It’s only fashion, darling. And yet you’d never know it from the fuss this week over the BBC’s latest fly-on-the-wall documentary series, set inside the offices of Vogue magazine. The big headline-grabbing revelation so far is – wait for it – that the magazine’s American and British editors occasionally fight with each other over who gets the hot cover model. Imagine: two very senior managers at the same company turning out to be slightly competitive with each other! Why, these “bitchy, backstabbing and bonkers” fashion mags (thank you, the Sun) are truly not as other workplaces.
But of course the point is that both senior managers concerned are ladies, not to mention working in an inherently comedy female world of hemlines and heels, and so – well, catfight klaxon! Cue lots of happy reminiscing about how the terrifying magazine boss immortalised in The Devil Wears Prada was actually based on a true story, plus the inevitable Daily Mail headline triumphantly proclaiming this as proof that women are their own worst enemies at work. Girls, eh? They can’t even run multimillion-pound businesses without competing for a profitable market position! Although strangely, it turns out they can run rings around a documentary-maker. (Poor Richard Macer only found out after filming stopped that Vogue’s British editor Alex Shulman had stitched him up like a kipper, making him sit through endless fake meetings as cover for what she was actually doing, namely secretly negotiating a world exclusive with the Duchess of Cambridge.)
It’s a shame, because beneath the froth is the makings of an interesting argument here about obsolescence and profit. At one point in filming a Vogue staffer says wistfully that, while the pressure is always to be coming up with something new, the problem is there isn’t always something new. As fashion director Lucinda Chambers puts it: “You’re making things redundant all the time and you’re also making them relevant – but in a very superficial way.”
Translation: fashion lives or dies on its ability to persuade you that the perfectly nice black trousers you bought only last year, possibly on Vogue’s recommendation, are now inexplicably all wrong and only this very slightly different pair of black trousers will do. And because there are ultimately only so many ways to wrap fabric round a human body, eventually people acquire all the vaguely flattering or useful ones, and start balking at spending money on yet more copies of something already in the wardrobe.
This state of grace – let’s call it “middle age” – is a rather liberating place for consumers but naturally terrifying for producers, and the desperate ruses the fashion industry adopts to get around this threat to profitability are what justifiably gets it a bad name.
The whispering insinuation is that failing to keep up is shaming if you’re young, ageing if you’re not. The hideous new trends are peddled more because they’re not like the old trends than because they actually look good, even on an apparently half-starved teenager with exceptionally good lighting. The bizarre shoots – let’s style it in the bath/using a model who looks 13 years old/in a manner vaguely suggestive of self-harm – are employed to make the same old stuff look somehow edgy again. And of course there are the faintly fascistic things occasionally said by designers, marinated too long in a culture where undermining people’s confidence is basically a commercial imperative.
But built-in obsolescence, the thing that actually makes the fashion world go round? That’s hardly unique to one supposedly bitchy, silly, airheaded industry.
A couple of weeks ago, my trusty six-year-old desktop Apple Mac seized up in the middle of trying to install an upgrade. Cursing, I hauled it off to the nearest big electrical chain for repair, only to be told rather crushingly that it couldn’t be fixed because parts were unobtainable “due to its vintage”. The implication hung heavy in the air; would madam care to cough up for a newer, more fashionable version?
Fortunately, madam found an independent computer engineer who fixed it in 24 hours flat for significantly less than the cost of a statement coat. Apparently he gets a lot of business from Apple owners, many of them deeply sceptical about the way the company keeps churning out new software that isn’t compatible with – and occasionally seems to fry the brains of – its old products. And yet we keep on falling for it.
Watching Apple trying to flog its newly released iPhone 7 this week on the grounds that this one’s got – gather round and marvel, everyone – no headphone jack, reminded me of nothing so much as bossy magazine covers telling you which “shoes to buy now”. (Hot tip: ones not massively different from the shoes that you bought a couple of years ago.) At least fashion hasn’t yet come up with a new kind of trouser that destroys all your old trousers when introduced to the wardrobe, although give it a few years and Apple will probably be all over it.
There’s no point getting too grumpy about this. Nobody wants to reach the cultural, technological or even political equivalent of what’s sometimes dubbed “peak new music”, the age where you simply give up even trying to listen to new bands because surely nothing’s ever going to be better than the stuff you grew up with. Humans need to keep moving to survive, not sit around moaning that there’s nothing new under the sun.
But true novelty is rare and precious. The genuinely groundbreaking things – the bikini where once there was only the one-piece, the mobile phone where once there were only tethering landlines, the political idea that changes everything or the Watergate story that brings down a president – come along only very occasionally and the truth is that that’s not enough to sustain the industries that create them or the millions of jobs that depend on them.
During the lulls between innovations, successful economies necessarily depend rather more than anyone would like to think on making perfectly good stuff artificially redundant, and fairly mediocre stuff suddenly relevant again. You can rail against the empty and environmentally unsustainable materialism of that, or accept it as the price of economic growth, as you see fit. But just don’t pretend that this particular devil only wears Prada.
