Fraser Live

Best seller

Quiz. What book written about the Australian fashion industry is now in its twelfth reprint? If you guessed my novel Feel the Width you'd be wrong. I have to offer a full set of steak knives to sell a copy these days.

The answer is A Cut Above the Rest  written jointly by Rose Samuels and Ronnie Hoffman. It is one of four books co-written by Ronnie, who wanted to present simple facts about how garments are made. They have all been taken up by various Australian TAFE colleges, and sell year after year.

A Cut Above the Rest deals with laying up fabric and turning it into cut pieces ready for sewing while Tried and Tested deals with quality control, Fancy Stitching with embroidery and Hanging by a Thread with sewing threads.

Apart from their academic application, Ronnie's books are simply expressed basic information for anybody involved in garment manufacture. They've also got quite funny cartoons to lighten the message. He can be called on (02) 9368 0833.

Designer opportunity

For some years the design and supply of corporate clothing has been a bonanza for the industry. I well remember Peter Weiss going to the extreme of shaving of his signature stubble to present his design story to unsmiling members of the Westpac board. He was one of the early movers who built the bridge between fashion and corporations, where not only blue collar workers were uniformed but so the whites.

Now, of course, everybody's got corporate clobber, from the bank to the corner coffee shop.
Common to all of these corporations is the allocation of uniforms to employees who deal with the public. Their uniforms are walking (or sitting) billboards, helping to bombard customers and potential customers with even more inescapable advertising messages.

I'm wondering when designers will be invited to tender for the armed forces and the police force. These protectors of liberty and order have been very fond of dressing up since the beginning of time and would surely take kindly to some designer input. The chief of anything is currently rewarded with a uniform laden with braid, lanyards, ric-rac, 3D embroidery, fussy buttons and  hats that make the wearers look much taller than they really are.

Even the more lowly placed in the public service are hung with layered clobber, in addition to attached implements for investigation and apprehension of villains. For a while they, along with workers in the desperation industries like ambulance and emergency services, had green (and occasionally orange) fluoro stripes to themselves, but now everybody's damn well got them.

Moreover, any civilian can now buy a safety vest to pop over his street clothes and pretend to be on officially dangerous business. Thus clad he can get past barriers and gain entry to big functions, like football matches, free of charge. Such people are the latter day equivalent of those, dressed in a white dustcoat with a stethoscope casually slung around the neck, who could get away with intimately examining patients in a hospital.

It's time the cops, and maybe the armed forces, moved forward in the design of their uniforms because the rest of the corprateers are making them look drab by comparison. Those with a bit of enterprise among the corporate suppliers ought to pitch for the work beginning, obviously, by quoting the authority of this column.

How about a Peter Morrissey range of police uniforms to cover every occasion from parade ground splendour to equestrian crowd control. After all, Peter is the man of the moment with his Pyjamas for Qantas international business class travellers and has a proven track record in many corporate designs. Why should the poor old cops be swathed in navy when there are far more fetching colours and prints, some of which could suggest what they are trying to do.

For example, parking inspectors, especially those who patrol outside the Ragtrader building in Surry Hills, should be dressed in skin tight black woollen jump suits with a screen print on the back which says: 'I'm having a fine day'.

Goodbye to the other cleavage

It is with great sadness that I bid farewell to the low rise jean, along with other low rise garments that have so delighted myself and my male colleagues in recent years. The other-side cleavage is now vanishing in favour of the next look - the high rise.

You can't stop the fashion wheel from turning, I know, and I usually applaud this, but I can't get excited about high rise. Not only does it swallow up the other-side cleavage but goes on past the naval and changes the line and look of the body.

Nobody was early out of the blocks with the high rise.