DIARY
VICKI WOODS Last Monday morning I commuted to hideous Waterloo from horrible Bas- ingstoke on the 7.24 — a packed, vile, shab- by train — in the company of my son, he heading back to school for the week and I to full employment. At Platform 12, I saw a graphic advertising poster: This Govern- ment's too mean to buy a bunch of Dafs. While filled with the intended pity for the Leyland truck-makers and murderous hatred for the President of the Board of Trade, I jumped the taxi queue. After drop- ping the boy off at school, the cab headed up Whitehall, the driver laying about him right and left on the evils of unemployment the like of which we have not seen since the Thirties, viz: the man he saw in Trafalgar Square wearing a City suit and a sandwich- board, like, saying, I Am 28 years Old, Unemployed, Give Me a Job, like, I Will Work Harder Than Anyone, something along those lines, anyway. Tragic, eh? I said it was tragic.
Later that day I left London for Berk- shire, to give a talk to Bradfield College about the difference between fashion and style. Unstylishly, I did not speak well, but the 60 boys and 40 girls rose gratifyingly like fish to breadcrumbs when I told them that an haute couture evening frock was `absolutely worth the money' at 30 to 40 thousand pounds a pop, and also that fur was 'poised to make a real comeback'. Hisses and boos. The boys were dressed in a curious mufti of tight sports jackets and ties and Brooks Brothersy slacks. With their natty haircuts they looked like the boys who left Lancaster University with me in the white heat of the technological revo- lution, all dressed up for the milk-round interviews with Metal Box, ICI, British Aerospace, British Leyland. But what are these Bradfield boys going to do for their interviews, after all their expensive educa- tion? They'd all make perfectly decent sales directors or brigade majors in Bosnia, but chance would be a fine thing. It's no go Your Leyland Daf, it's no go the Army and if I were running a sixth form now I think I'd be going barmy.
AI aimed back towards London by car, I watched a man in a chicken-suit leap lip and down outside the petrol station in the Great West Road, flapping his wings. He was advertising something, but I couldn't see what. Indefatigably, at eight in the morning on a raw, grey-black day, he leaps yards in the air and tries to frighten traffic. He succeeds, too, with a few sleepy- headed women; I see their mouths fall Open in shock as eight foot of chicken brushes the nearside passenger door. The chicken is possibly a Rada graduate or a biochemist or an Old Bradfieldian; he's certainly a chicken without a day job and I feel another great pang of misery for his loss of dignity. As the traffic finally moves on, I wonder why it is that I don't feel near- ly so miserable about out-of-work girls as I do about boys? Because I'm an ancient, unreconstructed feminist and I know that girls are so much tougher than boys; 30, 40, even to a hundredfold. We don't lose our sense of self-worth if we're unemployed. We don't murder our spouses and abandon our children because we 'can't take the shame' if we're made redundant.
Aeight o'clock on Thursday morning I found myself at the Ritz, hosting a break- fast to launch London Fashion Week. Strictly, London Fashion Couple of Days: the event has shrunk, like the market, to a shadow of its former self. Many British designers now show in Paris (Vivienne Westwood, Katherine Hamnett, John Gal- liano) or Milan (Rifat Ozbek). So few designers are left here that the entire British fashion galere can fit into a suite of bedrooms at the Ritz. Few foreign buyers have come to London to place orders. Are we down-hearted? Well, no, not altogether, funnily enough. Fashion is a strange trade. Its practitioners are part artist, part artisan; they have all the accountability and com- mercial responsibilities of captains of industry. But because they are slaves to a fickle public, they live their days as though it were show-business, displaying actorish behaviour to a degree. Fashion people never mention Macbeth, in other words the recession; they resolutely circumlocute (cf. `the Scottish play'). 'How do you find the climate?' How is it out there?' To which the only acceptable answer is 'So much bet- ter! And you?' In they throng to breakfast, the fashion people, all dressed to slay and looking absolutely fabulous, all beaming, all their little heads — in Miss Brodie's words — up, up, like Dame Sybil Thorndyke. `Isn't this great — you look wonderful — she looks fabulous . . . ' It's all defiantly cheer- ful, like lipstick in wartime.
That evening at Lancaster House, where the same crowd (still with their little heads up, up, but in different, quality, fabulous clothes) are fed and watered by the Daf- trampling President of the Board of Trade. I look for my murderous rage from earlier in the week, but it ebbs away as he speaks (rather unstylishly) about fashion. The fashion people are not impressed by the President of the Board of Trade as figure- head of their industry. 'You should have Ladidi,' comes a Eurovoice behind me, `because she love fashion,' but Ladidi is in Nepal, alas, with Baroness Chalker, healing lepers before the very eyes — as it happens — of a fashion team from American Vogue.
The Italian fashion collections took place in Milan — where I write this without benefit of speeches of welcome from presidents of the board of trade. All Italian politicians are keeping their heads well down at the moment because of the corruption scandal that's pole-axed the body politic. Here in `Tangentopoli' (Milan is Bribe City; Tangenti is the pretty Italian euphemism for 'bribes'), I was told, 'Every- one wonders who will be next to be named. At first you read about people you have barely heard of, but then the scandal gets closer; people who employ people you know, then people you know, then God knows who — your own family?' Everyone here says piously that no scandals, bribes or corruption would ever involve the frock business, of course, and since the Italians are the most relentlessly showbizzy and upbeat of all the world's fashion people, you'd never know things weren't absolutely fabulous until you saw the black Maria at the frock factory door.
Vicki Woods is editor of Harpers & Queen
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