Fashion’s Goons
KATE Moss was in trouble again. Kate Moss was in a fur coat.
Not for Kate tabby or rat but the softest to-die-for mink. And it looked good on her. The fur may even look better on Kate than it did on the donor mink.
But not everyone was impressed. Yvonne Taylor, spokesman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) said: “We urge her to take a look at one of our DVDs showing foxes being electrocuted, wild animals being trapped in bone crunching traps, minx being gassed and dogs in China being bludgeoned.”
These DVDs sounded truly disgusting. And we in turn urged anyone reading, including Kate, not to take PETA up on its offer lest the sight of such video nastiness turns their heads bad and mutate them into serial fox mutilators and beaver killers.
We should stamp out the trade in such filth before it is too late!
But such is fashion. It comes and it goes. It shocks. It amazes. It peels the skin off woodland creatures. It’s all about beauty.
Just get a load of the new David Beckham calendar in which a look-alike (or is it?) poses in a Kath Kidson-style apron and nothing else.
We have long viewed Becks as a cross-over footballer, the metrosexual in the sarong and shinpads. We have conjured visions of him dressed in his wife’s knickers – knickers, it must be said, far smaller than the national average and so flattering to even the most image-conscious player. And now this?
But, as we say, fashion. Its vagaries are a matter of record. Just get a load of Courtney Love. Last week, the wife of the late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain was telling us about her dalliance with Prince Andrew, the Royal Family’s roving golf ambassador.
There was a knock on the door of Love’s Los Angeles abode. It was night. Who could be there? Courtney told us: “Prince Andrew turns up at my house at one in the morning and he wants to party.”
The cucumber sandwiches are not sliced. Love has no suitable hat, in pastel shade. These are the vital ingredients of any royal party, are they not? What to do? What do to? And what has attracted Andrew to Love? Has he heard that she performs with the band Hole, and believed it to be a golf tribute act? Was Love Randy Andy’s nineteenth hole?
Love was in bunny slippers and a fluffy robe – we were back to fashion – sat on the sofa with the prince, doubtless dressed in his ceremonial cashmere tank top and Comfi Slax.
She put the kettle on and made not a cup but a pot of tea. She doid not say “C’mon Big Boy, do all the different dirty things to me you ever wanted to do.”
She poured tea.
And we moved on. We bowed her heads, removed our hat and saw Alexander Litvinenko being lowered into the ground in London’s Highgate Cemetery. There he was with his strange hair, ghoulish complexion and blank staring eyes.
But – hang on – that’s not the former Russian KGB operative and the after effects of polonium-210 its Ronald McDonald, showing what happens when you eat too many burgers and fries.
Alas, dear Ronald McDonald, we knew him. Ronald: Rest In Pieces (six pieces with a sweet & sour dipping sauce).
It was our proud duty to announce that the man in the fright wig, oversized shoes and terrifying make-up was dead. Or at least he was in Tavistok, Devon.
The market town had had its fill of processed chips and styrofoam burgers. Tavistock, named Best Food Town in the south west, had shunned Ronald and his day-glo food. McDonald’s was closing its store in the town.
AS we say, fashions change. No longer do we want to be served dead cow by a man plucked from the page of a Stephen King novel. Now, we want organic murder burgers made from organic cows that wanted to die for the good of our plate, cows that ate organic grass, fed by organic rains from an organic sun in an organic space.
The animal must not have died just to feed us. It has to have had a good life. To many, of course, this reasoning is a sick perversion – better to eat the cow that has endured a miserable life, that lives under no illusion that it will forever skip among the daisies and gaze at the clouds. To kill the beast that lives the good life is callous and wicked. To kill it in it prime is the act of a demented and godless mind.
Animals. And fashion. And football. Former England footballer Graeme Le Saux peered out from the African undergrowth.
With David Attenborough otherwise engaged, it was Le Saux’s chance to play TV’s voice of God. Le Saux wanted viewers of ITV’s Extinct to dial the phone number and thereby save the gorillas that appeared in the bushes to his rear.
“When you discover that these animals are balancing on the window ledge of extinction, it just kills you,” said Graeme, nearly moved to tears. Gorillas in the misty-eyed, it was.
We heard his lament. It was not every day you hear a footballer warning about defenestrated gorillas. More often it’s an animal rights group showing you pictures of gorillas being wired up to the National Grid or skinned for their fur and meat.
Gorillas! How we love gorillas. How many gorillas does it take to make a documentary? How many does it take to make a coat?
How many gorillas to the chinchilla? Madonna was wearing a coat made from 40 chinchillas about her famous person. For the record, we learnt that chinchillas are not all that different to rats.
Yes, Madonna was wearing the pelts of 40 skinned rats. Each to her own, we said. And we were unsure whether to lambaste her or pull on a mink-lined glove and pat her on her soft back. Aren’t we constantly being told that there are more rats than people in Blighty? Won’t rats outlast humanity when nuclear Armageddon and global meltdown come? Offing 40 of the biting, gnawing sewer-dwellers can only send out a warning to their kin.
And what rat would not want to dress a global celebrity? “Oh, yes,” says mother rat to her peers. “Of course our son is now living with Madonna in Marble Arch. Everyone photographs him. Talk of the town.”
And then there are the rumours that the rat’s going to mate with Kate Moss. Or at least with her coat…
Picture: bbdo
Posted: 9th, December 2006 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
