‘Sweatpants are a sign of defeat. You lost control of your life so you bought some sweatpants.’
-Karl Lagerfeld
I had my ear chewed off last month by a self-described ‘rogue ponderer and master of illegibilities’. Apparently, opining on the obesity rates of Arab women and ice cream parlours was not deemed to be sufficiently original and, worse still, lacked any clear policy proposals – so said the geopolitical savant who has a blog dedicated to Middle Eastern politics. Writing serious articles on the failure of Arab democracy certainly sets the bar for originality very high, but I will try my best to match this lofty feat.
At Pimlico Journal, we try to cover all bases, and with Paris Fashion Week upon us, there’s no better time to pay homage to one of Britain’s biggest and best cultural exports: fashion. Alongside sports and sporting culture, British fashion is an element of British culture which is now ubiquitous around the world, despite British fashion generally not receiving as much attention as French or Italian. This seems strange, because upon closer inspection you will realise that most modern men’s clothing is ultimately derived from the British three-piece suit, and most modern men’s footwear from the brogue.
Why this relative lack of attention? In short, it is because British fashion, and Savile Row in particular, have demonstrated a remarkable immunity to three key trends: firstly, globalisation; secondly, the perforation of hip-hop culture into fashion; and thirdly, the rise of a nouveau riche (and often third-world) clientele.
British tailoring came to the fore only two centuries ago. Prior to this, sartorial trends were being set by the Italians during the Renaissance, and the Spanish during their Age of Exploration; these trends were then brought over to Versailles by Louis XIV, thus cementing France’s position as the European capital of fashion, as well as of high culture more generally. During the reign of the equally eccentric Charles II, England sought to mimic this, effectively mandating that every man at court wear a waistcoat and breeches. This was the precursor of the three-piece suit. France would continue to set fashion trends into the eighteenth century, such as the widespread adoption of neckties, makeup, and heels (no, they’re not Persian, stick to geopolitics). With the accession of the Bourbons to the Spanish throne, France would usurp Spain as the fashion capital of Europe. I will not harp on about French fashion in the eighteen century because this article isn’t that ‘serious’, but just imagine the biographies of Madame de Pompadour and Marie Antoinette.
Then came the French Revolution. Woke? Not quite. Out went the sumptuous clothing of aristocracy; in came more austere and simple silhouettes, often loosely inspired by the attire of Ancient Greek parliamentarians. In what is called ‘The Great Renunciation’, bright colours, prints, and detailed embroidery were now seen as symbols of aristocratic venality. The new style soon spread across Europe. In some cases, this was due to direct French influence; through warfare and ideological contagion. Yet even Britain followed suit – pun not intended, but let’s run with it – and ditched its relative sartorial pomposity in favour of jackets, breeches, and ties for all classes.
The Napoleonic Wars crippled the Spanish Empire and ended their monopoly on black cochineal dye from South America. Black had traditionally been a colour of romance and luxury in Europe, and still is today in Spain – notice the proliferation of black in Spanish and Dutch paintings, the iconic black flamenco dress, the black shirt, traje de luto – but once Britain had cheap access to black dye from the newly independent nations of Latin America, black would grow dramatically in popularity, now transforming into a colour of austerity and business. Upon the death of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria would wear black for the rest of her life, also making it the de facto colour of mourning across all of Europe.
With France spending most of the nineteenth century deciding if it was Woke or not, it was too busy to contribute much to fashion. British fashion would fill the vacuum left by France thanks to George Bryan ‘Beau’ Brumell, the father of British fashion, who transposed military wear to the wardrobes of your everyday gentleman. Modern day menswear, from hunting attire to the default Finance Bro outfit, are all ultimately downstream of early three-piece suits and Brumell’s dandyism. Haute couture as we know it was also the product of a Briton: the maverick Charles Frederick Worth, who set up his own fashion house in Paris. Made-to-order clothing was now available to anyone who could afford it, and not just royalty. Worth is also credited with the introduction of modelling and stitching designer labels onto pieces. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, tailors began moving to Savile Row. In the 1880s, Savile Row tailor Henry Poole & Co would make the first modern-style dinner jacket.
