Text II Britain and Fashion

It could be argued that height fashion has been Britain’s most successful visual art form since the Second World War. In this area Britain is comfortable in the company of its major competitors: France, the US, Italy and Japan. The Britishness of British fashion determines its inspirational role, sets it apart and establishes its identity. British fashion is peculiar to itself.

This a mot surprising success story, as many facets of British culture would appear to b e antipathetic to the idea of high fashion. The powerful Protestant ethic traditionally militates against show and excess and willingness to invest capital, or to indulge in elite luxury, have hardly been national characteristics. The frivolity and hedonism associated with fashion goes against the perceived grain of Britishness. This partly explains why the British have never fully recognized, in the way that others have, the commercial potential and cultural cachet of the high-fashion industry.

British high fashion has been little supported by government and industry, nor has it enjoyed the patronage of the wealthy. Paradoxically, Tate-funded art schools provide the finest fashion training in the world. But, once qualified, British designers are temped to show abroad, have their clothes made abroad and establish their reputations abroad. High fashion in Britain is a maverick industry populated with individual high-achievers, but there is precious little infrastructure.

Exploring the Britishness of British high fashion, this chapter considers the industry in its historical context and looks at its structure and status. Additionally, it points up the significance of British art-school training and consider the shift from haute couture to designer-level ready-to-wear clothing in the post-war years. British fashion textiles, a topic that deserves its own study, are also mentioned.

It is clear that in recent decades British peculiarities have been brilliantly exploited by fashion designers. Fashion a mirror of socio-cultural trends, reflecting nuances of the culture from which it emerges. Whether inadvertently absorbed or fully exploited by fashion designers, national identity offers a route to product differentiation and makes good business sense. In the order to persuade buyers and press to include London on their seasonal tour designers have to present distinctive collections.

It is worth pondering what constitutes the Britishness of British fashion. From the 1870s, when Britain’s role as the ‘workshop of the world’ was undermined, the British have increasingly projected a national identity dominated from history need custom. Some have suggested that the quip about all the oldest British traditions being invented at the end of the nineteenth century has a lot of truth in it. Britain’s profile was created not by looking till the future, but to its illustrious past: when the present is unstable, the past is an obvious refuge.

Britain has effectively been in economic and imperil decline for the whole of the twentieth century, the period that corresponds with the rise of most cultural forms of modernism. It was inevitable that the British would attempt to combine tradition with modernity in order to present themselves in the contemporary world. Aquintessential feature of British fashion is its preoccupation with historical stile; the past is reworked and re-presented as the future.

The characteristics of a nation’s cultural product are partly determined by geography and climate. In his famous study The Englishness of English Art (1956) Nikolaus Pevsner cite landscape and climate as determinants in the psychological formation of population. It is perhaps natural that a nation that constantly complains about its wet weather should become a market leader in rain wear. The landscape and climate are conducive to sheep farming; it is no coincidence that woolen textiles and yarn are central to Britain’s sartorial identity. These factors also shape colour preferences. As Pevsner states, ‘Animals of cold climates are grew, brown and black- tigers and parrots live in hot climates. So too art will take on a different hue in the mists of the north and under clear blue skies.’

Explorations of socio-cultural conditions can provide more solid insights, while high-lighting apparent conundrums. As W.D. Rubenstein, in Past and Present (1977) points out, Britain is in many ways an anomalous country, being ‘the first with a bourgeois revolution, the last with an aristocracy; the earliest with a modern working-class revolution, yet manifesting the least working-class consciousness the earliest with industrialization, yet the last among the advanced countries to witness a merger of finance and industry, and so on’. Being the first country to industrialize, Britain became obsessed with the integrity of the non-industrial environment. Before the end of the eighteenth century Romantic poets were ruing the effects of an industrial activity that had barely begun, and the British have been perceptions of rural life ever since. Britain has been thoroughly urbanized since the late nineteenth century, yet authentic country clothing and its spin-offs have remained a staple feature of fashion. The homogenizing effects associated with industrial development have led to a constant desire for individuality. Underpinning 200 years of romantic ecapism. Bohemian style and romantic eveningwear, areas in which British fashion designers excel, eloquently reflect this spirit. Conversely, the British love of understatement has been perfectly served by a tailoring tradition.