Call it “The Devil Wears Galliano.” Wintour reckons that the British designer’s work “combines erudition and creativity, darkness and light, the past, the present, the future all smashing together in a brilliant way.” Less brilliant was Galliano’s tirade in a Paris cafe in 2011, when cameras captured him screaming at a woman, “I love Hitler. People like you would be dead. Your mother, your forefathers, would all be fucking gassed.” Witnesses reported that he also called the woman a “fucking ugly Jewish bitch.” He claims to have no memory of the incident due to substance abuse.

Wintour insists that Galliano “isn’t defined by a moment” and says that “John Galliano: Horizons” won’t “shy away from any of the darkness in John’s past. It’s part of what has shaped him. The show will take in the full arc of his career and grapple with all of it.”           

Wintour is garlanding Galliano with a rare honor. Only two other living designers have been feted by the Met with solo shows: Yves Saint Laurent in 1983 and Rei Kawakubo in 2017. 

Wintour has met with Jewish machers such as Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt and Rabbi Rick Jacobs about the choice of Galliano, who gave it their blessing, citing Galliano’s apologies and contrition. In the wake of the dark incident in the City of Light, he was fired as director of Dior and criminally convicted in a French court. However, he was quickly tapped by esoteric French label Maison Martin Margiela, where he completed a highly successful decade-long run in 2024. He has now taken the reins at mass-market retailer Zara, where he will “re-author” designs from the brand’s archives. 

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Galliano’s genius glowed early. A school collection inspired by post-revolutionary France, “Les Incroyables,” was snapped up by London’s legendary Browns boutique. A 1994 collection inspired by the murdered Romanovs, “Princess Lucretia,” was hailed by Diane von Furstenberg as a “watershed moment in modern fashion history.” Galliano’s bias-cut gowns ruled red carpets in the 1990s and his runways reached for historical phantasmagoria. No Brit had ever led a French couture house until he took over Givenchy in 1995. A year later, he was at Dior, giving the haute a surrealist flair. 

Take the Dior Saddle Bag, introduced in 1999 by Dior under Galliano’s direction. The asymmetrical item was popularized by Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City. It simultaneously conjures posh stables; a low-slung, hip-hop aesthetic; and the melting drip of one of Salvador Dalí’s clocks. Knockoffs became a Canal Street staple, and Wintour’s Vogue christened it a “pop culture phenomenon.”

Galliano’s sins, however, are hardly limited to that one outburst in Paris. His biographer, Dana Thomas, contends that honoring him is a “terrible idea” and that “his infamous antisemitic rants were not an aberration.” And beyond the judgment of Galliano’s character — by all accounts, it’s troubled —  lies a more difficult reckoning with fashion’s fascination with cruelty and fanaticism, which all too often has lain behind the glittering surfaces. 

Eighty years before Galliano’s outburst, also in Paris, fashion and fascism were sewn together in Coco Chanel’s atelier. Chanel was just one of many auteurs and geniuses to collaborate with the Nazis and freeze out Jews — Martin Heidegger was a member of the Nazi Party until the end, and failed to protect his mentor Edmund Husserl from being fired under anti-Jewish laws. During the war, the French designer — inventor of the little black dress and Chanel No. 5, the best-selling perfume of all time — had a Nazi lover and was in the formal employ of German military intelligence. Chanel also appealed to Aryanization laws to attempt to wrest control of her perfume company from two Jewish partners, proving that allegiance to beauty provides no inoculation against brutality. She received her own Met show in 2005. 

Even worse was Hugo Boss, a German citizen and clothing manufacturer who joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and whose company mass-produced the black uniforms of the SS, the brown uniforms of the SA, and the mixed brown and black ones for the Hitler Youth — made in part by forced labor. The company apologized in 2011 for using the labor of 140 French and 40 Polish prisoners. Boss’s imprisoned workers would have sewn the Totenkopf or “Death’s Head” symbol onto the garments intended for concentration camp guards, though Boss was not responsible for the design. After the war he was found to have been an “activist, supporter and beneficiary” of the Third Reich. On appeal, though, he was ruled to have been merely a “fellow traveler” of the regime.  

