I’ve been inside the beastly womb of fashion for about a year now. I’ve sat and observed; I’ve designed; I’ve written. The pre-conceptions about fashion are wrong. The image presented to you in The Devil Wears Prada is nowhere near true. It’s as true as the words of a song being uttered by any plastic sycophantic pop star. Ugly Betty is no better. None of that fashion-on-TV crap is (the closest is The Rachel Zoe project, a show about fashion-addicted lady who goes into credit card debt to buy fashion and uses phrases like “I DIE“. She‘d be an internet meme if the creators of memes didn‘t wear t-shirts made out of bedcovers and masturbate to Samus Aran.
); because to really understand fashion– to understand the addictive and terrible reality of fashion, you have to be in it.

There’s no point on getting into the clichés of fashion-on-TV. Yeah, there’s the Anna-Wintour-like boss who’s the boss-from-hell-demanding-a-copy-of-the-eighth-Harry Potter-book. There’s the gay man who dresses horribly; although Joe Public probably thinks that it’s “fashionable”. There’s the fashion designer….some catty bitch who talks about “inspiration”. Most importantly, there is the moral which the fashion-on-TV show tries to teach: whether it be “Fashion doesn’t like fat people so you should like fat people and fashion is bad and evil blah blah blah”, and “Fashion is a vindictive machine that takes you away from reality”. And the audience, dull as they are, nods sagely at the show feeling smug about themselves because they’re not in “the gosh darn fashion business.”
Essentially, apart from The Rachel Zoe project: the greatest show on earth, most of these shows pander to Joe Public and Mary Average in all their polo wearing glory.

On the other side of the fence; let’s call it The Fabric Curtain, lies the fashion people. On the most extreme side of the fence lies the tools of fashion: blazer-and-tights wearing tools who follow trends like a executive follows a golden carrot. They probably post on lookbook.nu; even though some genuinely creative people post there as well– sometimes amazing people. (I’ve become kind of addicted to this site, I admit…for better or for worse). These tools go to lookbook.nu and post their blazer-and-tights with the caption “UGLY FACE, UGLY LEGS” and get about 50 votes, because they’re trendy-brain-dead-sympathy-whores. Or if it’s a guy, it’ll be skinny jeans and wayfarers. Not that I have a problem with either skinny jeans or wayfarers, I happen to own a pair of each (although the wayfarers are proud fakes, and I bought them because Bob Dylan wore them and looked damn good in them; not because some stupid model or “celebrity” wore them.)

In this great and cold Fabric Curtain, there’s those who’ll support you and those…who won’t care. Maybe, if you’re famous enough someone will try and get you down. But the general attitude of fashion people is to ignore you. You walk past them on the path of fear and loathing in the mall and they ignore you; they don’t even glance at you. They might a concentrated effort not to see you. I’m convinced they practice this at home in the mirror: it’s a very particular look. Snub nosed; brunette hair (always, always, always brunette hair), Karen Walker dress if they’re from New Zealand, Marc Jacobs (more like Marc by Marc), if they’re American: That’s the isolation of fashion. Most people in fashion aren’t very fashion at all. The more you speak to them the more you realize they’re tragically closer to those generic polo-wearing American Average Joes. For them it‘s what the crowd thinks; and what is the fucking point of fashion for that? I personally have a very genuine dislike for every sad girl wearing a blazer and tights, and every sad boy wearing skinny jeans and an ironic t-shirt and way-farers with a stupid hairstyle. They’re ruining fashion, they’re giving it a bad name. They’re the sellouts. They’re corporate whores. They’re a silent killer. That’s right: they’re cold blooded cyanide. So fuck ‘em and wear your jacket backwards if you want.

On my itunes plays Prince. “U got the Look”. I’m unashamedly singing along to it, in all of Prince’s falsetto glory. I have met two people in all my time in fashion– which is probably more than a year honestly– who have “the look“. After all, I’m the 4 year old who insisted on wearing heels and clicking them together (I loved the Wizard of Oz) . But it only this year when I found out who that sexy motherfucker Margiela is. So let’s pretend I’ve only been in fashion for about a year– at least seriously interested in it, and then I can say that I’ve only met two people who’ve got “the look”. They both know who they are, and are probably smiling at this point as they read this piece.
One of them, of course, is the pseudo-daughter of Karl Lagerfeld and the person who’s responsible for my obsession with shoes. The other knows exactly who she is. She’s a semi-vegan most days.
Anyway. The point is that there’s so many fakes in fashion that “the look” is a rare thing….there’s so many duplicates. Photocopies. As I continue to traverse through fashion, that’s what I find: carbon copies of a girl I’ve met before.

I originally set out to write this article to convey the sheer hopelessness I felt at the time about fashion. I felt like I was drowning in a sea of clothes; of ideas….of all these people with their loud opinions saying this and that. Sometimes the sheer weight of what you’re wearing is too great: you actually start to worry about That Jacket, and That Scarf, and so on…You give so much gravity to what you wear that it becomes what they wear. And you just want to take off all your clothes and wear something without thought. Or just be naked and sleep, or whatever.
I guess you start to develop a relationship with your clothes. It has it’s rough points. But it can make you feel elated, it can make you feel wonderful; it can make you feel like Elvis on the Moon with One Million Hawaiians watching you.

I find myself drifting to Lou Reed’s opening lyrics to “Andy’s Chest”:
“If I could be anything, in the world that flew.”
That’s really what fashion makes me do; or makes me want to do. It’s like a slimy looking drug-dealer with his trench-coat open. “Hey kid, you want some of this?”
It’s the dark of the night-time and you probably should say no; you know what those drugs can do to you. Hell, let’s be more literal: let’s call them flying machines that you attach to your back and you can fly away. Say Anne Demeulemeester designed them: she made some cool steam-punk boots, and she has good musical taste. She’d make something like that. So it’s “Hey kid, you want some flying machines?” And you the kid say “Sure” because every kid wants to fly.
That’s what fashion does. It offers the promise of flying. Of soaring off into the sunset, sans wax-wings; and sometimes it really does do that. Sometimes a coat is really orgasmic-brain-shockingly good, that you fly off. And you’re gone…

I don’t think I’ll ever get over fashion: it’s a jealous lover, and a damn good lover. I don’t want to, anyway.