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There are two rival fashion strikes afoot. The first, sponsored by ‘Cheap Date’ magazine, is a fashion strike in support of TRAID (Textile Recycling for Aid and International Development, a charity that resells cast-off clothes or donates them to developing countries). To participate, you need to pledge to wear a sheet over your clothes or nothing at all from the 14th to the 28th of May, and then collect pledges from sponsors. All this would be easier to swallow if it wasn’t published in a magazine where half the staff are supermodels or contributing editors to Vogue. Accompanying the pledge sheet are pen-and-ink illustrations of a naked woman on a bed and a naked woman dressed in a sheet, ‘as designed by Bella Freud’. The strapline? ‘Stop Fashion Hypocrisy Now’. I’m not even going to start on the photos of Sadie Frost ‘wearing a sheet and filled with inner peace and happiness’.





There is a great British tradition of making an ass of oneself for charity, from red nose day to the hordes of students dressed as naughty nurses for rag week. I’d like to give ‘Cheap Date’ the benefit of the doubt, but it feels like the hipster equivalent of the kind of philanthropic dinners that are thrown simply to give their society hostesses a chance to wear their latest couture. At least another Vogue alumna, Plum Sykes, is brave and honest enough to take a gentle poke at benefit couture. In her novel Bergdorf Blondes a prominent Manhattan hostess refers to the benefits she throws as ‘Save Whatever’. ‘Cheap Date’ follows its pledge sheets and celebrity posturings with a right-on letter for readers to photocopy and send to people like Anna Wintour, Karl Lagerfeld and Donatella Versace. It reads:

‘I, the undersigned, consider contemporary fashion to be life-diminishing. In the interests of humanity I ask that you observe the Fashion Strike and cease trading from 14th May 2004.’ But even TRAID depends on the relentless fashion cycle to provide the underused discards it resells or ships off to Africa, and Cheap Date’s editors need people like Wintour to give them jobs.

The ‘Grey Sweatsuit Revolution’ is a more low-key affair. It hails from Canada, the land that gave us Adbusters and Naomi Klein. The website is no-nonsense – a manifesto written in the simplest sans-serif type in grey on a white background, with no flash animations or design pyrotechnics. Celebrity names? Forget it, even the founders don’t list themselves or try to take credit. But the sentiment is much the same:

‘The fashion system operates as a parasite on the body of authenticity. It feeds off cultures and subcultures. The pattern is obvious and so should [sic] our reaction. Stop fanning the flames. Let that shit burn out. It’s boring anyway.’
Unlike Cheap Date’s fashion strike, the ‘Grey Sweatsuit Revolution’ acknowledges that some people have to work and might be forced into corporate casuals for most of the day. Still, the photographs of models sporting grey look like chic outtakes from an A.P.C. catalogue, splaying their etiolated limbs at odd angles as they play ping-pong.

There’s a lot to be said for uniforms. Andy Warhol once said that the best look after a ‘bad’ look was ‘a good, plain look’ – something that was either so boring and classic as to be beyond fashion, or something so unique and well-suited to a particular person that they could get away with it for years. Looking at pictures of Warhol throughout his career, it’s easy to see he took his own advice. Despite a few changes here and there – in the 1970s he swapped his Velvets-style leather jacket for Brooks Brothers corduroy blazers; in the ’80s, his wigs got spikier, influenced by Stephen Sprouse and the crowd at Xenon – a definitive Andy look remains. The wigs, the skinny jeans or chinos, the sunglasses – they’re icons. Likewise, think of Stevie Nicks – her California, sun-drenched, Quaalude ‘n’ coke, gypsy witchery is still going strong to this day, to the extent that in New York drag queens celebrate the ‘night of 1000 Stevies’ every year. In fact, almost anyone who is promoted to the status of ‘fashion icon’ or ‘gay icon’ (and if you drew a Venn diagram, the overlap would be huge) has their own, consistent uniform that they keep, regardless of the moment’s stylistic dictates.


  


I am reminded of Jean Baudrillard, writing about the log fires on sale at Esso gas stations. He claimed that ‘What is consumed here is the simultaneous, combined, collusive enjoyment of the automobile and the defunct prestige of everything whose death-knell the automobile sounded – the latter now resuscitated by the automobile!’ If we substitute the fashion striker’s uniform for the log fire and the fashion system for the automobile, the analogy holds. In this same essay, Baudrillard also declaims historical re-enactments with their meticulous attention to the verisimilitude of the re-enactors’ attire, for the same reasons. Sure, Baudrillard’s a notoriously grumpy guy when it comes to faith in signifiers, but it seems that he has a point here. It’s telling that the grey sweatsuit manifesto promises socials in participating cities, including parties, parades, bike rides, nature walks and re-enactments for the so-called revolutionaries. How have we reached a point where wearing nothing or a sheet or some kind of ironic suburban sackcloth can pass as a serious subversive gesture? Unless, of course, fashion has truly taken over everything and no escape is possible, only collusion, in whatever form.

If that’s the case, the most rebellious protest against the fashion system may just be to wear the same old stuff that’s kicking around in your closet. Find what you absolutely adore and replace it when it falls apart. You want new meanings? You want your clothes to tell the world how plugged in and original you really are? Go out and live. Supply new contexts. Or just wait for time to pass, and history will do it for you.

Visit www.thegreysweatsuitrevolution.com and www.traid.org.uk for more details and forthcoming events

Emily Bick is contemporary’s Fashion Editor

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