Tag: fashion-tag/features

“This led to a process of re-evaluating my clothes – selling some things on, repairing others and only buying five new items a year. Everything else is second-hand,” Souslby explains. In the last year alone, she has repaired three items (a pair of jeans, boots and a skirt) and altered a pair of trousers and jeans to change the silhouettes.

For some, the comparative price of repairs and alterations to buying new from fast fashion brands can be too high: it costs £20 ($25) to repair a tear and £30 ($37) to create a new neckline on a shirt at The Seam. But for Soulsby, it comes down to value and mindset.

“If you love something, and you know it is so old you wouldn’t be able to source it again then it is absolutely worth keeping,” she says. “It’s hard to find things you really love and want to keep wearing – with all of the good times and memories that attach themselves to those items.”

Soulsby’s reevaluation of her wardrobe included tackling the hunger for new clothes, driven by brands pushing trends and new pieces, sometimes on a daily basis. She says it’s a model that even some second-hand sellers have adopted. “Lots of sellers echo the ‘drop’ model so they keep up that feeling that you have to have it. I think it can lead to rash impulses and poor buys.”

Lisa Wenske, a copywriter from Berlin and loyal second-hand shopper, agrees. She made a New Year’s resolution in 2017 to only buy second-hand clothing for a year – both out of necessity (a shoestring budget) and a growing concern for the effects of fast fashion on garment workers and the planet. The resolution became a habit; Wenske rarely buys new clothes.

For Victoria’s Secret, that “more” started last year in an Ohio warehouse, where 28-year-old corset engineer Michaela Stark was let loose in the brand’s fashion show archives. The self-proclaimed “body morphing bitch” was there “to dismantle this whole idea of a Victoria’s Secret Angel” by recreating their most iconic outfits with rounder shapes and more rebellious – even downright weird – creative imagery. What’s more, the mega-brand was paying her to do it. 

Stark is one of the new “VS 20” collective of artists, activists and designers chosen to revamp the brand – and document the process for the upcoming Prime Video film. “The whole thing was pretty wild,” says Margot Bowman, the emerging director hired to capture her London peers – including Stark, plus artist Phoebe Collings-James and designer Supriya Lele – aiming to destroy old Victoria’s Secret tropes and build new ones.

‘Female perfection‘

Like Wallis, Bowman came of age at the height of Victoria’s Secret’s take on female perfection. “I have an image of Gisele in the wings just burned in my brain,” she tells BBC Culture. She often felt excluded from the world that the brand fought so hard to create, and, she says, that’s exactly why she wanted to partner with the lingerie mainstay: “The fact that I can remember Victoria’s Secret Angels from 20 years ago, when I wasn’t even watching the show, that says a lot about the power of their brand platform,” she says. “So I was really excited to be in a position to create a new set of images – a new historical record that would be more inclusive… It was actually quite cathartic for me, finding a sense of peace in my body through the process… and I have to say, during the entire thing, the aspiration to be thin literally did not exist.”

The same sentiment was true even for Adriana Lima, an original Victoria’s Secret Angel who was once a literal poster-woman for the brand’s tanned-and-taut perfection. When the 42-year-old received a call from the brand to return to their fold, it was mere weeks after giving birth to her third child.

“I thought that wasn’t ever going to happen!” Lima says from her home in Los Angeles. “We did the shoot and it was a few months after I had my baby boy. You can see clearly in the pictures that I still had the baby weight on… I mean, let me tell you, I gained a lot of weight!… which is totally fine! But not usual [in a lingerie campaign], you know? I didn’t think at that stage it would be possible for me to model [lingerie]. But they embraced me no matter what.”

(Image credit: Getty Images)

Garland wasn’t with her on the night, but saw the pictures online. “I thought it was fabulous,” she remembers. “It’s all about being noticed. It’s all about, ‘did I make you think? Have I left a lasting impression?’ And I guess there’s that shock factor as well, which is, whether people like it or not, they’re all going to be talking about it.”

They certainly were. Francesca Granata, associate professor of Fashion Studies at the Parsons School of Design, and author of Experimental Fashion: Performance Art, Carnival and the Grotesque Body, says the combination of raw meat on bare skin was what was most shocking to people. “It is the ultimate abjection,” says Granata. “It troubles the inside versus outside of the body, literally having flesh on the outside of the body. It reminds people of their own mortality. I don’t think any of her other looks were so explicitly disturbing.”

Granata says the dress can also be read as a critique of the objectification of women, “particularly the way female pop stars have been read as sex objects. With Lady Gaga’s meat dress, the expression ‘a piece of meat’ is turned on its head.”

