The fashion pack
Reviewer
Janice Breen Burns
May 7, 2005
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Marion Hume has drawn on her experience in the Australian fashion industry.
The Fashion Pack,
By Marion Hume,
Penguin, $32.95
Fashion is one of those industries - like music, or movies - with a lot more admirers than it probably deserves. Marion Hume's book is testament to why. Its plot swings through the fantastic upper branches of fashion in Paris, Milan and New York where moguls, super models, movie stars and sycophants converge twice a year to schmooze, shop and pose at the shows and where fashion writers and editors not only lap it up and write it down but are an integral part and propellant of the whole amazing business.
In Hume's world everyone's innate value - social, sexual, professional and even self-worth - hinge on who they can impress by how they look. Egos are monstrous or frequently bruised. Truth is useful or junked for a better outcome. Clothing is a language of right labels and wrong labels.
It's a world full of gratifyingly unlikeable people and unsurprising stereotypes: the predatory fashion photographer who exploits the brattish and vulnerable underaged supermodel, the salt-of-the-earth Aussie girl from the Western suburbs, the wry outback Aborigine, the ice-cool flawlessly fashionable b*tch from hell, and the succession of fussy fashion-obsessed homosexual queens.
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Hume's own, very real infamy as a 20-year veteran industry "insider", and as the renowned British-born fashion journalist sent out to the colonies in 1997 to edit our - at the time flagging - version of
Vogue, is mirrored in the plight of her main - and, she insists - fictitious character.
Red Harrison is sent to Sydney ("Style desert - how ghastly!" her friends helpfully inform her) to edit fictional fashion glossy
Joy. It's her initial perception of Australia as a hick, alien nation, two days' jetlag from the real world, that drives the book's first chapters and stimulates some of its most cringe-making cliches. Red checks for red-back spiders, for example, even in the slickest, five-star environments. She's heard of Lindy Chamberlain, and authorises a fashion shoot at Uluru with a teen model enacting the narrative: "A dingo stole my diamonds!" And the vast Antipodean vernacular is enthusiastically plumbed: "I'm full as a fat girl's bra," Red's Australian boss announces after a boozy lunch. "(He's so) ugly, he couldn't get a root in a slap house with a fistful of fifties," counters her heart-of-gold "Westie" secretary, Angie. As you do. The you-beaut Aussie meta-slangs roll on through the book.
Hume's prose is pacy but her characters are thin - as you might expect - and not especially engaging. Even Red, painted by Hume as a non-conforming "fat" woman in the land of the slim (that's size 12-14 to you) is irritatingly enamoured by the right shoes and frocks and prone to self-effacing commentary on her own unfashionable curves, puzzlingly described in one passage as ". . . on the chubby side of touchability". Enough already.
After about a third of the book's 663 pages, however, the plot thickens and quickens and
The Fashion Pack becomes an absorbing, escapist read. It keeps on bouncing between a sparkling, sunlit Sydney and the bigger pantheons of fashion, and it's possible, finally, to forget that you may not give a toss about the characters as people, but their lives are at least compelling as a car crash is compelling.
In reality, Hume was sacked from
Vogue in 1998. Circulation had spiralled relentlessly during the 18 months of her appointment.
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..thx for sharing..
