Mens

I can’t even watch the fashion shows atm.

Potentially this may not be exclusively a reaction to the system but also that it’s hot and it’s menswear (I don’t wear much menswear, so easier to avoid for that selfish reason), but mostly I think it’s because when I read the critics (aside from Antonio Mancinelli who is my true source of joy when it comes to deciphering codes and collections) I get as bored as when I look at the clothes.

We are at such a crazy point of dissonance between fashion shows and real life (or, wearing designers clothes and real life) that I may as well watch Totoro, which is prettier and funnier.

Aside from that, and London in the heat hasn’t changed much over the years, life’s a runway show.

English people and the heat - English And The Heat 🎶🎵 sing along to the tune of Beauty And The Beast - is not a novelty (although the extreme that we are currently experiencing is), I come prepared to the bother, the word is spelled with more Bs than I have written, but each year the fashion just grabs me like it was a brand new experience.

It’s all off. It’s mildly warm (imo) and in come short shorts, cropped vests, sun hats and basketry. Because, usually, when it was unduly hot in the uk life felt like a picnic.

I remember in 1983 I had been living here for about 9 months and it was my first London spring. It was a hot day (ish, really ish!) in March and everyone was nearly naked, sunbathing and eating ice lollies. Complaining and enjoying with every alternate breath.

Bikinis were out in the parks, people were sunbathing on benches.

We didn’t know then, not as furiously as we do now, that this heat is here to stay and increase exponentially. That this heat is here to kill us.

We didn’t think, when H&M and Zara and River Island arrived (because in the UK River Island was one of the first) that these immensely cheap and forever summery clothes on our high streets were the predecessor of an avalanche so huge it could clothe us all a hundred times over and leave us gasping for breath at the same time, because its wave is a tsunami we refuse to see in our collective horizon.

Meanwhile, an enormous amount of our governments money goes to finance wars and defence, as opposed to building (or, better, having built already, what ought to have happened over the past 30 years with both urgency and consistency) the infrastructure that can deal with the advancing climate breakdown.

And this is what I mean by patriarchy: a system so self obsessed with growth (we know where that obsession derives from) that it depletes and neglects all spaces of nurture, such as hospitals and schools.

In our world, the only things that shine of newness are weapons, computers and all that houses them, all else is dishevelled and unkempt.

We know who suffers the most: the poor and women - the people furthest away from the wealth of the belligerent, the Billionarses and the tech bros whose size fixation, delight in continuous conquest and greed for paper and power is leading us to the dogs and them to a life in a very luxurious, but lonely, underground shelter.

So you see I have a lot to think about and none of this thinking is assauged by a bunch of skinny guys wearing grass green and yellow, or tailoring, or paired back whatevers.