Australian Fashion Week: A Place For Fuckwits To Shop.

How much does that dress cost???!!!!

1,000 died at Rana Plaza, all so dickheads could buy 'fashionable' dresses.

I was astonished recently to learn this week to see that a dress available at Australian Fashion Week cost $8800.

I won't include a picture of the thing as I don't want to give free advertising to a bunch of rip off merchants, but $8800?!

The thumbnails show Morticia Adams wearing a dress made along similarly impractical lines.

But fuck me that's a lot of money..

What's more the garment in question looks like a wedding dress, and so I half thought, for a millisecond, that that was a reasonable price for an article you where once on a special day.

That's if you're one of those that still buys the myth of marriage.

As Basil Fawlty said to Sybil on Fawlty Towers, "Remember Sybil when we were first MANACLED together?"

I still don't understand why anyone gets married, particularly people with lots of money, as they then spend a long period in court arguing over said money once they divorce.

But back to fashion week.

The dress that started this is a long sort of gown, and around the lower part of the stick insect who is wearing it, there spreads a large conglomeration of dress material, making it look as if the wearer is being slowly submerged in an ever rising white ocean of crimplene.

As far as I can tell, there is no way for the wearer to successfully ambulate (walk) from once place to another.

It looks like whoever dons this garment has to be picked up by a guy from the warehouse on a forklift and then redeposited wherever she wants to go next.

So while the dress gives the uttermost chic to the wearer, the forklift carrying her around takes it all away.

I cannot even begin to speculate how the wearer goes to the toilet.

It's possible that like the knights of old, she has to be winched into place onto the dunny from above, with a small group of equerries pulling the bottom bit of the dress outward like roustabouts setting up a circus tent.

The price also drives spikes deep into my bah-humbug soul, for this reason: although the dress for fashion week was almost certainly made one-off in Australia, if it proves popular, and from its hideous, beyond-belief impracticality as a wearing device, I am certain it will be, then more of its ilk will be made in the third world by Asian women and children sitting at sewing machines for twelve hours a day earning $36 a month.

Yes, that's the average wage in Bangladesh.

One Australian dollar a day.

8 cents an hour.

What's more, dresses like these on our shelves are the ultimate cause of the factory collapse in Bangladesh at Rana Plaza. (pictured above)

Now I know you don't tune into Buzzfeed to go back to school, but here's a little economics lesson.

If you sell cheap T-shirts, then economically, if not morally, getting them made in the third world makes sense.

You can have ten thousand t-shirts made over there, then shipped to Australia, and put on the shelves for a dollar.

Then you sell them for ten, making a 1000% profit.

OK?

But with a fucking dress that retails in Australia for $8800, why the living Christ does that have to be made in the third world?

Why don't these arseholes who makes such garments manufacture their whole-body engirdling female torture devices here in the country for $1000 to an Australian garment maker.

They would still make a 880% profit.

Isn't that enough?

Now the particular dress that I looked at also fills the bizarre criteria of the clothing size-price-inverse law.

AKA: It seems that the smaller a piece of garmentry, the larger the price tag.

So a pair of underpants purchased by a man on Valentine's day for his girlfriend/wife, costs enough to fix the head gasket on the car.

One of the smaller dresses available at the fashion week website, is a small thing, much smaller than the dress alluded to above, and that costs a grand.

I guess you would categorize it as what I used to know as a miniskirt, as it seems to stop before it covers the microscopic underwear that the model in question is no doubt wearing, but then on the front there hangs several folds of material making it look like the model has put several napkins on to eat dinner and then got up from the table forgetting to take them off.

Now this I can go for, a dress that provides you with multiple hand towels to wipe your hands on was you go about your daily business.

Just the job for the next time I am in the workshop gapping my spark plugs, I think I'll look good in it too.

I might add this same inverse size-to-price law also applies to boutique restaurants.

I'll never forget my first encounter with this.

It was a Uruguayan restaurant in Sydney's chic inner East.

I had played rugby that day, and then gone there for a feed with my girlfriend at the time.

I ordered a steak and veges, and with my as-usual massive post-match appetite kicking in, I looked forward to the meal arriving and launching in.

When our waiter emerged from the kitchen, I was at first impressed, he carried two plates, each the size of the satellite dish.

"You beauty", I said, "that plate could hold a whole buffalo".

However rarely have I been more disappointed.

When the waiter set the plate down, I had to get out a pair of binoculars to find the food.

Huddled, pathetically, in the middle of the plate was a steak the size of the palm of my hand.

Next to it were three beans, artistically laid, with a drizzle of some source next to that.

Cost $30, a lot for main meal at the time, and I'd finished the lot in less than twenty seconds.

Surely a record.

I ate at $1.50 a second.

Afterward we left the restaurant and I had to stop in at the fish and chip shop to get a load of chips to fill me up.

There's more rubbish at fashion week.

A handbag for $300, leading me to conjecture that any specialist thief would mug the owner,keep the cash and credit cards, and then sell the bag.

More accessories are available that cost as much as a decent mountain bike and all the rest.

It's conspicuous consumption writ large.

And I might add, Fashion Week is aimed at women, and so before I am howled down at the Journalists Club as sexist, I would like to add this.

By a wide margin, the biggest fashion victims in Australia are male surfers.

Head out to Bondi or Manly, or here at my home break of Byron Bay, and all you will see is 18-year-olds wearing only five name brands around their butts.

I did check and my board shorts are one of the name brands, but I didn't pick them for that reason, they were the only pair at the op shop I found big enough to fit my hugely distended arse.

So male surfers wake up to yourselves, buy something made in Australia, and all surf gear is made in the third world now, whatever the name on the label is.

So to close, although this article is supposed to be humorous, I can't help but think of the thousand Bangladeshis who died at Rana Plaza so fucking idiots in Australia can buy a dress for $8800.

So if you are one of these idiots, by all means buy the dress, but tell your supplier that you want $7,000 of the price to go to Bangladesh to buy cement to strengthen the factories that are still churning out this bloody rubbish.

Read more of my rants here at Buzzfeed.

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