No. 51 The Chancer’s Formbook: Fashion

Ah, the fickle world of fashion. Populated by preening poseurs, pretentious pillocks, and temperamental tossers. A shallower arena of vacuous whores, brainless drama queens, and slaves to the god of money, you’d be hard-pressed to find.

responsible advertising from the shallow world of fashion

So how would one define fashion?

Well I took the liberty of peeking into the Not What it Used to Be Dictionary of Foolishness and found the following:

Fashion [fash-uh n] noun, verb, idiom
-    Looking at what someone else is wearing before making a purchase yourself.

Indeed so. Fashion is dictated by a cabal of ludicrously attired and obscenely overpaid designers who would readily sell you the shirt off your own back at four times the price you paid for it, and then proceed to make you feel guilty for breathing the same air as them. It is from this arcane collective (I hesitate to use the word thinktank) that the clothes you or I wear filter down to the high street. Like shit down a hillside in a particularly heavy rainstorm.

It seems that any chancer can become a fashion designer. All one needs is a hilarious name, an outrageous accent, and a complete and utter detachment from reality. Noble qualifications indeed. Once these are acquired then you’ll be ready to take on the glitzy world of fashion and destined for the untold riches that come with it.

For instance, there may be economic upheaval every which way you look, but that doesn’t stop Ralph Lauren charging £90 for a shirt. And if we’re in any confusion as to what a shirt entails, it’s two arms, a bit of fabric front and back, and some plastic buttons to stop your belly hanging out. Oh, and don’t forget the little stitched polo player on the left breast. There’s no need for anything as elaborate as LEDs stitched into the seaming, or even a collar that glows in the dark.

In fact, the beauty of this scheme, and what will appeal to every chancer worth his salt, is that these garments can be knocked up for about 50p a pop in one of the many third-world sweatshops where child labour and bondships of servitude are not only legal, but actively encouraged. The public will eagerly pay the other £89.50 for whatever insignia you spend all of three minutes devising on the back of a beermat.

Obviously, once you’ve penetrated the elite, then you can hurl any old tat down a catwalk so long as it’s sellotaped to the withered frame of a chronically bulimic 15 year old, too smacked off her tits on heroin, coke, horse tranquilisers, and crème de menthe, to realise how preposterous she looks.

The name of the game is exploitation; the noun of choice for the veteran pros of the chancing circuit. Exploitation of the serf workforce assembling the garments. Exploitation of the waifs and strays plucked from obscurity to model the tat (although if they play their cards right, have a volatile temperament, or are of the correct breeding; they too can progress to the official status of overpaid chancer). And exploitation of the consumer at large, who comes to the table ready brainwashed into believing that the more you pay for an item of clothing, the higher your social standing is.

Simple fact: it doesn’t matter if you have neither a pot to piss in, nor a window to chuck it out of. If you’ve got your hands on a £100+ shirt, the world will think you’re someone.

Any chancer with a steadfast conviction to their chosen vocation has a strong footing when it comes to taking the fashion world by storm. The possibilities are endless, so long as the public at large allow themselves to be dictated to on what they can and can’t wear. And as it’s the fashion Gestapo dictating the pace at which fashion changes, the canny chancer will always be quids in.

Example: Some gullible type spends £100 on a shirt; £150 on some jeans; £200 on shoes; and £400 on a jacket. Within the year, they are made obsolete by the very bloke who created them when he brings out his latest line of overpriced scrag-end. Ergo: the gullible type has to rush out and buy some more, thus avoiding the ridicule of their equally shallow friends.

Fashion designer is possibly the Dubai World Cup event of the chancing calendar, and therefore the ultimate goal of any Young Turk starting out on the scene.

So what are you waiting for? You need never work again.

Jeffman doesn’t follow fashion. He exists in a place between past, present and future; beyond the grasp of fad and trend. His trilby and the occasional Cromby are his only nods to the sartorial SchutzStaffel. Suffice to say, this refusal to conform ensures he always looks good.

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