Why do celebs wear silly, uncomfortable outfits?
Imagine Princess Grace of Monaco or Audrey Hepburn preparing for a Hollywood gala event in the days when stars were stars, not celebrities.
The dresses would be exemplars of breathtaking, though understated, elegance. Immaculately coiffed and bejewelled, their wearers would emanate serenity and calm as they glided through the throngs of admirers.
Today, aesthetics are barely taken into account when celebrities turn up on the red carpet. Outfits are designed with one purpose only – to get the most attention possible, however short-lived this attention will be – and to have the greatest number of paparazzi encircling them.
Pop performer Sam Smith succeeded in being the most photographed celebrity at the 2023 Brit Awards. Smith wore an inflatable black latex suit, whose arms and legs were not so much puffball in design as beach-ball. Each limb looked as though it was suffering from elephantiasis. Think spatchcock chicken and you’ll get the picture.
Smith’s inflatable suit was designed by Harri, a London College of Fashion 2020 graduate. It has valves in it, rather as bicycle tyres do, and needs to be blown up by an air pump.
First, a liberal dusting of talcum powder is required before the wearer tries to insert him- or herself into the latex prison. Once you’re inside, there is no question of being able to go to the loo.
Discomfort is a big theme in spring fashion. Bottega Veneta’s Mostra platform ankle boots (£1,510) will add an impressive nine inches to a party-goer’s height – but who could enjoy the feeling of balancing on stilts for an evening?
Your main focus would be avoiding being knocked off your perch by another guest pushing through the melee. Harri’s inflatables and Bottega Veneta’s platforms are distinctly reminiscent of fairground mirror distortions.
Do the wearers believe they look good? They may well do.
Critic Dean Kissick, who has written about what he calls the ‘bimbofication of art’, has noted the same tastes emerging in the art world. The salerooms cannot get enough of ‘Hi-Lite’ art, where cartoon forms merged with traditional concepts have been selling for huge sums to culturally-illiterate buyers who ‘don’t like complicated ideas and like the relevance of recognisable shapes’.
We are all guilty of having worn uncomfortable clothing in our youth, and we too did it simply because it was a trend amongst our age group. Who ever enjoyed wearing jeans so skin-tight that you had to lie on the floor to wriggle into them and couldn’t risk eating or drinking anything until you took them off?
Our great-grandmothers willingly wore hobble skirts, which fitted so tightly around the lower legs that they could progress only at the pace of a snail.
Our great-great grandmothers wore six-foot-diameter crinolines – which must have meant hosts had to cut the numbers on their guest lists for space reasons. The purpose of the crinoline was to achieve the illusion of a tiny waist.
Tiny waists were so desired that they also led to the torturous corsets which later deformed the skeletons of wearers, damaging ribs and misaligning spines. They squashed the intestines out of the space where nature had designed them to reside and down below where they had no business being. Peristalsis could not take place and constipation was the result.
Talking of waist size, the average female’s in 1950s Britain spanned 22 inches. Today’s average British woman’s waist is 34 inches. In America, it’s 38 inches.
When the Victoria & Albert Museum held its 2013 celebration of David Bowie’s career, sylph-like Kate Moss was too big to get into the costume worn by Bowie in his 1970s Aladdin Sane outfit.
More recently, the thong tops the charts as the least-comfortable piece of clothing invented. Anyone with common sense could see that thongs were a health hazard. They acted as ‘wicks’ transmitting undesirable products from back bottom to front, triggering urinary tract infections. Yet some fashion victims still persevere with them.
Ballet pumps, which also had a moment, were equally unhealthy. Repeated wearing destroys the protective fatty tissue of the foot and encourages corns and calluses.
Still, perhaps we should welcome the fashion for discomfort in clothing.
Two years’ pandemic slobbing around the home triggered an explosion of gymwear on our streets: sweatshirts, sweatpants with elasticated waists and giant bulbous trainers which look like tractor tyres.
Gymwear is worn almost exclusively by people who have never set foot in a gym, and it is seductively comfortable.
The arrival of inflatable, suffocating and restrictive clothing is an idea whose time has come. It is a necessary corrective.
The Oldie May 2023
