It is entirely possible that future fashion historians will consider July 15th, 1997, as the watershed for the end of the 20th century. It will be appropriate if Gianni Versace's murder is seen as marking the end of the fashion century. Much that has worried thoughtful commentators, much that we already see as having disturbing effects on society, much that we recognise as late 20th-century decadence was found pre-eminently and in the most glamorous and arresting form in the clothes and lifestyle of Versace.
In fashion, the 20th century has come to a halt in a morass of decadence - a tangible decay of previous standards, the result of a creative degeneracy caused by a lack of rigour and energy. The reason lies in the industry's shift from seeing itself as creating something that could be considered an art form to creating something that, above all else, must sell. It is a radical realignment that began to take effect in the Eighties, a time when, paradoxically, fashion seemed stronger than it had ever been and the future seemed assured.
How many fully knew and understood Versace's skill as a designer compared with the many thousands more who admired him mainly for the impressive wealth generated by the huge money-making machine his name had brought into existence? It is the same for all major designers at the end of this century. We are asked to admire men such as Giorgio Armani, Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein for nothing more than that they have large amounts of money. How and what they design means less and less to the public and, cynics might suggest, to the men themselves.
A crudely sexist development over the past few seasons illustrates fashion's rottenness. It is the amazing increase we have seen in nudity on the catwalks, especially on those of Europe. In the past two seasons, we have seen a plethora of "nearly there" dresses that reveal much more than they conceal.
The trend confirms the contempt that many designers have for even the most beautiful of women - whom they wish to present as slave girls, ready, exposed and vulnerable for the whims of men.
The people who must bear much of the responsibility for these images - which even the most liberal of us must surely see as decadence - are fashion photographers. They are the great unaccountables in the fashion equation: people who wield enormous power but are rarely, if ever, taken to task for the effect their work might have on society.
Their aids are the stylists. Faced with banal and predictable clothes, they have decided, possibly correctly, that the only way to make them interesting is to present them with attitudes so perverse and insulting to the viewer - male and female - that the styling does what the clothes should but cannot.
That is, arrest the attention and stimulate the imagination. The process begins at show level, where the clothes, often of little originality, are styled with an aggressive crudeness, not to mention brutality, that is guaranteed to catch the headlines.
Interestingly, this is not happening nearly so much in nations, such as France and Italy, where fashion is understood and appreciated. The phenomenon is, for the most part, specific to London. Unable to separate the substance of fashion from the illusion of style, many young British designers appear incapable of anything but shock.
No magazines and no catwalks are showing images as depraved as those found in England. Other countries draw the line at women walking the catwalks as if they have been defiled. They do not show women as victims of crude violence as, for example, Antonio Berardi and Alexander McQueen have done. They do not subscribe to the belief that weirdly made-up, mad women are what fashion needs today.
Of course, the attitudes behind many of the more extreme stylists' images have been censored before they reach the magazine pages - for commercial, if not moral or social scruples. What we get in our glossy magazines is the cleaned-up, commercially-acceptable face of fashion imagery. By looking at a book such as Fashion Photography Of The Nineties - published last year by the Swiss publisher Scalo, and featuring work by most of the current big names in international fashion photography - we get a good idea of what the mind of the fashion insider finds exciting.
It is the old ground first exposed 25 years ago by Helmut Newton - that grey area where glamorous women slip in and out of the role of victim and predator, often in the same image. But Newton is a genius whose skills rob his vision of much that would overtly cause concern, while still addressing the serious questions that society needs to ask. The photographs featured in Fashion are too often exposed as decadent by the lack of sophistication and visual control - quite apart from the much more limited artistic vision - of lesser photographers.
The message in Newton's work is not always healthy, happy or reassuring, but at least it poses honest intellectual and social questions. He uses his artistic skills to create images that force us to question our views on morals, ethics and, above all, the balance of power between and within the sexes. But the photographs of lesser talents expose nothing much beyond a sordid and barren vision where there appear to be no standards to adhere to. They desire to do nothing more than feed creativity's increasing need for violence - not least against women and the vulnerable - in order to make a statement that will briefly shock, rather than permanently change viewpoints, as Newton's does. It is voyeuristic violence of the crudest kind.
In the second half of the Eighties and first years of the Nineties, fashion hid behind the smokescreen of revivals, pillaging the work of the great couturiers of the past in order to produce images that would photograph well.
This is, perhaps, the most damaging kind of decadence: an industry that is dedicated to making apparel seems content to create items of dress that have no function other than to look superb on a fashion page. It is creating a product that signifies nothing. Such an industry is in very serious trouble. Endlessly recycling the past is not only decadent, it is totally sterile.
