Fashion Vs Merchandise |

You may have heard it by now as the news have been all over the Internet for a while: yes, Liam Gallagher has launched a fashion line, Pretty Green.

When I first heard about it I honestly shivered: could Gallagher, the missing link between a primate and a man, have any genuine talent as a fashion designer? Maybe he would launch a clothing line with a logo characterised by his distinctive “mono-eyebrow” or a range of House of Holland-style T-shirts with massive prints of his favourite swearwords? Well, maybe this would have been almost more original. The line – launched last week – features indeed rather bland T-shirts, polos, knitwear, jackets, Liam classic parka and accessories such as hats (the sort of bucket hat you were photographed in around 1989 in a post-rave stupor, but there’s no evidence of that embarrassing fashion mistake as you destroyed the photograph a long long time ago) and scarves. All the items are characterised by a logo spelling “Pretty Green”.

Despite Liam quoting as references Qradrophenia, the clothes really look plain and redundant. If this is fashion we have all been designers in our lives: we were designers when at 5 years old we did a little bracelet using coloured beads and we were designers at 15 when we vandalised a T-shirt with our favourite band's lyrics.

Like it or not, fashion is – should be – a highly skilled profession. It takes many years to become a designer and many more years to develop your career and establish your fashion house or brand, even a “sportsy” or casual one.

There is art in real fashion: making an impeccable fold, creating the perfect sleeve and coming up with the best combination of colours and prints is indeed an art. A few designers have developed and patented unique systems that are still employed in fashion and interior design (think Mariano Fortuny), others lived their lives between art and fashion (think Elsa Schiaparelli) and a few have also been sculptors and architects (think Gianfranco Ferré). Liam Gallagher doesn’t stand in any of these categories.

“So if he has not produced fashion, what has he produced?” you may be wondering. Despite my urge to answer this simple question with a rather short swearword, closing this post in a vulgar and abrupt way, I would like to elaborate a bit more my final answer. Gallagher has produced a pile of merchandise: take any of the stuff on his site, re-imagine it with an Oasis logo or with another band’s logo and you could sell it on a stall at the end of a gig.

The language used to describe each item is extremely risible: the parka is an “iconic” piece (look, “iconic” is a big word: Yves Saint Laurent’s Le Smoking is iconic; Liam Gallagher’s parka is…a parka), the jacket is a “quintessential light-weight” sport jacket (like other million jackets produced every year by thousands of sport brands all over the world, each of them claiming they have done the lightest sport jacket…yawn); the T-shirt, crafted from “super fine Egyptian cotton” (!) is “created to Liam’s exact specifications” (which translated from PR slang means: “put the logo here, and it will do”) and the scarves are hand printed by “Italy’s leading producer” (names darling, names!). The “Words” section of the site also proves Gallagher's vocabulary is extremely limited, with posts such as “In the Gore Hotel doing a photoshoot, upto my eyeballs in podel moses, that’s fashion for ya…” (sic).

Apparently Gallagher has decided to launch Pretty Green because clothes and music are his “passions” (mind you, if any of us who's into clothes would have launched his or her own label, by now the planet wouldn’t exist anymore) and because there is a lack of stuff out there of the things he would wear (which means he hasn’t been shopping in the last – what – 25 years maybe?). His mission as he states on his site is clear: “I’m not going to put anything out unless I like it…” he claims. I wonder if this should distinguish him from any other designer out there. If he’s really into fashion, Gallagher should know that no designer who’s really into his/her job would ever think of putting out something they don't like just to make money.

We live in a world that is constantly on the lookout for new designs, but that also desperately needs something beautiful and not the umpteenth polo shirt or parka. What will happen next, I wonder, will politicians start doing their own fashion lines? (Ssshh, don’t tell Berlusconi, otherwise he re-launches the fascist uniform in the current political climate and makes it popular all over Europe…).

Apart from offending people who have studied fashion for years and are now doing a wide range of little jobs to sustain themselves and their dream of launching their own brand, Pretty Green is also trying to cash in on selling people a look that in the past you would have assembled by yourself, maybe buying things from market stalls and second hand shops.

This is the last and final sad attempt at making money through unoriginal products perfectly designed to complement a music industry that has clearly failed to generate anything new, fresh and exciting.

Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos

http://www.boxxet.com/my/badgeBN.80.15.js?boxxetId=u23036

Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos

http://www.boxxet.com/my/badgeBN.160.30.js?boxxetId=u23036

Add to Technorati Favorites