In a 1975 essay, “Fascinating Fascism,” Susan Sontag coined the phrase “beauty freak” to describe Hitler’s favorite director, Leni Riefenstahl. Sontag means it as something of a compliment — that in movies like Triumph of the Will and Olympia, Riefenstahl was acting not as a “horrid propagandist” but instead as an almost autistic auteur in search of the perfect shot. Fascist art, Sontag writes, “glorifies surrender; it exalts mindlessness: it glamorizes death.”

Sontag reasoned that “most people who are turned on by SS uniforms are not signifying approval of what the Nazis did,” as if the fashion could be detached from the fascism. In truth, Riefenstahl was hardly ambiguous. In 1937, she gushed that “Hitler is the greatest man who ever lived. He truly is without fault, so simple and at the same time possessed of masculine strength.” One of her films used extras sourced from a concentration camp. They were sent to Auschwitz when the movie wrapped. 

A half-century ago, Sontag predicted that a “revival of Nazi art, following the revivals of Art Nouveau, Pre-Raphaelite painting, and Art Deco, is most unlikely. The painting and sculpture are not just sententious; they are astonishingly meager as art. But precisely these qualities invite people to look at Nazi art with knowing and sniggering detachment, as a form of pop art.” A harder question is presented when the art is rich but the artist is rancid.  

Galliano, then, appears to belong to the tribe of beauty freaks and antisemitic art monsters that includes Riefenstahl, Chanel, and Kanye West, not to mention composer Richard Wagner, poet Ezra Pound, and Voltaire  — and, some might say, Sontag herself, who in an infamous piece appeared to justify the 9/11 attacks as “an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions.”

The raising up of Galliano comes three years after Karl Lagerfeld, who once declared that “no one wants to see curvy women,” was honored at the 2023 Gala. Fashion, it seems, has few untainted heroes to choose from. That honor, though, was posthumous. It also came before the Costume Institute took over prime real estate at the Met. In May, it ascended from the basement to the Condé M. Nast Galleries, adjacent to the Great Hall — the former location of the museum gift shop. 

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In honoring Galliano, Wintour is taking something of a gamble with an event that has become a gilded goose. The Costume Institute has become crucial to the Met’s bottom line. Last year’s Gala brought in $31 million. The museum’s most popular show in history was the Costume Institute’s “Heavenly Bodies,” in 2018, which was seen by 1.7 million people. That edged out 1978’s “Treasures of Tutankhamun,” which was viewed by 1.4 million visitors.

The Met contends that “rather than presenting a conventional narrative of disgrace and redemption, the gallery will examine how memory, experience, cultural values, and historical circumstances continually reshape the reception of a designer’s work.” It could be, though, that the old parabola of grace and redemption, as hoary as it is, remains the best shape to map the choice to honor Galliano, who was raised in a devout Catholic family and whose work often bears the imprint of the Church’s couture. 

The Met originally intended to honor Galliano in 2024, but postponed the plan in the wake of the Hamas massacre on Oct. 7, 2023. Those sensitivities appear to have dulled in the years since, even as antisemitism against Jews in New York continues to rise. The New York Police Department reports that antisemitic incidents increased by more than 8% this year, and that more than half of all hate crimes are perpetrated against Jews, who constitute just 10% of the population. Antisemitism is a fashion that is very much back in style. 

In a 2023 documentary, John Galliano: High & Low, Wintour explains that “it isn’t often that you meet a great designer. But when you saw what John was doing, you realized that he was one of them.” Perhaps it is as simple as that — the rules are different for the great and glittering, even if their sins and prejudices are no less ugly than ours. Or perhaps a line ought to be drawn when it comes to the world’s oldest hatred.

Sontag concluded that “Riefenstahl’s current de-Nazification and vindication as indomitable priestess of the beautiful — as a filmmaker and, now, as a photographer — do not augur well for the keenness of current abilities to detect the fascist longings in our midst.” Wintour, a lioness in winter, is set to test again if the beautiful ought to bleach the baleful. 

