THE FASHION CONSPIRACY
Nicholas Coleridge
New York: Harper & Row, 1988
323 pp., $19.95
For someone who stumbled onto the fashion industry simply "by accident," Nicholas Coleridge has crafted a remarkably intelligent, intriguing, and riveting book. Because he approaches the topic from the vantage point of a curious bystander, not a seasoned fashion watcher, Coleridge's expose of the ambiguous world of "haute couture" smacks of adventure and well-placed naiveté. His descriptions of designers, buyers, and fashion editors read like the diary of a wondrous bushwhacker.
What prompted Coleridge to write The Fashion Conspiracy is the author's bewildered realization that a select group of individuals--most of them paranoid, eccentric, and very rich--manipulate international fashion in a way that has never been achieved or dreamed of before.
Coleridge recounts how a group of Irish nuns who settled in northern Thailand sparked his interest in fashion. The nuns set up a weaving cooperative to produce quality cotton, which caught the attention of Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto. The material was shipped to Yamamoto's design house in Tokyo, and then to his factories in Japan for manufacture. Once completed, the garments were flown to Paris in time for the spring couture show, and then on to New York for the company's press office to promote. Finally, an American magazine commandeered the samples for a fashion shoot in the Seychelles. The garments originating in Thailand wound up in the Indian Ocean in the hands of a German photographer and his Swiss model.
This complex scenario compelled Coleridge to investigate. The English writer--editor since 1986 of the British fashion periodical Harpers & Queen--traveled to fourteen countries to interview more than four hundred fashion personalities and gain firsthand knowledge of the apparently booming industry. He reports:
Fashion is an infinitely larger and more complex world than
it appears from the outside. The decade from 1978 has
been decisive for fashion, as important as the 1950s were
for the motor industry. Designers like Ralph Lauren,
Calvin Klein and Giorgio Armani have created from nothing
fashion empires on a scale and with a speed that seemed
impossible in the mid-1970s. In less than ten years they
have achieved annual turnovers of $1.3, $1.1 and $1 billion
respectively. This has produced a compelling new factor in
the world economy: designer money.
Coleridge's interviews with Oscar de la Renta, Yves Saint Laurent, and Katharine Hamnett abound with anecdotes and amusing trivia, but also offer arresting insights into couture's bustling corridors. Designers, buyers, and editors cluster into warring factions and pursue each other across continents. Boutiques become "embassies," and press
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