I've always been fascinated by Studs Terkel's broadcastings and interviews tackling themes such as the Depression, the war, race relations, labour and the American dream.
In fact I think we desperately need a series of interviews in the style of Studs Terkel that focus on the fashion industry.
Despite what they want you to believe, the fashion industry is indeed based on the cult of the fake and on a pile of massive lies.
Many teenagers believe nowadays that if you post online a picture of yourself looking stylish, you may become a model, will be invited to sit in the front row at catwalk shows, will turn into a credible fashion commentator and even get a job as consultant for a big fashion house. Some people even think that the word “blogger” means “job/money/no compromise” and is accompanied by the sort of income that allows you to buy three pairs of designer shoes a month.
Young fashion design students naively think instead that one day they will win a major competition just because their work is the best in their class/year, then they will launch their own fashion house and live happily ever after.
Sadly this is not the truth: in the last few weeks, between one thing and the other, I have been sitting with different fashion designers, artists linked with the fashion world and young creatives.
All the people I've been interviewing or informally chatting with have one thing in common, they are very talented, usually even more talented than the people who continuously appear on magazines or on the Internet, but they often struggle to get noticed.
This essentially happens because they aren’t anybody’s protégées, they aren’t supported by some diabolical PR officer/consultant or endorsed by prominent bloggers.
The system currently regulating the fashion industry basically favours the less talented ones and helps those who don’t seem to have anything strong to say, creating an entire generation of highly talented but unnoticed creative people juggling different jobs, usually 3 to 4 at the same time.
Two of these jobs usually pay the bills and the food, in a nutshell they allow you to survive; the others don't but it’s these jobs that don’t pay the bills that make you happy and make you feel alive.
In some cases on top of the 4 paid/unpaid jobs there are also the semi-unpaid jobs, that is jobs rewarded with clothes/accessories, make up and other assorted goods. Unfortunately you can't eat a lipstick or the review copy of a book (when you're given a physical copy and not a PDF file…), though you may try and sell them on eBay and maybe make some money out of them.
Though physically tired, if you have 2 paid and 2 unpaid jobs, you are obviously in a much better situation than young graduates who are currently caught in “the internship tornado”, a phenomenon that doesn't have much to do with climate changes, but refers to the fact that you pass from one unpaid internship to the next without gaining any experience, but becoming well accustomed to sleep on friends’ sofas and floors, while cursing the day you decided to enrol in a university course that didn’t give you much experience but left you indebted for life.
And what about edgy, trendy and cool young fashion designers? Soon we will have to establish a charity to save them all from suicide since, as a journalist, once you have reported about one of them once or twice, magazines don’t want to know anymore about the young and talented designer in question, but ask you to pass onto the next big thing and focus on someone even more exciting and extravagant.
This means we are creating a generation of young designers who are fashionably hip for six months and we are ready to move on looking for more fresh blood like thirsty vampires as soon as our interview is out, abandoning the young and hip ones we interviewed to their cruel faith, which usually consists in finding another job to sustain themselves and leaving behind their fashion dreams.
So far we have created designers, trends, books and films that don't last more than 6 or 8 months. Funny if you think that some of the stuff – clothes, books, films, etc – created 50 years ago is still inspiring us. Will our current routines inspire people in 50 years' time? I doubt our silly tweets about having a cup of tea, feeding the cat or the dog and other assorted mediocre amenities will inspire somebody in future.
Things are even worse if you are a woman. Indeed, if you are a woman you face different levels of exploitation: most of us are aware of unpaid fashion models, but there are also fashion houses who get hip male artists to come up with the concept for advertising campaigns for products aimed at women. Usually such artists do not even bother to check if their vision actually inspires a woman to go out and buy that specific product, because they think they are hip and cool and therefore do not need to ask women about their opinions.
While we still have an amazing amount of idiots trying to make you believe fashion is a healthy funfair full of smiling happy people, a democratic bubble of joy floating in an otherwise sad and nuclear wasteland, little by little, people are waking up from their fake glamour-induced slumber realising that some designers wouldn’t have probably won major fashion awards without the support of specific editors; that the wardrobe of some of the most fashionable “Internet icons” of our days would actually fit a Samsonite for Ryanair trolley if fashion designers would stop giving the alleged “Internet icon” free clothes and accessories, and that when powerful fashion editors leave the magazine they work for is usually because they are going to get a disgustingly overpaid job as a consultant for a disgustingly powerful fashion conglomerate.
I do think that while the first stage for a major change in the fashion industry, but also in the art and culture world would be a series of interviews à la Studs Terkel with real people working in this fields and talking about their jobs, projects, problems, pains and joys, I also feel that the second stage must be a cultural coup-du-monde similar to that envisaged by Alexander Trocchi in the Sigma Project.
As much as this may sound utopian, extracts of Trocchi’s “Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds”, such as the part in which he says, “The cultural revolt is the necessary underpinning, the passionate substructure of a new order of things,” could be the key to new ways of looking at the future.
Trocchi wrote about a world in which life was renewed by art, in our case it’s the fashion industry that should be renewed by life and by truly creative and dynamic people with an international mind-set.
It would help a lot being able to throw out of the industry liars, poseurs, pushy and unimaginative PR officers and people who still think that if you don't own a designer bag you're not worthy of being considered a human being. But maybe we could start by applying our own knowledge and specialisations to different fields, mixing them all together, operating metacategorically and looking at collaborations with different like-minded professionals, from artists and architects to directors, scientists or designers, in a nutshell with a pool of talents from every medium of creative endeavour.
The future will indeed not be about matching this pair of trousers with that pair of shoes, buying into trends and pretending you are happy, but in building bridges, looking at thought-provoking and mind-expanding ideas that can truly change us and our society.
Fashion is essentially a rotten corpse with the annoying tendency of continuously standing, like a zombie in a Romero film. Yes, for the next Autumn the zombie will hide its putrid smell under layers of latex, plastic and rubber, but it will still be a rotten corpse currently feeding off superficially demented things such as Kate Middleton’s wedding dress, the positive vibes you can get from wearing bright coloured lipstick and idiotic columns in which women continuously complain about leading sexually depressing lives à la Bridget Jones.
This is not fashion, this is not art and this is not culture. We've all had enough and it's time to cut the crap and look at ways to develop culturally innovative and inspiring projects. Fancy joining the fashionable insurrection?
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