Totally Over The Industry

To fit in this London Fashion Week, it’s not enough to stand in line for ages only to find you haven’t been put on the list, to capture a taxi all the way to another boring place in Shoreditch where the free drinks have just run out, or to join the herd of desperate moronistas as it stampedes into a show. To be one of them, you have to have mastered this year’s in act: “totally over fashion week”.

“I’m sooo bored of the industry.” It’s very easy to say, when you’re queueing to get back into whatever magazine launch because you only went out for a fag but they’ve reached maximum capacity already and people have started breaking windows for air. Seemingly the only conversation going on was about how awful working in fashion is. And maybe it is, even if you’re Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada. But in a week where the industry – a word whose use in this context probably has Brunel spinning in his grave faster than the right piston of Stevenson’s rocket – in a week where “the industry” gets you pissed out of your mind for free every night, is there much real complaining to be done? The only thing boring me was the sheer amount of facile self-effacement going on, an exercise in pretentious crap-spouting that casts a long shadow over that bad simile I wrote back there. I even heard it on the second day, drooling fashionista after fashionista sordidly munching the hand that fed it – I’ve had enough! I’m off to Varsity comment to write about local elections! I am totally over the industry!

While you ponder the philosophical implications of that act of professional foot-shooting, here are some nice hats by Piers Atkinson, from the up-and-coming milliners’ show (“Headonism”) at Somerset House. Because they’re really, really good.

And while you reach for your glue-gun and rush out to buy glitter cherries, just three more words of advice for next year.

Big Polka Dots.