Let's Roll Kate Moss in Crushed Sea Snails

One of the luxury goods produced by the Byzantine empire was silk robes of breathtaking colour and magnificent quality. For centuries these beautiful garments were a tool of Byzantine foreign policy. Barbarian warlords would visit Constantinople dressed in animal skins whose principal decoration was fleas. They would stare with envy at the magnificent clothing of their Byzantine interlocutors. Each of them imagined how classy they would look parading around at home in such items. Byzantine negotiators would delicately hint that if their talks came to a satisfactory conclusion then the emperor would surely present them with a few items as farewell presents. Furthermore it was possible that more could be forthcoming if the barbarians did a good job of guarding the imperial borders.

The fact that this sort of diplomacy worked for so long is a sad commentary on the propensity of human beings to be fashion victims. Of course the most gorgeously dressed of the lot was the emperor himself whose purple garments weren't for sale at any price. Purple silk was the highest standard of both luxury and status. It was reserved for the emperor and his immediate family. Somewhere along the line everybody managed to overlook the fact that silk came from a caterpillars arse and that the purple dye had been made by crushing up millions of sea snails. Naturally it was difficult (and very smelly) to create this dye thus adding to the rarity factor.

It is the same attitude that leads the robes of royalty (and members of Britain's House of Lords) to be lined with ermine. The ermine is a stoatlike thing whose pure white winter coat was highly prized for its purity and rarity. As time went by it got more rare and you can probably now see more ermine fur in the House of Lords than you can on actual living ermine.

Tastes change though over the years and what was in one century was definitely out a couple of hundred years later. In the early thirteenth century the Byzantine emperor and his courtiers decked themselves out in their finest in an attempt to impress some German guests. The Germans bluntly pointed out that their kings wore iron not silk and the moisture on their brow was not perfume but the sweat of the battlefield. Not coincidentally Constantinople was sacked a few years later as was the emperor.

In these modern and civilised times, of course, things have changed. Rather than crushing up inoffensive sea snails we just inject poison straight into our foreheads (I use the word "we" in a very loose sense) and insert silicon into various other parts of our anatomy. We send half starved drug freaks down a catwalk with various shreds of fabric hanging off them that a Byzantine emperor wouldn't wear in a fit and think that somehow we have come further than those barbarians staring in awe at the wonderful clothing of the imperial officials. The Maoris must be pleased to see that tattooing is making a comeback though.


On the subject of body shape too we have gone through a kaleidoscope of changes. It is highly likely that many of the beauties of yesteryear wouldn't be looked at today. There was even a short period in the early nineties when I was two thirds of the way towards being sexy. There was a brief fashion for skinny, effeminate pretty boys. I nailed the first two but fell down on the pretty, sigh. Things have now tilted back the other way so my faint hope of having to fight women off with a stick seems to have vanished. Mind you there are so many artificial enhancements that it's sometimes difficult to know what a persons bodyshape actually is. I'm pleased when I see a fat or ugly person on television (it happens about once a decade) as I know I'm probably looking at their genuine physique.

The real difference modern civilisation has made is in scale. The Byzantine emperor and his officials dressed largely to impress each other and the occasional foreign guest. Most citizens of the empire never saw them. Nowadays virtually everyone can see how the socially prominent are looking and what they are wearing and can attempt to imitate it. Possibly this is why so many people are so badly dressed. I feel quite smug, I'm badly dressed simply because I'm a bad dresser. Perhaps its time to reinvent some old fashions, Byzantium died in 1453 and is well due for a comeback. That is why its time to roll Kate Moss in squashed sea snails. It will make a nice change from cocaine.