A confession — it has been stalking me for years now, this crawling disdain for fashion; the certainty that it is not an ally but an enemy.
The older I am, the more disenchanted I am with what is meant to make us beautiful. Now, at 36, I believe it is one of the ultimate evils in the universe, with yoghurt. It should have its own Death Star.
I hate fashion. I scowl at Harper’s. I snarl at W. I spit at Vogue. Sometimes, I tear them up, these glossy pages full of anorexic children — part human, part make-up, part computer program — just because I’m worth it. Then I put a colander on my head.
You may say that I am bitter. How is my sex life, you ask? Do men flee my fashion-free person? What is my weight? I must be ill. Weep for me in my giant knickers. I am outcast.
Not at all. I like food and men and comfort. It is just that at some point, the unceasing prattle of fashion has become a scream in my head. I cannot ignore its idiocies any more.
Late last year I read that a 16-year-old girl had fallen between the carriages of a train in southern England. She died, of course, and her corpse was wearing high-heeled shoes.
It was snowing that night. But still this young woman, with a lifetime of fashion choices before her, ran for the train and is now dead. And I couldn’t help suspecting that had she been wearing a shoe designed for movement — rather than to push her breasts out and her pelvis forward — she would still be alive.
This was different from the usual Fashion Death, where a model has a heart attack on the catwalk, because she lives on grapes. This was an ordinary girl — a bystander. And why was she wearing high-heeled shoes on an icy night?
Because fashion, the whispering monster, told her to.
If you are a young woman, it is never enough to wear a clean dress and comfortable shoes and be done — fashion is a Jewish mother on crack. This will make you beautiful! This will make men want you! Wear this! Wear that!
I discovered fashion when I was 13. I can’t remember exactly how I knew what I was supposed to be wearing. You breathe it in, like air. So I spent years buying junk — what else was money for? To make me secure? No. How much more feminine to be insecure.
Run towards the ever-receding sense of self-acceptance and the promise of love; perhaps this collection will fix you! Or this one!
I worked for a tabloid newspaper for a few years and I earned a lot of money. I used to wander around expensive department stores, particularly on weekdays when I was at a loss for anything to do — up and down, up and down, an insect with broken antennae.
The first thing I noticed was how miserable all the shoppers looked. White and windowless, it smelled only of anxiety. I also noticed how easy it was to buy a dress and a bag and then perhaps some stupid, unnatural shoes and feel a kind of brief, bright burst of self-acceptance, which always evaporated as soon as I was home.
I now know that fashion can’t even make itself happy. I met a 16-year-old model once, a sweet, utterly ordinary girl with an astonishing face. She exuded gloom.
She showed me a photograph of herself. It had appeared on the cover of Vogue.
“I don’t think it looks like me at all,” she said. She was right. It didn’t. It was a nonexistent woman.
She described how they had attached long strands of hair to her eyelashes for the photograph.
“It was really painful,” she said. “They said ‘Don’t blink’. But I need to blink.”
Do you like any of these pictures, I asked her. “No,” she said. Do you think you are beautiful? Again — “no”. And then I knew — it is worse for them than it is for us. I only have to compare myself with the nearest angry writer. Models compete with Aphrodite.
The oddest thing rescued me from fashion. It was that I got fat. Never mind why; that is a story for another page. But I got so fat that even fashion wouldn’t pretend it could fix me. You can get so fat they don’t actually want you in their clothes.
I was consigned to frumpy smock-land, across the River Styx. And it is lovely here; no heels, no stupid dresses-of-the-moment, certainly no thongs. Fashion has died for me, with an angry little hiss. Ah, peace.
I can look at the clothes on the catwalk now and laugh at their imbecility. They are not for me. I still think about that young woman on the train tracks, though. What did she pay for her shoes? —