London Calling - James Craig [39]
The fact that he had spent the previous night with a corpse made the morning – Alice munching, the sun shining and the city bustling – even more enjoyable than usual. He turned away from the balcony and ran an eye over a poster announcing the imminent arrival of an exhibition of work by Lithuania’s leading avant-garde fashion designers. Carlyle had never heard of Helmut & Karl. To him, they looked like a slightly hipper version of Gilbert & George, the aged English artists famous for a laugh-a-minute oeuvre with titles like Shit Faith, In the Shit, and Bloody Life. Letting his eyes slide down the poster copy, Carlyle saw that Helmut & Karl looked like a somewhat fluffier proposition:
Helmut & Karl are widely acknowledged to be the leading geniuses of the post-modern fashion industry. ‘The House of Helmut & Karl’ will show a selection of the designers’ leading signature pieces from 1984 to the present, reborn in a newly commissioned installation that dominates the entire Esterhaus gallery on the fourth floor of the Centre. Among the highlights will be the pair’s world-famous 1992 ‘Chinese Doll’ collection. For this exhibition, emerging supermodel Madison Smith will be dressed in a series of twelve jewel-encrusted dresses until she is wearing 250 pounds of haute couture worth more than $60 million. ‘What we are bringing to London is an ode to individuality and exclusivity,’ say the designers. ‘Unavailability is what gives fashion its aura. If it is too easy, too accessible, where is the art? We will show you the art.’
‘Exclusive’ and ‘unavailable’ took him back to the Garden hotel and the rather over-the-top claims in its brochure. There are, what, more than six billion people on the planet, Carlyle thought. So why do we all struggle so hard to be unique? One of his wife’s favourite phrases, taken from Freud, was ‘the narcissism of small differences’. She usually employed it when she was baiting him about the tribalism and stupidity of football fans like himself. Was narcissism the reason behind Ian Blake’s death? Some drive for an exclusive experience? Carlyle filed these thoughts away at the back of his mind and cast a final glance at Helmut & Karl. Not one for his own ‘must see’ list, he decided.
Next to the exhibition poster was an advert for Blossombomb, the first perfume created by the same dynamic duo. That was much more straightforward, featuring an almost naked woman waving a bottle of their product in a fairly unimaginative manner. After the bullshit, thought Carlyle, comes the hard sell. Is there anyone on the planet who doesn’t now have their own fragrance?
He looked over at Alice, still munching her sushi. Already, she had probably been exposed to more advertising than he had seen by the time he was thirty years old. It was relentless, indiscriminate, everywhere. What did she make of it all? Carlyle and Helen warned her that advertising was basically there to sell her crap she didn’t need. Sometimes that message seemed to get through, sometimes not. Blossombomb wasn’t yet the problem, but it – or something very much like it – would become one soon.
His watch said 8.52 a.m.. They had entered that ten-minute open zone before nine, when the girls could be dropped off in the school playground. Carlyle knew that they wouldn’t be late, but they wouldn’t be early either.
‘Come on,’ he said gently. ‘We’d better get down there.’
‘Yes, Dad,’ Alice nodded, handing him the now-empty plastic tray and taking her apple juice from his hand. Draining the last