Fashion is dead. Long live fashion! The strangest strike ever held against haute couture is to be held this week, as those most deeply enslaved to the dictates of cool meet to protest outside Vogue headquarters.
In a gathering that could be ironic, hypocritical or deeply confused, catwalk models, fashion writers and clothes designers - not to mention a contributing editor to Vogue itself - will demonstrate against the tyranny of fashion.
'The tyranny of fashion is the creation of unfulfillable aspirations and pointless dress-code criteria,' said Kira Jolliffe, founder of the self-styled 'uncool cool' Cheap Date Magazine and organiser of The International Fashion Strike. 'It is also the tendency of fashion people to think they are great artists, the creation of homogeneity and fear of being different.
'While we are at it, let's not forget the premium given to youth and the consequent disparagement of older people and the encroachment within the fine arts of shallow, pretentious fashion photography,' she said.
Bay Garnett, contributing editor to Vogue and editor of Cheap Date, agrees that picketing outside her own office block in London's West End could be construed as contradictory but believes the message is important enough to risk her intellectual street cred. 'We're against big business brainwashing, built-in obsolescence, heroin chic and anorexia chic, creating physical discomfort by the wearing of uncomfortable clothes and the exploitation of child workers in Asia and elsewhere,' she said.
Catwalk models including Erin O'Connor, who opened John Galliano's Christian Dior 2004 spring/summer collection, upmarket model and accomplished table tennis player Iris Palmer and heiress Jasmine Guinness, have agreed to hang up their kitten heels long enough to join the picket.
Alongside them will be Anita Pallenberg, the serial Rolling Stones girlfriend, Sophie Dahl and Karen Elson, one of Britain's top models who is rumoured to have earned more than £9 million in the past four years from the industry she is now happy to lambast.
Adding more confusion to the picket will be designer Wayne Hemingway, who recently congratulated Nike for being one of the most powerful fashion forces in Europe. Some intellectual respectability could be lent by the expected presence of Carol Vorderman, who lifted her earnings into the multi-million range after conforming to the most rigorous dictates of fashion and publishing books advising others on how to follow her lead.
The group will make their stand on the morning of 14 May, with nothing to declare except their placards and a motley display of fashion faux pas.
