People tend to use the term ‘fashion victim’ somewhat damningly — and maybe jealously — to describe someone obsessed by the latest look. I’m not sure I agree. There’s something endearing about anyone who wants to dress in the newest style, and anyway, isn’t being up-to-date the whole point of fashion? It’s no more reprehensible than wanting the newest car, or iPhone, or flattest TV. ‘Victims’ are surely those who get it wrong — the mutton and lamb syndrome. More like what my beloved friend Melissa Wyndham called ‘fashion casualties’.
But now Alison Matthews David has brass-tackled the subject. In Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress, Past and Present (Bloomsbury, £25) she has shown in gruesome detail many fashions that did — and still could — hasten their wearers to an untimely death. We’ve heard about arsenic in St Helena’s green wallpaper poisoning Napoleon, but not that our Victorian forebears were swathed in the same toxic stuff, in clothes, shoes, feathers and artificial flowers. And who’d have thought that our parents’ boots were blacked with benzene treated with fuming nitric acid, which causes the extremities and lips to turn black from cyanosis — the very same concoction ‘used extensively in dry cleaning’.
In my youth, little girls in tulle dresses were always going up in flames, but its alarming to read that today’s rampant slogans on even the most respectable brands of T-shirts are made from nonylphenol exothalates that, when washed, leach deathly chemicals into the rest of your laundry.
The danger of standing too close to the fire in crinolines (from Fashion Victims)
If you sport your grandpa’s topper at Ascot, chances are it’s embedded with mercury, heralding ‘a pus-filled rash on the forehead’, or even ‘impeding your intellectual faculties’.
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