Fashion, aware perhaps of the ignoble state of western creativity, has searched for new nobilities behind which to hide. It found them in the civilisations of the developing world. But in its rampage through tribes and totems, fashion has begun to patronise and exploit this world with an insensitivity that makes its previous pursuit of the perverse seem almost acceptable.
Ethnic attitudes, colours, creeds and nations are now demeaned in order to introduce colour into the jaded world of the high-fashion photograph. Whole tribes are now reduced to the level of fashion accessories as they pose next to white models wearing ballgowns. Ancient civilisations and their artefacts are reduced to the level of decorative embellishment to alien cultures in order to add a new viewpoint to the tired perspective of western fashion.
Worse, people of colour are used in a way that is offensive to their colour, as stereotypes of cultures in which they do not belong. The use of third-generation Londoner Naomi Campbell for Ralph Lauren's Masai-inspired advertising campaign this year is a classic example of this patronisation and falsification. It appears to cause no ethical problems to fashion people: not one magazine is reported to have refused to run the< WS advertisement
the grounds that it was racially offensive and ethnically degrading.
Is Ralph Lauren making a serious attempt to open up the African fashion market? I leave the answer to you. It seems to me that blackness is increasingly being used as a decorative commodity in order to sell exotic fashion to white women at prices that few women outside the industrialised, commercially successful nations of the west could possibly afford. If that is true, it should be offensive to us all. If we do not find it so, we must ask ourselves if we have not already allowed our sensibilities to be dangerously undermined by fashion's latest decadence.
Is ethnic pride to go the way of youthful innocence and become another selling tool for fashion?
Versace's murder need not remain a senseless act of violence, signifying nothing. If it leads to a new approach to fashion, a higher level of ethical control within the industry and a more honest assessment of the role society wishes fashion to play, then July 15, 1997 can become not only the day when the 21st century dawned in fashion - it can also become the day when the long overdue radical rethink of the form and function of fashion for the 21st century actually began.
Colin McDowell is an author and fashion historian.
Guardian Service.
Robert O'Byrne responds: London Fashion Week opens later this week and with it starts the twice-yearly circus in which designers, photographers, journalists, models and buyers are all equal participants. This time, however, a more sombre mood than usual likely to prevail because of the recent deaths of two people; Gianni Versace and Diana, Princess of Wales. It would be no bad thing if a degree of quiet sobriety cuts through the customary hyperbole and hysteria. Fashion thrives on at tention and feels few qualms about making vacuous or vulgar gestures provided the result is some kind of publicity. But to dismiss the fashion industry as silly - a common enough gesture even among those who are associated with the industry - would be a mistake, not least because of its sheer global scale. One of the world's largest businesses, on which millions of people depend for their livelihood, cannot be so casually summarised. The connection between clothes and commerce is close. Fashion has always been focused on eventual sales. It has never had any other option. Unlike other forms of creativity such as writing or composing, fashion design constantly keeps a purchaser in mind.
Two hundred years ago, Marie Antoinette's favourite dress maker, Rose Bertin, used to drum up international business by sending images of her work to the Russian Empress Catherine the Great. In 1785, one of the very first fashion publications, the Magasin de Mode, began to appear in Paris. For all its modernity, Vogue is now 105 years old. The objective has always remained the same; to encourage sales of clothing.
Today's mercantile impulse, therefore, is no different from that of centuries ago. The only shift is the way in which fashion must now be sold. The change began during the 1980s, a decade in which everything - and everyone - came to be perceived as having a price and one always worth paying. We now live in an age of intense marketing and if any business is to survive in the face of competition, then it must examine and learn from successful examples. Clothes are now sold much the same way as films or books. One of the key elements in this selling derives from our era's extraordinary preoccupation with the cult of celebrity. Fashion designers are no more immune to this trend than members of any other profession. Indeed, such is the incessant public desire for famous figures that there are now celebrity models, hairdressers, even make-up artists. Gianni Versace knew the advantage of playing the celebrity circuit and the Princess of Wales believed she did so. She best represented the concept of fame existing for its own sake; a woman whose eventual renown was such that anything and everything she did attracted worldwide attention.
