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Fashion Week: Another Trip to the Theatre?

As a prelude to the announcement that London Fashion Week will be running from February 18th until the 23rd, I’ve decided that it’s quite a talk about the Fashion Week phenomenon in general is quite topical. Two weeks out of the year, arbiters of fashion gather like moths to the effervescent flame; the lucky few (or thousand) that get the first glimpse of their favourite designers’ collection. They scrutinise, they gush and they “oh my gaaaaah” over the selection of trends that are on offer to them to choose from for the following season. In essence, Fashion Week is a shopping trip for fashion editors, only, they’re not shopping for themselves, they’re shopping for everyone. If there’s something that they don’t like on that runway, the chances are that we’re not getting it...unless of course we’re best friends with Betty Jackson or Matthew Williamson. Fashion Week is a big deal. It’s a chance for designers to showcase their talent, the clothes are the main event...so why is it that some catwalk shows steal the limelight?

John Galliano and Alexander Mcqueen are famous for their shows, stealing the show...so to speak. Half the time, the clothes on their models backs were not even wearable but seemed to simply be there to create this ‘brand image’ that society has become so used to. The late Mcqueen is famed for his controversial runway shows but was quoted admitting himself that the shows often out shadowed the collections. Production team Gainsbury and Whiting of London were employed to seal the deal and make Mcqueen’s nightmarish visions reality. His fashion shows had everything; live moths, obese women in cages, holograms and robots spraying paint onto a tent-like dress that would only ever be worn by Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw. What’s the point? This is all starting to sound very negative and I was taught never to speak ill of the dead. This isn’t a criticism of Mcqueen but more of a general pondering about our culture and contemporary society. At one point, people went to the theatre to catch up with the latest fashions worn by their favourite actresses. Skip forward a few decades and women were emulating the styles of Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly and Marylin Monroe. It seems that the fashion show has become a copy-cat of other forms of cultural output. People don’t just want to see the clothes anymore, they want fireworks. What’s more, this benefits the designers. They can distract buyers from the essential purpose of the runway show, advertisement, by putting on a show for them. Fashion week has become one big theatrical masquerade. It’s advertisement sugar coated with the pretty veneer of the theatrical. Top dogs in fashion buy into the image given to them and we hop on the bus into town, Topshop card in hand. It’s a shame we only get the product and not the show, after all, we are the ones (with a little help from student finance England) that make it all possible.