Some were angry. Animals rights charities condemned the dress, with Peta calling it “offensive” and saying “there are more people who are upset by butchery than who are impressed by it.”

In a post-show interview with Ellen DeGeneres, Gaga said no offence was intended, and explained that the dress was a statement protesting the US military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy – which prevented service people from disclosing their sexual identity. “For me this evening it’s [saying], ‘If we don’t stand up for what we believe in, if we don’t fight for our rights, pretty soon we’re going to have as much rights as the meat on our bones’.” A week later, she appeared at a rally calling for the repeal of the policy and gave an address entitled “The Prime rib of America”. The law was formally repealed three months later.

In fact, in the late 15th Century, Leonardo da Vinci sketched out a machine for making sequins. It was an elaborate contraption, black-inked lines illustrating a series of pulleys and wheels that worked together to punch out small metal disks. There is no evidence that this machine was ever actually made, but there is something pleasing in imagining it in motion – a rudimentary form of mass-production that might have sped up the process of turning an elite status symbol into something so widely available as to start losing its lustre.

As fashion curator and lecturer Vanessa Jones puts it, the historic sequins still preserved today are largely found “on really high-end garments from the 15th Century onwards… In the 16th and 17th Century we see [more] of these decorative metal, sequin-esque shapes adorning garments… from wealthy or at least middle-class families”. Now, as she says, “you can pick them up for next to nothing. You can get thousands for a couple of pounds”.

Fashion’s biggest sequin champion

In designer Ashish Gupta’s exhibition Fall in Love and Be More Tender, currently on display at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, London, a wonderful tension emerges between what sequins were, and what they have become today. Born in Delhi and based in London, Gupta’s Ashish label is best known for his sparkling, eye-catching designs that have been worn by figures including Madonna, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. The French word “sequin” comes from the Arabic sikka (meaning coin or minting die) and Venetian zecchino (a type of gold coin). In England, they were previously known as “spangles”.

The word itself captures the humble sequin’s early alliances with affluence and artisanal splendour. No better way to prove you have money than to wear it. But the transition from metal to gelatin, followed by further leaps forward, via acetate, mylar and vinyl, transformed sequins from a rare and sparkling commodity to the embodiment of mid-century glamour to a kitschy form of ornamentation that runs the gamut from all-star entertainment (Elton John, Dolly Parton, Tina Turner, legions of drag queens) to everyday celebration (festivalgoers, ardent Christmas party attendees) to children begging their parents for a sugary rush of glitter.

It’s a far cry from the days when women didn’t even have kits of their own, and instead sported baggy attire on the pitch that was made for men’s bodies. And while football’s ties with fashion are established, with male footballers dabbling in modelling and building relationships with fashion houses, the fashion world is starting to call on female footballers too as the women’s game continues to skyrocket.

How early women footballers had to make do

In the UK, women’s football started to build momentum in the late 19th Century, following the country’s first recorded women’s match in 1881, with local clubs later starting to compete against each other. But its popularity really boomed during World War One. With millions of men away from home fighting, women took on traditionally male jobs working in the factories – and as a way for them to keep fit and build their stamina for heavy physical labour, sports such as football were encouraged. The most famous factory-based team was Dick, Kerr Ladies who notably drew a huge crowd of 53,000 spectators for a match against St Helens Ladies in December 1920.

But just as women’s football was growing in popularity, its momentum was halted in 1921, when the Football Association (FA) announced a ban on women playing the sport on professional grounds and pitches. The reason given: that football was unsuitable for women and not to be encouraged. The ban was not overturned until 1971, and for 50 years women were sidelined to playing in public parks – a stark contrast to the roaring stadiums they previously shined in.

“Football was an underground activity and that meant women who played during this period would wear or borrow male football gear,” says football historian Professor Jean Williams, author of A Game for Rough Girls: A History of Women’s Football in England. Naturally, this typically looked loose and baggy on them. And it wasn’t just in the UK where women’s football was stymied: during the 20th Century, bans and restrictions swept across the globe in countries including Brazil, Belgium, France, Nigeria and Norway. Even when bans subsided, bespoke kits for women were still a rarity well into the 21st Century. Just six years ago, the Irish women’s team threatened to strike due to being treated like “fifth-class citizens”: they alleged among other things that they were forced to change out of their clothes in public toilets to and from matches because they shared kit with the youth teams. For Dr Ali Bowes, a lecturer in the sociology of sport at Nottingham Trent University, the designing of bespoke kits represents a wider attitude change: “One of the biggest changes in recent years has been the shift to women’s football being seen as its own entity and not the hand-me-down version of men’s football,” quite literally, she says.