, Paris and New York (where they were in designers' showrooms in the grotty old garment district). On day one I was so naive, I didn't even fret about what to wear. Why would I? 'NO ONE WILL BE LOOKING AT YOU,' Sarajane Hoare, Vogue's prodigiously talented and forthright then fashion director, had yelled at me across the Great Divide (the corridor that protected the Chanel-clad stylists from the Phase Eight lot in features). So that was that. I packed my two velvet tunics and two pairs of silk trousers (a look a dressmaker friend copied from a little-know){kind=link}
Much has changed since I first began writing about this wonderful, confounding subject, but the allure of a great show is stronger than ever
I can’t remember the first show I ever went to. Probably because it was one everyone else knew to avoid. I was working on Elle in the late ’80s as arts editor and, sensing a useful foil, the fashion team would dump unwanted stiffies on my desk. In those days, London Fashion Week’s HQ was Olympia in West Kensington.
It was a cavernous, uninspiring trade centre hijacked by designers who couldn’t care less about business. If they had, maybe they wouldn’t have repeatedly gone bust, which seemed to be an occupational hazard among British creatives back then. But it felt rude to point this out. You mourned their great talent, bemoaned the government’s refusal to invest in flaky but hot fashion names, and moved on to the Next Big Thing.
There was a never-ending stream of NBTs, thanks in no small part to the brilliance of Britain’s fashion colleges and art schools, and the fact that every fashion graduate thought they could set up a business and throw a show within 10 seconds of leaving. They could certainly do the latter. The former proved more challenging.
I didn’t officially work in the fashion department because I didn’t know, before I joined Elle, that you could make a living writing about this wonderful, confounding, infuriating, all-encompassing subject. British fashion was a tiny cottage industry peopled by very big characters: Vivienne Westwood, Katharine Hamnett, John Galliano, Antony Price – who’d designed for Roxy Music and Jerry Hall – Jasper Conran and, oh my God, The Fashion Editors.