Archive for A/W 2001 / Prostitution?

autumn/winter 2001

Prostitution?

The concept of PROSTITUTION? comes from my reaction to those who attack designers because they create clothes which are commercial. „You prostitute yourselves” we are told, „you sell yourselves out to the supermarket.” Of course there is a part of any artist which needs to pursue inspiration for its own sake and to wherever it leads. My favorite dream is a High Street where everyone is dressed in the fullest statement of their personalities, joy and hope. But are designers prostitutes when we meet people half way? As a boy in Poland, I loved reading about the romantic English sex workers of the past, and I knew that they were different from ours. We were taught about Russia and how Peter the Great met a sex worker and made her Empress. The communists argued that this showed the common touch of the great Czar, but I only thought of how the prostitute lost her freedom and became part of an oppressive and hideous elite. My heroine was English Nell Gwyn, mistress of King Charles II. His other mistresses were aristocrats, but Nell’s father sold fruit and her mother got so drunk that she fell into the Thames and drowned. But when Nell was the King’s mistress and a mob was rioting, she had only to pull down the window of her coach and shout „Peace! I am the Protestant Whore!” Everyone loved her. Nell was an actress, and she brought art and the people together. If fashion designers can sow seeds which people love, my dream of streets which look like catwalks may come true.