A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away fashion was considered as something strangely subversive: throughout the centuries and the history of fashion we saw designers shaping, sculpting and liberating the female body; we witnessed mini-skirts and practical hairstyles giving a new sense of dynamism to women, and looked in awe and admiration at punks embodying subversion through ripped clothes held together with safety pins.
Luckily, every now and then you still meet a designer who has managed to preserve certain degrees of fun, rage and subversion that prompt and push them to go beyond any kind of limits. One of such designers was Alexander McQueen with his dark vision of the world and his twisted irony that pushed him - according to the legend - to sew offensive messages ("I am a c*nt") into the lining of a jacket for Prince Charles.
Yet that sense of subversion has in a way gone: currently fashion is a bit like a juvenile delinquent sent to a reformatory and finally turned into a socially acceptable person. At least this is the impression you got after reading what Britain's Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron said about fashion on Monday night during the private party held at Downing Street to celebrate the opening of the “London Collections: Men” event.
Known in the fashion world for his wardrobe malfunctions - not wearing socks with black shoes while on holiday and the shirt in his white tie outfit suddenly opening during a banquet at the Guildhall (things he mentioned) - Cameron provided useless information about his outfits ("...and my pants are by Marks and Spencer") and about his wife Samantha (also known as the "First Lady of Fashion" in some selected British circles) choosing his clothes for him ("When I go shopping my wife doesn't allow me to look around the store at all. I am put in a changing room and things are passed to me like you would pass food to a prisoner").
Yet the worrying bit still had to come: maybe jealous about his Scottish cousins getting all the attention and the fun after being “honoured” by Chanel last month or just thinking about the money the industry makes (£21 billion annually, according to the media) Cameron added: "As far as I'm concerned fashion is not some add on, it is not some accessory to British economic policy - you are absolutely at the heart of the vision this government has."
In a way this was a lighthearted speech considering that it came from the same man who last October spoke at the Conservative conference using words borrowed from the semantic field of war ("There is a global battle out there to win jobs, orders, contracts…and in that battle I believe in leading from the front"), reminding in that occasion to his ambassadors they were part of the country's salesforce ("When I became Prime Minister I said to the Foreign Office: those embassies you’ve got to turn them into showrooms for our cars, department stores for our fashion, technology hubs for British start-ups. Yes, you’re diplomats but you need to be our country’s salesforce too").
You wonder if Cameron really understands what goes on in the fashion industry and the risks and exploitation it involves or if he just sees fashion as a part of his "aspiration nation" and "aspiration economy" plans to show how "enterprising, buccaneering, creative, dynamic" (his words again from last year's speech at the Conservative convention) Britain is.
Yes, Britain has managed to remarket itself better than Italy or France where there is at the moment a lack of relatively young and credible figures in the government supporting the local fashion industries, yet Cameron's statement still makes you cringe. It's indeed perfectly fine to praise the efforts of all the people working in the British industry, but thinking about fashion as something "at the heart" of a Conservative government is a bitter oxymoron.
If fashion still represents madness and creativity, thinking about a Conservative government being into it naturally worries you. In fact it's definitely not into it: Cameron is into fashion as much as Thatcher was into fashion - in financial and not in creative terms (window shopping was a remote act Thatcher carried out on her way to the dentist, as she stated in an interview in 1984 - check out the video embedded at the end of this post). I doubt Cameron would easily accept controversial figures linked to fashion such as Leigh Bowery or Alexander McQueen if they were still alive. In fact you just wish they were still around to cause a bit of mayhem and chaos and maybe drop one or two offensive messages in someone's suits...
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