John Galliano and the Biggest Tits of the Fashion Industry by Nick Bryans

Forget the drunken rant, haul him in for that hat.

As a nation, we always look for role models in the wrong industries. Footballers for example; overpaid, semi-literate individuals, whose occupation involves belting a dead cow round a pitch should be given a wide berth when we form our heroes, yet routinely when another roasting session or prostitute scandal emergences, middle England howls at these men not setting a better example to our children. Fashion is no different. Fashion – described by Oscar Wilde as ‘a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months’ – and the fashion industry at times exemplifies this.

High fashion is like art. An exclusive club of abstract visionaries who are labelled as ‘geniuses’ for having the foresight to send a 4st Czech teenager down a Milan catwalk wearing nothing more than a hubcap, one Dr.Martens boot and a pair of marigolds. It is impossible to keep up with fashion. My advice to budding fashionistas out there would be to pick one dress style and stick to it. Now, fashion tends to move in a 5 year cycle, so once your tailored choice is en vogue, you have to move quickly in those few months and get 5 years’ worth of sex, partying and ego inflation in, and then once it’s out of fashion, hibernate in a dark and secluded place. It’s the only way to be fashionable; otherwise you’ll always be *slightly* out of the loop, chasing shadows and never being totally accepted by your stylish peers. I’m just waiting until parachute pants come back into style, then it’s my time to shine.

This week, John Galliano (designer for Dior, darling) was found guilty of racist and anti-Semitic abuse.

In the February incident, a French couple having a beer outside La Perle bar in Paris’s Marais district said he repeatedly insulted them with lines including “fucking ugly Jewish bitch” and “fucking Asian bastard”. Geraldine Bloch, 35, said he first asked her to shut up, then criticised her clothes, hair, thighs, eyebrows and makeup. He made 30 anti-Jewish insults in the space of 45 minutes, she said. Another woman said he made similar insults to her in the same bar in October.

Shocking. Though perhaps the most shocking thing being that Galliano had the temerity the insult someone’s appearance, when on a good day he looks like this:

Now, although one should never turn a blind eye to any form of discrimination, and Galliano was rightfully prosecuted for this, should we really be that shocked? The fashion industry has previous in terms of ‘appalling attempts a resembling human beings’, so perhaps the Galliano case should just be another log on the fire, stoking the claim that one could comprehensively generalise high-fashion as a ‘berks tea party’.

Naomi Campbell has had a chequered past with law enforcement and the UN court of human rights, but hey, who doesn’t hold those two institutions as their own personal bête noires? Campbell pleaded guilty to assaulting her personal assistant with a cell phone (2000), pleaded guilty to assaulting her former housekeeper Ana Scolavino (2007), and she again pleaded guilty in England to assaulting two police officers at Heathrow Airport in London (2008) in amongst 10 assault accusations levelled at her. But hey, we can all laugh about it now, as she stated in a diary she wrote for W magazine on the experience, “I’m getting very protective of my pile of rubbish—kind of the way I feel about my Hermès handbag”, and one would assume she was paid handsomely for a Dunkin Doughnuts advert she starred in, ‘which showed her breaking her heel while gardening and throwing it through a window’. And if you can’t make money after pleading guilty to a string of assaults on people, where can you make it?

But Campbell wasn’t to be done there. The Pièce de résistance in her hot streak of douchebaggery (I think this is word) was when she was pulled up in front of a war crimes trial, to give evidence over her receipt of a gift of suspected ‘blood diamonds’ from former Liberian leader Charles Taylor. Rather than act sheepish considering the pickle she was in, Campbell cranked the crazy up to ten. She described the trial as being ‘highly inconvinent’ for her, whilst the evidence she gave was considered by experts of “not being entirely truthful”. Firstly, her claims she gave the ‘gift’ from Taylor to a children’s charity were denied by the charity. Secondly, after denying she knew what the small stones were, witnesses stated that she was informed at breakfast that the small stones were in fact diamonds. Thirdly, witness accounts suggested she was in fact disappointed by the “small dirty pebbles” she was given, and stated she would have preferred a “big shiny diamond.” Then finally, she claimed that at the time of the incident she didn’t know Liberia was a country, and added that as far as she was concerned, there was no such thing as blood diamonds before 1997. It was a performance not seen in a dock since the H.M.S. Pinafore.

