Saturday, Jul 5, 2008
In the fashion feudal system, it helps to be completely monomaniacal.
Mar 12, 2001 | It was the little dog that did it. The little dog and the little baby. The dog was a wild-eyed pug squirming in his oblivious owner's lap at the show for the Fake London collection, terrified by the bright spotlights and pounding bass lines. The baby, so young his head still needed to be supported, was being oohed and ahhed over at a fashion party as if he were a Vuitton graffiti bag, earning his mother a comparable number of status accessory points. Who, I wondered, would bring these fragile creatures into a hot, crowded room unsuitable for nervous systems even more delicate than a designer's?
My colleagues, as it turns out. But only a subset of the group, a subset beset with FOD (fashion-obsessive disorder) and hereupon referred to as FOEs (fashion-obsessed entities), a subset that migrates in clouds of parfum that you cannot buy, to places you may not visit, for events that are probably meaningless -- to you.
Through my work I've met many like myself who toil in the fashion vineyards. They include journalists, publicists, stylists, makeup artists, buyers and designers. Most are not unduly obsessed people for whom it is occasionally important to look fashionable. They will often, however, settle for throwing on anything that is clean and not notably laugh-provoking.
Twice a year, we gather together for the frenzy of London Fashion Week, a chaotic period during which London designers roll out their next season's collections (similar weeks take place in New York, Paris and Milan). There we are joined by a passel of FOEs, alien beings with preternatural standards of grooming who must never be seen without a minimum of three signifiers of up-to-the-minute fashion insiderdom. They serve to remind us that, in fashion terms at any rate, we disheveled peons are strictly low-count and no-rent.
These are not ladies of leisure, per se. Instead they are whirlwinds of sharp elbows and purposeful activity, filling sheets of heavy paper in chunky spiral-bound notebooks with sketches of the clothes annotated with brief descriptions ("lots of frills," "batwing!"). Some take a post-literate approach, holding tiny titanium digital cameras high above their heads to shoot the models as they come down the catwalk. And the minute the show is over their mobile phones are clamped to their heads to retrieve numerous urgent messages.
It has to be said that senior fashion editors of major newspapers and magazines, manifestly serious professionals, behave in much the same way, but somehow the FOEs give the impression that this runway work is perhaps a hobby, certainly nothing that would interfere with more interesting pursuits, like shopping. This has much to do with their enviable combination of ample time and ample money. Usually there's an independent income that enables these lean, mean consumption machines to be in it for the fun, the glamour and the sample sales. It is a closed world. A few of the FOEs surface in the gossip columns or open boutiques, but for the most part their names are unknown outside the magic circle, certainly to someone like me to whom they see no reason to introduce themselves.
The senior editors are often able to dress above their incomes -- thanks to generous discounts offered by friendly designers -- but they have a distressing tendency to let maintenance standards slip because of the necessity to meet deadlines. Plus, they often look -- I can hardly bring myself to utter this calumny -- tired. As for more junior staff, they find it impossible to live on what a low-level magazine job pays and buy shoes at prices equivalent to the deposit on a one-bedroom apartment. No one, with the exception of Carrie Bradshaw, a fictional construct, can support a serious shoe habit and an endless round of drinks, lunches and dinners on a journalist's income.
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