Ignore the deadly dictates of the fashion world

There is one week in the year when London, the city I love, enrages me. It has come round again: London Fashion Week. The fashion industry converging on the city this week is dedicated to the cultivation of humanity's most trivial and stupid tendencies: a concern with status symbols and artificial physical beauty.

There is one week in the year when London, the city I love, enrages me. It has come round again: London Fashion Week. The fashion industry converging on the city this week is dedicated to the cultivation of humanity's most trivial and stupid tendencies: a concern with status symbols and artificial physical beauty.

Why do we pretend that these people are anything other than pernicious snake-oil salesmen? The "looks" promoted by the fashion "world" (in reality, a tiny number of designers and journalists) are completely beyond the grasp of 98 per cent of the British population, but still we allow them the power to make us feel inferior and inadequate. It is time we said to the fashion industry: enough. Pack up your ridiculous clothes and your stick-thin models and get a proper job.

The low-level everyday pressure exerted upon women to subscribe to grotesque "fashion" norms can be seen in the life of Cherie Blair, who said last year: "When I was just a barrister, I didn't spend much time worrying about how I looked, but I found out quickly when Tony became leader of the Labour Party that I had to get my act together."

This is extraordinary. A brilliantly clever, decent, hard-working woman is forced to apologise to the public for dressing unfashionably. She has internalised the totally unreasonable bullying of the fashion industry, when in fact she always looked like a smart working mum with, frankly, better things to worry about than clothes (like, um, helping asylum-seekers and lesbians fighting discrimination).

There are many reasons why the fashion industry is malevolent. Its moral scruples are plain to see in the way its treats its own "stars". Look, for example, at Karen Mulder: feted in her early twenties as "the face of her generation", she pouted at the world through hollow cheeks and dead eyes from dozens of Vogue covers. Within five years, before she was even 30, she was "past it" and became clinically depressed. Within just eight years she was in a coma after a massive drugs overdose, her life effectively over. The fashion world chewed her up and then vomited her out.

Of course there are horror stories in every high-pressure industry – but not with the tick-tock predictability of the fashion world. Models are routinely ditched after a year or so on the grounds that, in the words of the Times fashion editor Lisa Armstrong, "their curves are no longer the right kind of curves." Taking fragile, insecure young people, smothering them with attention beyond their wildest dreams, drugging them (as many models are, to get through the brain-melting boredom of their routines), and then ditching them after a few years as their looks "fade" – is this not a recipe for depression and suicide?

Another indicator of the fashion world's morality can be seen in some of its repellent "collections", introduced with scarcely a mutter. One avant-garde French fashion house three years ago introduced a "Holocaust collection" which featured anorexic models dressed in striped and numbered pyjama suits. The firm Quick Brown Fox were quick to issue a "Twin Towers Handbag" in 2001, which they claimed was a way of showing sympathy with the victims of that attack.

There has been a ripple over the last year of "homelessness chic", which was defended by Gareth Scourfield, the fashion co-ordinator for GQ magazine, who claimed that "Because so much fashion is coming from the street, it makes sense for the models to come from the street. Agencies are looking for idiosyncrasies, which give character."

And homelessness, it seems, is a great "idiosyncrasy". Don't forget this is an industry which wholeheartedly embraced the concept of "heroin chic" – and I won't even dignify "Soweto chic" ("the look of the South African slums... is in this year!", one magazine boasted) by discussing it.

Imagine a scenario. You are at a party, and you have been chatting to somebody who seems very nice. Eventually, you get around to asking what she does for a living. If she says she is an arms dealer, most decent people will recoil and the conversation will dwindle. But if she says she works in the fashion industry as, say, a designer, we do not react the same way – but we should. This might sound extreme, but in fact the fashion industry leads to the self-mutilation, starvation and deaths of thousands of women

The world today is beset by what Germaine Greer has identified as "a global pandemic of Body Dismorphic Disorder (BDD)" – a condition whereby people feel that their normal bodies are "wrong", "inappropriate" and "ugly". Over 50 million people (mostly women) in Europe and the US are starving themselves – or daily ramming their fingers down their throats – to bring their flesh closer to the fashion industry's concept of "beauty". BDD has been a factor in more than a million suicides.

This is just the most extreme manifestation of the phenomenon. So many of my female friends deny themselves food and skip meals that I've stopped even worrying about it when it happens. We have all heard about the (possibly apocryphal, but plausible) private London girls' school – a high-pressure, high-prestige place – where a persistent problem with the pipes leading from the toilets forced them to call in the plumbers every six months. After going through several plumbing firms, they finally had their pipes analysed – and discovered that the trouble was caused by excess stomach acid running through the system. Bulimia was so rife that it was actually damaging the plumbing. Of course, the fashion industry is not purely responsible for things like this – but it is the clearest exponent of celebrating an impossible body image that leads directly to bulimia at an epidemic level.

It is a sign of how unattainable the anorexic forms of supermodels are that most of the models themselves – even with their full-time trainers and chefs to prepare virtually calorie-free food – don't achieve "the look" most of the time. As the recent Kate Winslet fuss showed, they are invariably pampered by small legions of stylists and make-up artists, and their images are often computer "enhanced" before we gaze on them. Fifty million women are damaging their health to achieve an appearance that nobody – literally nobody – can ever achieve.

Every Independent reader can, in small incremental ways, work to stigmatise this disgusting industry, and to popularise the idea that the people who fall for its siren call are misguided or stupid. Don't buy labels; don't feel inferior to those who do; go out of your way to praise people who wear interesting non-label clothing; don't indulge in the self-loathing act of buying magazines like Vogue or Cosmopolitan. Of course, we all like nice clothes, but a good shirt is not susceptible to the whims of the "season." As Coco Chanel said, "fashion fades, only style remains."

We also have a responsibility to make sure that the clothes we wear are not manufactured using slave labour (almost all high fashion is exploitative in this way). If you want to know if the stores you shop at are sweat-free, check out the excellent website www.nosweat.org.uk. But even ethically manufactured "labelled" clothing – a YSL jumper here, a Jean-Paul Gaultier skirt there – feeds a beast that is causing terrible, terrible damage. Cherie, forget about the Jimmy Choo shoes: you would still be a great person in Oxfam sandals, and to hell with the carping fashionista bitches. When it comes to fashion, it is time for us all to stop being victims.

johannhari@johannhari.com