Maybe it was all Berlusconi’s fault. The Prime Minister has indeed got Italians used to the fact that if you say anything against him, you are automatically sued/dragged to court in a defamation case or fired from your job. Many were the victims of his anger - from comedians to journalists - but I never thought that fear of criticising people would have reached global levels. 
I’ve often noticed how the media avoid writing constructive critiques about particular celebrities. We do have enough vitriolic ‘look how thin/fat’ comments in the tabloids, but that’s not what I’m wishing was on the pages of magazines and papers. I would indeed like to see articles that are less condescending and respectful and more cleverly sincere. I used to write a lot of music reviews in the past, but I have stopped for two main reasons: I couldn’t find anything exciting happening in music and, well, I was told by Scotland-based publications that you should tone down your criticisms when you write about local bands. I guess this is why Franz Ferdinand and the now defunct Bricolage were deemed geniuses and not Orange Juice/Josef K copycats or why The Fratellis are a great anthemic band and not just the umpteenth and very loud and untalented guitar band. 
Things are just the same in the world of fashion: it can be difficult sometimes to find people who can honestly talk about what they like and what they don't. I find hard to praise House of Holland's supposedly Beverly Hills 90210 inspired S/S 09 collection. Why should I want to praise it in fact? It screams poor quality all over it, it's mainly London-relevant (which makes it unsaleable outside the English capital) and it makes me feel as if a nightmare from my teenage years - high waist trousers with an ankle-length hem - had come back to haunt my stylish adulthood. But most of the fashion mags praised HH and a fellow journalist confessed me she was dreaming of doing a photo shoot with some garments from HH’s latest collection. In her opinion the stuff would have looked extraordinary in a photo shoot (well, maybe she’s a wizard at digitally altering images with Photoshop…), in my opinion the stuff would have just looked extraordinarily horrible as its quality and its cut look horrendous from miles and miles away. 
But there is this sad trend in fashion not to say anything bad about somebody even when they’re shit, just in case they don’t invite you anymore to their catwalks and parties, events that seem to be more important and relevant than the actual collections. Which is a shame as many designers acknowledged in interviews how the criticism they received from journalist and International Herald Tribune fashion editor Suzy Menkes helped them growing up and developing their styles in a better way.
There's no doubt about the power of good and sound criticism, take the late Mr Blackwell. Since the '60s he wrote some of the most caustic comments on the worst-dressed women in the world, including movie stars, music icons and European royalty, providing us with endless fun, but opening in many cases people's eyes to some of the worst fashion faux pas.
Another trend that I'm currently hating is the media inexplicably falling in love with particular celebrities who don’t seem to have done anything really relevant in their lives. Yes, I'm thinking about Peaches Geldof, you guessed it. We all know she’s an absolutely redundant and useless human being with no skills at all. Maybe if we all started telling her how shit she is she might realise it and even refine her extremely poor writing and interviewing skills (see clip). Unfortunately, somebody has convinced her that she's great so she’s all over the place, infesting with her lack of talent the pages of Nylon.
I was convinced though that this lack of criticism was only infesting the media, but I recently realised it has somehow seeped into the conscience of human beings. A few days ago I had a big row with a guy over a popular Italian brand, Diesel. Everything started when I expressed my dislike of the brand and of its policies. 
I was somehow astonished that offending the brand in front of people entirely unrelated to Renzo Rosso caused a scandal of major proportions. Well, I guess you’re not obliged to like a particular brand, are you? And what if I don’t like their designs, their ideas and ideals, their parties or their branded lifestyles? Or should I feel somehow obliged and indebted to life to companies that invite journalists to see their catwalks by paying them two-day trips to New York and expecting the journalists to go back home and write amazing reports on the mags they write for? I'm actually very annoyed that a lot of space on various magazines is given to such brands, their collections and their parties only because they have the money to buy it. They indeed drastically reduce in this way the space that should be given to independent and emerging designers.
Making a nasty comment peppered with two swearwords on a powerful brand had the same effect of swearing in front of the Pope and anathema was invoked against me. Soon after I revealed my ideas, the guy I had a row with asked a mutual friend who runs a magazine if I actually wrote on his magazine as if I was a potentially dangerous big mouthed crazy maenad (hmm, I think I quite like this definition...). It was then that I had to sadly acknowledge how something has dramatically changed in Italy: the country where the satire genre was born in Roman times doesn't seem to be able anymore to joke on social mores and attack the rich and their lifestyles. If you have money - it doesn’t matter how you made it, as Berlusconi's political career proved - you are automatically respected. So if you have built an empire like Rosso’s and you're worth billions of dollars and even more, you deserve to be respected, no matter if you are just forcing down people's neck your 360° lifestyle ideal.
So well, maybe next time I'd better shut it. Yet at the same time I'm sure I won't. I don't know what's wrong with me - maybe it's just my big mouth, my tendency to be politically incorrect at the wrong times or to speak my mind - but, hell, you know what? I'll just keep on saying what I think.
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Comments