When sex doesn’t sell

 

I am perhaps the only woman in Australia, nay the developed world, who has not clocked in a single episode, let alone an entire film, of Sex & The City.

It’s not that I don’t like the concept, nor that I detest film and television. On the latter front, I probably  crunch a good 20 hours a week of Breaking Bad, True Blood and Friday Night Lights, a series based around an American high school football team. The Lights appeal has nothing to do with its smorgasbord of well developed jocks, rather its er, well developed characters.

Moving on.

I’m also a rabid cinephile, and have probably watched more films in the last year than blinked. I have to be bribed into a night out on the town, any town. I’d much rather a trip to the Moon.

Does this reluctance to venture out into the big smoke have something to do with my aversion to Sex & The City? No, because no such aversion exists. I just never got around to watching the original show – that simple – and the thought of cramming all those missed seasons in for its cinematic debut never appealed.

So now I simply sit back and enjoy what the franchise has done for fashion. Not just for the likes of Australian jewellery designer Samantha Wills, whose products were featured in the recent movie sequel, or sass & bide, which boomed on the back of ongoing plugs in the television series.

I appreciate it on a more elemental level. It’s made women more ambitious about what they wear on a day-to-day basis. Who needs a ‘catwalk to reality’ dilution when those four women have made it perfectly acceptable to wear six-inch heels and evening dresses in broad daylight? Who needs to take off an accessory when they leave the house, when one’s bangled arm can resemble a miniature totem pole?

Some trends, however, are proving difficult to shift off the catwalk.

Leather, during an Australian spring/summer, is one of them. Our last leather report in January looked at the uptake of kangaroo skins for summer; our current edition looks at key trends moving forward. Rosemount Australian Fashion Week 2010 cemented leather’s place as the ‘new black’ of fabrics.

But in my conversations with designers so far, they’ve expressed a reluctance among the majority of
industry buyers to inject leather into their spring/summer spend.

One designer told me it was a question of price, another said it had more to do with mainstream demand.
Buyers, I’d love to hear from you. Is this a trend for down under divas or is it best left to the northern hemisphere?

assia@yaffa.com.au.