The witticisms of a Fashionable Student

Sleep is a foreign concept to the fashion student.

But then again, the studio in which I spend my days toiling away in the eleventh arrondissement of Paris has no windows, so the passing of time remains largely undocumented; a day is marked with randomly allocate cigarette breaks and caffeine intakes, rather than regular meals, and the only hour of the day marked with precision is 8.30, when the students trundle in from their morning's metro commute. The phenomena of Night and Day are long forgotten abstract concepts; the idea of ceasing work to curl in a ball under more fabric an absurdity for those not faced with the imminent threat of a Slovakian couturier's gaze on their piped pockets.

You do not want to show KatKat (as she has affectionately been named by the students of the sophomore year, a result of the same sentiment that leads someone to name the rat living in their kitchen that turns invisible with the illuminating flick of the light switch. In a severe case of stockholm syndrome, this affection actually actualises until the point of self flagellation and invoking her holiness' name...) a poorly piped piped pocket. It's not even as if she shouts, doles out machiavellian punishments or devillish diatribes; it's the look. Any childhood guilt-trip pales in comparison to the disgust and dissapointment you can be bestowed with in a nanosecond by the steely, stiletto clad styliste that has clawed her way up into the echelons of couture with such a level of blood, sweat, hard work and passion. The sense that you've failed as a human being and should crawl backwards down darwin's theory of evolution comes to mind, returning to the primordial swamps where you no doubt deserve to live (nay, exist. just)

I would posit, in fact, that if libraries distort the space and time of our reality with L-space, then the isolated campus that houses the university's fashion students too distorts into a polyfractal dimension in which everywhere is also everyhere else; for the 6 studios absorb all other locations in the student's universe in order that they should never leave. Or, it could rather be said, never leave in a conscious state.

Not that being present is a guarantee of cranial activity. Under the high vaulted ceiling of cement and glass tiles (the sort you more habitually see on pavements in london beside houses with basements), glass tiles which, it should be noted, have been frosted to such an extent that they do not allow for light to pass through them, the 8 (formerly 9) students that make up the entirety of the sophomores have cracked. It started early on, when we realise that we could tell when little a, a small indian girl from London, previously known more for her tendency to dine at l'avenue and party on the champs elysee, her absent work-ethic and her inability to take public transport (giving her a 40 minute commute by taxi to school...) was tired because of her tendency to squat on the wooden drafting tables, wrap things around her head and start talking like bo qui qui. In fac, by the end of the first semester, we found that this was contagious, and that a had just been ahead of the trend. Incedentally, I have never seen such a change in work ethic. The girl went from not knowing what a selvegde was, winding her bobbins by hand (she couldn't work out how to use the sewing machine) and never having touched an iron to kidnapping her mannequin and even taking it home to sew for four hours a day in the holiday, in london...

You civilians will never know the stress and tears that the designer went through to design and prototype your tailored trousers, only to work for minimum wage (or, even better, as an intern (read slave) until the age of 30 only to have their designs stolen by Topshop or Zara and sold to you for cheaper. (did you know that Zara actually has secret product recalls whenever a too close resemblance is actually noted?) You can't put yourselves in the head of that poor soul who runs at a loss so as to avoid using sweatshops and use organic cotton that doesn't burn the skin off and blind the young female workers... clearly, because you buy the cheap knock offs that secretly, you know can't be good for humanity. Do you really think Primark can legitimately charge a fiver for a shirt that i can tell you would take at least a week to even prototype? with at least 3 people working on only the design, drape and pattern (on the smallest scale of operations plausible) And then pay for manufacturing costs? didn't think so.

One sad plight is the moment of embarassment that we are forced to endure upon admitting to being a fashion student. I would rather admit to having sex 8 times in two days to a room full of strangers, talking about monkeys inbetween. There's the pause, the look of vague concern/puzzlement. The... well you don't look like a fashion student (Do we ever? they're easy to spot. Eyebags, monotone dressing, the vacant look in there eye that suggests they've forgotten they should be working and a really strong desire for a drink. Or caffeine. Or a drink with caffeine.) We have been painted as vacuous bitches with no interest in anything "worthwhile" (or, indeed, intelligence- sad given that most of the ones I know are trilingual at least and often have other degrees or were at least accepted into doing psychology or economics or medecine.... Don't get me wrong though, there are some peaches as thick as two planks of wood nailed together. My last few research projects have involved researching the theories of cosmic variance, Platonic allegorys, French marxist philosophers, the anthropology of burmese sea gypsies , polar exploration and randomness and probability (the mathematical definitions thereof). I fail to see how i could possibly be pegged as uninterested and vacuous. Say what you want of my intelligence, but do not claim that i have no curiosity, no desire for knowledge.

