Where would girls be without fashion?

How would the poor darlings know what to wear?

We all look back, those of us who are old enough, at what we wore 20 years ago and wince. I can remember in the 1980s wincing about the flares and platforms of the '70s and the minis and ethnic skirts of the '60s. Now I wince at the thought of ra-ra skirts, big hair and shoulder pads.

Where does it come from?

The desire to look good, obviously. The need for acceptance. The desire to conform. We are pack animals, and we use fashion to denote which pack we belong to. No-one would confuse a goth-girl for a hippy-chick, though both wear long skirts. The fear of exclusion from one's selected group, of rejection by one's peers, is a powerful force in humans and other pack animals.

Maybe a lack of imagination can contribute too. The current fashion for face and body piercings started among teenagers and people in their early twenties during the 1990s, but it has spread up beyond that generation, so that people who were 'too old' for the fashion when it started now sport odd piercings in their ears, or in more private spaces. Billy Connolly got his nipples pierced when he was 50.

Piercings are a perfect example of what Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene calls the 'meme'.

The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission or a unit of imitation...

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation... As my colleague N.K.Humprhey commented... 'When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the same way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.'

Malcolm Gladwell takes the idea of memes to the next step in his book The Tipping Point which is subtitled How little things can make a big difference. There is an entire chapter devoted to the Airwalk shoe and their advertising agency Lambesis.

They took the cultural cues from the Innovators ... and leveled, sharpened, and assimilated them into a coherent form. They gave those cues a specific meaning that they did not have previously and packaged that new sensibility in the form of a pair of shoes.

Fashions don't just happen. The may spring from the streets, but they are selected, developed and exploited by advertising agencies whose psychological mastery of propaganda techniques is so great that we believe what we are seeing is pandemic zeitgeist. It is nothing of the sort.

Fashion and control

In apparent contradiction, fashion is of course closely linked to culture, perhaps more so in the past than now. The cruelest and most unacceptable fashion of all, the Chinese fashion for footbinding, was possibly more a matter of culture than fashion. "Footbinding" sounds relatively harmless. However it involved the breaking of the foot, either the individual toes or across the arch, and the compression of the broken bones into as short a space as possible, ideally three or four inches. Now look at your feet, and consider how long 3" really is.

It is hard to tell whether the Victorian fashion for corsets was fashion or culture, though it is notable that it ended with the expansion of the economic and political roles of women in the early decades of the 20th century. Lacing not only created permanent ill-health and internal deformity, it was on occasions carried to such extremes that it killed. There was an infamous correspondence which ran for several years published in Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine edited by Sam Beeton (husband of the redoubtable Isabella). Both of these however illustrate one of the more profound effects of fashion, namely the control of women.

The fashion industry is currently dominated by gay men. Now the fundamental thing about gay men, no matter how great their liking for silks lace or indeed leather, no matter how good their eye for detail, is that they dislike women's bodies. They are grossed out by breasts, they can only contemplate the vulva by describing it as a camel's foot, and they like the smallest and tightest of backsides.

And so we hand our bodies over to men who dislike them, in order to attract men who adore them. What is that about?

"I believe that beauty magazines promote low self esteem"

What that is about, of course, is insecurity. A survey conducted to compare what women thought men found attractive with what men actually find attractive came up with results which confirm the con-trick. A series of images of women, varying from the anorexic to those shaped like earth-goddesses were shown to women and to men. The women assumed that the men would prefer the stick-insects. The men on the other hand chose images of much more substantial women. As Savage Garden say I believe that beauty magazines promote low self esteem.

The average British woman today is 5'4" tall, with a 38" bust, a 32" waist and 40½"hips¹ compared with her grandmother's 37-27½-39 inch size 12² figure on a 5' 2" frame. The average woman's dress size in the UK is 16³. However 16 is the largest size stocked by most high street fashion stores. Yes, you can buy larger sizes, but in places with the style and glamour of BHS and Marks and Spencers. Not in the fashion retailers.

Fashion and exploitation

The irony is that the waif-like models are among the least healthy people on the planet. Ian Halperin went 'undercover' to write his book Bad and Beautiful: Inside the Dazzling and Deadly World of Supermodels in which he details, slightly repetitively, the degradations and dangers of being a model. Gaiman and Pratchett put an apocalyptic spin on the subject in Good Omens where Famine is waiting patiently in New York, promoting diet meals for models. There is even a term for fashionable women whose bodies are like sticks and whose heads are disproportionately large; they are known as 'lollipops'. The point that Gaiman and Pratchett are making, is that women can be persuaded to starve themselves, and indeed mutilate themselves, in the name of fashion and commercially propagated ideas of beauty.

Of course there are luckier women in the third world. Women who are not starving. Not quite. Women who work in sweat-shops in India and China and indeed the USA to put the latest throw-away shirt on our backs or training shoe on our feet.

This is not a new phenomenon. Women have long been exploited not only as wearers of fashionable clothes but as makers of fashionable clothes. It has been going on for centuries and was powerfully noted by Thomas Hood in The Song of the Shirt.

Oh, Men, with Sisters dear!

Oh, men, with Mothers and Wives!

It is not linen you're wearing out,

But human creatures' lives!

Stitch--stitch--stitch,

In poverty, hunger and dirt,

Sewing at once, with a double thread,

A Shroud as well as a Shirt.

At least it kept them off the streets.

Another irony, here, is that if "Model, Actress, Whatever" was the 20th Century euphemism for a high class freelance, then when Pratchett again used the euphemism of "Seamstress" he was not too far off the mark. It was, and still is, significantly more profitable for a good looking girl to sell the skills of her body than her skills with a needle. This is observable from the map of London when "Gropec**te Alley" was renamed "Threadneedle Street".

In her book Courtesans, Susan Griffin defines the French word grisette thus:

Literally, milliner's assistant, but the word applied to seamstresses and shopgirls too. Since these women were paid so little and had few prospects, many engaged in casual prostitution hence the meaning: a woman of "easy virtue". Madame du Barry began as a grisette.

It looks so good on you, Madam

Why do we sell our souls, our peace of mind, our health, our self-esteem, the very way we value ourselves so cheaply? It prevents us from discovering what suits us. Sarah Ferguson's hourglass figure looked frankly frightening in the boxy shoulder-padded fashions of the 1980s, but on her trip to Canada in 1987 she wore an 18th Century outfit in the style of the portraits of Gainsborough, and suddenly she looked voluptuous, sensuous, well proportioned and stunning. However she did not learn from the experience, and stuck with the fashions which made her so lumpen, because they had been scaled up from the entirely different and considerably less feminine profile of sticklike women like Diana.

What contribution would that be, then?

What do we have, when we look at the whole picture from a distance?

An industry which provides power and influence to a small group of men. An industry which forces western women into ill-health and drug dependency in order to promote it. An industry which forces third world labour into slavery and sweat-shops in order to provide the goods for it. An industry which destroys the self-esteem of the vast majority of the western women it promotes itself to.

This entry discusses the subject in some detail, but in fact there is a more elegant way of summarising The Fashion Industry and its Positive Contribution to Society.