Concentrated malignity
When anorexics disport themselves in inelegant tatters
The garments exhibited at fashion shows, Dalrymple writes, are
not only impractical (splendour, after all, is often impractical) but hideous. They seem little more than rags sewn together almost at random; I have never seen anyone in anything that resembled them off the catwalk. Surely no one, even in a world in which people are prepared to fall for almost anything, actually buys these clothes.
Festivals of ugly, unsaleable, expensive rubbish
The models
Hatred of the world
seem to do everything to imply that the wearing of these clothes is a sure route to misery. They look as if they have been kept in an underground cave and deprived of food by some kind of sadistic sex criminal. Their facial expressions, as a consequence, are those of concentrated malignity or hatred of the world, as if there were no pleasure or joy to be found in it. Anorexia is the highest state to which man or woman can aspire.
Perhaps, Dalrymple hazards,
the ugliness of apparel, deportment and facial expression that the industry promotes is a sign of how far our obsession with ‘justice’ has reached. If not everyone in the world can afford elegance or live in conditions that conduce to ease and happiness, no one should. Until the world be made whole, no one shall smile and no one shall be finely dressed.
He adds:
Not, of course, that this attitude goes as far as the incomes of fashion designers.