The particularly sad thing is that the industry itself is to blame; fashion encourages it's own negative image in order to be able to survive as a system/visual code in postmodern society; perpetuating its own negative image so that people can rebel against it and feel individual whilst at the same time employing the code of the system that they are rebelling against. I'll put it this way: with the 1970s in western countries, people began to refuse dictates (to greater or lesser extents) and in particular the dictates of fashion. Fashion was recognised as a way of showing affiliation, and people did not want (to think that their) affilliations (had been) handed to them by an industy. Particularly one with so many nasty aspects (Like most large corporate entities). Yet we didn't just stop wearing clothes. Fashion survived because "fashion" offers an escape from homogenous (read, being the same as everyone else) fashion with the idea of diversity, of freedom to rebel against the system. Anti fashion was born. Look, i can wear clothes that are unfashionable! I have a personality (that i choose to associate with this group of likeminded individuals ohwaitisthisbringinguplogicalproblemswithassertingmyindividuality?). Except who is antifashion made by, and what does it become? Fashion. PArt of the fashion industry and establishment. The fashion apparatus operates on the basis of its own denial.... It is foolish to see  the fashion system as so simple that it is possible to rebel against it. If you embrace the idea that you are rebelling, then you simply perpetuate its dominance. The idea is something of a mindfuck, and it is odd that an area of sociology and anthropology so massive, a visual code that we use every day, is often ignored, dismissed as irrelevant, and allowed to grow monstrously influential with little intellectual checks made upon it.

The idea that life as a fashion designer is glamorous is also laughable. Free champagne is the exception, not the rule. We'll put it this way; a career path where you're expected to work for free/meal tickets for the first 4 years minimum does not lead to good nutrition. Especially when, armed with certain knowledge not known to the average layperson, we know the human cost of buying cheap high street clothes/fabrics for our own toiles. I must spend 3/4 of my money on supplies and the rest on convenint food that then gets microwaved in the studios of the university. A steady diet of Picard frozen meals, bakery sandwiches (after monery transfers first arrive)  and chinese food from the vietnames traiteur, eaten irregularly (if at all) if the only way i see sunlight during the day, in three minute increments when Ii leave the studio/my appartment's cutting table. If i wanted a life in the glamorous side of fashion, i'd be doing a management degree and working as a PR. The CEOs of luxury goods companys are the best paid in the world; in real life, designers take teaching jobs at multiple schools in order to support themselves financially.

There is some light to our days; mainly the fact that we can blast out music whilst working in the studios. You have not lived until you have seen tension until you have seen the warring ipods of A and E, our minimal-techno-loving, bent as a helter-skelter, resident male student from Minnesota, the only male in our class of 9. The safest place to reside is the no mans land of lady gaga and 90s hip hop, that or in the next room. Exept that we couldn't do that because of the 20 or so industrial sewing machines we have lining the rooms, 4 work. And someone set fire to one of the industrial ironing boards, so you can't use that.  And there's no way anyone's suicidal enough to go through to the senior studio two months before there graduate show... (If you were even contemplating it, the sign on the door with the skull and crossbones saying "SENIORS ONLY" might give you second thoughts.) There is also the general degradation of our sanity, which can be entertaining. For instance, the day that a small wire sculpture, creatively picturing a man buggering a woman, appeared on the corner where the topshelf meets the pillar/beam join. Or the degradation of our language into small sets of standardised catch phrases with a narrower vocabulary than the average sitcom. It's like family guy on acid. with scissors. One dysfunctional family, whose pleasures are the little things in life, like snatches of sleep or when the sewing machine functions properly and doesn't eat your work.