By KAREN von HAHN
Saturday, August 7, 2004 - Page L3
Fashion, like humour, is about timing. And the similarities don't end there. The standup comic and the fashion maven also share the hipster's winking sense of being in on the joke.
Hence the success of expensive trailer-trash looks from Prada, the entire thought process behind high-heeled sneakers and a clownish pair of oversized white plastic sunglasses my daughter purchased at Malabar costume house for $8 that pass for the latest from Gucci. On the whole, I enjoy fashion's sense of humour, but with the arrival of John Galliano's new "Rasta" collection for Dior, I am beginning to wonder whether the joke is really all that it's cracked up to be.
Galliano is notoriously outrageous. The designer -- who wears wife-beater tanks, hair extensions and Dali-esque mustaches, and stages operatic runway shows with models in geisha hairstyles wearing cancan skirts and oven mitts -- has in the past been inspired by so-unfashionable-they-are-totally-in groups such as Hasidic Jews and the homeless. It's all so wacky it's like a skit on Da Ali G Show starring the hilarious fashiony Bruno. But with this latest collection, which "borrows" from Rastafarian culture, even Galliano might finally have taken a fashion step too far.
In this month's Vanity Fair, a glossy, double-sided spread proclaims this fall's offerings from the house that once brought us the revolutionary New Look. A tanned Brazilian supermodel, improbably clad in a Dior Rasta bikini and Siberian fur hat, and leaning against a Dior Rasta snowboard (I get it, the Jamaican snowboard team, ha-ha), is clutching an inordinate amount of similarly logo-covered Dior merchandise. On the flip side, the same beauty, this time in a bra and hip-huggers, sports a heavy necklace of Dior Rasta sneakers as if they were designer reggae bling.
At http://www.dior.com, there are also Rasta handbags ($660 U.S.), high-heeled pumps ($425 U.S.) and turtlenecks ($1,090 U.S.). And all of it, from the bikini top right down to the sneakers, is spotted with the brown-on-beige Dior logo and striped with the familiar Rastafarian colours of red, gold and green.
Dior and Galliano, however, cannot be held solely responsible for watering down the elements of Rasta style. Gwen Stefani has riffed on both the musical stylings of reggae as well as the emblematic colours, often including them in her stage costumes, and now her line of handbags for Le Sportsac. Cool white skater dudes grow dreadlocks. Partiers sport T-shirts emblazoned with "No Problem" and don green, red and gold tams with fake dread attachments at sleazy beach resorts during spring break. The Jamaica Tourist Board has recast Bob Marley's spiritual anthem One Love as a campaign jingle.
Moreover, since the deaths of Marley, Peter Tosh et al., reggae music has moved from being inspirational and revolutionary to the Muzak played at grocery stores and roadhouse restaurants. The streets of Kingston's slums now ring with the aggressive, nihilist beat of the dance hall rather than songs of peace, love and liberation.
It may seem quaint in this day and age to bemoan fashion's superficiality. But Dior's flippant co-opting of Rastafarianism -- a liberation movement derived from the teachings of Marcus Garvey that is centred on the principle that white culture has not only enslaved blacks physically but psychically, by perpetuating an idea that God is white and blacks are inferior (Rastas believe that Haile Selassie, the late black Ethiopian leader, is God, or "Jah") -- is reprehensible.
In New York, where common street lingo for the Target chain of discount department stores is the cheeky "Tar-jay," Dior is referred to with a faux hip-hop accent, as in "Di-oh," a direct reflection of the fact that the label is red-hot with one key sector of the buying public: the Lil' Kim and Foxy Brown gangsta moll wannabes, whose closets are busting with Di-oh handbags and whose rides have been "pimped" in head-to-toe Di-oh bling. At Dior, this is an appeal that has been pushed aggressively by the marketing honchos, who marvel at the success of other rap-friendly brands such as Adidas and Tommy Hilfiger, who push label merchandise to rich white kids around the globe.
To Rastas, "Babylon" is not only the white political power structure of oppression, but everything that is crass and empty in our lifestyle. It's interesting to imagine what Marley and his ilk would think not only of Dior's Rasta collection, but of black culture's current heroes, whose principles can be summed up in a bumper sticker that says "he who dies with the most toys wins." In Rastafarianism, living in Babylon's false luxury is akin to living in captivity. This makes P. Diddy nothing but a slave riding in a limo decked out in diamonds.
The CEOs of Babylon, in my view, are global brands such as Dior who co-opt meaningful cultural symbols as decorative trim on belts and handbags. Even though I get the joke, it isn't funny when, in their neocolonial efforts to push their trinkets, they sully the aims of these symbols by tying them to a spiritually bereft and violent lifestyle of empty status and vulgar luxury.
I get her point, but all religions, political ideologies, etc. can and will be incorporated at som epoint in time into mainstream fashion. I guess taking influences from rasta is what is being focused on now. I personally think all the rasta wear is ugly.
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