AND ANOTHER THING
Time for women to get together and give the fashion frogs a bloody nose
PAUL JOHNSON
Whenever I am tempted to despair about the state of the world, I remind Myself that women, at any rate, have made great strides in recent years in taking power for themselves and transforming society for the better. I am no feminist and despise all the theoretical stuff. I believe in getting real women into actual top jobs, where they can show how good they are. Here the progress is constant. It is true I have not yet succeeded, despite repeated efforts, in per- suading a newspaper proprietor to appoint a woman editor of a quality broadsheet among the names I have suggested are Eve Pollard, Polly Toynbee, Barbara Amid and Liz Forgan. Nor, for that matter, is my campaign making much headway to restore Margaret Thatcher to her rightful place as ruler of this country, from which she was ejected by a male conspiracy of treacherous Welsh larrikins. But most of the ground, Once gained, is kept and the ladies are inch- ing forward everywhere, even in Japan, where I have hopes that the advent of Women to positions of power will make that xenophobic country far more outward- looking, culturally receptive and civilised. All this being so, I am irritated by the failure of women — rich, educated, power- ful women, too, in many cases — to throw off the chains of male oppression in the one field where women have absolute Power to raise or destroy. Why do they put UP with their twice-annual degradation at the hands of overwhelmingly male fashion- designers? High fashion is a tyranny in which men are contemptuous masters and Women are willing, grovelling slaves. In recent years, it has become even more of a display of sado-masochism than in its classi- cal period in the late 1940s and 1950s. Indeed the latest fashions coming out of Paris and elsewhere suggest a sniggering conspiracy of les prides to see how far they can go in forcing women to make monkeys of themselves.
Much of the material for these multi-mil- lion shows appears to have been dredged UP out of a down-market Oxfam sale. One exquisite model is dressed in a black, ankle- length cretonne bin-bag completed by a pair of Irish bog-shoes. Others are forced to wear what look like grungy McDonald's aprons or the kind of pinnies forced on underprivileged Victorian children. A girl with a wire-wool haircut is strapped into a sawn-off tweed jacket long since discarded by an unsuccessful Haute-Marne poacher, or nailed into a string vest hand-knitted by Peruvian convicts, her bruised toes painful- ly crunched by down-at-heel Rochdale clogs.
One of the leading designers displays an outfit consisting of a shrunken old Wool- worth sweater, a dirty brown hanky-skirt and an uneven pair of black wool golliwog socks. Some of the dresses seem to have been designed by a committee composed of Old Breughel, Hogarth and Jerry Bosch, with Shirley Temple as Consultant Toddler. There is a mendicant's medley of grubby bits of yellow lace, greasy armchair covers and stained satin gents' waistcoats rescued from a Bowery old-clothes shop, and four or five different versions of the pyjama- suits and nighties currently worn by experi- enced Calcutta street-dossers. Paint- splodged patches, hacked-out bits of Turkish fire-rugs, barbed-wire wool scarves, frayed thermal vests as worn in the Chinese Gulag, ripped -bodices, holed cami-knick- ers, even tartan chippings from the Bal- moral ash-heap — these now seem to be the favoured textiles of the Avenue Mon- taigne.
Now I know that some of the way-out ideas displayed on the cat-walks never find their way into the salons, let alone the shops. Only some of the clothes shown at the collections are actually bought by the super-rich or made into toiles for sale to the mass-manufacturers of New York and Lon- don. So much of this rag-bag stuff will never appear on the streets. Or at least I hope not. The fact is that the latest collec- tions are so uniformly ugly, so unremitting- ly contemptuous of women, so obviously designed — or so it seems to me — to take the mickey out of the fair and foolish, as to constitute a revolution as big as the New Look of 1947.
No doubt in the old days men like Bal- Remember, if anyone approaches the vehicle, you let out a high-pitched squeal.' main and Captain Molyneux had reserva- tions about female intelligence — and taste — and liked to play a joke or two. But they also loved to display their skills at making beautiful women look still more splendid. In the days when I followed such things, I often noted the enormous trouble Christian Dior took to .ensure that the very best fab- rics, the most delicate colours, and the finest cutting, stitching and pressing, went into his outfits, many of which were indeed masterpieces of craftsmanship. His work- shops contained perhaps the most accom- plished team of people ever brought together to make women happy. And CristObal Balenciaga, the greatest artist of them all, used to say that, while anyone with a bit of flair could make a skinny 18- year-old look ravishing, his peculiar delight was to transform a 60-year-old Chicago millionairess, or a cross old duchess from Touraine, into a cynosure of all eyes, entirely by the magic of his clothes. The aim then was not to belittle the female sex but to make silk purses out of sows' ears.
So how much longer will women tolerate the arbiters of haute mode spitting in their faces? It is not as though the leaders of female opinion still turn their backs • on beauty and elegance. The new feminists like Naomi Wolf are proud to be good- lookers and admit that a big part of a woman's fun in life is to lure men. If a few hundred women in positions of influence stamped their feet together, the entire Paris fashion industry, and its surrogates in London, Rome, New York and elsewhere, would come to heel.
The foot-stamping does not need to come from the Madame de Rochefou- caulds or the Lady Rothschilds or the Mrs Vanderbilts, or any of the female gratin who patronise the collections. It can be done by the fashion correspondents and editors whose professional job it is to judge high fashion. It seems to me that these gen- erally hard-bitten women are the most gullible and brainwashed of all — Lowri Turner of the Evening Standard is an excep- tion — though probably the majority of them are embittered feminists at heart, with long histories of worthless husbands, divorces, beatings and abortions behind them. So what are they waiting for? Here is a chance for women to stand up to the cul- tural-sexual tyranny of the city where, after all, chauvinism had its origins, and give the frogs a bloody nose.
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