( Article for SUPERBLOW magazine )

KILLING LABELS FOR FUN.

Colin McDowell wouldn’t know where the fringe was if he were pushed over the edge of it.

Before I start, what is about to happen might shock you.

Its just words in a magazine written by a fashion designer, so try to remember that when you are reading it. I’m not an editor, and I haven’t learned to use words in the same way.

So this text is hastily assembled here because sometimes we get asked these questions by journalists, they like ask you to explain why you’re doing something, different things, whatever you may be doing at the time, it doesn’t seem to matter, but this time its got to be on the theme of death, cos that’s the magazines theme apparently, and Pete Docherty is gonna be in it, so yeah I’d be interested to write something actually cos I don’t understand the hype.

You see we are about to change from one label name to another, and therefore there must be a reason as to why we are doing it, cos we have to fit in somewhere, there’s bound to be some big fucking thing about to happen, some big wave about to crash just behind us.

Sophie sits down, and I give her some paper, I been working on editing together a film documentary of our label, this big epic story that is about our whole design careers, late nights & the computer keeps fucking up.

So we are both sat watching this film, and as we see things appear on the screen we both make word lists of anything we remember from the time, & so these are the words we’ll give superblow, words that sum up our labels life & death, all written within the space of a TV advert, a single blink of a fashion editors eye.

You’ll see how our lives weaves in & out, collaborating, the time before we met, everything we put out together and released.

And at the end of the film it’ll just finish and we’ll have no words left to describe it, and that’ll be the end of the article & the exact point in time that the label officially ends.

Everything will stop, but you know I’m gonna be out there somewhere afterwards doing stuff, making moves, inventing the next thing, working the room, so you keep reading, cos you want to know whether it makes any sense in the end, or if it’s a happy ending.

So the movie starts and we just start writing on A4 paper, random words, well not random words but actual memories, divided by comas in a long streaming list that’ll probably annoy you after a while but stick with it, click the mouse, lights camera action, 3D lettering, science, cold weather, fuzzy socks, sewing yellow binding, no money to show, screensavers, lifesavers, a girl from Poland picked out of the streets to model, shot in the council estate round the corner, red tubes of fabric, last minute embroidery, fun to do but would like to have done more of it, crazy hot summer, eating dried mushrooms, Christmas at the Cheung’s, Japanese MTV, the grey area, wires falling out of sockets, blank screens, where the fucks that wanker technician the ICA promised us, mechanical sleeves, alphabet skirts & tops, first term at the RCA, introduction to creative pattern cutting at studio 4, ski yogurt pots & multiple desktop folders, following the dress underwater as she dives, fashion in motion, a million bubbles, flipped upside down & inverted, paper embroidery, scratched denim, pattern paper instead of currency, Laura Ashley florals, DIY stencil prints, sticky aerosol ink between my fingers, 3 sleepless nights twisting & knotting denim, tripping out onto the catwalk, nice picture of us in the Scottish Herald & on TV with Jodie Kidd, cold dark nights after September 11^th, in Glasgow texting Julian, in London on the night of the projection, video images bigger than a building, blown up images of a naked Laura Morgan in the studio, free jeans & printed tights with sexy stripe gussets, Japanese wholesale orders, faces of those I LOVE & HATE, heroes & anti-heroes, icons, Paris showroom, throwing up in a Parisian nightclub, getting blown, screen printing, photo shoot at Lifestyledeath PR, Worthing train station, an empty studio film set, piano playing, cracked oil, latex, growths & protrusions, half-circle smiles, pink & orange, lazer cut bobbed hair, cutting cloth against gravity, the return of the Lageos space probe, black rain teardrops, embroidered dresses, plimsolls, air filled shapes, lines running down her tights, pyjamas & interviews in bed, combat pockets, sex & the city, Suzy Menkes perched on my foot, black rabbit nighties, champagne & picture mobiles, good TV channels & posh bathrooms, leaving without paying, no money but lots of good press, marching & demonstrating, stop the war, a dark day with sun shining, photographers snapping us, cuddling up to get closer, to get into the cameras picture, shorter hair, painting the duvet, like a flag or banner, my brother out there somewhere, united through television, us with them and everyone, a documentary film version shown at the ICA again, tiredness, completion, the point in the graph where the baseline rises, flatlines & then shoots upwards suddenly.

And we’re back in the room.

What happened there was that we both wrote out lists to describe our lives in & around the time of a film we’ve just edited showing EVERYTHING WE HAVE EVER DONE IN FASHION.

And you were there reading the list with us & then suddenly you…

“Hold on a minute, what was I thinking?” Pause for thought.

“Was I remembering or reading?”

Freaked myself out there, the writing all went schizophrenic, like there was me ‘the writer’ & you ‘my audience’, but then I realized that I’m supposed to be writing this article and haven’t yet submitted it, so let’s calm down and try to concentrate.

Anyway I should say a few words about the label I guess: Julian & Sophie has finished. Sorry to break it to you like this. It’s like the brand I had before called ‘nothing nothing’: the one I got rid of on eBay. Except this time it’s just simply stopped.

We’re dropping ‘Julian & Sophie’, and we’re starting afresh with a brand new intense focus.

Just cos we can. Just cos we need to really.

It’s about change & progress, and I should know because I’m the new Professor of Fashion at the University of Hertfordshire and change & progress is my fucking thing.

Today when I was thinking about what I might write about I looked up on the internet the word ‘Death’ for some reason, and the website http://www.deathclock.com/ popped up and they have this series of questions they ask you about your age & weight & outlook & whether you smoke or not, which I had to answer yes to knowing full well that doing so meant I was gonna get a shite score, and you then click this button and it calculates how many more seconds you’ve got left until you die.

So I’m a 32 year old skinny smoking optimist with shaved lines in my hair, and I have 1,444,141,200 seconds to go, or at least I did at the time I did the test: it ticks down so fast, and so that works out at about 46.95 years, which means I’ll be 79 years old when I die.

That’s not bad. Longer than I thought, I was actually quite chuffed.

But the FASCINATING thing is that when I changed my outlook from ‘Optimistic’ to ‘Pessimistic’, just to see what difference it would make by ticking a different box in the little drop down window on the website, then instead I scored a death at 48 years old, and when I changed it to ‘Sadistic’ then it said I’m gonna die in only 5 months time from today, which would be sometime next February.

How lucky is it that I am an optimistic designer and not a sadistic one I immediately thought, cos I don’t know what I’d do if I only had til February to live. I don’t know how I’d fit it all in and get round everywhere I’d need to go.

So outlook on life & lifestyle can have worse effects than smoking, I mean according to this website test anyway, and this just got me thinking about how responsible fashion is for shit, and therefore how very very important it is too.

Fashion & lifestyle should come with health warnings: following them ultimately kills you.

So what I’ve got to say to you is that you’ve got to chill out and not worry about what you read in fashion magazines, what this cool new mag is trying to hook you into. You shouldn’t be worrying about catwalk shows, or what some new avant-garde designer is trying to impress you with, you should just ignore all the headlines and wear what you want, what makes you feel good, makes you happy, and learn how to make and adapt clothes yourself, understand how they work, how they function & communicate, and make the clothes you really want to wear, and then just start your own label, simple as that, sell them locally, make clothes for your friends, for the real people in your life. It’s all so easy. Anyone can be a designer. I can even help you for free if you get really stuck, my emails info@julianand.com , just pay me back before I hit 79.

Words by Professor Julian Roberts

JULIAN & SOPHIE 2002-2004: ‘To Future Generations of Ourselves’, SUPERBLOW, issue 1.