
This autumn's fashion shows have com- pleted a remarkable counter-revolution in Britain's formerly innovative rag trade. Like hapless intellectuals at Stalinist show trials, one 'street' designer after another has recanted. 'You have to work within the Establishment,' says one-time enfant terri- ble John Galliano, inventor of upside- down jackets and wild, Bacchanalian cat- walk shows; 'All that rebelling and knock- ing down doors, and doing things that shock people — it doesn't get you any- where.' Miss Katharine Hamnett, who once wore a No Nukes T-shirt on a visit to Downing Street, and supported all things green and progressive, now tells City Limits that she 'finds all those old feminists really boring', and that while 'it's a pity the unemployed can't afford my clothes. . . I felt it was time to get serious and fresh. . . I didn't want to be seen to be kicking the system in the same way, because you get sore feet'.
As with many counter-revolutions, however, the cost to our fashion industry is likely to be high. With the possible excep- tion of Marks & Spencer underpants, the British are not very good at mainstream, serious clothing design: we're best known abroad either for timeless, craft-based clas- sics such as Burberry overcoats, Harris tweeds, Church's shoes, cashmere jum- pers, and Savile Row suits — or, at the other extreme, for exciting, unpredictable street styles created by the impecunious young. Britain's haute couture is perceived abroad to be comparable to our sexual prowess — uninspiring; we do not compete with the big international empires of Valentino, St Laurent and Chanel. One indication of our insignificance interna- tionally: the whole of British fashion week had to be put back a day, at immense cost, because Italy's Mr Valentino threw a din- ner party which no buyer or editor was prepared to miss just to come to London.
The Government treats fashion as a cultural anomaly, rather like Trooping the Colour — good entertainment for tourists, and best left to the royals. Ministers make ritual visits to fashion jamborees to egg everyone on, but in contrast to the huge government-backed organisations that sup- port fashion on the Continent, their prac- tical contribution is minute: this year, a 1100,000 donation to the industry's coun- cil. Even this gesture is of dubious value: one leading designer, while conceding that 'we're all Thatcherites now', said this year's visiting minister, the hapless Giles Shaw, came across as 'a complete buffoon'. And Bruce Oldfield, one of the industry's brighter and more ambitious empire buil- ders, says, 'Government seems to be terri- fied of getting too close to a bunch of limp-wristed incompetents — but our in- dustry is a billion-pound exporter and does an incredible amount for Britain's image abroad.'
And there, for Government, is the rub. Although fashion is a cultural as well as a manufacturing industry, it cannot prosper on image alone. Spiky hair and pierced nipples may contribute to our reputation for trendiness, but they don't get textiles made to a decent standard, or replace the chronic shortage of skilled cutters, most of whom are immigrants even now. But the dry position is that fashion is less a manu- facturing than a post-industrial marketing operation, in the same mould as music, advertising and tourism. Labour, inter- estingly seems to share this view; saying design is 'as near a consensus issue as you'll get', it recognises that fashion seems to provide some kind of ineffable psychic nutrition, and has made dress a central plank of its modernisation programme. It seems torn, however, between a desire to make its members look reassuringly like sales representatives, in the mould of Mr Hatton, and a drive towards new voters — Youth, and the City: hence Mr Kinnock's suits, and his ties.
The wet strategy for fashion, which is just as bad, is to try and turn fashion designers into manufacturers, technicians and businessmen by clamping down on art college curriculums, or by closing them down altogether. Moulding art education to the needs of manufacturing may appear an attractive industrial policy, but consider the consequences: it will dry up the supply of pop stars, copywriters, video artists and designers upon which fashion and the service sector depends. The eager involve- ment of foreigners and oilmen in our fashion industry today proves that there will always be plenty of entrepreneurs to exploit our creative talent; remove the supply of talent, and they will go else- where.
Mind you, in fashion, as in all the arts, the line dividing good-natured iconoclasm from degenerate pastiche is a thin one. One distasteful example this year — a display of banal choreography mounted by a well-known design team called Body Map. Only recently rescued from bank- ruptcy by a misguided backer, Body Map's show was memorable only for the Kafka- esque zombies which carried the inert and passive bodies of models from the stage. Is this perhaps a fitting metaphor for the creative crisis afflicting this once vibrant branch of design? The fact that this inept performance was greeted by bouquets, still wrapped in clingfilm, being thrown onto the stage, confirmed one's fear that in fashion, creativity is in danger of congeal- ing into mere performance.
The weakness of British fashion is that despite turning its back on the craft tradi- tions for which it is best known, it has not developed an alternative design tradition of the kind that the Japanese now enjoy. While Mr Issey Miyake, for example, has developed an alternative to Parisian haute couture, drawing partly on the traditions of native costume, British design (in contrast, interestingly, to our burgeoning new sculp- .ture) has become steadily more obsessed with appearances. The importance to most of our designers of sophisticated public relations is one example of this; the critical atrophy which afflicts most of the fashion press is another. It seems to be taken for granted that the job of fashion journalists is to concentrate on the sellable, not the cerebral — to select and promote new products to consumers. Most fashion jour- nalists thought privately that this year's shows were pretty dire, but their published reports were anodyne. Perhaps it was always thus. In his otherwise impenetrable Fashion System Roland Barthes observed that 'industrial society is obliged to form consumers who don't calculate; if clothing's producers and consumers had the same consciousness, clothing would be bought only at the slow rate of its dilapida- tion'. The trouble is that while consumers may not calculate, governments do — trying to eradicate fashion's undisciplined and subversive ways, when they are an essential part of its character; and attemp- ting to subsume an art into a management activity, when the two are complementary.
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