Clique Week

London Fashion Week rolls into town, but the general public are not invited

In 9 days time London Fashion Week kicks off in a specially constructed marquee in Duke of York's Square. Hundreds of designers, models, photographers, make-up artists and buyers are already booking into the capital's hotels and flooding her bars to talk shop and eye the competition. Newspapers will give the event broad coverage over the next fortnight, and there's talk that this London Fashion Week will put the city firmly back on the style map. And indeed the show will be spectacular, a crammed catwalk featuring the cream of the world's designers and some formidable home-grown talent. All this is well and fine, but what I want to know is, why not invite the public?

Publicity material for London Fashion Week opens with the smug reminder that "London Fashion Week is a trade show open to registered buyers, press and members of the fashion industry". A single weekend of the event is open to the public at extortionate prices, but the vast majority of top designers will exhibit on closed catwalks. London Fashion Week is the preserve of the fashion crowd and their rich and famous friends, whereas in cities like Milan, Paris and New York the public play a vital role as audience and judge. I suspect this is a dream come true for the industry – just models, designers, bigwigs and of course the lovely media, and not a pleb in sight.

Fashion experts within the media never see fit to criticise this exclusion of reality. Who are they to question an industry that, for a week each year, gives them a golden key to a land of catwalks, models and after-show parties? It seems hardly proper to bite the hand that feeds one free canapés and booze. However, I feel no compunction clutching a handful of invitations to my chest with one hand, and with the other, pointing to the organisers of this week and saying – you are wrong.

I remember the excitement of attending The Clothes Show Live! [sic] as a child. A catwalk run is truly a stirring sight to behold and would be an inspiration to many a young designer in the making. The British Fashion Industry positively revels in its exclusive, cliquey ways, as if gratifying a long suppressed urge to mimic the Art world. Meanwhile, all the best British talent is completely uninterested in high fashion, and has to be drafted in expensively from far cooler urban design shops when the couture houses suddenly realise that they have lost their sense of cool. Anybody who likes London and loves clothes can tell you, this is NOT a proper event. The only fashion week worth mentioning, the highpoint of our fashion calendar, is the Alternative Fashion Week in Shoreditch.

And with that, I'm off into a miasma of free parties that concludes next Friday at the aptly titled 'Orgy' thrown by Toni & Guy in Rouge. What a shame you can't be there, my dears…

Gold-plated Fireworks

This year Ken Livingstone, the London Mayor, has earmarked £1.2 million to celebrate the arrival of 2005. The brains and credit behind the event will be that of Jack Morton Worldwide. They were the British Fireworks firm behind the spectacular and acclaimed display at the opening and closing ceremonies of the Athens Olympics. The company prides itself on "creating moments of drama and spectacle". They are keeping precise details of their plans for the £1.2 million display under wraps.

Abandoning the Bard

The Globe Theatre's artistic director Mark Rylance has resigned. Mr Rylance, 44, announced he will not continue after a decade of management that has seen the recreated Elizabethan playhouse rise to become one of London's most breathtaking venues. Rylance is an accomplished Shakespearean actor himself and starred as title role of the opening play Henry V back in 1997. The move also gives The Royal Shakespeare Company a new alternative in its quest to return to a more permanent location in London having so far failed to establish such in the West End.

The National Gallery's facelift draws to a close

Two new entrances to the National Gallery have been unveiled, the latest phase in the £21m redevelopment scheme of the Galleries East Wing. Visitors can now enter the building from both Trafalgar Square and St. Martins Place. The entrance from the Square used to lead into the gallery shop but now opens into the newly refurbished Central Hall home to eight paintings from the Italian Renaissance. The Sir Paul Getty entrance, named this in lieu of the £10m donation from the family foundation, leads into a light-filled atrium with an imposing staircase against a black marble wall before reaching the Hall. The other entrance leads into the expanded and refurbished café from St Martins Place.

Previouse article

 

Next article