Despite being engaged in an ever-changing industry, Iain R Webb is a nostalgic fashionista. I grew up spending hideous amounts on monthly fashion magazines, so I know Webb as Elle’s dynamic fashion director. He has now left to work freelance, most often for The Sunday Times, and to write fashion books. In these books that he indulges his passion for the 1960s. His latest describes the idiosyncrasies of Carnaby Street label Foale and Tuffin, who created quirky items that have now become a collector’s dream. In the popular imagination, fashion is an industry for back-stabbers, attention-seekers and primadonnas, but during our interview Webb could not be more kindly – not a glimpse of Anna Wintour froideur.
Webb is troubled by the current slickness, sterility even, of fashion. He describes his collection of photographs taken behind the scenes at various fashion weeks over the decades that ‘sum up the mess that is the international collections’. It’s the messiness and the spontaneity and the freedom of fashion that drives him. He goes on to lament the passing of ‘the olden days’ when pictures came from photographers all along the catwalk. Now one only ever sees that perfect photo of a dress from the end of the catwalk. There’s no movement, no awkward angles. It is this haphazard, creative boldness lost, that informs Webb’s disappointment with the present, and his nostalgia for the sixties.
Since the 1980s, Webb explains, youth culture has been dragging its feet. The 1960s saw a seismic change ‘from this very grey world into colour’. The 1970s glam movement was ‘really outrageous because it played around with sexualities’, then of course came punk. These days it has become ‘really difficult to rebel. I mean now everyone’s mum listens to Lily Allen’. He is relieved to still find people ‘who use fashion intuitively, subversively’. However, for the majority, the ‘mega-watt, loudspeaker message now is copying a celebrity, trying to live their life. There are fewer people trying to make statements – other than ‘I want a footballer to be my boyfriend’.
It makes sense therefore that Webb finds the trend for vintage worrying. Rather than innovating, the best people can do is ‘put it together in a different way. It’s that post-modern approach to everything. I feel the same about music.
Can’t they get any tunes of their own? It’s someone rapping over a song I danced to in the eighties. That’s culture now, just different ways of putting things together’.
Alongside this unhealthy lack of creative flair, he believes that there are too many designers finding success simply because they are ‘very good at packaging themselves. It’s that packaging that can now take you forward. I don’t know what is there with a lot of people. You can get a gimmick, do that for a few seasons, great success. Then you’re gone!’.
He identifies strongly with the insights provided by The September Issue, a documentary made to reveal the creative process of American Vogue, as Anna Wintour glowers and belittles her way through her editorship. He acknowledges that ‘ruthless editing’ is what makes Vogue so commercially successful but as a former creative director and presently a tutor at Central St Martin’s, he regrets that too many now ‘just see it as a job and want to go to this place for lunch or get that handbag’. By contrast, for Webb, fashion can be intensely moving. He loved the ‘powerful imagery’ of Alexander McQueen’s and John Galliano’s shows. ‘To me it’s the nearest thing to opera, the sense of it can just transport you somewhere else’.
Foale and Tuffin: The Sixties. A Decade in Fashion
By Iain R. Webb (ACC Editions, £25)
