life is unfair

Hussein Chalayan ‘Weirded Out’ by Models Who Design Clothes

Kate Moss, Erin Wasson, Elle Macpherson, and, most recently, Amber Valletta have all added “slash designer” to their job titles. Taking clothes designed by models seriously is hard enough for us, and we can barely stitch a button on a sweater. After blogging about fashion for long enough, we’ve learned to accept and sometimes (ironically) embrace their work. But Hussein Chalayan doesn’t stare at fashion on the Internet all day, has created technologically magnificent dresses with LED laser lights, and once struggled for funding. So these model clothes don’t amuse him in quite the same way. WWD reports:


“If you have a really strong sense of style and people want to aspire to being like you, I can understand that,” he says. “But if you really are doing it just because you think of yourself as a brand and you haven’t had the training and you know nothing about clothes, it kind of demeans all the training that designers have had.”

Though Chalayan criticized Moss’s line in the Independent over a year and a half ago, he now accepts it, at least begrudgingly.

Still, her Topshop efforts haven’t passed muster. “I don’t think it represented her, and I didn’t think she worked hard enough. I even told her to her face.”

And?

It’s no secret that when Moss designs clothes all she does is pull designer pieces from her disgustingly large closet and have Topshop reproduce them — no real design expertise required on her part. But maybe Hussein should let go of these negative feelings toward Moss and her ilk. Model lines won’t go away anytime soon. It’s kind of like reality TV. We’ve put at least some effort over the course of our lives into being decent human beings, we’ve worked to earn money to feed ourselves, and here we have Real Housewives and people who live in The City on TV making gobs of money for behaving like vacuous aliens with no souls. But do we dwell? No. We accept the unfairness that is life and drink it off after work.

Chalayan’s New Channels [WWD]

Hussein Chalayan ‘Weirded Out’ by Models Who Design Clothes