The Penguin Book of Fashion Writing
ed Judith Watt
Viking, 360pp, £25
Buy it at BOL
I must be honest, reviewing a book on fashion was not a prospect I relished. The term "fashion journalism" seems, in itself, a contradiction. The people I encountered in the fashion industry as a model, from the late 1980s onwards, seemed intent on being apolitical. The idea of engaging with the world, rather than the hemline, is clearly taboo (unless it's a statement that can be written on a t-shirt.)
It's a conservatism that fashion shares with the epicentre of the film world - Los Angeles - where I now sit and write, and where the notion of confrontation is greeted with horror by sheep-like agents and executives. Smart, expensive, navy suits are the dress code, unless you're "talent", in which case you're allowed to go casual.
It strikes me as ironic that the story-telling capital of the world and the "revolutionary", gender-bending, art school-fed fashion business are so deeply reactionary. Both industries share an insidious homophobia and racism, and are shockingly complacent about the status quo. But of course, they are just that - industries - and it is naive to think otherwise.
And so, The Penguin Twentieth Century Book Of Fashion Writing comes as a pleasant surprise. Here is a book which is greater than its title. Its contributors are not simply fashion writers, but great authors, all with an individual, perceptive view on clothing.
Editor Judith Watt clearly believes that 20th century dress history has been shaped by, and is a response to, social, political and cultural developments. Her book recognises the pivotal effect on fashion of war, poverty and class, whilst exploring themes of identity, sexuality, gender and fetishism. There are extracts from novels, poems, memoirs and journalism. Everything has a context, and the result is a surprising, engaging book, full of humour, insight and pathos.
Take Vera Brittain in 1916, describing the clothes of a loved-one killed in action. A microscopic bullet had entered through the front of the man's tunic and expanded on impact before bursting through his spine and out of the back of the cloth. "All the sepulchres and catacombs of Rome could not make me realise mortality and decay and corruption as vividly as did the smell of those clothes."
Virginia Woolf, meanwhile, reveals different priorities, in her diary, during the days of the general strike: "The shops are open but empty... I think we shall become more independent and stoical as the days go on. And I am involved in dress buying with Todd (editor of Vogue); I tremble & shiver all over at the appalling magnitude of the task I have undertaken... here my blood ran cold... Perhaps this excites me more feverishly than the strike." The anti-semitism that pervaded both Woolf's and Jean Rhys's thoughts on shopping is revealing in its parochialism.
Yet, a descriptive extract from John Mortimer's Paradise Postponed is quite devastating. A young man is going out to a party, in a suit hired by proud parents, who have clearly stretched their finances to afford the rental. He is then systematically unpicked, verbally and physically, by his wealthy peer group, who pull his jacket off him, joking that it is "...as last worn at the Municipal Workers' Ball". It is a beautiful piece of prose describing a lynching of the economic kind. This, side by side with Nancy Mitford's musings on the dowdiness of English women and the superior state of French underwear. The book clearly has an eye for irony.
Joan Smith provides a discerning voice, writing for the Guardian on the dubious trend of the baby doll slashed-dress look, which she notes is often photographed as if at a murder scene, with blood-smeared female legs akimbo. "Rarely has the sinister nexus between sex, faux-innocence and death... been so frankly exposed." Smith defines the "Kinderwhore" trend as a fin-de-siècle sexual panic; a need for the re-assertion of roles. "The look replays the tiredest trick in the paedophile book, that of absolving the partner of responsibility either for his desire or its satisfaction."
The rather sad relationship between The Left and The Stylish is also explored. George Orwell, in 1937, describes a bus journey when "two dreadful-looking old men got on... one of them was obscenely bald, the other had long grey hair bobbed in the Lloyd George style... they were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts... their appearance created a mild stir of horror on the bus. The man next to me glanced at me, at them, and back again at me, and murmured 'socialists'." Christian Dior was apparently rather disappointed with the British Left when his New Look was denounced in Parliament by Harold Wilson as "damn silly" and Bessie Braddock described it as "the ridiculous whim of idle people."
All this social commentary does not prevent the book celebrating the beauty and evocative nature of clothing. There are intensely intimate, at times erotic, pieces of poetry and prose: Ted Hughes describing the dress of his bride Sylvia Plath; Anaïs Nin's relationship with a belted, trousered crotch; Kerouac's "whole enormous sadness of a shirt."
Sexuality is much discussed - as in Ian Fleming's description of James Bond's encounter with a masculine-suited Pussy Galore in Goldfinger: "Bond liked the look of her. He felt a sexual challenge all beautiful lesbians have for men."
Quentin Crisp describes a homeless London woman attempting to change into a backless beaded frock she had found in a dustbin. "She chose the churchyard and sat among the dead to wait for nightfall. When it was barely dusk her eagerness had overcome her prudence. A crowd collected large enough to attract the attention of the police and she was led away." When a magistrate asked her what she had been doing, she replied: "What any woman would be doing at that hour. Changing for dinner."
Nell Dunn's women have a great scheme when they're skint; "Pay-As-You-Wear, you berk! You only have to put down about fifteen bob deposit." When cash is demanded, they explain that they can't settle up, as Sylvie's been institutionalised; when the second call comes, Sylvie's passed away, wearing her two-piece to the grave.
The subtle language of clothing, the power of a garment to develop beyond cloth, all this is explored. "This overcoat," writes Anthony Powell, "gave Widmerpool a lasting notoriety which his otherwise unscintillating career at school could never wholly dispel."
Julie Burchill's "It's just material! The Technicolor wonderlands are in our heads, not on our backs" sits provocatively alongside Virginia Woolf's "Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have the same, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us."
Judith Watt has created a collection with wit, eclecticism and moments of quiet revolution, which suggests that clothing, fashion, style pervade our lives, creating moments of vivid recollection, in much the same way as music does. Her anthology offers not only a powerful cumulative effect, but also the satisfaction of dipping in and out, as with good short stories.
There are moments of great pathos, humour and irony - but it's perhaps in its sense of detail that the real strength of the book lies. For, surely, isn't history all about detail (and t-shirts).
