After THAT savaging by Radio 4’s grouch-in- chief, ex-Vogue boss gives him a very stylish handbagging
IT TOOK only took eight minutes, but by the end it felt like eight rounds, perhaps 12. I’m talking about last week’s interview at the hands of John Humphrys, heavyweight inquisitor on Radio 4’s Today programme – an interview in which I unexpectedly found myself having to defend the fashion industry from all manner of evil, such as promoting anorexia among young girls.
I love Today and listen every morning. So when I was asked to come on and talk about 60 years of change in the fashion industry, I was delighted to accept. This, after all, was part of a series looking backck at six dec-dec ades of progress in British life. Yet what actually took place was something altogether different – a grilling that turned into a denigration of the fashion industry and magazines.
It all started rather well. At 7am I was in the Today studio, excited as a teenager at t a rock concert to be e where it all happens. John came for a chat in the green room, warning me the coffee was disgusting. He was friendly and relaxing and said – light heartedly, it seemed – that he had intended to be ‘a bit chippy’ about fashion but that the programme’s editor, Sarah Sands, had talked him out of it.
I should have known better. My friend, Mail on Sunday columnist Craig Brown, once hilariously described to me the personality transformation undertaken by Humphrys in the journey from green room to Today chair, from a host who seemingly admires you to an attack dog.
By 7.32 am I was happily talking about developments over the past few decades – the emergence of youth culture, the baby-boomer generation and how street style became a force. There are all sorts of interesting things to say – for example, how jeans, once the uniform of the midAmerican labourer, are now worn by Silicon Valley tycoons.
I would like to have spoken about the emergence of nylon, acrylic and polyester, and how they helped to release women from the drudgery of the kitchen sink and ironing board. Or of the massive increase in fashion retail that allows people to buy clothes at all points on the price spectrum. Had I been given the opportunity.
But exactly 1.55 minutes into the conversation, John decided he’d had enough of all that.
Having shown a polite interest in my views on youth culture, he interjected – without warning – that ‘hourglass’ figures had once been in fashion but that ‘now you have to be skinny as a rake’.
Back, in other words, to the same old, same old limited, repetitious and banal conversation. I was swept relentlesslyre into an attackat on the size of models and their appearanceap in British Vogue,V the magazine I left in June after morem than 25 years at theth helm.
The urbane John of justju a few minutes ago had turned into the hard- hitting pit bull bI hear many mornings, set on to politicians of the day. Suddenly I was confronted by a greyhaired guy in chinos hectoring me on the business I had worked in for a quarter of a century and which he neither knew, nor cared, much about. I faced, for example, a truly ludicrous accusation about the ‘cruelty’ of fashion, as demonstrated by the way women were forced to wear painfully high heels. As if we were promoting ancient Chinese foot-binding!
HE TOOK me to task for not including ‘comfortably shaped women’ on the cover of Vogue, even t hough I am well known for advocating healthy body shapes. Never mind that I had used images of Rihanna and Adele, and most recently size 18 model Ashley Graham, among others who are hardly rake-like.
Yet John ploughed on. Even Theresa May got swept up in his rampant critique of fashion, just because we have a Prime Minister confident enough to
wear interesting shoes rather than the low black courts which are a female politician’s default.
After a difficult eight minutes I left the studio, wondering, not for the first time what it is about fashion that makes so many people unable to react to it with the serious attention it deserves?
Bang had gone my hopes of having an interesting and educated conversation on one of the most listened to current affairs programmes on radio.
John was obviously having a good time scoring some points – and I remain a fan. His personal interest in and general knowledge of the subject was no doubt low, and he probably thought the combative approach would liven up what he might have considered a shallow subject for discussion.
And that is my objection. Fashion is not trivial.
Although some of the follow-up comments on social media focused on his ‘ mansplaining’, there are many female newspaper columnists who make John’s inquisition look sympathetic when it comes to sounding off about the dire effects of fashion on our world.
Size zero seems to be a treasured go- to newspaper column filler when a writer is stuck for a couple of hundred words, and it knows no gender boundaries.
Yes, of course questions of health and body image matter, and I understand why films such as the recent Netflix movie To The Bone, starring Lily Collins as a woman battling anorexia, generate so much debate. But it is frustrating that fashion, a business that contributes a staggering £28 billion to this country’s GDP, which employs just short of a million people, which is a part of everybody’s daily life and which combines creativity and commerce in a uniquely fascinating way, is so often portrayed as a negative.
Fashion is not some totalitarian state which deems everybody needs to look identical to models in fashion photography, or which tolerates only a slavish adherence to a rigid style, dictated by some Spectre-like global criminal organisation.
FASHION is not some weird and evil conspiracy that lures the unsuspecting into spending their hardearned cash on things they don’t need. Nor is it some malign social force which encourages eating disorders, slave labour and narcissism.
The truth is that fashion is a fact of life. An interest in how we appear and dress is one of the things that makes us human – driven by people’s desire to use clothes to demonstrate their taste, status, wealth, creativity and sexuality.
I dread a day when the prediction I jokingly made on Today – that we will all end up wearing unisex jumpsuits – might actually come true. The fashions of the day emerge from the general culture we live in. Corsets were thrown out when the world changed after the slaughter of a generation of young men in the First World War and it became more acceptable, necessary even, for women to work.
The hippie style came about as international travel become more accessible in the 1960s and a booming economy gave young people the opportunity to escape the conventional treadmill. Punk was a reaction to the economic downturn and political chaos of the late 1970s. Designers react to the times.
Even the silliness of some elements is enjoyable. Why else do newspapers routinely scour the fashion shows to fill their front pages with the most unwearable and outrageous look they can find on the catwalk?
Why are so many people obsessed with the lives of the fashion models, designers and the new Instagram stars?
Fashion gives most of us great pleasure, and were it such a malevolent force I very much doubt there would be the vast number of boutiques, departments stores, high street chains, pop-up initiatives, and online sites thriving around the world. How many of us enjoy snapping up something inexpensive as a treat for the weekend, or saving for a dress or shoes or handbag we will treasure for years?
Fashion is fun. It makes us feel good and adds to the whole richness and beauty of the world we live in. And I for one say hurrah for that.
I will NOT be taking any fashion lessons from a g rey-haired attack dog in chinos!