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I am ostensibly the editor of a fashion magazine. It’s a job I’ve done on and off for a good part of my adult life. I don’t know if I’m a devil (I do aspire to a smattering of “demonhood”) but I can categorically say that the closest I’ve come to the real bearer of that satanic sobriquet – Anna Wintour – was in an anteroom in the Grand Palais in Paris, where we were both watching a Chanel fashion show. Eye contact was not made – she very publicly does not acknowledge lesser life forms - but there was, on my part, a frisson of proximity with this woman at the top of the fashion pile.
The reality, of course, was that our jobs, then and now, are like a Venn diagram with a very marginal overlap in the middle. Wintour’s circle then was a global empire where advertisers fell over each other for space in her glossy editions that had the heft of telephone directories, while she abused a staff of hundreds from the back of her town car travelling from show to show.
In my battered and bruised circle, telephone directories were long obsolete and the aches and pains of rapid market change had struck fast, first and furiously. We were, indeed, running in heels to catch up with a train that had long left the station. If there was any overlap it was in title alone.
Editrix.
Apparently, if the Devil Wears Prada 2 is anything like verifiable reality – they too, in that golden circle at the epicentre of fashion, find themselves running breathless and slightly dishevelled only to reach the platform in order to watch the train leave the station. The town cars are gone and even Miranda Priestly, the protagonist and “devil” of the film, is waiting for an Uber.
My brief encounter of the third kind with the glacial Wintour was during Karl Lagerfeld’s reign at the House of Chanel. The king demanded productions worthy of his stature as the Kaiser. Insanely huge panoramic dramas would unfold in the cathedral-like art nouveau Grand Palais with mammoth sets that inspired awe and reinforced the brand’s supremacy.
That spring, a globe practically the size of an exoplanet rotated in a stately fashion with myriad small flags firmly planted across the Earth’s continents representing the Chanel Fashion Imperium. Africa had not quite been colonised yet - a visceral representation of the fact that our pockets were still recovering from the other, older imperialists.
A carpet with the same theme was specially woven and covered the entirety of the hall while the vast majority of the audience of top clients and Chanel brand ambassadors sported their Chanel trophies like show ponies at a cut-throat version of the Hunger Games. This impression would be further reinforced by frenzied shopping immediately after the show at the flagship store on Rue Cambon.
Fashion is a strange beast. It’s terribly compelling if you judge by the delight people take in watching the devilish film, and all the joy with which they consume the artefacts of that world.
Just observe last Monday night’s Met Gala - that annual spectacle, this year designed to reinforce the idea that Fashion is Art and not just very big business. But if the Venn diagram of editorial overlap highlighted the great chasm between Anna and me, and the glaring lack of little Chanel flags in the poor-addled parts of the world did not tell a story, then this annual display of costumes at the Metropolitan Museum should function as a reality check of the ever-widening gap between the world’s haves and have-nots.
It’s fitting that the gala takes place at a museum where the cultural artefacts of human societies are displayed for us to really understand a few things about how human societies have functioned across the ages. Each crown, each painting, every ancient sword or statue (just not Heidi Klum, who dressed as a statue for the Met Gala) bears a message about how things worked in these other times and places.
The exhibition on the red carpet last Monday tells a jarring story. Fashion, especially the kind that’s on display on the celebrities, influencers and outrageously rich who spend small fortunes to attend the gala, gets ever more outlandish and garish every year. Movement is impossible in many of the outfits unless you have help from an army of attendants and wage slaves. The aim, it seems, is to display good taste or stealth wealth, which is just the nonsense they generate to make poor people aspirational. No, in fact, the aim is to make clear that you can’t actually wear this stuff - not in your wildest dreams, you poor peasant, toiling in the fields of late-stage capitalism in rags that fall apart after a wear or two.
Of course, those in their superyachts and tech palaces are wearing panniers and dripping in diamonds and crazy costumes that reinforce, like nothing else could, the ever-widening distance between them and us.
If you needed proof of the messaging, just look at how the prices for these super fashion brands have escalated in direct proportion to the ever-widening chasm between the super-duper, eye-wateringly rich and the rest of the world.
And right on top of the shit show is the couple that bankrolled this year’s spectacle, Lauren Sanchez and Jeff Bezos, who properly embody this display in all its dystopian glory. Both he and she are morphing into untouchables threatening to buy another desperate media company, Anna’s, like a bauble to play with until they get bored and crush it.
Mrs Bezos was dressed like a John Singer Sargent portrait of a New York railway baron’s society wife (“fashion as art” was the theme, you see). It was incredibly apt. Sargent famously painted the elite of America’s Gilded Age, the last time income disparity was so stark. The Vanderbilts and Rockefellers built the museums and institutions that Sanchez and her techbro are now storming. Of course, you can buy anything these days (you always could).
The sumptuary laws of today are that you will dress to impress. That is, impress into the minds of the little people that they’re Shein-wearing ants while they, the stars, exist in a firmament where even hideous costumes are pored over and dissected as if they mean something other than a physical representation of a giant foot squishing you.
That’s what they mean when they say, “fashion is crushing it”.
This article was first published in Sunday Times Lifestyle.
