New age knocking off
While copying local styles has come in for some legal and financial punishment in recent times, knocking off overseas garments is alive and well.
The overseas stores will clap you in irons for photographing garments on the floors, but you can take a snap of a window display if you're discrete. Apart from that, you have to buy the garment you want to copy - and that can be expensive if you especially love a designer piece that might set you back thousands of dollars.
On a recent trip to London I discovered a better way to do it. You will need the following: a good camera, a certain amount of charm, Olympic running speed over short distances and a commercial interest in young fashion. You will also need a return ticket to London.
Proceed thus. Catch the tube to a suburb like Hammersmith where there is a high proportion of young girls of African or Caribbean background. Some will have been born in England of African or Caribbean parents and others will be relevantly recent immigrants. What these girls bring with them is an innate and brilliant skill for putting clothes together. The trick is, they don't spend a lot on the pieces. It is what they choose and how they combine it that is worth noting.
It is best to dress like a local Brit if you don't want to be noticed. That means dun coloured, ill-fitting gear topped off by the obligatory beanie. If winter, wear an old army great-coat and don't shave.
You now just hang about in the street, camera cocked. A female accomplice can be handy for the operation. She stands near the girl you want to photograph and you simply move the lens a few degrees and capture the image of the fashion girl instead.
After a few days of this you will have a collection worthy of reproducing into a snappy young range for Australia.
At times you may feel brave enough to approach your unsuspecting model and ask for a picture, telling her that you're a fashion photographer from Australia. However, in order to look like an authentic Australian photographer, you'll need clothing so bad that no op-shop would dare offer it for sale.
The fashion girl will sometimes tell you where she bought the clobber. It might be Primark (now my favourite retailer in the world), or Zara or Mango. But it won't be YSL or Chloe.
If you happen to offend one of the fashion girls, be warned that they often have powerful boyfriends close by. This is where fleet of foot is required.
Trooping the colour
Once, fluro vests and other garments with fluro or reflective panels attached, used to be worn only by those engaged in official safety operations, like coppers directing gawking crowds or firemen running out the hose to a blazing building. But now this action garment statement is spreading to those who have no moral right to wear fluro.
Recently I went into Campbells wholesalers grocery supermarket and found the check-out girls done up in green fluro popovers. They were not directing anybody or saving anybody or doing anything dangerous, unless charging people for groceries is filled with unseen hazard. Mr Campbell must simply have thought it might be nice if his girls joined the 'there's something important happening' brigade.
I mean, how would it be if I was catapulted into a tree by a gas explosion in the street outside Campbells? If I didn't know better I'd expect the check-out girls to rush out and save me because they're in fluro.
Green is the favoured danger-danger signal colour, but orange is also popular. And those reflective white panels are also part of the look for added drama.
It is the density of the fluro pigments that triggers alarm in the onlooker. If your mum washes your fluro shirt too well or too often, it fades down to bright green and nobody notices you. Washing, therefore, is not recommended.
It is time state governments legislated against just anybody being allowed to wear fluro. You're not allowed to dress as a pretend police officer, or put on a white coat and go around examining people in hospital, so why are you allowed to don the fluro and impersonate a safety worker?
The fact is that we judge people by what they wear. That, after all, is what keeps our industry going. Corporate clothing indicates a certain responsibility to represent the company, then, as you move into garments for safety responsibility you arrive at fluro.
Since I am not overly busy at present, I could become a fluro inspector, searching out and fining those wearing fluro without a 'permission to wear fluro' license which my newly formed government department would issue.
By Fraser McEwing