The mostly women queuing obediently around Manhattan for cult hits like Soft Swerve and HeyTea are displaying sartorial choices as sweet, shapeless, frothy and generic as the products they’re waiting to consume. Soft Swerve, for the uninitiated, is a New York-based chain serving kiddie-colored soft-serve ice cream in Asian flavors, topped with whimsical, nostalgic items such as mochi or Fruity Pebbles. HeyTea is a blended-tea-drink chain launched in China that brands itself as distinctive by using real fruits and juices instead of powders. And while millennial restaurateur David Chang and his pastry chef Christina Tosi deserve credit for the soft-serve revival in the aughts — their “cereal milk” flavor tapped into millennial nostalgia for adult-free Saturday mornings bingeing cartoons — at least Team Chang did so with a healthy dose of kitsch and camp to add some acid. Gen Z goes the same route with earnest sensitivity. The trend, it seems, is self-infantilization. 

The “West Village girl” uniform on display in these lines is amorphous, unisex and pre-sexual: white tank-top and figure-obscuring, light blue, baggy denim. Each young woman wears exactly the same thing as her friends, and as everyone around her. This look’s stylistic predecessor, “mom jeans,” wasn’t very sexy, but it was more grown-up, accommodating a postpartum midsection and tapering down the leg in a last-ditch nod to the feminine silhouette. The new West Village cozy-chic barrel cut is so voluminous and unstructured below the knee, it resembles a pair of surplus-store jogging pants. 

The Zoomer mood board deserves the label “self-infantilization chic,” or “toddlercore.” The generation is defined by historically high sugar consumption, the choice of lifestyle over fashion, aversion to sex and vice, diligent consumption of media, and dutiful consumerism. At the center of the board should sit a single analog hack many Zoomers have probably never heard of — the sugar tit. 

The sugar tit was a staple in the South for poorer families, especially during the Great Depression, and is essentially a makeshift pacifier. To make one, mothers whipped softened butter and sugar into a creamy emulsion, then wrapped it in cheesecloth for babies to suck as they explored the world, wearing a flour sack fashioned into a onesie. Thus ensconced in a cocoon and suckling on mommy’s teat, they could enjoy a carefree existence while mainlining sweet cream.

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Ejection from this paradise is the existential gripe of the character Rue, the lead in HBO’s Gen Z-defining television series Euphoria. The show identifies the basic fact of eviction from the womb as the origin of Rue’s outsized anxiety and ensuing opioid addiction. Anesthetizing drugs offer Rue the closest simulation she can achieve to this amniotic sanctuary, until her tragic almost-reunion with mommy in the finale.

A cozy, safe place in an IG-worthy line makes the same promise as Rue’s drug addiction: a second-best return to the creature comforts of early childhood, when a diet of already-masticated foods is spoon-fed for easy digestion and quick endorphins, and while the conflict between baby and mommy, self and object, male and female linger on the horizon.

Soft Swerve offers a checklist of exotic flavors — ube, saffron, halva — but the essence of the pleasure is mouth feel and texture, or lack thereof. These chilled, aerated puddings are a toddler’s fever dream. Like the sugar tit, they combine ice cream and baby food, and even the self-definition of a deliberate scoop isn’t required. A concoction that is neither liquid nor solid splooges out from a teat-like apparatus to the queuing masses. 

In late May, the soft-serve lines were eclipsed by the grand opening of a HeyTea Tea Bar on the Upper East Side. The city already had more than a dozen locations of the Chinese chain, the heir to the boba craze, but the UES outlet is the first in New York to offer sit-down service. Drinks such as the Coconut Mango Boom, Supreme Brown Sugar Bobo Milk Tea, and King Jasmine Guava start at approximately 400 calories. The signature “Cloud” line is topped with a “cheese cloud,” a “pillowy foam” of condensed milk, cheese, and cream — in other words, a sugar tit. And the chain’s marketing copy is correspondingly banal and unthreatening. The IG feed for its United States locations promises that the product “never gets old … milk aroma. Easy on the palate, easy to love….” Just what the toddlers ordered.

