The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee? Please Bring Back Some Anti-Royalist Feeling

Queen Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee has extended its tentacles a bit everywhere.

In a way, from the historical/political features page, this theme has happily migrated to the fashion section of papers and magazines where Queen Elizabeth has been promoted to fashion trend-setter and beloved, admired and cool icon of style even by hip young designers. Not being British, I've never had any kind of interest in the British Royal family, but mainly considered them as a tourist (and at time clownish…) attraction.

Yet what's getting on my nerves at the moment isn't the Royal family per se, but the way a clever marketing and repackaging of the Royals made them acceptable to a new generation of youngsters.

If you read the main British papers you get the idea there are no artists, creatives, musicians or fashion designers who have any kind of anti-royalist feeling left. In fact it's almost as if any kind of anti-royalism had been left behind in a different time and space, say the late '70s with punk.

Yet anti-royalism still exists: a case currently on at the High Court in London is considering the claim of 20 individuals who are arguing they were arrested and subjected to searches last year during the Royal Wedding in London by the Metropolitan Police.

So while the other fashion and design sites may offer you suggestions on what to buy/wear/cook to join the celebrations (designer scarves? DIY paper crowns? fascinators with embarrassing tea cups incorporated? Made in China mugs/T-shirts? patriotic muffins?), I've decided to look for my own version of the Queen and found the picture accompanying this post.

The photograph shows Thierry Mugler's costume for Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare's play staged at the Comédie Française in Paris in 1985. I guess this is exactly my vision not only of Queen Elizabeth, but of any kind of Queen, rich, glamorous, but also grotesque, exaggerated, excessive and, well, ridiculous.

Maybe it's time for Great Britain and for British fashion designers to grow out of this infatuation with a tourist money-making machine with too many social costs attached to it, and rediscover punk, protest and that anti-royalist feeling that really generated some of the most iconic fashion trends in global fashion.