You see no such developments among Frenchmen at this time. While Louis Vuitton and Hermes were both founded in the nineteenth century, they started out making luggage. It wasn’t until the early twentieth century that French – they chose to be Woke – fashion houses began to pop up, meaning that Britain had a fifty-year head start.
It was at this point that British and French design philosophies began to diverge. Coco Chanel introduced her garconne style, imprinting male tailoring styles and techniques onto womenswear. This was followed by Christian Dior’s new look, which revived the baroque pinched hip style, and Yves Saint Laurent, from whom the slimline rockstar aesthetic of the ’60s and ’70s was derived. While French fashion adapted to changing social attitudes, British fashion – at least high fashion – remained steadfast in its commitment to classic menswear. Even to this day, formal British menswear is as it was eighty years ago.
For this, we at Pimlico Journal should give a rare ‘thank you’ to the monarchy. Twee as this might sound, giving the tailors of Savile Row royal warrants has ensured that they have remained largely immune to global fashion trends. The warrants give Savile Row an unassailable air of legitimacy, helping sustain demand: the Shanghai businessman will get his suit made here on this basis alone. This almost feudal system means that tailors aren’t subject to the musings of French paedophile philosophers, the complaints of fat women for not making clothes that fit 48-inch waistlines, or American hip-hop artists who would vandalise the British aesthetic altogether.
I will not bore you on why aesthetics and morality are both properties of one another, but it is worth knowing that fashion is the most right-wing coded – if not at times downright crypto-fascistic – of all the arts industries, despite appearing to be the opposite. In short, you cannot adapt fashion to suit your ugly, deformed, leftist weltanschauung because it comes at the expense of beauty. You cannot get someone to like ugly fashion because it is emblematic of your ideas. There is no media literacy test in a way there might be one for a movie. You can perhaps hide your plebian tastes in music or movies. But everyone has to wear clothes, and you can immediately tell a lot about someone from the way they dress. Jeremy Corbyn still hasn’t put on a proper suit and done up his tie; instead, he has spent forty years wearing an ugly brown tweed blazer like some disgruntled Northern former coal miner who has to show up to a hearing for domestic violence related offences. It conveys his ugly views, and his ugly views call for an ugly sense of style.
High fashion is the only artistic institution that has proven to be immune to the Woke. The fat tubs of lard in underwear you saw on Calvin Klein billboards are now gone. Models are still mostly white, with those who are not often being (for instance) visually striking Sudanese Nubians and noble Macrobians. Streetwear came and went, because being a woman and dressing like Michael Jordan before game six is ridiculous. Runway models are still living off cocaine and are still throwing up into the toilet bowl. Leftist women still date the guy in the Barbour gilet despite knowing that he is probably a right-wing misogynist and is definitely a cunt.
Creative directors have pretty much free reign to say whatever they want. John Galliano, the then-creative director of Dior, was ousted for a Nazi rant in 2011 so over-the-top that it would make Nick Fuentes look like an AIPAC lobbyist:
‘I love Hitler. People like you would be dead. Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be fucking gassed.’
Galliano was promptly fired, but the fashion world rushed to his defence. Giorgio Armani himself said that he felt sorry for Galliano and that he was filmed without his permission. Vogue Italia went further in defending him, stating that ‘…perhaps behind this event are just some parvenus of journalistic scandal who, in our opinion, were waiting to have three minutes of video to sell to someone for a good deal more than thirty pieces of silver’. Galliano, by virtue of being one of the most talented fashion designers in history, would soon be rehired as the creative director of Maison Margiela, where he has continued to win high praise.
Nobody really cares that Coco Chanel was a Nazi who worked for the Gestapo, or that Céline Vipiana was a virulent racist. Gucci were never cancelled for their blackface inspired knitwear, nor was Miuccia Prada cancelled for her Little Black Sambo handbags.
