People tend to use the term ‘fashion victim’ somewhat damningly — and maybe jealously — to describe someone obsessed by the latest look. I’m not sure I agree. There’s something endearing about anyone who wants to dress in the newest style, and anyway, isn’t being up-to-date the whole point of fashion? It’s no more reprehensible than wanting the newest car, or iPhone, or flattest TV. ‘Victims’ are surely those who get it wrong — the mutton and lamb syndrome. More like what my beloved friend Melissa Wyndham called ‘fashion casualties’.
But now Alison Matthews David has brass-tackled the subject. In Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress, Past and Present (Bloomsbury, £25) she has shown in gruesome detail many fashions that did — and still could — hasten their wearers to an untimely death. We’ve heard about arsenic in St Helena’s green wallpaper poisoning Napoleon, but not that our Victorian forebears were swathed in the same toxic stuff, in clothes, shoes, feathers and artificial flowers.
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