Gen Z’s culinary fixation also extends to savory mushy foods, though to a lesser degree. That soggy midday snack, Tater Tots, is “no longer just for kids,” as the Nickelodeon slogan once promised. Fried blobs of mashed potatoes have appeared on gastropub and upscale menus, satisfying the desire for the toothless enjoyment of soft edges. Lacking the confident crisp of frites or chips, each tot-morsel pays off with a creamy reward at the center. 

Clout, in this form of consumption, is communicated not just by imbibing the decadent, excessively sweet novelty du jour, but by displaying the supposedly insider knowledge and expertise to be there in the first place — never mind that thousands of other insiders are there with you; it’s better that way, there is safety in crowds. Documenting the endless wait under the blazing sun for a mere trifle (a mass-humiliation ritual, really) transcends the banality of it all. A lick off a finally attained matcha-colored cone or a sip of the last liquified-mango-custard of the day is an act of valor. And the “mukbang,” internet slang for a video of a person eating, completes the consumerist burlesque. Contrary to the obvious sexual potential, this Zoomer dessert-porn signals the chaste pleasure of wholesome childhood favorites.

On the rare occasions Zoomers prioritize lining up and paying for fashion over food, for example the April 3, 2026, grand opening of Uniqlo Union Square (USQ), it is usually for items characterized by ultra-relaxed, voluminous silhouettes for men and women alike. Clothing popular with Gen Z comes in various neutral shades of white, beige, and pale blue. With the exception of the occasional animal motif, Uniqlo’s best-selling adult garments are interchangeable with its children’s collections. The sizing is mass market, the fit is relaxed, and the leisurewear for men and women could easily function as jammies. There is even a resurgence from denim mainstays Levi’s and Gap, not just of overalls, but of baggy, hygge overalls, once again, channeling the onesie. Perhaps snap-crotches will be next for an easy diaper change. 

Fashion these days is focused on comfort at the expense of sexy provocation or a visionary reconfiguration of the human form. In fact, fashion is hardly prevalent at all, with Zoomers obsessing over easier, less distinctive options such as skincare and accessories. The post-Covid focus on grooming is supposedly a self-care revolution, but it really seems more like a self-erasure. The ubiquity of “clean girl” and “glass skin” aesthetics, and the preference for “blush blindness” — essentially pristine, bouncy, baby skin with an innocent pink flush on the cheeks and barely rouged, moist lips — opts for a common, innocent face for the masses.

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If any fashion choice sums up this generation, it is that Gen Z icon and avatar: the Labubu. Though the trend has waned, at its peak, Labubu, a mid-teens Pop Mart creation, drew long lines and sold millions, all through the appeal of childhood-stuffed-animal attachment. There were collaborations with brands as storied as Coca-Cola and Art Basel. Labubus hung from key chains and dangled from designer statement bags, and the larger and more demonic-looking, they were, the better.

Ugliness, in fact, was the essence of the Labubu appeal. The bubble heads, distended bellies, and pudgy legs revealed the underbelly of all that Zoomer optimism and perfect skin. These coveted plushies were the scowling talismans of the hangry toddler. They are what happens when the owner can’t get their way: an Oscar-worthy tantrum that only ends with another sweet, gummy treat, a mouth plugged with a sugar tit.

Zoomer men are little better. They also display the pre-sexual signifiers of self-infantilization — potato sack silhouettes, Tater Tots cravings, and jolie-laide plushies — with one distinctive touch of their own: the “broccoli cut.” This hairstyle is a closely shorn fade on the back and sides of the head, which is supposed to be read as ultra-masculine, referencing the sharp, clean-cut geometry of alt-Right aesthetics. But the front, in nearly schizoid dissonance, is often curled or even permed into loose, tousled tendrils, with a light touch of wispy bang. Like the softly billowing flesh of the Renaissance putti, broccoli hair is reminiscent of the pre-verbal intimacy between mother and son; it is a last frolic in the feminine cocoon before being wrenched from mommy’s nip and inducted into the world of men and masculinity.

