(Bitchy mode on:) Every Wednesday since The Herald, also known as ”Scotland’s leading quality daily newspaper” (quality what?), started doing a brief piece on fashion, I have been laughing my heart out. If you like fashion and you feel depressed, sad, desperate or you haven’t laughed once in the last six months, try The Herald’s Wednesday fashion feature and you’ll recover all your lost happiness. Just don’t do it on a bus or in a public place as they might arrest you for laughing too loudly.
I wonder who had the silly idea – with all those fashion magazines, dailies, supplements, TV programmes and blogs that try to tell us what to wear and how to wear it – to start doing this rather unstylish regular feature. I guess people would be interested in it if the damn thing was at least slightly intelligent or if it featured exciting stuff. But no, that would be too cutting edge I guess, so – in true dull Herald style – the fashion feature consists in choosing one item and suggesting three different ways of wearing it. Each horrendously assembled outfit is also given an incredibly demented name (who would give names such as "Flare up", "Stop and Flare" and "Flare to be different" to outfits featuring horrible flared jeans?), but the worst thing is that all the items suggested are usually picked from high street shops. Yes, I know, most of us do not have the money to afford expensive designer clothes, but, come on, try to be more exciting, suggest vintage, try customising, be revolutionary, why the fuck do you have to be so boringly lame and tamed?
The other reason why I hate this shambolic feature is that it implies most women do not have any taste and are not able to put together an outfit (which is somehow true in the case of most women walking in the Glasgow city centre perimeter on a Friday/Saturday night…). Besides, receiving advice for somebody who is colour blind, doesn’t have any taste in dressing or any fashion journalism background (because, unfortunately for The Herald, it shows…) is somehow offensive.
Beware, though, the crap Wednesday “fashion feature” is not the only fashion crime contained in The Herald: its Saturday magazine has great examples of “valium photo shoots”. What’s such a thing? A photo shoot so unoriginal and boring that eventually makes you fall asleep. Sleepy parks and country houses are the favoured backgrounds to show models in uninspiring outfits. Once they did a photo shoot at the local Mitchell Library, without realising the prints of its psychedelic carpets were much more exciting than the prints of the outfits portrayed in the pics. Now, don’t come and tell me it’s a money problem, because bloggers have proved you can take good pics, show original and inspiring styles and have a lot of fun with a very low budget. So it must definitely be a lack of style.
The worst thing about The Herald, though, is the tendency it has of glorifying the so-called Scottish designers. Everybody who was born in Scotland, but eventually moved away, studied at Central St Martins and made his or her fortune somewhere else, is idolised. Christopher Kane is one example, Jonathan Saunders another. Shame The Herald never supported them when they first started showcasing their stuff, but just jumped on the bandwagon when everybody said they were cool.
A consistent fashion crime of The Herald remains its love for tartan and for every single designer who uses it. This means Vivienne Westwood’s constant use of tartan has elevated her to sainthood status and if she started doing tartan toilet paper she would still be loved by “Scotland’s leading newspaper”.
A few months ago the Scottish Fashion Awards were held at Stirling castle. Being one of the media partner, The Herald asked its readers to elect the 2008 Fashion Awards Style Icon, from a list of supposedly stylish contenders who never launched extremely influential style themselves. You wonder, how they came up with such a list of randomly picked people.
Sometimes I feel very sad about Scotland: all this talk about independence has turned it into a very small and narrow-minded country, that, rather than opening up to the rest of the world, is looking inwards for a lost identity and a style it doesn’t have. All this is sadly reflected by Scottish publications that have turned too local and irrelevant in a world that has gone global.
Just five years ago working at The Herald was what 98 per cent of the people in my journalism class wanted to do, maybe this was the standard they were aiming for: unassuming, depressing, a bit ridiculous and just utterly unstylish journalism. (Bitchy mode off)
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