Catwalk show at London Fashion Week brought memories back to existence

Long ago, in a far-off land called the 1970s, the fashion spreads in magazines for young teens utilized to be drawn, not photographed. I loved those drawings, of tall, slender, elegant creatures, all with precisely the same faces, figures and hair, in absolutely fitting, perfectly draping clothes.

At the time, I thought extends were drawn because the women they depicted were too unfeasibly idealized to exist in real life. Last Saturday, the vastly rated stylist Katie Grand recreated those 70s drawings precisely, using real women, and real clothes, for London Fashion Week’s Topshop Unique catwalk show. I’d forgotten the drawings until I saw them brought to life, similar to weird magic, like amazing out of the Nutcracker.

Now I appreciate that the 70s presentation of teenage fashion was now a much cheaper and less labour-intensive way of doing things, back when fashion wasn’t fairly the huge British industry it is now.

In 1970, Grand could incredibly well have been drawing clothes manufactured in Britain. In 2010, she commands a massive budget and loads of staff, to show clothes manufactured abroad to an audience of writers and photographers employed to clarify them. Forty years of profound economic shift, all summarized on one catwalk.

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