It’s quite the self-own that Clavicular, proselytizer of jutting edges and hard exteriors, has adopted this hairstyle. What a waste of bone-smashing and steroidmaxxing to adopt the romantic coif of a cherub, and to accidentally acknowledge that the eternal feminine perfects the eternal masculine. Manosphere stars routinely fall for this trap. HSTikkyTokky, the main subject of Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere, is also a broccoli-cut mannequin, though it is more forgivable on textured, ethnic hair. In the closing sequences of the film, he perhaps realizes that there is no honor in the combative machismo he projects, and he brings his mother into it — we suspect to humanize and defend him. In a climactic scene, she offers him a juice bar to calm his nerves while she does damage control. To save face, he protests to the camera, “but mom, I don’t want a juice bar….” Except that we know he really does. He’s even willing to stand in line for it. 

The loss of any profound sensibility — whether in fashion, philosophy, physics, film, literature, politics, music, or engineering — is cause to think about its absence and its impact. Valentino’s passing shows us that high fashion has become a feckless and heartless enterprise, afraid of the poetry of universal forms, and, in particular, of the masculine appraisal of the female form and of the synergistic relationship between the male eye and the feminine as a civilization-enhancing ideal.

What Valentino stood for — what his work manifested — was the apprehension of beauty, rather than the presentation of an ideology. His reign from the 1960s through the late 1980s, and his decline through the 1990s and aughts, almost perfectly tracks the radical aesthetic break after 1989, when a confident, gendered view of both men’s and women’s fashion gave way to the shiftless, formless, deconstructed grunge aesthetic that has, in one form or another, predominated for the last 30 years. 

At the street level, the apotheosis of this drab, ideologized style are the hideously baggy women’s sweatpants and jeans that have come to prevail in the post-#MeToo era: low-rise or otherwise garishly revealing — but, crucially, without celebrating the female form.

Valentino’s gift — visible in dresses for stars from Elizabeth Taylor to Julia Roberts, and most radiantly evident in the dresses he made for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis — was for framing his subjects in a way that enhanced their elegance without reduction to plainness or over-simplicity. The essence of a Valentino dress might be summarized as decorated elegance, the suggestion that there could be more, that there is more, that the designer could have done. Valentino’s dresses hover at the edge of restraint, just over the line of good taste. 

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To borrow from the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, Valentino’s dresses were some of the last miracles of a European tradition that risked, aspired to, and was drawn toward transcendence (or what Sloterdijk calls “verticality”). Valentino never fell from grace or respect in the fashion world; rather, the civilization that he designed for ceased to exist. 

The fall of the Soviet Union, especially, freed the West from the reliance on tradition that it formerly used to draw a clear contrast between itself and a revolutionary utopian enemy. During the jaded ’90s, fashion was flattened and became “horizontal.” The red carpet, which represents what a culture wants to see about itself, lost interest in the female form as a miracle and final flower of civilization, and Valentino’s very Catholic vision of beauty, which was not open to deconstruction and moral nagging, fell out of fashion.

To borrow another key idea from Sloterdijk, fashion over the last 30 years, and especially in the last decade, seems to have become more and more armored, as if clothes were an immune response to a chaotic and dangerous world. Celebrity fashion’s strategic shift toward the ugly, oversized, and ironic might be described as so many inoculations against judgment — protection against any accusation that the wearer might be secretly allied to the old, pre-social justice cult of sumptuousness epitomized by house Valentino in its heyday.

Valentino’s death this week coincides strangely with the eruption of public drama between Brooklyn Beckham and his family — in particular his mother, Victoria, the pop singer-turned-fashion designer whose minimalist, wearable brand, which is clean, neutral, and risk-free, embodies the very horizontality that Valentino must have abhorred. The strange thing about the intra-Beckham spat, however, is that it seemingly began with the choice of Brooklyn’s betrothed Nicola to wear Valentino, rather than Victoria Beckham, at the couple’s 2022 wedding. The younger Beckhams didn’t just reject their aesthetic matrilineage; they embraced something like an aesthetic nostalgia, a desire for a fashion absolute.

And yet the Beckham family beef, which has played out on Instagram, also demonstrates that nostalgia for the vertical, Catholic sense of beauty has no chance of reaching escape velocity. It will be dogged and enchained by the puerility and ugliness of social media culture and, by extension, a celebrity culture that has lost all connection with iconography and ritual.

