The Fashion Thing

The fashion thing is a strange animal. It likes clothes, but it hates clothes that look like shit and cost the earth. It likes the flighty flutter of the scene, but not the models- most of who go through life with a perpetually baffled expression on their faces.
The fashion thing finds things to be at their strangest when it’s trying to get a magazine issue on fashion going. To be fair, the fashion thing isn’t the only one in this predicament. Three other souls share its dilemmas, but as it can’t vouch for them, here’s its version of the dirt.
It found that women are the easiest to deal with while sourcing clothes. They understand things easily and don’t treat clothes as if they’re bombs about to go off. And store managers can be actually charming, even if you’re not buying their clothes. Some say “si” with the perfect Italian accent though their names make you think they’re men. Others get the necessary permissions with a minimum of fuss, and help you pick the clothes. Our shop-girls are coming of age, it seems. Their male counterparts are another story all together. They start off looking as if they’ve just swallowed a hot potato, and then they ask you why you can’t shoot at the shop! They treat a simple requisition as if it’s a state secret and are at pains to get multiple permissions from a hundred bosses. It becomes their personal promotion lollipop. And after a few days of cloak and dagger, a second executive calls up from another city and begs you to be careful about the brand. His job, he says dolefully, is on the line. Disgusted, the fashion thing drops the brand. Pooh!
Then there are the models who act as if they’re posing for their personal family album. They grin like buffoons and are so stiff you can hear them creak. Some are steroid kids, while others are two-dimensional. Then the stylists come on all la-di-da (they alternate between trying to get passes to the Fashion Week, and crying to their mothers, and calling up their ‘partners’ for movie tickets). Then they run away when they’re required to do some styling. So the fashion thing and Co do it themselves. There are some hard working stylists as well, but poor guys, they seem forever marginalized. They are the ones who get into Fashion Week through hard work. So that’s cool. There are some infuriating models who carry off everything beautifully. Even if you’re shooting for fashion faux-pases they look gorgeous in the clothes. It sets the fashion thing’s teeth on edge.
And then we come to fabrics. There’s cotton (from cotton), linen(from flax), and cashmere (from goats). But then there’re chambray, tweed, denim, corduroy, etc etc etc under cotton, and worsted, micro-lite, Australian, Kamchatkan wool!!! For linen you get Italian, Irish and other anglo-saxons you don’t want to know, and then some more. Suits are not just suits, but micro-lite, worsted and cashmere (Fat lot the fashion thing cares!)
But yes, clothes are fun…as clothes. I guess couture is not the fashion thing’s cuppa but it ain’t the cuppa of most of the various fashionistas the fashion thing had the pleasure of observing. Badgering store owners for the right to click pics, the fashion thing took with him a jovial Bong and photographed the sky over Connaught Place instead….then another day, it went and took pics in a retail store through subterfuge, but while subterfuging, forgot to take the down the prices of the clothes photographed. So when the crunch came, the fashion thing spent most of the evening badgering the store attendants- over the phone!- to hunt out the mannequins in question and give out the prices…needless to say, it was tickled pink. Even better was when it called up various stores and posed as a harassed buyer who dunno what to buy and ask for prices. Shop attendants probably like the dumb buyer, because they fell over backwards to provide the information. As the fashion thing writes this, the entire fashion experience as embodied by the magazine is yet to go to press. So there are tense moments yet. But what a month. OOOOH those linen pants! They’re so, like, in!!!