10月 13 2008
英语阅读 Ask Hadley
Hadley Freeman 的周一时尚答问专栏。
Copycats
Hadley Freeman can ease your fashion pain
Hadley Freeman
Monday October 13 2008
On a recent documentary Kate Moss seemed to design her collection for Topshop by just getting things out of her wardrobe or finding vintage pieces and telling Topshop to copy them. Is this how designers work these days?
Sarah Morris, London
Oh, you picky, picky public people! What do you want from the poor, hard-working, straining-by-the-grit-o’-their-teeth fashion designers? Donatella, Karl Lagerfeld, Miuccia Prada – honestly, most of the time, they look as if they work down mines. Especially Karl, when he wears that little Chanel hard hat (quilted, obviously) – faaaaabulous.
Anyway, there they are, making clothes that are quite nice and what do they hear? “It’s not original!” “You just nicked that from Oxfam!” “My gran wore something like that 70 years ago!” I mean, WTF? Poor Marc Jacobs suffered a true arrow of outrageous fortune earlier this year when some totally tedious old Swedish dude complained that the pattern on a scarf in Jacobs’ spring/summer collection was maybe a tiny bit similar (“tiny bit similar” being Swedish for “exactly the sodding same”) to one his dad designed a trillion years ago in a totally foreign country and therefore completely irrelevant.
But let’s look at this from a different perspective. Clothes are great but after more than 2,000 years, most things have been done with them. This explains why Coco Chanel’s designs from the early half of the 20th century keep being “referenced” by designers today, such as Luella Bartley and that kleptomaniac, Marc Jacobs. And why not? Why should we, modern-day dwellers, be denied nice clothes just because we were unfortunate enough not to have been born in 1922?
Anyway, when designers do try to reinvent the wheel and proffer things such as wetsuits with giant cutouts trimmed with ruffles, what do they get for their pains? A massive photo in the tabloids with some hilarious and never-before-seen headline of the “Do Designers Really Expect Us To Wear THIS?!?!?!?” ilk.
So take your pick, Sarah: either an expensive version of something your mum gave to a charity shop 27 years ago, or a humpbacked coat made out of patent leather and fish scales. Yes, this does raise the query asked by pretty much everyone who’s seen a Turner prize exhibition: why can’t modern designers make nice things like in the old days? I cannot resolve the mystery as to why instead of Rembrandt we are stuck with Damien Hirst and his Blue Peter-esque skull, diamonds and glue gun, but I would argue that some designers today are, if not exactly Michelangelo, pretty handy with the ol’ needle and thread. And also pretty good at spotting things to copy, which, after all, is a talent. Well, sort of.
I seem to have mutated back to a size 10 after having been size 12 all through my 50s. I am still fatter than I was in my 40s, so have the sizes changed?
Kate Davis, by email
Yes, and thank the good Lord for it. I’ve never been totally clear whether it’s due to good nutrition or bad nutrition, but we are all much bigger than generations in times of yore, ushering in what is euphemistically called by the industry, “a change of measurement scale”. This means that what was once a size 28 is now a size 12. Now there’s a whole new set of neuroses for women’s magazine readers.
Partly this is a sop to sensitive consumers’ feelings: just as you shouldn’t buy something from a shop where the sales assistant made you feel as if you were asking her to be a surrogate mother because you asked where the underwear section is, so you wouldn’t hand money over to a label that told you that you are 10-tonne Tessie. Yes, yes, we should all get beyond size concerns but, for the moment, most people don’t seem to be able to, except you, Kate, whose reaction to this size malarkey is more “baffled into writing a letter to a newspaper” than “flattered into buying lots of clothes”. What a truly charming throwback you are to a more honest (and smaller) time.