Designers chose to play the celebrity game because they realise its importance in today's world and believe this is too important a form of potential publicity to be ignored. In this, as so much else, they are creatures of the world in which they live. The same is true of fashion's current preoccupation with nudity, seen earlier this year in a summer fad for sheer - otherwise known as see-through - garments. Gratuitous nudity is offensive and unnecessary but it is by no means confined to the fashion industry; look at mass market advertising across the whole spectrum of products and its use will be widespread. Alternatively, talk to any actress under the age of 50 and she will speak of increased demands for nudity in film and theatre alike over the past few years. There is no more necessity for crude imagery in fashion than in any other creative medium; such images - of wasted forms, of semi-nude bodies, of under-age girls - are to be found everywhere. If they turn up constantly, it is because they have a ready and eager market. The same argument may be employed here as has been used in relation to the paparazzi's pursuit of the Princess of Wales; blaming photographers (or in fashion's case, stylists) for what appears in print is to overlook a substantial public appetite for such material. Who leads and who follows is impossible to quantify. Clearly, however, the fashion world understands what the market wants, unattractive though some may find this proposition. Attention-grabbing techniques are not exclusive to fashion but employed just as much by every other art form. The desire to shock is especially endemic in England. How great, after all, is the difference between the techniques employed by many young London-based designers and artists such as Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin? The common characteristic here is a desperate need to grab the public eye by any means, no matter how distasteful.
Antonio Berardi might be considered the fashion world's equivalent of Quentin Tarantino. In his plundering of the past for visual references, John Galliano has much in common with Peter Greenaway. Fashion designers do not exist in a vacuum; when it comes to being noticed, they take the same approach as their contemporaries in other related fields. Visual assault is a universal element in our age, be it Trainspotting or trend spotting. The most popular play in London over the past year has been Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and F**king, an attack on the eyes and ears every bit as violent as an Alexander McQueen show. For anyone who believes the role of the artist is to inspire and uplift, both will be deeply disturbing experiences. Particularly in England, fashion reflects the present preoccupation with all the most unpleasant aspects of contemporary life. Nor is this a particularly novel phenomenon. Helmut Newton's photography caused offence more than 20 years ago and continues to do so. Newton's genius is open to question, depending on whether you find images of women's heads being pressed into lavatory bowls or distorted by neck braces gratuitously distasteful or not. The recent revival of interest in his work does suggest that fashion continues to be cyclic in nature, persistently turning back on itself for inspiration. But pillaging the past is scarcely new, whether it be Dior remembering his mother's clothes when creating the so-called New Look 50 years ago, or women of the French Revolution borrowing from the dress of ancient Greece.
The same is also true of fashion's tendency to borrow elements from on other global cultures and re-deploy them in a distinctly unsophisticated manner. Again, this is by no means exclusive to any one creative form. Think of the craze for orientalism at the end of the last century, the effects of which were found as much in the paintings of Whistler and Puccini's Madame Butterfly as in the `Japanese' robes of Liberty's. No one denies, or finds offensive, Picasso's very obvious borrowings from African tribal sculpture and nor were any objections raised to Galliano's collection for Dior last season, in which Chinese traditional culture was ransacked for ideas. Ralph Lauren and his advertising agency chose to pluck details from Masai tribal culture one season and from British tailoring traditions the next. To take offence at one and not the other is to be guilty of gross condescension. Fashion does not distinguish between different ethnic groups, being happy to steal ideas from both African-American street life and English aristocrats. For years, overseas fashion magazines have come to Ireland and photographed shoots in which the countryside and its people have acted as backdrops without causing outrage. What matters is the eventual result, not the diverse sources of inspiration.
Taking fashion to task for its manifold weaknesses is never much of a challenge. Because the business has such a heavy reliance on publicity, its faults will always be easily exposed. Fickle and often absurd, fashion usually lacks gravitas except at rare moments such as the funerals of Versace and the Princess of Wales. Otherwise, it deserves much of the opprobrium thrown in its direction.
But fashion is a mirror of the age in which it exists and its weaknesses differ little from those of other art forms. They too are desperately, even overly, dependent on publicity of almost every kind, inclined to engage in shock tactics and shamelessly guilty of plagiarism. Casual and random acts of violence abound in the novels of Martin Amis and the films of Martin Scorsese without these being perceived as simply gratuitous. Cinema feeds off itself just as much as does fashion but the former case is often regarded as paying tribute to the past rather than showing a dearth of originality. The acclaimed wave of new British art owes not a little of its success to the revulsion excited in many viewers. By comparison, fashion can look rather tame; neither an exposed breast nor a face made-up to look bruised can never be justified but they should be placed in context. All creative forms fleece one another for material and all reflect the world in which they come into being. Today's fashion is a creature of the present moment, with all the violence and disorder which exist today. If a malaise of fashion exists, if it suffers from decadence and sterility, then so too does every other form of cultural life in the late 20th century.