FASHION: IT’S NOT ALL GLAMOUR, SOME OF ITS FILTH

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Isn’t fashion fabulous, they all say. And it is: all those handsome models, the parties, those great designer togs. But below stairs and out of sight are fashion’s dirty drawers, a soiled and unseemly side – no gloss, no discerning surface. Here, we pick through the rag trade’s 10 dirtiest secrets. The things these fashion folk do.

Blogging can be blagging

“For me blogging is about being an independent voice; it’s about self-publishing and not being enslaved to advertisers as are glossy magazines,” says one blogger. What a refreshing sentiment. Fashion needs these recalcitrant voices, this youth. Pray then, why are a handful of bloggers, many sitting front row, taking wads of cash from designers to wear outfits during show season when they’re invariably papped and papped? The taxman would be very interested in this seedy little exchange. Another blogger charges for his attendance at designers’ parties and includes riders about the status of his flight (upper and club – no standard) as he’s flown around the world. Good luck to him and them, you say; business acumen like this should be applauded. And we agree, but drop the transparent mantle of being an independent voice in publishing, will you? Money talks. And gives you a front-row seat.

Strip search

Hairdressers like models, don’t they? Not always. One top session stylist tells us of the girls and boys who turn up to shoots with filthy hair, having promised to be product and dirt free the day before. Late night again, was it? This pisses off hairstylists royally. “Why don’t we pop a strip of extensions in there to give it some volume?” says the stylist “I’ll take it out afterwards, no worries.” The unassuming model nods and the shoot begins. At the end of the shoot the hairdresser conveniently forgets to take the strip of extensions out, leaving the model to somehow painfully pick away the glue and half of his or her scalp with it. Sweet revenge.

Demi-modelling

It’s normally those annoying Italian boutique owners during Milan Fashion Week or at the fashion trade fair Pitti Uomo. You’ve seen them on those street-style blogs in their sherbet tartan suit, cutaway collar shirt, John Lobb tan shoes, Etro paisley scarf (wrapped twice) and quirky pair of pince-nez. What a bunch of affected twats. Not forgetting their “Oh, I love a bow tie, cardigan and Goyard iPad case-cum-clutch” New York cousins. We’ve seen you, exiting the shows, as you blink into the sunlight and spot a snapper. Suddenly you take a call on your iPhone, but your iPhone never rang. Or perhaps you have a very urgent email to attend to, but your BlackBerry isn’t even switched on. Welcome to the world of demi-modelling, in which fashion types have adopted a strange deportment when confronted with a pap or fashion snapper: “Me on the phone to Anna”; “Me sticking my tongue to the top of my mouth while waving to nobody in the distance”; “Me hailing a cab while wearing a Hermès tank and Day-Glo Swatch in bright orange”. How embarrassing.

Front-row farce

“Are we starting this cocking show or what? I could have stayed in bed an extra hour.” Hark the imploring whine of a jaded and jet-lagged fashion editor at the menswear shows, and all because yet another American celebrity and his fey entourage were too busy blowing kisses to their full-length mirrors in their Milanese hotel bedroom to notice what time it was. And here he (she) is, a man who looks like he has turned around three times in the Attitude fashion cupboard and walked back out again; a man, who, if his cock were big enough, would fuck himself senseless. He sits, we tut, the show begins. Oh, and he’s been paid to turn up by the way, in money, but mainly clothes (better for the taxman, see above).

Front-row irony

“Ooh! Did you see thingy, that runner-up from The X Factor sitting front row at tra-la-la’s London show? How funny, he’s sooo ironic.” No, he’s not. Said designer is playing the celebrity barter game. When a young designer wants a fabulous celebrity on their front row, ensuring all-important shots in the newspapers, he or she has to enter into an agreement with a celebrity agent. The reckoning goes thus: “I’ll give you supermodel A, who’s dating Russian oligarch, for your front row if you sit saddo X Factor runner-up with really shit hair, tattoos and terrible make-up and voice next to her – also a client of mine.” “Deal!” says the designer. “I’ll pretend I’m being ironic.”

Doing a number 3

Male models have always played second fiddle to their pin-thin female counterparts. But imagine the unprecedented pressure in the era of Hedi Slimane’s Dior Homme – a new time of emaciated rockers, a look that inspired Herr Lagerfeld to lose half his body weight just to fit into the jeans. The sickest trick, confides one former male model, was to eat a lettuce leaf for breakfast: “That way, when you go to the washroom for a number 3 [make yourself sick], you know when you’ve got everything back up and down the pan. It’s like a sick flag – you see green, you know that’s the end of the food coming back up.” Lettuce leaves take longer to digest in the stomach, apparently. See also eating slices of carrot, licking the bottom of your sandals in India to give you dysentery and wolfing down boxes of tissues.

Ride-iculous

It’s not just blogging arrivistes with demand-all riders. Even in the comparatively sane world of menswear fashion magazines (ask anybody about the nutters who work in womenswear) there are certain editors who are singularly obsessed with their seating arrangements at the shows, and have the poor office “tea bitch” (or the work experience – their name not mine) to call the PRs before the shows to insist they are told where they are sitting on the front row. One has even demanded, “I don’t want to be near anybody with Twitter – I hate those fucking phones everywhere.” Delusional.

Booking bitches

Imagine remembering all the names of the girls and boys on your board – it can’t be easy as a booker at any of the world’s top modelling agencies. That probably goes to explain why certain bookers refer to their charges as “creature”, “it” or “thing”. Shocking, isn’t it?

Fashion ambush

It’s known in the trade as a “fashion ambush” and goes something like this… PR: “Hi Richard, how are you? I loved your piece in the last 10 Men about you losing weight and you being a dwarf.” Me: “Awww, thank you.” PR: “We’d love to take you for a slap-up lunch, not seen you in ages. Let’s have a good old gossip and catch-up.” Me: “Well, I can’t normally get out, but, yes, thank you, I’d love to.” A week later at lunch in posh eaterie somewhere in west London. PR: “So glad you could make it, Richard. Now, while we’ve got you here, can we talk about credits in the magazine? We’d like more. Is there something we can do to make it easier for you? We advertise and, well, we don’t feel we’re getting the coverage back. You know, quid pro quo.” Yes, what was flagged as an innocent “good old gossip and catch-up” turns into the third degree. It’s a trap. A twatting fashion ambush.

Polaroid perv

Reams of gossip have been written about perverted photographers in this here magazine alone, but there’s one London-based snapper who calls agencies across London and asks them to send their new faces (young lads of only 18, 19) to his flat. Up a filthy staircase the young hopefuls walk and are greeted by a middle-aged man. The casting, the model booker told them, is for “winter coats”. So why, then, does the photographer ask the young men to strip to their underpants for a potential never-to-materialise swimwear shoot in some faraway clime? The young model agrees and the photographer begins to take a series of intimate shots on Polaroid, the model dresses, then leaves. What’s happened to all these hundreds of snapshots, you ask. They’re stuck together in a box somewhere with streams of the snapper’s most intimate DNA.  

Text Richard Gray

Richard Gray is online editor of The Sunday Times Style

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