Jess Cartner-Morley, associate editor (Fashion), looks through the archives of Alison Adburgham, one of the pioneers of press style journalism
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“Now comes the Paris week, with the fighting on the stairways, the multilingual shrieking in the salons; a week of over-heating, under-eating, little sleeping; a week of vitiation and dehydration, ineffectively compensated by indifferent champagne.”
In other words, fashion week has barely changed in 61 years. “For the fashion critic, the sturm und drang of the Paris Openings follow on from the openings in Rome, Florence and London,” Alison Adburgham wrote in 1960. “Already she has an overdraft of fatigue from travelling, typing and long-distance telephoning, from parties and interminable talking … And yet she survives. She brings herself sufficiently alive to turn a confusion of impressions into a fusion of trends, from which she can distill the essential essence of the coming season.” The namedropping of glamorous destinations, while simultaneously giving the impression that covering the shows is war-zone-level challenging, the dash of performative ennui, and the obligatory twist of champagne: this is what being a fashion editor was and is, then and now. Alison, I couldn’t have put it better myself.
Her fashion pages both mirrored and debated the increasing visibility of women, fashion having long been a way to talk about women’s public and private lives
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