The decline of juvenile costume

Apart from a few survivals, the concept of special styles for older children is in abeyance today. We have in effect returned to the medieval system that recognizes infancy as a separate state but dresses children like their elders - or at least like their elders at play. This is perhaps appropriate, since physically as well as socially children grow up faster than they used to. In the 1860s, for example, the average age of first menstruation in Americawas 16.5, and girls who had not yet reached that age were, ap­propriately enough, dressed as children: in tight bodices and short full skirts, with pantalettes or long white stockings below.

Today the average age of menarche is eleven or less. Even ten-year-olds wear what are called “training bras” in sizes AA and AAA, completely nonfunctional except as a sign that the child will eventually become a woman. Girls' outer clothes, too, even those of three- and four-year-olds, are often designed so as to suggest (or perhaps magically encourage) the development of secondary sex characteristics. Nonexistent hips are suggested by excess fullness and breasts are outlined on the tiny flat chest and filled in with ruffles.

By Wayne Hemingway

THE GREAT DESIGNER RIP-OFF

From the man who brought us affordable style, a damning indictment of the fashion industry.

AT its best, fashion should be uplifting and exciting. We all want to feel good about our appearance, and well-designed clothes are the ideal way to achieve that.

But, since the advent of the high-profile designer labels over recent years, too much of the fashion industry has become gripped by greed and cynicism.

With the connivance of a supine Press and manipulative PR firms, many of the big fashion houses are systematically ripping off the public by charging outrageous prices for their ordinary, often vulgar, products.

As someone who has worked in the fashion industry for more than two decades, I know only too well how some of the major labels are engaged in a conspiracy of deception against the public through endless hype and ruthless abuse of commercial power.

And I feel it is now my duty to expose the insidious methods of these modern despots of taste, not because I want to boost my profile — I sold my own label, Red Or Dead, three years ago — but because I want the public to stop being so badly misled.

I've always been interested in clothes and I recognize the importance of individuality and how first impressions based on appearance are often the pre­cursors to the more important attrib­utes of what is going on inside a person.

When I first met my wife on a dance-floor in Lancashire 22 years ago, what instantly attracted me to her was her fancy footwork and the sense that she shared my tastes in fashion.

In 1982, soon after we married, we founded the Red Or Dead label. There were two motivating factors behind this move. The first was simple necessity: starting out in business, we did not have the money to buy expensive designer clothes, so we decided we should make our own.

But,second, I had become increasinglyangry at the absurd prices charged by labels that supposedly existed to serve us.

I remember my shock visiting London's King's Road at the height of the punk era in the mid-Seventies, and seeing a T-shirt on sale for £60 in Vivienne Westwood's cutting-edge shop, Seditionaries.

My disillusion with this fashion elitism — posing as hip radicalism — encour­aged me to set up a label which would provide good designs at affordable prices.

Red Or Dead was very popular with the public, but we continually faced hostility from the fashion industry. We were never really accepted as part of the catwalk scene, while we were initially refused shows at London Fashion Week on the grounds that our clothes were 'too cheap'.

Our contemporaries and much of the fashion Press frowned on our enthusiasm for selling to High Street retailers such as Top Shop and Miss Selfridge, sneering that we were demeaning design.

Yet, for all such arrogance, the truth is that nowadays there is actually little difference between designer products and those without fancy, expensive labels. Designer goods have become one of the great frauds of our time, for, in most cases there is nothing special about them apart from some more expensive cloth.

Few shoppers realize that designer label clothes can cost 10 per cent of their selling price. Absurdly, a man's suit, cost­ing £80 to make, might sell in the shops for almost £1,000. Yet it might be little better in style, quality and cut than one now the key elements of the fashion business. And in this area lies perhaps the darkest part of the conspiracy against the public.

Through the strength of their adver­tising, the big fashion houses are able to dictate to the glossy magazines and journals. This does not happen in any other commercial field.

In the cinema, for instance, even the biggest Hollywood producers cannot demand favorable reviews in the Press in return for advertising. Simi­larly, car manufacturers, no matter how large, are subject to regular nega­tive notices for their new models.

But fashion is entirely different. Because glossy magazines are so dependent on advertising revenues, they are deeply vulnerable to outside commercial pressures.

Magazines are bullied into ecstatic reviews by the constant threat of the withdrawal of advertising or loss of invi­tations to top events. The result is that impartiality disappears completely. The public cannot trust what they read.

And this commercial blackmail works in other ways. Magazine fashion jour­nalists are often deluged with free clothes, trips overseas and stays in luxury hotels. Young stylists, who set up fashion shoots for the magazines, can also be seduced by the designer bullies.

This is because such stylists are often badly paid, earning less than the aver­age national wage, so the label bosses hint that if they provide favorable coverage they might be rewarded with a job producing a lucrative advert. Understandably, with such extra earnings on offer, the stylists do everything they can to impress the fashion houses.