This is not the case in most other fields, even seemingly less ‘Woke’ fields like science and engineering. Compare Wernher von Braun, the chief architect of the Apollo Saturn V rocket, to Coco Chanel. The former was instrumental in one of humanity’s greatest feats; the latter designed clothes. The former, in helping design the V-2 rocket, was simply doing what he was told by the people who ruled his country; the latter was actively committing treason. Yet Von Braun will always have an asterisk next to his name because TMZ conspiracists in the hood love bringing up his employment in Germany (‘purrr and guess where those scientists went, they ain’t teach that in class!’). Nobody ever brings up Coco Chanel. Anna Wintour might be the most powerful woman on earth.
Dolce & Gabbana famously went on the offensive against Diet Prada (an account dedicated to exposing plagiarists in fashion) in response to blowback over a video that taught Westerners how to eat with chopsticks ahead of their show in China in 2018. What followed was a flurry Sinophobic remarks referencing dogs over Instagram DMs. Everybody forgot about it. Dolce & Gabbana filed a defamation lawsuit and are still here, while the Diet Prada account is now dedicated to propagandising against Trump over the poor Mexican kids he deported.
Speaking of poor kids from the third world, I want to touch upon the scourge that is fast fashion, and how UK BEASTS are responsible for the poisoning of kids in Myanmar. Online fast fashion outlets such as Boohoo, Fashion Nova, Pretty Little Thing, and SHEIN have flooded Britain with inexpensive, poor-quality clothes. They also gave rise to a new type within the dreaded ‘influencer’ and ‘brand ambassador’ caste. These outlets don’t release clothes in seasons. They churn out new clothes every week.
So how does fast fashion end up poisoning the water supply of a village in Myanmar? I used to think that it was that influencers would buy an outfit, post it on Instagram, and proceed to refund it. Turns out that, in fact, every provincial BEAST now does this. Perhaps their narcissism renders them incapable of wearing the same outfit twice. Or maybe they’re just cheap. Either way, refunded items cannot be resold: a £4 dress will never cover the cost of warehousing them, especially when next week’s batch of clothes will also need to be stored. In any case, you cannot resell a dress that’s been imbued with the stains of some Scouser’s boob sweat. So what do they do? They ship it off to a landfill in Ghana, or they dump it in a river in South East Asia. Made in Myanmar, Dumped in Myanmar – with a brief interlude wrapped around some table-hopping tart in a Chinawhite club.
It has gotten so bad that outlets are simply refusing refunds. After all, why should children in Myanmar die from drinking water contaminated with plastics because of the frivolous spending habits of UK BEASTS. Actually, we should stop calling them ‘UK BEASTS’, and start calling them ‘murderers’ instead.
To pander to a growing class of tasteless, nouveau riche third-worlders and monied Deanos, supposedly ‘high fashion houses’ have begun producing actual slop. Logo t-shirts, monogram sweaters, and tracksuits – articles of clothing that are never part of any ready-to-wear collection – are now mass produced for people who only care about the logo.
To complain about this is perhaps to flog a dead horse, but within this complaint lies an important fact missed by most of those complaining. Most of the world doesn’t have ‘fashion’ in an artistic sense, or at least they didn’t until very recently. Throughout history, most of the world dressed in various sheets and shawls until the colonial powers introduced to everyone their clothing. Style per se didn’t matter. Sure, you had different materials, colours, and embroidery being utilised in, say, China, but only ever as signifiers of wealth and status – never of taste or personal aesthetic. This attitude obviously still exists today: just walk into Harrods or a university campus.
It has gotten to the point where you just cannot be seen in Gucci or own a Louis Vuitton bag because people will associate you with tasteless Arabs, or think you’re wearing counterfeits. Entire fashion houses can become verboten, even when the individual items themselves are okay. It’s like owning a BMW: try as you might, you cannot avoid spiritually transmogrifying into a Slough street racer and becoming a nuisance on the road; you simply cannot be seen driving one. Instead, you are forced into a purity spiral, finding more and more obscure labels until these labels themselves eventually get overtaken. You can no longer buy Dior, so you buy Rick Owen; when Rick Owen becomes mainstream, Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck, Junya Watanabe, Guidi, and eventually Carol Christian Poell, where you have to be invited to follow his Instagram, where you’re wearing pig leather, and become every bit as insufferable as the guy in Dior. Instead of the BMW, you’re the prick who owns a Lancia or an Alpine and never shuts up about how difficult they are to repair.
