When fashion strides into politics
Have you seen those Jigsaw ads yet? The ones that feature great chunks of bold typeface telling us – sorry, telling us – that diversity is a beautiful thing, that British style is not 100 per cent British. In fact “there’s no such thing as ‘100% British’. Or 100% Dutch, French, American, Asian or European. Whatever your opinion, at some point in your ancestry someone moved in and unsettled the neighbours. Because none of us are the product of staying put.”
Et cetera.
Before I get lynched by the Twitterati, I’d better point out that I don’t have an issue with Jigsaw’s sentiments, which are currently plastered all over the underground at Oxford Circus in central London. I don’t doubt the sincerity of its CEO Peter Ruis, who told The
Evening Standard this week, that “We’ve always tried to talk about our values, because it feels like the right thing to do, rather than just [doing] pretty girls and pretty dresses.”
But what’s wrong with doing pretty girls and pretty dresses, if those girls (or women, as I believe most of them would prefer to be called) represent a wide cross-section of pretty and the dresses are well-made? I hereby disclose that some of my best wardrobe friends are items of clothing I’ve bought in Jigsaw. In terms of beautifully priced cashmere coats and tailored jackets, Jigsaw has seen me through. I like them even more when I know they’re produced in decent working conditions. I don’t need to be hectored.
Brands can be an enormous force for good. The bigger they get, the more incumbent it is on them to act responsibly, set an aspirational tone of goodness, nudge us all to make better consumer choices. This, after all, is the week that Gucci announced it will no longer be using fur. Now that is major. Gucci’s revenues were €2.8billion for the first half of 2017. But more than its financial clout, it currently wields tremendous influence: it’s the label that just about every other emulates. And it has used a lot of fur of late, making it seem “edgy” and aspirational to a whole new generation. (Or perhaps not.)
Now it has declared that “fur is no longer modern”. I’d like to think this is partly down to the quiet behindthe-scenes heft of the woman who occupies one of the most important jobs in fashion – Marie-claire Daveu, chief sustainability officer at Kering, the group that owns Gucci. Daveu is that rare thing, a French vegetarian. She doesn’t like fur. Since she has the resources of one of the world’s most successful fashion conglomerates at her fingertips, and the ear of its CEO, François-henri Pinault, she’s in a position to do something about it, working with hundreds of imaginative small start-ups on innovative fabrics and manufacturing techniques (you can read more about her in my interview in today’s Luxury magazine).
Jigsaw may well be a shining exemplar of working conditions, environmental standards and animal welfare, in which case I’d be happy for them to pop all the relevant info on their website, or on their swing-tags. Instead they’ve slapped a homily across their nice peacoats. And the worry with this tactic is that this season’s diversity statement might look passé in six months.
Alas, the stealth approach to virtue doesn’t seem to be on trend right now. So we get brands telling us how much they love older women, except, whoops, that was last season. There was no age “diversity” on the catwalks last month. And apart from some normalsized models in Alexander Mcqueen’s show (you know an industry is warped when ordinary looks extraordinary), absolutely no variation in the usual catwalk physique. The model of the moment was 16-year-old Kaia Gerber, daughter of Cindy Crawford.
The tokenism is infuriating, the inconsistencies ludicrous. Brands boasting about their ecological aspirations then breaking the first principles. Spouting on about how much they revere women while continuing to work with photographers whose sexual exploitation of young models, whose careers are in their hands, is on a level with Harvey Weinstein’s.
Please let’s skip this season’s show-and-tell session and move on to an era of doing and actually making a difference.