Because there is no criticism of the cat­walk gurus, the public swallow the hype. Customers think that, by buying into a certain label, no matter how obscene the mark-up, they win suddenly become cool and more appealing individuals.

It is all nonsense. Someone who wastes £400 on a jacket that costs only £40 to make is foolish rather than hip.

Thanks to the triumph of their conspiracy, the designer houses now think — with some justification — that they can get away with anything, churning out the most tawdry or vulgar goods in the knowledge they will be greeted with acclaim by their cheerleaders in the media.

Personally, I have never under­stood how the Versace label can be celebrated so wildly. For me, the company produces brash, tasteless clothes, elevating flesh-baring into its raison d'etre.

Equally repellent, I find, is the adu­lation for Gucci, whose central trick is to parade buttocks on the catwalk.

Yet, here again, the Press collude in the fashion conspiracy by giving acres of coverage to their excuses for dresses.

As I highlight the reality of life off the catwalk, I feel like the little boy in the tale of the Emperor's New Clothes. For, like the Emperor, the designer fashion industry — hysterical cheering aside — is a brilliantly executed fraud.

By robin givhan

FRAY CHIC IN THE CITY

Ralph Lauren Spins His Exurban Legend On the Upper East Side

NEW YORK, Sept. 22

On Saturday night, designer Ralph Lauren staged his spring 2003 runway presentation at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum on the Upper East Side. The setting was the most elegant of the week, which in reality would not have been that difficult, since getting to many shows required picking one's way down streets filled with auto repair shops, garbage dumpsters and bags of curbside refuse sitting in puddles of liquid best left unidentified.

That sort of urban reality had its place during fashion week, which ended today. Some designers believe their clothes spring organically from abandoned warehouses, the aromas from street vendors and the microscopic grit that hangs in the air over most major cities. For them, the odors from the street are an inspiring perfume.

But Lauren spins fantasies—delicious, romantic, unnerving. The designer speaks of tradition, but the reality is that he builds history from the ground up. His work requires a setting that evokes frayed wealth. And while some might argue the disingenuousness of Lauren's story line, that complaint sounds suspiciously like jealousy. After all, who wouldn't like to have had a say in the history out of which they were formed?

Lauren's guests passed through a wood coffered foyer, down a stone staircase lined with hydrangea-stuffed urns and glowing candles, and into a garden. There, waiters gliding among the guests offering glasses of champagne and trays of hors d'oeuvres some of which in­volved foie gras—a culinary in­dication that this was not the kind of fashion affair that would include Nelly rapping about the heat, groupies in graffiti print suits and a phalanx of overstuffed security guards protecting a starlet with the bullying swagger of a SWAT team.

To some degree, these few min­utes of artfully created civility— like the sounds of car alarms and garbage trucks at other shows— were as important as the clothes that would eventually come down the runway. As the fashion industry focuses on nostalgia as well as a vi­sion of the present that is defined by comfort and familiarity, the im­portance of mood and subtext has never been more important.

The clothes have lost much of their ability to entice. In some cases, garments churn up no ex­citement because they are unin­spired. But in many cases, the clothes fall flat for reasons that are more complicated. The garments are lovely, the fabrics are luxuri­ous. But the shapes are familiar— cargo pants, T-shirts, board shorts, yoga pants, tennis skirts, jeans. And unlike the '90s, when design­ers took familiar shapes and made them extraordinary with embel­lishments, for spring 2003, the clothes slip quietly into the back­ground. That is both their beauty and their flaw.

Lauren's collection was filled with prints suggesting the faded wallpaper in the powder room of a family estate. The dresses, cut from ivory tulle, had slightly tat­tered hemlines. He mixed dis­tressed linen with silk and paired a long denim skirt with a beaded cot-ten top. They didn't look as though they had been self-consciously de­stroyed but rather as if they had been frayed over time.

What Lauren was championing more than the actual garments on the runway was a belief that age adds value. Logic, then, would sug­gest that one should comb one's closet for an old pair of Levi's. Ask Grandma if she has a favorite old throw that might be turned into an heirloom bustier. Finish things off with a cameo that has been in the family for generations.

But for those lacking the appro­priate family history, Lauren will provide. And for those who are skeptical of the legitimacy of the vi­sion, the elegant setting helps to make the aesthetic more palatable. It argues that even in an un­forgiving city and in uncertain times, there is a place for nostalgic romance. Indeed, one magazine ed­itor bemoaned the fact that she hadn't changed her Saturday work attire for evening clothes. And yet, how often does anyone—other than a tourist—really change for dinner anymore? Another editor reminisced that the calm, the beau­ty, the polite chatter was how fash­ion used to be.

And for an hour—until guests stepped out onto Fifth Avenue to find helmeted roller bladers thrash­ing out acrobatics off the Guggenheim Museum’s stone plaza – Lauren made a valiant argument that fashion could be that way again.