Now catwalk shows must battle with protest frocks to win the ratings war
You may think Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-cortez is a self-aggrandising hypocrite for attending the $35,000 a plate Met Gala this week in a couture gown with “Tax the Rich” daubed expensively across its acres of fabric. Or maybe you think: “Go, girl. What a warrior!”
Ocasio-cortez has a history of provocative tweets. She campaigned against the demon Amazon setting up HQ in Long Island, whence she hails, claiming “victory” when Amazon eventually pulled out, and yet more victory when the company later announced it would, after all, establish an office in Manhattan.
Amazon would have received millions in tax rebates from the Long Island deal, while it got nothing from Manhattan. So yes, victory, of a kind.
But what Ocasio-cortez omitted to say was that the Long Island HQ would have brought an estimated 25,000 jobs to a predominantly blue-collar neighbourhood, while the far smaller offices they eventually went for created a mere 1,500 jobs in an already wealthy part of the city.
I’m interested that she’s now turned to clothes as a medium. Then again, her good looks have harmed her not one iota in the era of social media, so why not join forces with the most look-obsessed event in the universe? She’s not the first. She wasn’t even the only one posturing at the Met. Carolyn B Maloney, another US politician (and like Ocasio- Cortez, a Democrat) had “Equal Rights for Women” daubed on her dress.
Most of us can get behind that sentiment. It was less abrasive than AOC’S. Was it as effective? Depends on the angle. Certain shots show AOC surrounded by the poor, benighted masked-up flunkies who have the wretched task of shepherding the needy narcissists and desperado hangers-on along the Met Gala’s red (but technically beige) carpet. Oops. Bad optics.
What you can’t deny is that The AOC Dress turned her into an international meme. #AOC is now known on both sides of the Atlantic.
If only Keir Starmer could find an outfit as powerful. The man really needs to hire Kim Kardashian, whose seemingly Talibansponsored look at the Met may have attracted more eyeballs even than AOC’S. Actually, it was from Balenciaga but since it covered every millimetre of her skin, including her face (there’s footage of her being verbally guided to her waiting limo as the poor thing evidently couldn’t see out of her mask), it might as well have been gifted her by Afghanistan’s breezy, women-loving new government.
Is this what fashion is now? A branding exercise in which taste and style, let alone the antediluvian idea of elegance, have become cancelled concepts?
London Fashion Week began yesterday. New York Fashion Week ended earlier in the week. What’s the betting that the Met Gala, with its gurning goons and muddled political messages garnered more likes than the two big fashion events combined?
If fashion weeks seem increasingly beside the point, perhaps that’s because many houses still haven’t learnt lessons from the past two years.
“Seeing a model walk around a room on a catwalk feels completely irrelevant,” said Roland Mouret, the London-based designer, when I visited him in the imposing Victorian Mayfair town house which for the past decade has been home to his store, offices and, in the attic, an elegant pied-aterre for Mouret, who spends most of the week in his Suffolk cottage.
Mouret, who saw 80 per cent of what was previously a very solid business evaporate last year, will show a film tomorrow instead, “a narrative featuring 12 women wearing my clothes in real situations. And not just my clothes. But jeans from other labels. Because that’s how women dress”.
Mouret has always been rooted in reality – he attributes it partly to not having attended some fancy fashion college, but to having learnt his trade by draping and cutting on friends. He’s still a master at body contouring. His Galaxy dress, first launched in 2006, was beloved by both A-list celebrities and millions of less wealthy women who bought the copies. He notes that dresses that sculpt the body and give so many women confidence are back, at least on the pages of fashion magazines and at the Met Gala (his views on which are trenchant).
But no one in real life wants to be trussed up. His new collection features fluid shirt dresses in relaxed jersey knits, knee-length jumpsuits and flowy but shapely dresses in ribbed knits, like the one here. It is absolutely about form and function – and colour: lilac with emerald, camel with yellow, scarlet.
Next month he launches – finally – active wear and it’s terrific. Similar colours and detailing, plus all those years of expertise about how to sculpt a bum and waist. We’ll be wearing this outside the gym, too.
And if his business ends up being smaller, he’s OK with that. In the end, it’s about profit, not turnover – and at the end of 2019, his profit was close to a million.
“It’s a terrible feeling knowing that your creativity is somehow contributing to the destruction of the environment,“he says. “So, if we sell less, we just have to make less. There will be less waste and, in the end, we will work it out.”
We should all hope he does, along with other British-based talents such as Erdem, Roksanda, Richard Quinn, Emilia Wickstead, Self Portrait (designed by Han Chong) and Michael Halpern. London Fashion Week has been an incredible flag waver for British creativity and resourcefulness for decades (so resourceful are our designers that Mouret now photographs his collection himself ).
The Government seems to understand the importance of fashion. At any rate, one insider told me last week that someone in government gave Burberry a rollicking for not showing this week (instead they sponsored the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition last week, and dressed some of the guests – which you could argue is a way of showing its clothes that’s ultimately more appealing than a catwalk).
Meanwhile, the Government has done just about nothing to support these businesses in their hour of need. But then it’s hard to sell the notion of tax breaks and rebates for luxury brands to the public.
But think about the big picture – jobs and a very real soft, global power for UK Inc. Try fitting that slogan on a protest frock.