Industry | 2010.08.21
Fashion and blood diamonds: a tale of two tyrannies | Tanya Gold
It is entirely apt that Naomi Campbell and co are at The Hague. Fashion should be put in the dock
The fashion industry, which I like to visualise as half-Nancy Reagan, half-sock, has disgraced itself this week in two separate incidents. It has sunk into a mire so depraved that even I, a seasoned watcher of the anorexia and buttons industry, am surprised.
First, the war crimes and diamonds story, which is fascinating not because it features Naomi Campbell trying to talk, but because it exposes fashion\'s childish bafflement when reality intrudes. I don\'t really mind Campbell\'s arsey demeanour before the judge; for all I know she thinks genocide is a face cream and the international criminal court a themed spa.
Nor do I mind the Facebook-tagged " blood diamond party ", celebrating either Campbell\'s making a twit of herself or the opening of a new dungeon for models. It\'s Campbell\'s attitude to the gems I can\'t get out of my head.
Campbell described the diamonds given to her as "small, dirty-looking stones". To a supermodel, fed on mirrors, the diamonds weren\'t sparkly shrapnel from a war. They were a commodity and, because they were not pretty – or branded – she despised them. When she realised that they had a significance beyond their appearance, she was almost touchingly bewildered. Were she to be introduced to some teenagers with bulimia, I suspect she would be bewildered again.
Which brings me to the second story – which is, apparently, one of redemption. Robert Duffy, president of Marc Jacobs , has divulged via Twitter that he is considering having clothes above size 14 which is, at present, the largest you can be while still being acknowledged by the fashion world as in need of clothing. Anyone above a size 14 is dead, albeit shopping in Matalan.
I don\'t know why Jacobs can\'t be president of himself, but I do know I have just blown a big, fat raspberry at this promise. No whatever-took-you-so-long swan song from me; no lying on the pavement outside Marc Jacobs, waiting for a size 16 to be spat into my arms. I\'ll believe it when Kate Moss explodes, leaving a small puddle and some hair.
Every year, fashion hints she may atone and be a nice girl forthwith, responsible and useful, dedicated only to female pleasure. We may see a model with breasts, or Beth Ditto, the obese singer, sitting in the front row at a fashion show looking, as ever, like a surprised cherry dropped into a bowl of ravenous ants.
There may be talk that fashion will downsize, and become less extravagant and more worthy. Sometimes there is gossip that too thin models may be banned from the catwalk altogether, which is ludicrous, because fashion, as anyone who has ever seen a catwalk show knows, has no concept of being too thin. After all, this is the industry that has failed to notice that Karl Lagerfeld has been stolen and replaced by a toy goblin.
This annual penance is usually a response to a public relations catastrophe too grotesque to ignore. This may be the ever growing figures for teenage anorexia and obesity (they are twin, not opposite psychoses) or the spectacle of a model starving herself so energetically she actually falls off the catwalk and dies. But any atonement, including the tweet from Robert Duffy, is a big, fat tease. Fashion won\'t change. She can\'t. Her idiocies are essential to her survival, and eternal – Duffy\'s plan will be strangled at birth.
But I say to those who believe that fashion and murderous tyranny shouldn\'t be tried in the same courtroom: why not? They are both in the annihilation business. It\'s just two for the price of one.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]onds-fashion-tale-of-tyrannies
