ANOTHER VOICE

In such an age, I thank God I am a man

CHARLES MOORE

cadilly, you pass various commercial gal- leries, such as Agnew's, with framed pic- tures disposed in their windows. On the corner of Stafford Street, you pass windows similarly filled with picture frames, but the frames contain no canvasses. They hang, gilt, Victorian, embarrassed by their set- ting, in front of women's clothes. The frames are intended to imply, presumably, that the author of the clothes is an artist.

Certainly he has the artist's gift for uniqueness. After studying the windows and wandering through his emporium, one feels one would recognise his creations any- where. A typical trope is to mix the incom- patible — so that a denim blouse is taut on top of a frothed up silk mini-skirt which is brown and yellow like a banana and belted with gold medallions. Colours are chosen for their defiance of nature — pink bags and green jackets like the most disgusting sort of ice-cream and men's boxer shorts covered with scenes gold and garish and inaccurately mythological, as if they were fragments of a mural from a casino in Las Vegas.

The ground floor offers 'accessories', such as sunglasses for £170. The next floor offers 'couture'; the top floor is the 'ate- lier'. Both are misnomers, since what is for sale is off the peg. In the basement are th6 men's clothes, lurking among the marble and mirrors like gaudy homosexuals in a fantastical public lavatory.

This is the new shop of Gianni Versace, which has cost fl 1 million, and opened last week in the presence of Joan Collins and Marie Helvin and Kylie Minogue and Elton John and his wig.

There is something shocking about this shop. It is not that it celebrates extrava- gance, that it defies recession, that it caters for human vanity: those are all things which fashion must do, and which can be done delightfully. What is shocking is that it is ugly and vulgar and degrading, and no one has said so. If a new, very expensive restau- rant opens, and serves revolting food, at least a few of the restaurant critics who go there to review it will notice, and write accordingly. If a play is poor, the critics will pan it. But Versace got half a page of most of the newspapers last week without a word of criticism.

Which shows not, as a puritan might argue, that we take clothes too seriously, but that we scarcely think about them at all. Fashion writers always use the metaphor of language to describe clothes — clothes 'say' such and such. The language of Versace's efforts mixes. the tones of a prostitute and an international arms dealer — lewd, aggressive, rootless, mercenary. Yet it is accepted without a murmur or, rather, with a fanfare. I know virtually nothing about fashion, but I can see at a glance that Ver- sace is not speaking the same language as, say, Armani, whose clothes are restrained and cool. Yet the two are mentioned inter- changeably in the same hot breath of hype.

There must be a tremendous lack of cul- tural confidence for this to be happening. In any field where such confidence exists, people can intelligently and intelligibly make critical distinctions. Equestrians know whose dressage is good and whose bad, not because there is an objectivity of judgment — there isn't — but because there is a canon of taste and a tradition of how things are done and what they are done for. This does not seem to exist with clothes. People have so little idea of what they are for that they seek reassurance in the label and the price.

But it is not money that is the root of the evil. Money only connives at a bad idea, rather than conceiving it. I think that the villain is the post-romantic notion that the point of clothes, as of everything else, is to be yourself. This assumes that your self has an existence independent of the world in which you live, and that it is an interesting thing to be. You start searching for your- self, and you find that this is not the case.

You panic, and you spend your way out of the boredom and emptiness with the char- latans who say that they can find 'the real you', the sartorial equivalents of psycho- therapists. The paradox of that search is that you cast about ever more desperately for a new look in which the self will at last be expressed.

The best dressed people are those who do the opposite. The best dressed people in London are the Chelsea Pensioners. They have sacrificed being their 'real' selves to a uniform which expresses the innate dignity of their calling. The paradox of that sacri- fice is that it wins them their individuality because they have not sought it. Anyone looking at their faces remarks that they are full of character. The same result is pro- duced by dress worn for reasons of tradi- tion or rule or trade. Once, in a heatwave, I was walking through Piccadilly Circus. Crowds of shirtless, Bermuda-shorted peo- ple thronged the place. From 300 yards away, I could discern the broad hat and black frock-coat of Monsignor Alfred Gilbey, instantly recognisable, elegant and distinct. Women in New York pay literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to achieve a comparable effect, and fail.

Dress benefits from rules, because they sharpen the eye. At Eton, there are strict rules about the morning dress, which is the uniform. So a small breach of the rules, like letting your shirt show beneath your waist- coat, is, as the fashion writers like to say, a powerful statement. Hierarchy is marked by gradations: various sorts of prefects are allowed to wear wing collars rather than

ordinary starched ones, and the grandest sort — the members of Pop — can put

braid on their tail-coats, wear sponge-bag trousers and affect multi-coloured waist- coats. There is no better example of 'power dressing'.

Fashion used to be dictated by the court. Ladies not grand enough to be at Versailles would wait in the country to be sent little dolls dressed in the court fashion, which they could then copy. I suppose a similar role of dissemination is played by glossy magazines and high-street shops today. The difference lies in the dominance of the designer. Instead of rules, there are names. The idea of authorship, the idea that the signature matters more than the quality of the work, is taken to extremes.

In such an age, I thank God I am a man. At least I can take refuge in cheap versions of Savile Row — a way of dressing which survives everything because it stands in a tradition, and is served by craftsmen rather than prima donnas and accountants. But what is a poor — or even a rich — girl to do?