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Fashion Celibacy
Warning: As with many of the finer things in life - drink, drugs, cigarettes and illicit sex — drawing your wardrobe from the rails of fashion's avant garde can also have its downsides. Namely: you might not get laid...
If high fashion is 'all about' sex, then how come full-on fashion victims get fuck-all in the fuck department? Because, alas, avant-garde fashion can be a lonely pursuit; by adhering to an 'intellectual’ mode of attire that only a few like-minded souls can contextualise, the likelihood of pulling tends to be severely compromised. At fashion shows, for instance, beady eyes are everywhere. Everyone is checking out the packaging, but paying little attention to the groceries.
Hence, it is always the attendant rough diamonds, the dressed-like-they-don't-give-a-fig sorts - plus the models in states of undress backstage who are lusted over within the fashion industry; not the people who spent hours getting ready beforehand. Why do you think Alexander McQueen looks and dresses like a geezer, and not one of his own dazzling catwalk visions? Ditto the likes of Noki and Adam Entwistle.
Why do you think Isabella Blow, who herself dresses with unbridled lobster-on-head flamboyance, has said: "I only work with people I fancy, and therefore chose to champion said geezer-McQueen?
Even a designer such as Russell Sage, himself a purveyor of nerve-jangling garb, insists: “Avant garde dressers? I just think they're twats, so if they can stick to going out with each other that's great, because then the rest of us don't have to bother with them." He continues: "I used to think it was all brilliant, but I've actually found they're often more interesting to look at than to speak to. They're often really thick, too, much thicker than everyone else. They dress up like that to overcompensate. I avoid the people who show off in fashion. I just see them and I think 'you twat'. It makes me feel physically sick to look at them."
Looking like the proverbial Christmas tree or succumbing to the lure of a costly designer sack with roughly-hewn stitching tends to suggest a self-absorption that translates as crap in bed/asexual/not-a-phwoar. It is not uncommon to see former nightclub habituees, once immersed in frippery and labels way beyond the call of duty - and forever waking the morning after with little more than a smudged maquillage - now attired like market traders (the boys) or teen pop starlets (the girls), and copping-off right left and centre.
Jordan, the legendary sales assistant at Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren's mid-70s Kings Road boutique, Sex, encountered many problems relating to her appearance of the time (rubber attire, geometric face paint, Myra Hindley-esque bleached beehive hair). Not only did British Rail have to allocate her a train carriage all of her own for her daily trip to work from Sussex to central London, as fellow passengers were so disturbed by her looks, but she also found romance sorely thin on the ground. "I didn't go out with anyone," she reveals in Jon Savage's book, England's Dreaming. "The image was everything. People were scared out their wits of me. Absolutely. I never got anyone saying they'd like to take me out. I exuded a leave-me-aloneness."
And as far back as 80 years ago, this plight of the style terrorist was recognised by the late Quentin Crisp, who minced the mean streets of London in loose suits and sandals, with full powdered make-up and flaming henna'd-red hair. Back then it was difficult for anyone to 'place' the stately queen's flamboyant, pre-pop, pre-style magazine appearance - comprising of jumble sale hand-me-downs held together with safety pins and a fondness for the type of kit typically nestling in a tart's make-up bag. Imperious, he never deigned to tone down his look despite the beatings and verbal abuse he regularly received from an appalled public, the lack of employment opportunities and relative poverty caused by such an image and, most significantly, despite his realisation that he might woo - but would not ultimately hold on to - the Great Dark Man of his desires, as long as he dressed-up his effeminacy so blatantly. For him, to alter his attire would have portrayed a serious lack of style.