Great Article

[Pringle]

This article is so spot on. Yes, it was written in 2002, but it still rings true today, regardless.

Voyage of the damned
Voyage was so snooty that even Madonna and Naomi couldn't get served there. Now it is to close, depriving the anonymous rich of a place to waste their money on overpriced tat
Julie Burchill
Guardian
Friday February 1, 2002
To my mind, following fashion is rather like masturbating or making silent phone calls to ex-lovers after midnight; sort of cute and inevitable when you're young, but indicating a rather tragic lack of life once you're old enough to vote. It's another thing entirely to reach your 30s, 40s, 50s even, and still be shelling out vast quantities of cash that could be better spent on drugs and weekends at One Aldwych on a piece that can only be worn for four months before becoming beyond the pale (and interesting). Sadder still is pretending that your sheeplike docility in chasing the latest "must have" handbag (waiting lists of 200 eager dupes for some models, apparently) in some way signifies your "individuality" or "creativity". God gave us brains and speech with which to cultivate and broadcast our creativity and individuality; as Fran Liebowitz said of sloganised T-shirts: "If someone doesn't want to speak to you, why the hell should you think they want to hear from your clothes?"
No, fashion is the rapture of the dullard, the ecstacy of the castrated - furthermore, it is the actual eroticisation of one's castrated state. And it makes you look crap. To me, the best dressed woman in the world, the one who always looks absolutely just-right whatever the occasion is Kate Moss, who must surely be the Einstein of aesthetic loveliness - looking good appears to be an actual sixth sense with her. Yet Kate looks so singularly good precisely because she never follows fashion and dresses mostly from second-hand and vintage shops, mixing pieces that were hot 20 years ago with just one new thing - a pair of boots, a bag - from the current catwalks.
She always looks good because she knows what suits her. On the other hand, when we think of badly dressed women, we think of the likes of Meg Matthews and Victoria Beckham - sad sacks who follow the dictates of fashion with all the desperation of a junkie trying to keep tabs on his dealer, whether it suits them or not.
We quite rightly feel that women such as Matthews and Beckham must be profoundly stupid, because what sort of adult would willingly change their entire wardrobe three times a year just because a screaming woofter with a lifelong aversion to T&A told them that spending thousands of pounds on dressing up as a monk or a cowgirl was now the only way not to become an object of pity and scorn? Still, if they want to waste their money that's their business. It's only when fashion tries to pass itself off as some sort of relevant real-world art form, or even worse as "caring", that its practitioners are in danger of becoming offensive and practically asking for a good, classic kicking.
At the start of the 90s, fashion decided that it was green; the catwalks were full of models wearing unbleached white cotton shrouds and carrying babies. How a business which, more than any other, depends on built-in obsolescence and the casting off of perfectly wearable clothes thrice yearly can see itself as green was never satisfactorily explained to me, but there you go.
Fashion by its very nature only makes sense, is only true to itself, when it works completely outside the moral framework of society. The Ritch ***** and Ghetto Fabulous looks of last year were admirably candid in their refusal to maintain that fashion was about anything but mindless, shameless spending. I don't like people who wear fur, but in the context of the fashion industry it makes perfect sense. Fur looks good (that's why we find furry animals so gorgeous) and costs a lot, and fashion is only about what looks good and costs a lot. To expect it to have morals is as silly as expecting the stock market to have morals. It's the nature of the beast.
Fashion is an upside-down looking-glass world and anyone who tries to apply real-world standards of decency to it is entirely missing the point and tilting at designer windmills. All the fuss about showing "real"-sized models; what on earth is so good about having an even wider range of women objectified? Isn't it terrible how snotty and contemptuous the shopgirls in those extortionate West End boutiques are of their customers? Well, no, actually, because if I saw someone looking to blow a week's wages on a T-shirt, I think I'd sneer at the dumb cluck, too.
Fashion is shallow and mercenary and without any intrinsic worth; that's why it's called fashion. And for this reason, I cannot get gleefully self-righteous about the demise of Voyage, the Fulham Road boutique which was so up itself that you actually had to belong to its "club" - 60,000 membership cards issued over the past four years, though the shop itself has been around since 1991 - in order to shop there. After all, you wouldn't be allowed into the Groucho club to have the honour of buying an overpriced vodka and tonic unless you were a member, or the guest of one, and you wouldn't be allowed to use the pool at the Third Space gym unless you'd stumped up the hefty membership fee. What's the difference?
And frankly, having seen the clothes close up, most people would think that the Mazillis - the Italian family who are Voyage - were actually doing womankind in general a favour by not allowing her to spend £10,000 on a coat made of woven ribbons, or £2,500 on a frilly top. The Mazillis were not in the business of taking from the poor in order to fill their own coffers; they stated with admirable bluntness that only the very rich need apply for the right to waste their money on overpriced tat.
Often called the Italian Addams Family, the Mazzillis are composed of queen bee matriarch Louise, her estranged husband Tiziano and their children Rocky and Tatum, who act as models and publicists for their parents' creations. In a milieu ruled by gay men, such flagrant flaunting of family solidarity, albeit eccentric, was unusual in itself. Add to this the fact that the Mazzillis, with almost Marxist purity, were more interested in rich, anonymous customers than in famous, freebie-expecting ones; as Tatum once boasted, after saying that celebrity customers were often more trouble than they were worth, "Our real customers come every three months and spend £80,000."
Madonna and Julia Roberts were both turned away after ringing the notorious Voyage doorbell; Naomi Campbell was actually banned from the shop after being rude to the assistants. In the super-schmoozing climate of the fashion/Hollywood crossover, the Mazzillis' behaviour was a breath of air which, if not quite fresh, at least reeked a good deal less of groupiedom than the behaviour of most other schmutter cutters.
The clothes themselves could not be accused of being boring. The Mazzillis had obviously never heard of greige or minimalism, and their garments were a touchy-feely riot: velvet, fur, silk, leather, boucle, embroidery and tassles all tussling for attention. With such obvious leanings towards the more-is-more philosophy of fashion, it was perhaps inevitable that in June of last year they announced that Victoria Beckham was to become the £800,000 face of Voyage. Said a spokesperson: "Victoria is the epitome of cool in Britain and is a very exclusive lady." (So exclusive, in fact, that she sold her wedding to a porn baron, but that's just nit-picking.) "She represents everything Voyage is about and will propel us even more as the store for the great and the good in London."
Fashion designers are never intelligent in the real sense of the word but for brief flashes they can be almost differently abled, like an animal hearing a note that humans cannot. And then it's gone, as fast as it came; and with no conventional good sense or cleverness to fall back on, they tend to end up dead and penniless like Ossie Clarke, or batty burlesque shows like Vivienne Westwood.
There were rumours as far back as February 2001 that Voyage was on the way out, but to mistake poor Posh, with her fake lip-ring, plastic catsuits and crisps adverts, for the epitome of either cool or exclusivity, was obviously enough to send their remaining clientele screaming for Harvey Nicks. Still, the deposed Mazzillis can console themselves with the latest fashion idioc: Being Unfashionable Is The New Fashionable. You really couldn't make it up.

[MachielS]

looks like someone copy pasted all your posts from the last weeks into an article

[Pringle]

Originally Posted by MachielS

looks like someone copy pasted all your posts from the last weeks into an article

That's why I like it lol.