You’ve almost certainly never heard of James Scully. He’s a casting director, which means he’s paid to decide which models should “walk” in the shows of big fashion brands such as Tom Ford and Stella McCartney. You’ll know already that this is neither rocket science nor finding a cure for cancer, the two comparisons usually given when someone does something deemed not at all important to the wider world.
Yet surprisingly, Scully may have lit a touch paper for change by doing nothing more radical than telling the truth. Back in December, he was on stage at a fashion conference hosted by the industry’s go-to-site, BoF, which stands for Business of Fashion and was founded by a bright disrupter, Imran Amed. Scully sat alone, telling terrible true stories of teenage girls being used and abused in a big bucks business they are neither emotionally nor physically equipped to handle.
“I have a problem with asking a teenage girl to do a woman’s work. People forget they are children not women,” said Scully of today’s modelling world. What was new was that Scully presented his evidence only metres away from the chief executives who are ultimately responsible for ensuring that no one, let alone a 13-year-old girl who happens to be pretty, suffers workplace abuse.
Imran Amed had briefed us not to expect a lazy weekend when he invited 150 fashion insiders to a barn in the English countryside for the first annual BoF Voices. Speaker Maajid Nawaz talked about terrorism and its impact on the global economy, describing how it felt to be prisoner 47, bound and blindfolded next to prisoner 46, who knew he would soon be tortured to death. Then came Oxford professor Alexander Betts, who laid out the economic impact of a Europe post Brexit.
Fashion's little white lies
Calling out bad behaviour should not be in any way revolutionary. Yet it is becoming increasingly so. The people of the USA find themselves with a president who has arrived at the White House after a race where he never let truth be a hurdle to success. In Britain, whether you are a Brexiter or a Remainer, the architects of Brexit now agree that a central promise that helped swing the vote – that £350 million a week would be channelled into the free health service if Britain left – was a lie. Professor Betts called where we are now a “post-truth” political landscape.
Elements of the fashion business have been “post-truth” for as long as I can remember, whether with the little white lies (“your bum doesn’t look big”) or the whoppers (that “Save the Planet” tote, messaged in toxic ink and made by slave workers). Yet where fashion is unique among global business is in its ability to pivot quickly – change is its raison d’être, after all.
Scully’s speech made speaking the unadorned truth look right, in contrast with the old conference model of on-brand mission speeches. The overall message of BoF Voices was about the need to adapt to new norms in a global business already directly affected by diminished natural resources, gender inequality and economic instability. How to do this? We must first be truthful about what’s out there. In fashion, “post-truth” is already out of vogue.
International fashion editor Marion Hume is based in London.
