So I finally saw The September Issue, which is all about the crazy world of American Vogue, and it was fascinating, though not for any of the reasons I was expecting. The film is full of strange absences, chief among them any sense of taste or insight on the part of its editor, Anna Wintour. Also, food.
In my experience, office life is quite food-focused. How else are you going to break up the tedium? In the Vogue offices, however, no one talked about food, and no one ate it. Grace Coddington, the magazine's creative director and only bona fide human being, was filmed forking a few leaves into her mouth, but since at that moment she was in a fury about the editorial treatment one of her shoots was receiving – photographs were falling from it like sequins from a cheap dress – maybe this was a form of protest. Anna loves skinny, you see, so perhaps, subconsciously, her staff is only able to eat when raging at the boundless limits of her authority. It's a passive-aggressive thing, I expect.
Somewhere in the middle of the film, we saw Coddington producing a Versailles-inspired shoot. Her model for this was wearing, among 8,000 other items, a corset, in which she gamely tottered about, looking like a wooden spoon in a children's puppet show. But then… oh my God… transgression!
Right there in front of everyone, the model picked up a glazed strawberry tart, and took a great big bite. Now, at fashion shoots there is always food around the place, but it is there only for show; no one actually eats it. This girl, though, ignored this etiquette and, around her, the world seemed suddenly to slow. It was like watching a very elegant version of the old Cadbury Flake ad, only much more exciting. A model eating a cake. How outré. How risqué. How absolutely disgusting.
Fashion and food don't go, do they? I once interviewed a famous model, which was hard work – though never harder than at the moment when lunch arrived, at which point I was struck dumb. Yes, the model reached for a sandwich, but very slowly, her hand moving from tray to plate awkwardly, as if even the act of taking an item of food might lead to sudden weight gain. First she removed the top slice of bread, and cast it aside, like last season's Manolos. Then she considered the contents. The sandwich was sweetcorn and chicken, with salad. Using her thumb and index finger, she gingerly removed the chicken. Ditto the lettuce. Finally, she picked up a single kernel of sweetcorn and gnawed at it, field-mouse style. That was lunch. I wonder what she had for supper. Two kernels?
The irony is, of course, that in public, fashion pretends that it loves food. Hence its current obsession with cupcakes, an accessory more fashionable than the latest Mulberry bag. Just don't force it to, like, consume any on a regular basis. This is about control: fashion people feel good – shiny and virtuous – whenever they are seen to be avoiding calorific temptation. But it is also another instance of their passive-aggressive tendencies. They want the rest of us – or at least those of us who can't afford their clothes – to eat properly, for the same underhand reason that, when I'm in mean mood, I love presenting carbo-phobics with huge bowls of risotto. They long for us to be bigger than them, and they subliminally encourage it by acting like frosted icing is no big deal.
This, then, is how it goes: fashion people eat a cupcake, and their bums remain as small and round as baby tomatoes. Normal people eat a cupcake, and their bums grow five inches overnight. Of course what you know, and what I know, is that behind this biological paradox lies a whalebone will – their cupcake will last them all week; yours will duly be followed by a Wispa Gold and two Kit-Kats – and a personal trainer with muscles the size of Yorkshire baps on 24-hour call.
Last month, the Council of Fashion Designers of America published The American Fashion Cookbook. Why, I thought when I heard about this. Do I believe that Carolina Herrera, a favourite of Ms Wintour, sits at home eating pommes toupinel? I do not. She looks like a wafer in lipstick. But then, noticing that the defining characteristic of all these recipes was a certain lardiness – stand up, Zac Posen and your butterscotch cookie – I understood: this is just the cupcake stunt all over again. These designers are merely indulging in yet more self-boosting yet duplicitous boastfulness: look what we eat, they're saying, and yet still we fit into a size zero! But I know what they really eat, and not only in my gut. I think that Catherine Malandrino – trust a Frenchwoman to be so chillingly honest – has rather let the cat out of the bag with her "recipe" for Le Panier de Crudités. Raw vegetables are still raw vegetables, even if you do stick them in a basket.