Contemporary British high fashion houses have given a relatively good account of themselves compared to many fashion houses elsewhere. Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney, Burberry, Vivienne Westwood, and Dunhill have certainly taken traditional British tailoring and prints and adapted them to modern high fashion and the avant-garde scene that emerged out of Antwerp and Tokyo in the ’90s. They have done this tastefully. There are no Alexander McQueen monograms that I know of, or any fughazi Stella McCartney shirts.
British fashion has, however, suffered an assault on its suiting tradition by Italy. The pretentious relaxed green blazer with no shoulder padding, narrow lapel with off-white chinos and sandals. Britpopper dad dresses like this. It might even be your dad, or maybe not, but you have definitely met the type. He voted to remain. He fawns over Rafael Nadal, but admires Roger Federer’s class. Andy Murray? He just didn’t have what it takes.
After being called out by geopolitical experts for not having serious policy proposals in an article about dessert cafés, I drafted a few:
Shut the borders.
Spending caps on UK BEASTS to save children and our oceans.
Ban tracksuits.
Hail Kate Moss.
Thank you.
Image credits: Crooked House Films, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
This article was written by an regular Pimlico Journal contributor Henry Reynolds Skelton. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.
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finally someone recognises the hard work it entails, being a model is basically being an activist for good taste.
This is the only thing I could have ever seen myself writing about and you stole the words right out of my mouth, nice. The UK definitely doesn't get enough credit for fashion despite so much of it coming from us, because we have so many more cultural exports on peoples minds unlike say Italy, whose national image may as well be "ruins, coffee, and trousers that are too short".
Definitely think that other certain cultures don't really "get" fashion as anything more than vague status symbols, because they lack the exposure of all sorts of subcultures we take for granted (mods, punks, skinheads, ska revival, new romantics, teddy boys, the list goes on) and for whatever reason their culture never thought to invent their own (there are no polite ways to say which or why). You'd think as well some of these would rub off on them, you can't go to Brighton without having some of this crammed down your throat but, well I guess a lot of these people prefer Bradford and never interact with anything outside of it.
I think these third worlders getting into fashion has made it ironically less progressive and limited what these brands can really do. Just a few years ago Balenciaga had some clothes with pride flag motifs revealed (don't think they've done it again) and the backlash from thirdies was immense, as if it had never struck these people from Azerbaijan or wherever that the fashion industry might contain gay people in it, because to them "fashion" is when you spend your deliveroo bonus on a t-shirt that just says "Versace" in block letters. And that was just from some virtue signalling flags so god help a brand if they wanted to sell any of the bondage gear Westwood/Mclaren did.
I've found the way actual fashion is online now, is that people have to get into nicher and nicher brands from the US/UK/Japan/Sweden all while not saying the quiet part out loud and I've often seen anyone who does gets ostracised for it, even though everything you say is spot on. Japanese fashion in particular does actually recognise and respect the traditional aspect of it too, even for our own fashion probably more than we do which is funny.
P.s. as you described it as an uncancellable industry and diet prada, another good example would be Gosha Rubchinskiy, a Russian designer (doverstreetmarket protégé) who was "cancelled" for asking to see a prospective models non-nude body when casting online, who then didn't get the job and attempted to cancel him (w/ diet prada helping). None of the cancellers saw any issue with a minor lying about their age, or trying to "out" GR as gay when he lives in Russia (not sure if he actually is). If there were other motives that aren't "he didn't give me a job and is Russian" who knows but he thankfully didn't end up cancelled, and still runs a hugely successful brand and recently collabbed with Kanye, much to the chagrin of a certain fashion-blog turned Palestine-campaigner.
P.p.s Yes we should ban tracksuits, and bring back the ban on hoodies in bluewater.