A sad life sans sweatpants
Mystery piles on mystery. As regular readers will recall, the first mystery was God the Sniper and the second was conjoined dogs. And the third is one of the supreme mysteries – admittedly a little late but that’s because I have been stewing on it – which is the mystery of Karl Lagerfeld.
Lagerfeld died not long ago, and one is expected to speak well of the dead, but I think I’m OK in that regard. I may not be planning to praise Lagerfeld, but neither am I going to pan him. For I viewed Lagerfeld’s way of life in much the same manner as I might view a television documentary about fungi. I gawped and wondered, but I did not see in him a fellow creature. Rather I sensed Lagerfeld belonged to a different eukaryotic kingdom to my own (and please feel free to look up the word eukaryotic. I just have done so and am hugely impressed by my own erudition.) For Lagerfeld was a fashion designer.
The fashion industry is like wine-tasting or the art market: it is 98 per cent hoax. At the root of all three is a simple aesthetic judgment: this wine tastes nice; that picture’s pretty; those clothes look good. But from that reasonable beginning has evolved an edifice of jargon and pretension. The effect is to create insiders and outsiders, those who are in the know and those who aren’t. This in turn generates mystique and cachet. And mystique and cachet generate money. That’s all. Like the $20,000 St Emilion, or the abstract tosh on the gallery walls, high fashion is a rort, a scam.
Consider the runway with its stream of bulimic teenagers, pouting, miserable, breastless, putting one foot in front of the other in a manner that no human being has ever voluntarily chosen. The poor gaunt girls believe they’ve discovered glamour. All they’ve discovered is exploitation. They’ll be replaced and forgotten the moment they sprout a hip.
And clustered around the runway are the exploiters, the puffers of the business and its dupes: the prim critics, the prancing photographers, the Botoxed editors of the 2kg glossies and the chocolate heiresses with nothing to fill their too-many days.
And at the heart of it all the designers, the godheads, adored and fawned upon, and a surprising number of them, for whatever reason, men. (How easily human affairs sink to idolatry. It’s our default pattern from Rome to the All Blacks, from Jonestown to Paris Fashion Week.) Which brings us to the late Lagerfeld.
‘‘Sweatpants,’’ he once said, ‘‘are a sign of defeat.’’ If by sweatpants he means elastic-waisted cotton trousers without a fly, then I slumped to defeat in my teens and have happily stayed there. But Lagerfeld never did. He was a walking advertisement for his absurd profession. In every photograph I can find of him he is dressed in a black Victorian frock coat, a triple-decker dog collar which looks, frankly, surgical, black fingerless leather gloves and – oh spare us – sunglasses worn indoors. And in none of the photos, not one, is he smiling.
And the mystery to me is how he kept it up. Did he never yearn for the ease and honesty of the sweatpant? Did he never, as he laced himself yet again into fancy dress, wonder what all this pretending was for? And did he never laugh, not once, not even when an animal rights protester threw a pie at him but missed and hit Calvin Klein?
No? Ah well, rest his bones.