Banter. Innit.

It’s not just the people, however. Fashion houses themselves have also been up to questionable activities. Going all the way back to the 1930s when a young Hugo Boss got his big start as a designer by creating the uniforms for the Nazi SS, Dolce and Gabbana have been accused of tax evasion by funnelling money though Luxembourg for 2 years, between 2004 and 2005. The case is still on going.

High Street fashion also has its fair-share of misdemeanours. American Apparel is one store which is regularly in the news for the wrong reasons. Despite a public imagine of left-wing policies and humanitarianism (high wage and employment benefits for manufacturing employees, paying US average wage for Chinese employees, environmentally friendly practices, restrictions on outsourcing), owner Dov Charney has proved himself countless times of being a colossal twerp. In one of several sexual harassment lawsuits levelled at Charney from previous employees, he offered a whopping $1.3M to settle out of court. In addition to this, four ex models sued Charney and American Apparel for a combined $250M, following the surfacing of unsolicited nude photographs, consensual sexual text messages and requests for money from Charney. Charney himself doesn’t present a particularly pretty self-portrait, admitting in 2004 to repeatedly referring to women in public as “sluts” and “cunts”, claiming that “slut” wasn’t a derogatory term. Smoooooth. But away from Charney, the brand itself gets its fair share of flak, both from a moral and legal perspective. American Appeal adverts are routinely criticised for using very young, childlike models in its adverts, and getting them to adopt sexually provocative poses, whilst adverts run by American Apparel featuring pornographic actresses have been banned, due to their ability to offend.

But one ad that has consumers and marketing experts doing double takes depicts a young woman — one critic described her as “pre-pubescent” — photographed from behind. Bent over, posterior in the air, long hair flowing, the girl is clad in American Apparel tights. Like many of her counterparts, she is young and topless.

But what’s fashion without photographers? Nothing. Just a load of people standing in a warehouse pouting whilst wearing trousers made out of venetian blinds. And the photographers have also got in on the act of being complete wassocks. Photographer Terry Richardson has a reputation for sexual explicit shoots, but, naturally, one person’s ‘artistic erotica’ is another person’s exploitation. Danish model Rie Rasmussen described Richardson’s method as “completely degrading to women”. In a chance event at Paris fashion week, she said to him; “I hope you know you only [bleep] girls because you have a camera, lots of fashion contacts, and get your pictures in Vogue.”. Her gripe was with his book ‘Terryworkd”, which featured compromising images of underage girls.

Right, so apparently this isn't just a nondescript black hoody worn by a despondent looking lady, it's cutting edge art-fashion. Glad we've cleared that up.

Following Rasmussen’s public spat with Richardson, more and more underage girls came forward, claiming Richardson had acted inappropriately with them. Richardson – whose images regularly feature spanking and group sex – faced a public backlash following this. Despite him professing his innocent, Richardson admitted that often his shoots end with models performing consensual sexual acts on him. In an attempt to defend himself, Richardson stated that:

“I don’t think I’m a sex addict, but I do have issues…maybe it’s the psychological thing that I was a shy kid, and now I’m this powerful guy with his boner, dominating all these girls”.

But Rasmussen went on to add that this ‘free love’ image that Richardson was trying to put across with his work was only one interpretation of events.

“He takes girls who are young, manipulates them to take their clothes off and takes pictures of them they will be ashamed of. They are too afraid to say no because their agency booked them on the job and are too young to stand up for themselves. His ‘look’ is girls who appear underage, abused, look like heroin addicts … I don’t understand how anyone works with him.”

Her comments were echoed by British model turned trade unionist Dunja Knezevic, who stated “I think his work is pornography passed off as high fashion.”

So in summary, the fashion industry has proved to be a safe haven for some of the most deplorable people on the planet. Whilst there is no doubt that there are a lot of good, honest and nice people in the business, it should come as no surprise when one of the throng of twats the place harbours produces another classic cock-up. So perhaps we should look for our ‘geniuses’ elsewhere.

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