If the women that Valentino dressed in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s stood for aspiration toward a distant and beautiful absolute, then the celebrities who will undoubtedly line up to wear vintage Valentino in the coming weeks and months will stand for nothing other than the lust for clicks and attention. Jackie Kennedy, dressed in Valentino in the ’60s, could only be glimpsed by the public in snapshots that still contained a sense of scarcity, yearning, and symbolism. Images of celebrities on red carpets today are subject to endless recirculation, memeing, commentary, and now AI recreation and modification. If you don’t like how a celebrity is dressed on the red carpet, you can use AI to realistically redress or undress them, destroying any vestigial sense of the sacred, and degrading yourself in the bargain.

The coincidence of Valentino’s death with Brooklyn Beckham’s break from House Beckham, in the context of our menacingly tasteless algorithmic era, suggests that a rebirth of Valentino’s aesthetic spirit will not, ironically, have much to do with celebrities or celebrity culture. Valentino’s greatest designs came about during an era of analog media, before imagery overload became too profound. My guess is that the designer working in Valentino’s mode — with an eye toward the splendor of the human form, the splendor of clothes, and the union of the two — must serve private audiences away from cameras and screens. He must seek after the limited eternity of private memory, not terabytes. Fashion in the future, ironically, might resemble the anonymous design of the pre-celebrity, premodern era: it will be for aristocrats and salons removed from public consumption and opinion. 

“I love beauty. It’s not my fault,” Valentino said in 2008. It was not a fault, but a virtue, and his legacy will long endure for it.

Alibi, a bar in Altrincham, Cheshire, recently made the news for banning solo patrons after 9pm. But it’s worth noting what else the landlord frowns upon — or rather, who else. “No sportswear/trackies,” wrote the landlord, Carl Peters. “No Stone Island. No ripped/frayed jeans. No baseball caps. No roadman vibes.”

Roadman? To the uninitiated, the term generally refers to a young, working-class black Londoner wearing a black puffer jacket, a dark tracksuit, black Nike Air Maxes. The look fuses the casual with the athletic. He might be carrying a manbag and wearing a face covering of some sort. He mostly listens to grime and drill music and he speaks a kind of Multicultural London English (MLE), often sneered at as “roadman English”. Yes, that guy.

In the 2000s, the roadman had a negligible presence in the mainstream. He was very much associated with grime culture (Run the Road, a seminal early grime compilation, was released in 2005). Since the 2010s, however, the figure has stepped into the mainstream, thanks to films and TV shows like Anuvahood and Top Boy, and the rise to prominence of drill music. Michael Dappah’s caricature of a roadman in his satirical 2017 song “Mans Not Hot” was a turning point. It turned the figure of the roadman into a meme, made him loveable even, pushing many signature phrases into everyday speech and opening the door to TikTok trends like the “roadman parliament” and “roadman translation“. Luxury fashion brands, always keen to make money from black-originated trends, have put out streetwear inspired by roadman chic. So what was once a niche, underground, street identity and sub-culture associated with inner-city black youth has morphed into a mainstreamed, commercialized aesthetic and memeified trope.

Take, for instance, Stormzy’s McDonald’s advert from earlier this year. The advert encouraged people to “order like Stormzy”: to march up to the counter and use his distinct roadman English lingo: “mandem”, “ting”, “fam” and so on. The joke, of course, was that white English people, especially those who don’t live in London, don’t talk like that, perhaps even aren’t supposed to. I wonder how it would go down if Harriet from Oxfordshire strolled into her local McDonald’s and tried speaking like this.

But the roadman — or as British-Nigerian comedian Nabil Abdulrashid’s referred to him in a skit, “the gentleman of the road” — is an authentic British figure, part of a subculture that grew within a much wider multicultural urban milieu. The term derives from Jamaican patois — to “run di road” is to be in control of a particular area — signifying its origins within black Caribbean culture. His ancestors are the “rudeboy” and the Yardie, who were for a time the bogeymen of black criminality in British society. The rudeboy, forged in the street-gang-infested shanty towns of Kingston, symbolized the rebellious culture of Jamaica’s post-independence youth, who crossed the Atlantic into Britain in the Sixties and Seventies through the post-Windrush immigration wave. Known for their sharp suits and pork-pie hats, and immortalized in the ska and rocksteady music of the era, the rudeboy archetype soon became at the center of sensationalized discourse around mugging. In the Eighties and Nineties, the Yardie, likewise a product of the Jamaican diaspora, became the evolution of the stereotype, encapsulating all the fears white British society harbored about black British youth. For the writer Jeffrey Boakye, the Yardies were seen as “ostentatious gunmen obsessed with cars and jewelry, speaking in broken English from a former colony and completely unconcerned with the safety of the majority white public.”

