The Australian premiere of the Absolutely Fabulous movie went down in Sydney over the weekend and featured Aussie designer Alex Perry as MC.
Perry stood in front of a packed audience to introduce stars Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley and began to talk jokingly about drug use in the fashion industry. He also used the opportunity to have a go at David Jones, the retailer who had fired him three years earlier.
“When you watch Ab Fab and you see Patsy coming out of the bathroom and she’s been ‘racking up’. Sorry ‘racking up’ is drug speak for people who do lines of cocaine, I googled that,” said Perry. “There’s never as much mirth in it when someone from the fashion industry is watching it because we’ve been at functions and we’ve watched that person go relentlessly to the bathroom 12 times. No one pees that often. But whatever it takes to get you through the DJs [David Jones] fashion launch.”
He continued, “We judge, but we get judged as well. We’re also inappropriate and there’s inappropriate behaviour that runs rife in the fashion industry.”
After being joined on stage by Saunders and Lumley, Perry began to profess his deep-seated love of the Absolutely Fabulous TV series. “Every time I go to Asia I watch [Absolutely Fabulous] on loop because the TV is so bad there, I mean I watch it on an autistic level,” he said.
He even went to far as to suggest that the next chapter of the film could be based in Australia, a point that Saunders and Lumley refused to rule out. “I think this could be Edina and Patsy’s spiritual home. It’s a crazy city full of crazy people,” said Saunders. “I thought we were quite extreme until we came to Sydney,” agreed Lumley.
