MAY
8, 2002 : Former model turned actor Elle Macpherson
with Time Magazine journalist Michael Ware
in Sydney 08/05/02 during Australian Fashion
Week.
LAST week, Michael Ware went to some fashion shows. A
month ago, the Time magazine foreign correspondent
was undercover in former Taliban strongholds in
southern Afghanistan, where clothes had the power to
save his life. He accepted The Australian's
invitation to come to Fashion Week out of curiosity.
"It intrigued me. I'm a foreign correspondent and
fashion is a world that is obviously very foreign to
me," says Ware. "I've always had a preconceived
notion of the fashion industry. Can it be as empty as
it really appears? I wanted to compare it [with] the
places I go and the things I see.
"The first thing that struck me was that the
accreditation badges [delegates wear around their
necks] are strikingly similar to the one I wore at
all times in East Timor. My identity card looked like
this one [for Bar Bazaar]. But it didn't say `Be
famous, Be someone, Be seen.' That's a treat."
Colour? "It can save your life. In a combat
situation, decisions are made on the split second.
That first glimpse can be a defining moment. Take
Timor. There, the Indonesian military-backed militia
wore red-and-white headbands and armbands, and a
sight of that and you knew you were approaching a
dangerous situation,'' he says.
"Alternatively, in Afghanistan the signature turban
of the Taliban is of a particular kind of dark black
silky cloth, which is much longer and so much puffier
than other turbans. As soon as you see one, you
automatically know, even if he's not Taliban, then he
is not far away from it, so it's a dangerous
situation.
"I ended up adopting Afghan dress once I had grown my
beard. I studied what the Afghan men wore and how
they wore it, and it helped me to be able to stay
alive. Sometimes the gun can't protect you. What can
is looking like everyone else."
At Fashion Week, Ware bristled when he spotted
stylist Kelvin Harries dressed in a boy
scout-military-looking shirt.
"My eye was immediately drawn across the crowd. You
become acutely aware of uniforms in my world because
they can signal change in a situation, either making
it more friendly or more dangerous. I had to catch
myself, tell myself there was no reason to worry.
"A uniform can have dire consequences. Here it
represents benign authority and security. But for
others it is not a fashion statement.
"The single most disconcerting thing that I
experienced at Fashion Week was the really gaunt
looks on some of the model's faces. That emotional
blankness had a resonance for me. It compared to what
we call the thousand-yard stare, when people who have
been through terrible situations look straight
through you. The look on some of these models had
that vacancy.
"I know it is passe, but the dire emaciation of these
women conjures immediate associations for me or
anyone else who has ever been to a refugee camp. The
only other people I have seen like this have been
struggling to live. I don't want to be overly
judgmental but it does make me angry. I think we've
got no right to make ourselves this thin.
"I don't want to be hypercritical. But the fluff and
the pap that goes with all this! It is decadent,
frivolous and vacuous. I've listened in to
conversations and they seemed to me to lack a sense
of proportion. But then I reminded myself we are in
Sydney, Australia, in the Western world.
"But it could get too much. One of the photographers
working this week was an old shooter mate of mine
from East Timor. Then the next minute I was literally
standing next to Elle Macpherson. I had to go outside
and have a couple of cigarettes just to help myself
come to terms with the unreality of it."
At the shows, Ware was noticeably jumpy. Sitting next
to him at the Grand Marnier 5 show, I was aware his
body was moving the whole time.
"I tried to concentrate on sitting still. I felt
self-conscious. The other reason is going to sound a
bit prudish, but the visible breasts made me really
uncomfortable. When I got back from Afghanistan, I
had gone four months without hardly seeing a woman,
except for a few in the burka. South Afghanistan is a
conservative stronghold, so when I came home, for the
first 10 days I had trouble coping, not just with
crowds but with displays of flesh.
"I didn't know where to look. How my Afghan friends
would have reacted was playing through my mind as
well. They would have been salivating.
"They are 25, 30-year-olds who have never had sex
with a woman.
"We talked about everything, from Islam to weaponry.
"But when it came to sex, they would ask the most
simple things. But then, even those who were married
might have had 13-year-old brides they had never seen
naked.
"Discarded Western magazines would turn up at the
American air base and you were free to help yourself.
I saw a US Vogue and I took it into town and there
was an obsession about it. The guys loved it. It got
to the point that that magazine was kept in my room
and one of the Afghans elected himself as its
guardian -- he called himself the librarian -- and he
would note who was taking it out and when it would be
returned. When I left Kandahar it was the first
possession they grabbed.
"The ones who could read English were studiously
poring over the text and they would ask, 'What is
that?', 'Who would buy that kind of thing?', 'How
much does it cost?', 'Would you go to the bazaar to
get it?' and I would explain about boutiques. But
they could never understand why these women would
shame themselves so much.
"I live with my girlfriend at Bondi Beach. A beach is
hard to explain to people in a landlocked country.
They'd say, 'What do people wear?' and I would
describe a bikini and a one-piece, and after the
titillation factor I would get very serious
questions: 'Do you take your woman to this place?',
'So other men can see your woman in these clothes?'
On two separate occasions, men asked me, 'How do you
resist the urge to want to kill those men?'
"To put this in context, one of my friends lives with
his mother, father, uncles, cousins. His male cousin
is his best friend. He can't even talk to his female
cousin. If he did, his uncle would be honour-bound to
take retribution, either flogging, humiliation, even
death. It is about the avoidance of sin. To avoid
sin, you avoid the temptations that lead to sin.
"Something else at the shows took me back to the war
zone, although on a totally different scale. Getting
in is a bit like passing a checkpoint. In my world,
when they say no, they mean no. The authority comes
from the gun. You have to do everything in your means
to either bluff, bullshit, bribe or avoid to get to
where you want to go and I had precisely that
experience at Morrissey.
"The place was packed, it was a long way to get
through the approved channel, so we went through a
gate, through the technical area and, at just the
right moment, we popped out and the show started. I
thought, this is exactly what I do all the time.
"I have respect for fashion journalists. Not for the
life of me could I put up with this circus. When I've
spent five days travelling to a place that is
extraordinarily difficult to get to, at much risk, to
get an interview and a fashion story gets in instead,
well, I understand the reader has only a certain
stamina for what I do.
"Put it this way, you come really quickly to an
understanding of what things really are worth dying
for. Sometimes it was just water off a duck's back.
But sometimes it made me want to go up and shake
someone. It just reminds me of the privileged state
we live in.
"It has taken me quite some mental effort to come to
terms with some of the events here in the [past] few
days. People say: 'It's good to see you in the real
world' but this isn't the real world. Fashion is very
much the unreal world.
"Yet it's part of life. It's not something we should
completely denigrate and refuse to give any
concentration to at all. We should just not be
exulting it beyond its proper context. Fashion Week
to me has been a fun experience. What's great is that
what I see at a fashion show is not going to live
with me late at night.
"At the same time, it is a little depressing. I've
gone home after these extravaganzas each night trying
to put the pieces back together. In conflict
situations, while they are never black and white, you
feel you know what's right and what's wrong. Here,
there's a nagging guilt. This has been an emotional
experience for me. I'm really glad I've been here and
I've had an insight into what, to me, is a different
universe. But it has been a very up-and-down
ride."