More specifically, and as its etymology implies, to be a roadman is to be someone who is “on road” — the British equivalent of being “hood”. This means that the roadman operates in the mean streets of the post-industrial urban metropolis. To “do road” may mean to sell drugs, to be involved in petty street crime, to play drill music loudly in public, and to keep an eye out for the “opps” — gangs of rival roadmen. The roadman’s calling is not a glamorous one. “Doing road” means struggling and hustling to survive in an unforgiving world by any means necessary, which will take its toll. The rapper Berna, who was raised in an East London council estate, put it this way: “And the gang do crimes cause crime pay / Can’t wait for the day we don’t have to / But if one don’t die it’s a nice day / So I always gotta watch how I move”. The roadman knows his life is a vulnerable one, that he always has to look over his shoulder: but he knows he cannot admit weakness.

In this sense, being a roadman is both an accusation and an achievement. Yet he is also a figure of parody, derision and pity. The roadman exists within a hierarchy within the criminal underworld — alas, for him, he is at the bottom of it. He is just entry level. A few echelons above him in his social ecology is the badman, who lives by his own code. Being called a badman is an accolade. The badman is tough, fearless and dangerous. His reputation for violence and dominance earns him respect on the road. He is discreet, but everyone knows not to mess with him. It’s like being an alpha: something you can call someone else, but never yourself.

Plenty of roadmen talk a good game and think they’re a badman; that is until they meet a real badman. In Guy Ritchie’s film The Gentlemen, there’s a scene where one of the main protagonists, played by Charlie Hunnam, confronts a bunch of machete-wielding roadmen who have a phone containing crucial information. They refuse to give Raymond back the phone, even as he offers money for it. With some bravado, they warn him to go away or they’ll cut him up — until he pulls out a compact sub-machine gun to demonstrate who really is the apex predator. The scene has spawned a small internet subgenre of “roadmen meet real gangsters” compilations.

Still, due to social media and general cultural commodification, the roadman “look” and the roadman lifestyle have somewhat become divorced from each other. Many young people, and not just in the main cities, adopt the roadman aesthetic, speak a multicultural English dialect, and listen to grime and drill without being a part of that life.

And if London was the social laboratory where the roadman was born, the phenomenon is no longer contained to the capital.  The roadmen of Birmingham will speak “Multicultural Birmingham English” (MBE); similar to its London equivalent but adapted to a Brummie context. The chav subculture of the 2000s (racially coded as white and out of London) has largely been subsumed by roadmanism. You even have white poshos from the Home Counties who cosplay as roadmen to appear more “authentic”. Indeed, the racial imagination has always been fascinated with blackness as a source of Dionysian vitality: from minstrel performers to Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G. To connect with “blackness” is supposedly to connect with one’s elemental impulses — a momentary means of escape and rebellion from a repressed white, Protestant, bourgeois mode of existence.

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By Ralph Leonard

It’s tempting to reassess the roadman in this light. Given that “integration” is a consistent if vexed topic in our national discourse, it has been argued that roadman-ism might be one of the few (sub-) cultures within Britain that can easily integrate, or rather assimilate, newcomers. For one, it has a low barrier of entry. It’s genuinely inclusive and open to new influences. To be a roadman doesn’t mean assimilating into blackness. It is really a pan-ethnic subculture, in many ways the default youth culture of the super-diverse cities that immigrants and their children encounter. For second- and third-generation immigrants who are alienated from both the mainstream national culture and the native culture of their parents, being a roadman offers an identity, a surrogate tribe (a mandem), something to “belong” to. Perhaps, then, roadmanism is the closest thing there is to a British melting pot.

