Che Camille Fashion Show

It's hard not to be impressed by Camille. That it took a New Yorker to do what she's doing is telling. In return for a commission on sales, Camille provides space, equipment and marketing for a select group chosen from the creatives flooding out of Scotland's art schools and colleges. Fashion's the main business but she also associates with various artists in most mediums. 

Her latest venue, many floors above Argyll Arcade, doesn't have any signage and the lift is erratic. So when we turned up for a fashion show on Saturday it wasn't just the anticipation that had set my heart pounding. Still, no pain, no gain.........

Over the years I've noticed a few things about fashion.....

For example, at any one time the most unfashionable thing you can possibly think of, is, simultaneously, the most fashionable.

Also, fashion too often lacks any sense of humour, finding it as hard to laugh at itself as others find it easy. 

No such problems for The Niallist seen performing here. His tongue was planted firmly in his cheek, and I'd wager, by the end of the night he was hoping it'd be planted in a few other cheeks too.

One of the designers 'Rabii' makes made to measure denim. The emblem's a small embroidered silhouette of himself in his trademark cap. Recently he secured a rather spectacular order to make jeans for the Man Utd team. Just before the show he told me he'd been, not surprisingly, a bit nervous at the prospect of measuring Ronaldo and Co. But when the time came, bizarrely, the soccer stars were just as awestruck.... "No way, you're the actual guy on the jeans!"

Walking home after the show I spotted a young chap in some incredible get up. As they say on Project Runway, "Very fashion forward".

In the years after Communism, via telly and travel, we got to see what the ordinary people in those countries actually looked like. Isolation had left them ten years behind the times with a unique take on western styles. Into the mid 1990s men sported perm topped mullets and patterned jumpers that even M&S, by then, would have been ashamed of.

Well, that was 'the look' that walked past me, and I've coined it..... "Sarajevo Chic". 

If you think that's a bit tasteless, well, to quote Julian Macdonald.... and you must read this in a camp haughty Welsh accent, "This is fashion, and fashion has no mercy".

Che Camille

Floor 6

Argyll Chambers

Glasgow

G2 8BD

0141 221 9620

(It's first on the left as you walk in off Buchanan Street)

The Niallist

somewhere in cyberspace