If there's one industry which should think twice before issuing April fool's day press releases, it's fashion.
Despite the best efforts of Sacha Baron Cohen and the writers of Absolutely Fabulous, it proved itself beyond satire many years ago. Besides, when it's your business to trade on people's gullibility 365 days a year, you should probably keep schtum when everyone else is doing it too.
But what's really scary is that any "hilarious" jokes the industry makes about its own excesses could well come true. If not next season, the one after. Stuck for ideas, someone will decide last year's ridiculous April fool's day press release is actually worth touting as the new black.
If you were to have believed the most ludicrous release from last year, for instance, you'd be queuing up at Asda tomorrow for the launch of a new capsule collection by John Galliano, the disgraced former head of Christian Dior. The three lines announced in 2011 for the George at Asda range and due in store on April 1, 2012 were to be called John, Paul and Ringo. Funny, no? No, because it could very easily still happen.
Given all that, you'd think the wiser heads in the fashion pack would have binned the April fool's day gag years ago. Not a bit of it. Last year, august New York agency Ford Models announced potential recruits would no longer have to provide a portfolio of glossy 10in x 12in prints, as Ford alumni like Twiggy, Jerry Hall and Christy Turlington once did, but could email the picture on their Twitter account instead. Slippery slope, my friends.
Even the US army has joined in. Generally, nobody believes anything it says – especially not sitting US presidents – so it's hard to know how people will have taken the news that the stetson is soon to become official army issue. Nonetheless the move was announced by one Sgt Maj Bob S Stone, army uniform board headgear task force president. "It's been a while since we have changed the headgear, so it's time," he said. "Plus a stetson is functional and downright American." Could it come true? With Mitt Romney in the White House, anything's possible.
Admittedly the most fabulous of the recent crop of pranks is unlikely to happen – a collection of handbags by someone called Rebecca Minkoff. She's real, but the unicorn hair in which the bags were clad definitely wasn't. There was a shoe, as well, with a unicorn horn – a unihorn? – sticking out of the front. It's the kind of thing Vivienne Westwood might wear to one of David Cameron's kitchen suppers, if she had £50,000 to spend on the privilege. And if unicorns actually existed.
My advice, then, is this: instead of taking tomorrow's fashion "news" with a giant pinch of sodium choride, take it as a guide to what we'll be wearing in a couple of years. And as you're reading this on March 31, you'll know I'm deadly serious.
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