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on fashion,
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Kate Moss et al wearing fur on the cat-walk again! Christy Turlington baring it all for PETA's anti-fur campaign: Was it worth doing it? Was not this battle won a few years ago? Can this battle actually ever be won? Or lost? Can Kate Moss et al be blamed for fur becoming fashionable again? The virtual reality of the global village has no memory, no history: no mark ever remains of its many folds, once unfolded. Reality is real as long as it stays within the virtuality of the world of the media, of the now and of the today, within that over-world moulded and controlled by anonymous men, running amok hiding behind the facades of multinational banking and financial institutions, the faceless power of money.
We are hooked. |
It is cool to be seen in a fur coat, as Naomi Campbell recently indicated. Cool Britannia, cool Brit babes, cool Tony Blair and New Labour. The notion of "cool" is all persuasive and has certainly penetrated deeply into our zeitgeist and our lifestyles, but ultimately it is no more than a word invented to hide the essential emptyness of modern times. |
Are we ultimately gambling away our own lifestyles in our insistence to buy the obsessions being sold to us through the virtuality of the media, without questioning the techno-industrial and economical strata shoring them up? Were we ever told about the nightmares which went with it? The awakenings are numerous and abrupt, the price in social and environmental damage is high. We are all paying it, but the profits are being milked by very few grey men.
The unregulated free market's gurus are pressing for easing safety, health and environmental legislation to help the economies `prosper' and be `competitive'. The potential for disaster is incalculable. However, we cannot blame solely the nuclear or the chemical industries for the succession of disasters or the long term persistent damage to the environment. There is a nuclear industry because of our endless thirst for an unlimited supply of electricity. There is a chlorine chemical industry because PVC miniskirts and clothes are fashionable, because we want to buy cheap PVC products, uncaring or unaware of the cost to the environment, wild-life, human health, or even the future viability of humanity as a species. |
Why does PVC give rise to greater environmental concern than any other plastic? The answer is that a seemingly harmless PVC miniskirt or soft PVC toy is the product of a highly dangerous and toxic industry, because the manufacture of PVC is linked to the production of chlorine to a degree unmatched by any other material. |
We bought the shallow claims made by the nuclear industry to provide cheap and unlimited electricity, we are now lumbered with an increasing number of shallow graves. We are now gambling with humanity's reproductive system and with genetic experimentation of our food, what kind of graves are we now going to be lumbered with?
Even the pawns being used inside the fashion industry indirectly acknowledge this: "They don't give it enough time to breathe and to live its life. They squash it like a fly. It's the same in fashion: from one season to the next it goes from 20s to 60s to 70s in four months. Nothing ever lasts''. (Interview to Kate Moss, 'Elle' UK Edition, February 1997). People, the very foundations of social life, feelings, love, laughter, sadness, environmental sustainability, seals, dolphins, whales, sandeels..., we are all "squashed like flies''. Do
we want this to be the 20th Century's legacy |
PVC is used in a broad range of applications, so startingly diverse that it becomes difficult to speak of it as being a single material. It is also widely used in the fashion industry. The production, use and disposal of PVC results in the creation and release into the environment of large amounts of two toxic chemicals known to be hormone disruptors: dioxins and phthalates. Scientific evidence shows that the exposure of wildlife to these chemicals in the environment has resulted in problems such as immune system damage, cancer, and disruption of the hormonal systems. |
Maybe Kate Moss et al cannot be blamed for fur becoming fashionable again, perhaps she does not even wear fur in her private life, she claims that she is not the anorexic chain smoking heroin addict, her `virtual' ego constructed by the media to sell more papers, magazines, or whatever they sell. But undoubtedly her `reality' and her `face' have been ransacked and re-constructed, although she has been an accomplice in this crime, with no consideration at all to either her well-being, her feelings, seals, the environment, to sell the idea that by wearing fur women have gained a 'fashionable' lifestyle. Or fashionable clothes moulded in the latest products churned out by the chemical industry. Do they care about the kind of world that our children and grandchildren will inherit from us, as long as the price is right? Christy,
we still need you, better naked rather than in fur. |
In a few decades, the modern chemical industry has distributed millions of tonnes of organochlorines per year into our environment. The whole process represents an environmental catastrophe on the largest possible scale. They are universally recognised as so dangerous that they are slowly being phased out and banned from production and use. |
Are we not suffering from a kind of collective paranoia about ironing, like an insane obsession for the crease in our otherwise perfectly well ironed shirt? Is not this obsession part of our unquestioning drive to reach this lifestyle being flaunted at us? Are we not paying a very high price in environmental damage because of this paranoid obsession? Should we wish that we could get away from those endless Sunday evenings of ironing piles and more piles of shirts and trousers, only for the sake of wearing a shirt with not a single crease. Power plants operators going absolutely mad on Sunday evenings switching on extra power to cope with the ironing peak hour of the national grid. Nuclear reactors overheating. Alarm bells ringing everywhere. Lets make clothes made of natural chlorine free fibres fashionable again. Lets make those who wear fur and chemically based clothes be the new slobs of the turn of the century. Fashion designers, young and old alike, ranges of fashionable clothes are needed for men and women which do not need ironing, made of natural materials to cater for the old and the young, for the elegant turn of the century woman and for a slob such as the writer of this article, suitable for those long global warming summers and glacial winters. Red or Dead can do it. Can you? Any ideas? A better naked than in fur fashion fair. |
Kate? |
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The reality being flaunted at us
by the `virtuality' of the media have little resemblance
to the lives and concerns of most people, even within the
developed Western nations. A lifestyle is being sold to
us. Kate Moss' image is in almost every corner of the
world ostensibly advertising `Obsession' for men. But is
it only `Obsession' perfume that she is selling to us? Or
is she rather selling an obsession for raising our
lifestyle expectations to an unsustainable level? If
we buy this obsession, then we will also buy `Obsession'.
We not
only nearly managed to blow up half of Europe (Chernobyl,
Saturday 26 April, 1986, 1:23 and 40 seconds am), we are
now tampering with humanity's reproductive system, not to
mention the incalculable damage we have inflicted to
wild-life, in our reliance on technology to shore up an
increasingly unsustainable lifestyle.
People,
reality, history, are expendable commodities to be
ransacked, used and manipulated at will, and then
forgotten when there are no longer needed, by this
relentless drive by the media flaunting dreams at us.
Dreams sell goods and commodities. 
