Today, as outgoing British Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak stood outside 10 Downing Street to deliver his exit speech following Labour's landslide election victory, his wife Akshata Murty stood behind him, clutching a navy umbrella.
While there shouldn't have been too many distractions in such a scene, Murty's dress was incredibly distracting. The heiress and businesswoman wore the Lina dress by Indian brand Ka-Sha. This relatively affordable (around €300) high neck dress with full-length sleeves features hand-appliqué details forming a vertical and oblique striped panel design in navy, white and red, colors that hinted at the flag of the United Kingdom.
Although the dress was meant to emphasize handcrafts and sustainability, it triggered a barrage of comments across the Internet. Social media users compared the pattern to dazzle camouflage, a skeleton, a prison uniform, and monochrome road signs. One even joked that it might be a stereogram: if you squinted long enough, you could see an airplane leaving for California; another suggested it was a QR code for a Disneyland fast pass.
Movie fans compared it to a vision from a Korean horror film, or a "Black Mirror" episode. In a way the dress had an undeniable cinematic quality, maybe reminiscent of Enrico Prampolini’s hypnotic sets that created a visionary and disturbing world in early silent movie Thaïs (1916) by Anton Giulio Bragaglia (View this photo).
Fortunately for Murty, none of the commentators had read Michel Pastoureau’s book The Devil's Cloth: A History of Stripes and Striped Fabric otherwise, there would have been even more references to striped designs as symbols of marginalization and criminality and to stripes in the Medieval period, when the pattern was associated with negative connotations, and worn by outcasts and people deemed morally dubious.
Fashion in politics matters: Rishi Sunak's passion for bespoke suits by Henry Herbert, which looked not just skinny but too small on him, didn't sit well with voters. His obsession with a formal approach made him seem out of touch with reality, a perception he tried to correct a few months ago by wearing Adidas Sambas instead of his favored brand, Prada, an attempt that only made him a laughing stock.
Yet also sartorial choices of First Ladies are significant, and, in this case, it seems the dress has become more memorable than Rishi Sunak’s politics. No one will remember the speech, but they will certainly remember the dress.
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