Hadley Freeman's The Meaning of Sunglasses: A Guide to (Almost) All Things Fashionable is the latest offering into the glitzy, glamourous, Anna Wintour/Carrie Bradshaw world of the fashion industry - and why people work in it despite a starting salary of the ultra-generous $28,000/yr (in not-so-cheap Sydney no less), with pay going up in tighter-than-a-fish's-you-know-what increments of $2,000-$4,ooo per year.
Freeman is deputy fashion editor for The Guardian and contributing editor for UK Vogue, so she is well placed to defend extravagent spending at the expense of dinner. In defence of the fashion industry's otherwise shallow as a fingerbowl image she states:
"It's never been made wholly clear why fashion is denigrated as shallow when similarly aesthetically based industries like, say, cinema or art or the theatre, are lauded as spiritually enriching. Those three also involve huge sums of money, attract appallingly egotistical people and tend to exclude anyone below the middle-class stratum... Object to the superficiality of this world all you like, but the fact is that the more women who look decent and and feel self-confident, the more women there will be in good jobs so we can take over the world."
Cheers to that one, darling.
... and you can add that big eulogy to the industry in devile Wears Prada, when Streep describes the trickle down effect of 104 brilliant stylists influencing the street.
ReplyDeleteand I loved Confessions Of A Shopaholic.
Isla Fisher is a new Judy Holliday.