In a new book, fashion commentator Colin McDowell takes a fresh approach to the business of clothes, write Alex McClintock and Cassie McCullagh. The Anatomy of Fashion focuses on the fundamental, yet overlooked foundation of all fashion, the human body.

When it comes to fashion, Colin McDowell has seen it all. The Sunday Times chief fashion writer has been in the business, on both sides of the catwalk, for more than 30 years. Starting as a designer, illustrator and publicist in the Italian fashion industry, McDowell has been a regular presence at haute couture runway shows since the 1990s.

According to McDowell, privacy used to be the watchword for fashion houses; they wanted to make sure their private clients received their tailored clothes before anybody else saw that season’s range. Today, he says, everything is different, but not necessarily worse.

‘We've got two levels really, the quick and the dead and those that take their time and sell much more quality stuff,’ he says. ‘I think all of this is good because if fashion is anything, it has to be a democratic pleasure. There's no place for any cynicism. If you can get something cheap that looks good, why not?’

Not only has the industry changed, but so has the fashion media, which McDowell says is almost unrecognisable from when he first started on the front row. A plethora of celebrities, sports stars and bloggers now sit in the space once occupied by ‘three or four’ monthlies and newspapers. While he says they can be a breath of fresh air, McDowell confesses he’s ‘ambivalent’ about fashion bloggers and street style photographers.

‘They don't have any real responsibility,’ he says. ‘If you're working for a newspaper or a magazine, you have to temper what you say, you have to inform your readers and preferably entertain them, but you can't say any old thing. Whereas there are very few controls at all on bloggers; they are favoured because they are young.’

That, says MacDowell, has made fashion even more youth-focused.

‘It has brought the age of fashionability down even further. If you go back to the glory days of Dior and Balenciaga and you look at Vogue or Harper's Bazaar or Elle, the models were made to look as if they were in their early 30s or late 20s. They had to look like ladies; they had to look grown up. Now, of course, fashion is promulgated as something for 15-year-olds up to 25-year-olds really.’

‘Women don't want to look dignified or grand anymore, they want to look young, sexy and up for it. It can sometimes be very distressing for the onlooker, of course.’

In The Anatomy of Fashion McDowell says he wanted to explore the obvious, but often overlooked, foundation of fashion: the human body. Starting from the beginning of recorded history and carrying through until the present day, he catalogues the various ways the body has been fetishised, forbidden and used to excite people through the ages.

As McDowell writes in the introduction: ‘Clothes do not simply conceal the body: they alter it. Pads make shoulders wider; bras change the silhouette of the breasts, corsets and belts provide narrower waists; collars make necks longer and more slender; vertical stripes elongate the body; dark clothes appear to slim. These physical trompes l’oeil have an emotional counterpart: if we think we look good, we feel good.’

Fashion writer Colin McDowell Saturday 17 May 2014 Listen to Cassie McCullagh's interview with Colin McDowell ahead of this visit to Australia for the Sydney Writers Festival. More This [series episode segment] has image,

Colin McDowell is appearing at the Sydney Writers' Festival between March 22 and March 25.

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