Catwalk Clowns
Those of us among Britain’s belt-tightened wage slaves who opt for The Guardian for non-tabloid, in-depth journalism on the parlous economic state of the world, mainly to avoid swelling Murdoch’s coffers, do so in the face of an aggravating and insistent contradiction. Having to put up with seven fawning pages devoted to the ‘glamorous’ non-entity of Cheryl Cole was bad enough, but the slavish fashion articles in both papers over the weekend of May 26/27 really put the boot in. Your more serious correspondents may decry the widening gulf between the UK’s rich and poor, yet your pages given over to vacuous catwalk fashionistas display a dumbed-down witlessness which is truly breath-taking. For example; Observer, page 31 May 27: Heatwave Britain turns on the style in the sunshine. Here we have a young man from Kettering dressed like a struggling refugee trying to find work in a circus, proclaiming ‘My shirt is from Tokyo, my jeans from ASOS and shoes from YMC’. So what? What is it with ‘designer’ brands which make the brain cells of duped, unimportant people dissolve and thus produce this this utter drivel? Why not simply wear a sandwich board proclaiming what you’ve wasted good money on, thus assuring your ‘cool’ status?
The narcissistic strut of Kettering was sad enough, but page 52 of the Observer Magazine, headlined Fine and Dandy, was hilarious and infuriating in equal measure. If the three hapless youths occupying a park bench in what can only be described as Technicolor clown outfits are about to set any trends, then without doubt fashion has reached the nadir it has been aiming at for decades. Minus their shoes and underwear, these three Max Miller impersonators (clothed, incidentally by a certain Matthew Miller – any relation?) were wearing threads totalling £6,965.
How many young people in the ‘Big Society’ can afford to spend £2,321 on one outfit? Who are these features for? Bankers? The children of dictators of banana republics? Ever heard of Tesco, Primark, Asda? Of course not – painfully ‘uncool’. It’s time these self-important preening nobodies took a walk in the real world. Perhaps you don’t have to be rich to read The Observer but seemingly, it certainly helps. Quentin Crisp had it right; ‘Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are’.
