When it comes to fashion I know little to nothing about it from a personal perspective. Clothes wear me, not the other way round, so without a little help from my friends I would look like I still live at home.
Fashion always holds a mirror to society. It challenges taboos and what could be more taboo than Migrant Chic? We had Terrorist Chic a few years back but it’s barely 50 years since fashion was holding up blurred gender roles and the permissive society in the face of an ordered 60s establishment.
A Hungarian photo shoot called ‘Der Migrant’ by Norbert Baksa turns the mirror on Hungarian society and delivers Migrant Chic. Photos of scantily clad models with half a breast visible, leaning on barbed wire (the barbed wire is that stuff in the background generally slightly less thin than the models). What an image! Fashion holds up a mirror and people don’t like what they see. Good.
These events are not isolated in fashion. We had heroin chic for a while. But then music came to the rescue with the Dandy Warhols’ excellent Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth (“I never thought you’d be a junkie because heroin is so passé”)
People complain about politicians lying, although I don’t see how the job can be done without do so, yet they really don’t like it when that mirror reveals something they were averting their gaze from, and that they, themselves, are living a lie by not looking. The Swinging 60s fashion just brought into the visible world what was happening behind the luckier twitchy curtains in the land, the rest insane with jealousy that it wasn’t happening behind their twitchy curtains. Nowadays, it’s the things political correctness has prevented from being frankly debated in the public arena.
There was a similar case in India last year when a photo shoot seemed to glamourise a rape scene on a bus. Photographer Raj Shetye held a hyperbolic mirror up to his society who then wanted to shoot the messenger instead of realising they are doing ‘anger’ with ‘denial’, which is not how it works. They’re stuck in a vicious circle.
As an artist, this has to be the pinnacle of expression: something so on-point that people don’t want to look. Broad societal dysfunction is the new black. ‘Free expression’ means the right of others to say things you don’t want to hear. Without it we are slaves, robots and oppressed.
“Soooo, how is the fashion retail sector doing then, Adrian?” I hear you interrupt uncomfortably. Comme ci, comme ça, now you mention it. American Apparel [NYSE:MKT AAP]has gone Chapter 11 this month in the hope of restructuring its finances and recovery. The US economy is far more buoyant than the UK, so they must have been doing a Fukushima of a job. Looking at the price chart: DUDE! That is one ugly baby!
Meanwhile, in the UK, Burberry [BRBY] is a classic illustration of S/R, which I was writing about this week. Most stocks in a market will tend to emulate the chart pattern of the index when big moves happen. Here’s a good example of that. However this stock is firmly in bearish market mode. If it can break above the cloud it could become a failed failure, if you see what I mean. Most likely it’ll carry on deteriorating and this will become a Lower High. In any case it’s a completed H+S and we’re below the neckline now, so I wouldn’t want to be long this stock and arguing with a bearish H+S (bearish because the RS is lower than the LS). I have kept the neckline short as once it’s broken it becomes irrelevant – it’s not a trend line (although trend lines don’t always work terrifically well – another of those things that are self-fulfilling for the most part). Keep your charts tidy and don’t clutter them up with bogus, over-long lines that will be confusing in the future. That said: a tidy desk is the sign of a sick mind. Not with charts though.