The Invisible Man

5

The Invisible Man

Ian Griffiths

I have been told that I am a typical product of the British fashion-design
education system, and to an extent this is true; I graduated from Manchester
Polytechnic in 1985 and the Royal College of Art in 1987, and like many of
my contemporaries became a designer working for one of the large Italian
manufacturer retailers that flourished during the 1980s, in my case the
MaxMara group. But my career took a more unusual turn in 1992 when I
became Head of the School of Fashion, and Professor at Kingston University
in tandem with my design role at MaxMara. With a foot in each camp, it
was inevitable that I would be drawn to make the observations about the
separateness of theory and practice which are the basis of this chapter.
As a student, my knowledge of the historical and theoretical aspects of
fashion was informed largely by the linear chronologies and eulogistic
biographies of Ernestine Carter, Prudence Glyn et al. Mildly soporific
afternoons at the Platt Hall Gallery of Costume in Manchester reinforced
the erroneous notion that the academy of fashion was a sleepy backwater
largely concerned with ‘hemline histories’, not much connected to the more
dynamic concerns of architectural and design history, and not entirely essential
for the practice of fashion design. I think this was an opinion shared by
many who were fashion students at the time, now fellow designers, and had
I not returned to education as an academic, I might well have remained
unaware that in the few years that had passed since I was at college, fashion
had become the subject of such great and varied academic study.
I knew as well as anyone else that fashion had become a mass spectacle,
its ‘superstar’ designers and models principal characters in the narratives of
popular culture, but it was a surprise to discover that it had attracted equally
frenzied interest from sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, cultural, social
and economic historians and historians. Many of these develop arguments
from studies which had existed long before I became a student, such as those