Boring. Just that.

Ok so here you go, I am about to say something that will generate the kind of uncomfortable dialogue the fashion industry finds so hard to swallow.

This piece is about anonymity and the need for it versus being honest in an arena that that rejects the truth as a guiding principle.

I find this thing about boring not com absurd, ridiculous and unpalatable  from every angle.

I follow the account.

Not because it illuminated me or gave me something valuable to think about, just because it was relentlessly there.

For those of you who don’t work in fashion and who buy clothes to cover and present themselves as opposed to making it a lifetime’s obsession BoringNotCom was an anonymous account which commented with its speculations and mild criticism of the industry. It looked like a series of acid green squares with white writing on them and it truly was never more than that: acid, square, wordy.

But not in a corrosive, imaginative and articulate way, it just contained some criticism and some sort of a personal opinion which potentially differed from the norm, and a sprinkle of piquant which was never ever peppery enough.

It made some predictable guesses on who would leave which brand and who would join another as the new creative director - which, considering we are talking about a handful of brands and a handful of potential creatives, is more like rolling the dice and saying at some point I will get a six.

At its best it ranked catwalk shows from 0 to 10 and - ooof, outrageously - it gave some mainstream luxury shows pretty low scores, when no one else dares to provide any kind of honest analysis.

A weak and lonely commentary in a sea of sycophants and blind followers.

The thing is, in order to do that, it had to be anonymous which is what made it irrelevant imo; just tat, a bit cowardly.

So now they (apparently) unmasked it and it transpires that the owner is an industry player of some sort, which was obvious in the first place considering the way it spoke; fashion is a language, and you can tell immediately if someone is in or out, like an elite dialect that only a few can accent correctly.

Bnc rose to fame, its decidedly non scathing criticism got it invitations to all sorts of events and the kind of curiosity which led to sponsored posts and paid contents, which were eventually what lifted the secrecy veil - when one equally bored journalist decided it was time to look behind the surface and name the owner.

The point is that it ultimately pandered precisely to the rules.

By remaining anonymous it reiterated the point that fashion critique is dangerous, that personal opinions are to be avoided at all costs and that to be outspoken you still absolutely need to be on the inside, front row and all that.

So the outrage was never real, the criticism never cutting, the predictions as predictable as those of a funfair mystic tarot reader.

An industry that can’t deal with scrutiny is lying. An industry that punishes truth sayers is despotic. But above all, an industry which calls itself creative, that describes designers as ‘Artists’ but doesn’t allow dissenters from within is not creative at all, because creativity is about breaking the status quo, about embracing dissent, dialogue and differences of opinions.

Without that, it becomes about standards, not about creating something new.

The freedom to be able to critique out loud the players, their outputs and their modus operandi should be sewn into the industry’s dna.

Without transparent, honest criticism, there is no creativity, no hope for an intellectual conversation, no chance of any eloquent, interesting, stimulating thought.

Can you imagine great art without vitriolic disapproval? Or poetry, or literature? Isn’t it in fact what pushes its boundaries?

We would not have had the impressionists, the cubists, even the YBAs without.

But in no fashion, oh no. Is it because ultimately open criticism could affect product sales? Or because an industry where any celebrity can become a designer is way too easy to criticise?

So, to recap. Boring not com, who was never in any shape or form groundbreaking in any way is named by some journalist with nothing better to do.

Another useless storm in a champagne flute.