There is a meme going around, one which has done good business on the sarky, bitchy, fashion-adjacent corner of Instagram and concerns one of the leading figures in the London fashion world. ‘If you know, you know,’ reads the caption.
Of course, we can’t speak about this rumour directly but the ‘wink wink’ nature of the post and the comments beneath suggest a secret lore of atrocious behaviour lurking beneath the most glamorous of businesses.
Fashion is an industry that excuses (and occasionally revels in) practices that have long been ironed out of others. It’s a business that still has ‘open secrets’ in the way Hollywood used to have open secrets. Remember when ‘everyone had a Harvey Weinstein story’ or you would hear of a flatmate’s cousin’s ex who experienced something bizarre or horrific on a film set? Fashion still creates those ‘Have you heard?’ moments in dizzying supply.
While the #MeToo movement swept through the film business, forever altering its practices from awards ceremonies to equal-pay terms, fashion has not had quite the same reckoning. Bar a few scalpings of ageing sex pests like Mario Testino and Bruce Weber, fashion is still a world of bad practice and dirty little secrets (Testino has denied these claims, while Weber settled out of court). Even when a story does break, the industry has a famously short memory. Indeed, both Testino and Weber are back shooting for major brands and magazines again, while John ‘I Love Hitler’ Galliano found career rehabilitation quickly.
At this year’s London Fashion Week, the designer Daniel Lee made a triumphant return at Burberry, having parted ways with Bottega Veneta last year in murky circumstances that are currently lighting up the gossip-sphere. Even Alexander Wang, accused of drink-spiking, sexual assault and humiliation by multiple sources, is showing at NYFW and being photographed with Kardashians and Hadids again (Wang, too, denies these allegations).
Much of this comes down to the financial clout of the fashion market and the power of its advertising. Unlike ephemeral, easy-to-pirate media products like music and visual content, people still buy clothes. This creates a situation whereby the big fashion houses and their parent companies have magazines (with their dwindling circulations) in a chokehold. ‘You can’t publish anything bad about anyone who advertises,’ one London magazine editor tells us. ‘Say you upset Dior, then all of the LVMH group are going to be pissed off. But if you say the new collection is amazing – when it’s actually terrible – then they might give you a big advertorial. One very well-known French menswear designer has pulled so much advertising over the years, over a whole variation of slights.’
I’ve spent a long time on the fringes of fashion: writing about it, teaching it at BA level, copywriting for brands and socialising with plenty of people who work in it full-time. From the sidelines, I’ve always found the industry to be fascinating, troubled and almost totally unaccountable. I’ve seen friends and family driven to the brink by its demands, enduring horrific treatment from a central casting roster of villains and their total disregard for labour laws. I’ve also seen people I know make some incredible work and been very, very well paid for it. But fashion’s bad habits have always left a sour taste in my mouth, and increasingly, the people who work within it are feeling something similar.
Having spoken to a number of sources, from stylists to photographers, editors to interns and designers at major houses, the picture I have gained is that of an industry that refuses to bow to standardised ethics and employee rights. A business that stops for nothing and often makes strange and troubling demands of its workforce. When sounding out contributors, the first response I received was usually: ‘God, I have so many stories.’ The fact that every single person asked for full anonymity speaks volumes about the industry’s power to blackball those that put their heads above the parapet.
