The four day frenzy that is London Fashion Week (LFW) is upon us again – the bi-annual apparel circus where serious newspapers suddenly become fronted by a Hadid in a hat.
The hallowed Frow becomes a word every London cabbie pushes to the top of their topical vernacular, and know to hang around – or madly avoid – 180 The Strand, where the British Fashion Council set up luxury stalls for the best of British apparel brands to sell their wares, hopefully to the rest of the world.
Sometimes, it’s easy to forget that through all the party pictures, street style poseurs, celebrity scene stealing ‘lewks’ and quirky news segments on Prince Charles making a fashion line out of his stinging nettles (yep, its a thing), that LFW is actually a trade show.
The UK fashion industry is worth £26 billion annually, making LFW less glamour and more like the Hunger Games of selling.
I’ve been to a fair few fashion shows, and I’ve actually styled a few too. A word of advice – do not arrive late (even though they can run an hour late, leaving all those tiny fashionista bottoms getting sore on the very squashed benches). And if you’re doing the catwalk yourself, in front of the most critical eyes in the world, you will sense every side eye, every raised eyebrow, or just plain judgment.
To sit on the front row (Frow) is a marathon of effort. You need to look at least as good as the models (if not better) who have already been painted and brushed for two hours. The competition of who sits where is high, as it creates a visual pecking order. Those who make it now all hold their phones up filming the show, so anyone behind them can air-kiss goodbye to a full view.
You never see the great shoes from the cheap seats, and content is king if you are an Instagrammer that gets paid for your hot content.
A fashion week wardrobe can take as long to prepare as the whole thing lasts. One year I saw a now globally famous singer changing into her fifth Frow outfit of the day in the well-used loos. The energy at fashion week creates that kind of desperation – to be seen as a part of it at any cost.
And I’m sure that you’ve heard the stories of models eating cotton wool to keep themselves coat hanger thin, haven’t you? Despite calls for very thin models to be banned, a catwalk show will invariably be filled with extremely young and slim models.
Diversity and inclusion are the big buzz words this year but very rarely will you see a size 10 model (usual labelled ‘plus size’), which makes you question whether designers really represent the women they design for.
The competitive atmosphere is as suffocating as air in a designer perfume hall on a hangover. Everyone from magazine editors to international buyers have their best game faces on, with elbows freshly sharpened to jostle their way through to the money.
It means so much as one failed season could kill even a middle sized brand, and it’s not always obvious who is welding the most powerful sword – the editors are in competition with the influencers, the designers are up against each other, and the buyers want the most exclusive scoop to get the fashionistas all spending that 2.75 per cent on the wholesale mark up in their swanky stores.
It’s exhilarating and exhausting – a bit like Wembley market but with luxury carpet and lashings of champagne. The week is extremely intense, like a 15 minute speed date on the wheel of fortune. Months of work to get to that make or break performance, as if you’re auditioning to angry volatile gods for your right to stay alive for another six months.
No wonder it all has to look so unbelievably, unattainably beautiful. Despite the glamorous dream, the main purpose of catwalk shows is to sell us a fantasy: that life is one long, happy, sparkly party, but the waste is extraordinary.
Designers put meters of luxury carpet down as a runway that goes in the skip an hour later. Full set builds (of airports and supermarkets, if you’re Chanel) that simply get binned after.
At best, catwalks shows are like theatre, moment-defining art created by a team of brilliant leading creatives. At worst, they are just machines churning more stuff that the planet doesn’t need with ever increasing speed.
This season, Autumn/Winter 2020, might possibly be the most tricky the industry has ever faced. Post-Brexit, pre-global weather-and-resources apocalypse, with calls from Extinction Rebellion to cancel the whole thing, it seems slightly like fashion is looking less cool.
London Fashion Week has always been the most interesting but least financially reliable of the four established global fashion capitals – New York, Milan, Paris all flex bigger muscles than the UK as they actually manufacture their clothes. We increasingly do not, which isn’t a great position to be in right now and the fear is palpable.
Designers and their sales agents here are eternally terrified anyway that international buyers skip coming to the UK, as they ‘write’ (make their final purchasing decisions) in Paris, which is the last of the fashion cities to show.
So take all this fear, competition, uncertainty and mix it all together with toxic substances and a lot of very hangry, super image conscious people and you start to get the real picture behind the perfectly groomed image.
The stakes are high and so is the pressure. This year is the 10th anniversary of Alexander McQueen’s death; he apparently used to scream at people backstage because of the huge pre-show pressure he felt. In the end it was that pressure that has been blamed for his untimely death on 11 February 2010, one month before he had to reinvent his own wheel yet again.
Unlike actual art, fashion doesn’t stick around and mature in value. It is transient, uber fast paced and brutal, and it makes the people involved in it feel justified acting like that, too. As one infamous fashion PR said, ‘The fish rots from the head down’. Can anyone really be sane in an industry which in effect eats its own babies four times a year?
I love what clothes can do for people – wearing something you adore can be as powerful as a superhero’s cape, but I didn’t like the person I was when I was working in the fashion industry.
It brought out all of the worst parts of me: vanity, insecurity, arrogance. I cared too much about whether I had the right look, shoes and bag – more than I cared about my well-being. While fighting those internal battles it was hard to have empathy for the models and how they felt, which quite often is worse than they let on.
And more generally in the industry, I had to try and find a toughness I don’t have to just survive. If I didn’t work for free or next to nothing there would be someone else behind me that would, and, in the end that drove me insane, too.
They say that you can’t find a different answer if you keep using the same formula. Fashion is full of brilliant innovators and their job right now is to work out how fashion can survive far into the future – not just for a week.
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source https://metro.co.uk/2020/02/16/dont-fooled-glamour-london-fashion-week-desperate-toxic-marathon-12242352/
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