THE FASHION PAGE

I don't do clothes in any fashion sense. I hate the fashion industry as much as the arms or the halal meat trades. I used to do clothes, in my twenties,suits and cufflinks, ties'n'hankies, but that's long ago and far away and  I don't do them anymore.  But  I don't not do clothes in a Monty Don way.

Dadoo DonDonDon  Dadoo DonDon

from ishmaelian archives

 You know how the BBC pays production assistants to locate for him battered old linen shirts, Fred Dibnah jackets, frayed braces, old cardies and worn cord trousers, so's he can continue his poseur's existence,  worthy and sincere,

ethically photogenic, green and right-fucking-on, committed to leaving a light carbon footprint.

Wryly, chiding her about GardeningPorn,  I bought mrs ishmael one of Monty's huge, millstone doorstop books, must have been six-hundred pages and there were pictures of him on every page, bending, stretching, leaning, more bending, must be over a thousand of them, in the one book, all of them in what we country house owners call shabby-chic, except that you know Monty's get-ups will have been checked and co-ordinated by lighting cameramen, directors, fruit and vegetable stylists, continuity personnel, his publishers, BBC producers and people from the Radio Times.

adamant agronomy porn-toy

That's not not doing clothes, that's doing clothes Bigtime, image creation and consumer manipulation, Monty's just like you, really, gets his old clothes on and pops down the garden, doing some organic stuff,  for the planet and for his childen, just forget the squadrons  of writers  who script his every word, his every conscientious, planet-friendly aside; forget the storyboarders who choreograph  his every lithe step, his every wheelbarrow pushed between two epic trees or hedges or sculptural garden features, knocked-up for Oh, just a few pounds, really, and some stuff you can easily get down the local garden centre.

He's an ordinary guy, Monty, just like us, in his shabby old linen. Clothes maketh the man.

Up here in the best part of England, tourism, consumer tourism, is about all that’s left, shameless politicians and braindead tourism executives from visitScotland  shitmouth about branding everything, Scotland the Brand, kilts and whisky and shortbread and the home of golf, Scotland is open for foreigners to examine, to peer into our homes, as though we truly were the  Reservation of young stanislav’s imagination; it’s  as though Scotland should lie on her back, legs spread apart for visiting Japs and Yanks to perform profound gynaecological examinations of her, see what makes her tick. Scotland,   Open fer Business, they call it, Smart, Successful, Scotland. And every morning the Glasgow Herald opens, again, like McGroundhog Day, a debate about what it means to be Scotland, No, What It Really Means, Where Are We Going? Where Have We Come From? And How Do We Get Where We Want To Be, Once We Know Where That Is?  The What Is Scotland Industry is immense, jerks and arseholes and rentagob nitwits pontificating endlessly on the box and in the rags.  Meantime, for a pittance and no doubt a post-retirement seat on the board,  Wee Sir Alec Lard sells off the priceless Highlands to some malevolent conglomerate of bent, carpetbagging windmillers, sells off an Aberdonian  site of Special Scientific Interest and Outstanding Natural Beauty so’s Donald McTrump can build on it some twee, tartan golf course and some architecturally abhorrent hotel, made of breeze blocks and pebblefuckingdash.  So long as you say Scotland a lot it doesn’t matter who you’re raping, what timeless features you are destroying. Doesn't matter that this landscape is virtually unchanged since the Ice Age, stick some pylons up there, quick.

It's often argued that the South American rainforests are just too important to be left to native stewardship.  I feel the same way about Scotland's Highlands and Islands. I know that people come here from everywhere, and are renewed by the wilderness, not by what's here, but by what's not here.  Vast empty skylines, little or no signage,  absolutely no noise or light pollution, the hand of Man, where it appears at all, is, North of the Keswick Suspension Bridge at Inverness, tame, tiny and unembellished, complementary; roads are frugal but adequate.

I went around an Orkney Distillery a couple of years back. Local peat, mmm, and local water, Oh, how fucking consumer divine, local water and aged in sherry casks, just smell that sherry, smell that oak.  In fact, you can buy a bottle of Highland Park, of any age, considerably cheaper in Birmingham than you can buy it in Orkney, where it’s made but the best of it is, that for all this phoney localism, the  Highland Park distillery is owned by Grants of St James, which is in turn owned by some gigantic GlobaBooze corporation, it’s all a bit like how Mr Lard’s unofficial foreign seckatry, Lady Sir Sean Connery, the wife beater with the big magic sword, lent, hired  his sibilant stuttering voiceover and antique visual  presence to an advertising campaign for Japanese Scotch whisky, just as long as the adverts were never shown in the West; that’s how patriotic Sir Sean really is and that’s how Scottish all the branding shit is;  the real money goes abroad, there’s few cheap, minimum wage jobs created and maintained in the glens or the isles but the projects are about as local as Coca fucking Cola.

But I saw a teevee series a while back about Harris Tweed, the suit and jacket material woven in the Western Isles by local families from local  wool and it seemed different from the usual Scottish horseshit. 

The Western Isles are home to some of the strangest people in the United Kingdom.  I don't just mean the retired English people,  to whom the Isles are the New Cornwall,  the smug, know-it-alls who've come up for the Quality of Life and who bust their balls raisng a goat and driving a fucking LandRover, as though inside every former primary school teacher there was a seasoned crofter just dying to burst out into kelp harvesting, tattie growing, sheep-rearing and the singing of ancient, discordant worksongs.  No,  they are frankly intolerable and represent the New Lunatic Fringe, they're all fucking nutters and some of them, the AmDrammers and the University of the Third Age wallahs, are embarrassingly priapic, septuaganerian wifeswappers by inclination if not virility.  Oh, and they all fucking paint, and saw away at cellos and things, with all the virtuosity of the orangutang.  And they write,  unpardonably turgid memoirs and novels.

The true islanders,  the Wee Frees,  the natives,  are as weird as can be. Now a hundred and eighty quid for a sports jacket seems a lot of money to me - although probably George Osborne'd spend that on his elevenses.  I never before spent that much money on an individual garment in my entire life - but that is the going rate, and now it hangs in my wardrobe, complete with label. I'll wear it one day.

The Fashion Page drafted 1/11/2011