In Svalbard, the most northerly inhabited place on earth, function takes priority over fashion.
Short is the new sweet, bum the new breast, tea the new lunch, poor the new rich, vintage is the new new. It seems that contrarianism is the new conformity. The ‘new black’ is a catchphrase that espouses and exposes the relentless search for innovation and the circular sameness of fashion.
It has always been attributed to Diana Vreeland, the ridiculous and venerable editor of Vogue, who actually once said pink was India’s navy blue, which is funny, observant and anthropologically worth a student’s dissertation. It was some other fashionista, I think Gianfranco Ferré, who actually said grey was the new black, which is gnomically dim, but then the ’80s were the gnomically dim decade and the new black encapsulated the common garden-gnomishness of it all. By the turn of the 21st century, calling anything the new black had exhausted its frail profundity and worn out its nickel-plated irony. And then along came Obama and suddenly black was the new black and it had jumped from fashion and style to politics and civil rights.
This wasn’t what I meant to talk about. I wanted to write about fashion and the cold because (I may have mentioned this before) I strongly believe that cold is the new hot and fashion is a vanity of temperate climates. You can draw the Tropics of Fashion on a map. The northern line starts about five miles above London and the southern just off the tip of Sicily. If you continue those two orbits latitudinally around the world, between the two points you’ve pretty much encapsulated the Tropics of Fashion. Of course, there are clothes and choices and fashionable people either side of that but this is where fashion gets indented and arbitrated. This is where the new blacks are posited. This is the zone where the weather allows you the greatest variation in clothes and you can dress with an airy disregard for the sky. Go further south or north and the climate becomes your stylist. There are stylish people above and below the meridian but they tend to wear things that have been made not by designers but by experience and necessity.
When I found out I was going to go to Svalbard, a huddle of islands overseen by Norway that are the most northerly inhabited place on earth, I knew I’d need some advice on what to wear and I wasn’t going to get it in the fashion department, from some editor who’d tell me that alpaca was the new cashmere and Dolce were doing some really butch biker boots that look warm.
Svalbard is 78 degrees north; the pole is 90 degrees. After Svalbard, there are only a few hunters, some climatologists, and adventurous nutters pulling sledges. It’s cold. Really, really murderously cold. It was too cold for the Eskimos to ever bother living here. It’s a place that is made up only and solely of weather. Big, white, mad, bad, bullying weather. But the Norwegians have a saying; they say that white is the new black. They also say there’s no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothes.
So I asked a Norwegian what I needed and he gave me a list that was longer than the one for my boarding school uniform. There was not a single thing on it that I already owned. All the stuff I thought might transfer from Scottish autumn walking holidays was damned as being suicidal.
It wasn’t just the amount of kit; it was the size and the volume. It started to arrive in my office and colonised a corner and then spread across the room like a glacier of goose-down, merino-wool waffle, wickable, breathable, impenetrable waterproof gear. I regarded it with an unbeliever’s scepticism. Nothing here was constructed remotely by aesthetics. Not a single stitch or button was added to make the wearer look svelte, or handsome, or taller or sexier or better proportioned. I come from a place that would rather be wet and chilblained than ugly but chilblains aren’t the price for getting stuff wrong up in Svalbard. Still disbelieving, I dragged a vast, waterproof North Face bag big enough to smuggle a gravid sow in up to the roof of the world. I stepped off the plane at Longyearbyen in my London tweed and the climate grabbed me by the lapels like a furious drunk. The scale of the weather here bore no relation to anything I’d waded through before.
My local guide said that if I wore gloves with fingers, I’d lose the fingers. You wear mittens. You wear boots with huge detachable inner boots of insulation that look like they’ve fallen off the space shuttle. If your feet get cold, you lose toes. You wear two balaclavas. The wind catches your nose or your cheek, it’ll cut them right off. I put on everything I’d brought with me, layer after layer. Everything you wear has an understudy: socks have other socks, pants have bigger pants, jerseys come in pairs, so do jackets and trousers. My gloves had mittens. This is not clothing for comfort. The Norwegians dress for life. Get it wrong and you could lose a finger or your sight or the whole mortal coil. What you have to do, in effect, is turn yourself into a self-regulating ecosystem. You become a purpose-built micro-climate. And as cold as it got, which was bloody cold, 30 degrees below with a 40-knot wind shoving down the temperature, so cold that our smart modern technology ran out of figures to measure it with, wherever I stuck my face out or took off a mitten, it burned like frozen venom, like all-over toothache.
And I became immensely interested in other people’s kit – but not in a fashionista sense, not in a ‘Where did you get that bag?’ way, but in a nerdy, mechanical way like boys talk about carburettors and torque. I’d ask about wicking and wool and weight and whether your socks had been organically lanolin washed. There was a relief in all this jargon, this heavy-kit chat. It was nice to be released from the insecurity of style, of taste.
I noticed something at the airport in Spitsbergen. The Norwegians are a remarkable weather-blasted, capable and bonetough people. You never see a fat one. I expect they leave them out on the glacier. They wear their skins tight-drawn over their angular bones like battened down, faded tarpaulin. They are admirable, attractive people who speak profoundly but seldom. To open your mouth unnecessarily is to waste hot air. And I also noticed that at the airport they were the best-dressed people in the world. In a postmodern Bauhaus-Corbusian sense, where form follows function, everything was carefully chosen for its practical application: the uniform of compatibility and outdoor competence. I realised that what they had was anti-fashion, given that the essence of fashionable style is to put on an attitude or an aspiration, to project a character, essentially to be someone you’re not. What the Norwegians dress as is themselves so they can continue being themselves. This season’s look is the same as last season’s look. It’s very, very damned cool. Freezing cool. I turned to Tom, my photographer, who occasionally works for Vogue, and I told him blonde is the new black.