But I’m not sure this is a model of integration that should be championed. The roadman is also a champion of ignorance, parochialism and shallow machismo. Newly minted roadmen who plunge deeper into that life will aspire to be a badman, often laboring under the delusion that doing “badness” is how you express just how masculine you are — and that you become “someone” through inflicting damage on the “opps”. That inevitably will lead to bloodshed and devastate communities. Crime and urban violence is a young man’s game and it is young men who are its biggest loser: 83% of teen victims of homicide were killed by stabbing in 2024; young men (aged 18-24) were eight times more likely to be killed by stabbing compared to young women.

The function of roadmanism, as Mark Fisher once wrote of hip-hop, is to operate as an “anti-mythical myth”. The Weltanschauung of the roadman has no room for sentimental idealism. It reveals life for what it supposedly really is: a social Darwinist struggle where only the fittest survive. Why was Henry Hill so enthralled by the gangster life in Goodfellas? It wasn’t just the money and flashy goods. It was a sense of freedom and excitement — of no longer being a non-player character in a dead-beat job.

And so the roadman “vibes” have transcended their working class black British origins to become the cosmopolitanism of the lumpenproletariat. The best remedy for it is a dynamic civil society that inspires young people to reject this nihilism. To translate their talent and graft into society’s gain. To realize that they can be free in society rather than acting against it. To discover meaning and purpose. Until such a thing exists, the roadman life will be the life that purposeless young men fall into. White middle-class people may laugh at the memes — but out on the road, baleful consequences will follow.

Now, after nearly a decade as creative director, Chiuri is parting ways with Dior. In spite of the recent flood of tributes, I suspect many people are greatly relieved. I know I am.

When it came to business, Chiuri played her cards perfectly. Quarter after quarter, Dior’s sales increased under her leadership. And she passed the crucial handbag test: designing the lucrative Book Tote, so popular that knockoff versions are still being hawked on Canal Street. She was everything that LVMH could want in a creative director.

Yet Chiuri’s self-proclaimed feminist activism left much to be desired. She is conspicuous by her absence among those designers, including Tom Ford and Marc Jacobs, who publicly refused to design clothing for the Trump family as early as 2016. Dior remains one of Melania Trump’s favorite brands, and LMVH maintains a close relationship with the Trumps. At the 2025 Inauguration, Ivanka Trump was outfitted in Dior. Chiuri’s own involvement in this is impossible to ascertain given her silence on the topic; regardless, it is incongruous with her politics. She supports a woman’s right to choose — something the Trump administration campaigned on curtailing.

After her debut, feminism faded from her collections. Her Autumn/Winter 2025 show focused on corsets — what critic Alexander Fury called the “cage of nineteenth-century femininity”. And one couture collection used crinoline, the stiff material comprising petticoats, as its prevailing motif. Still, Chiuri sought to underscore her commitment to the cause by collaborating with women artists for the staging; a Judy Chicago tapestry here, a Mickalene Thomas backdrop there — all feminist Teflon to protect her collections from detractors.

At her first show, Chiuri told Vogue: “The message, really, is that there is not one kind of woman.” Yet during her tenure, Dior models were invariably waif-thin women dressed in sheer gowns; her final collection was a parade of ghostly Victorian brides.

This might explain why in the nine years that she helmed Dior, her collections were for the most part poorly received by critics. Recent tributes waxed poetic about the pioneering nature of Chiuri’s career, but older, more candid reviews called her work “cookie-cutter” (Cathy Horyn, The Cut), “excruciatingly obvious, slogan-dependent feminism” (Vanessa Friedman, The New York Times), and, more bluntly, “Meh”, (Robin Givhan, The Washington Post).

What I did appreciate about Chiuri’s tenure, however, was her determination to abide by what are called the “house codes”. Creative directors often have a difficult charge, which is to honor the founder’s vision for their brand, while also modernizing and personalizing it. T-shirts aside, Chiuri often referred to Christian Dior’s revolutionary Bar Suit, which transformed the silhouette for women in 1947, bringing a post-war sumptuousness to the fore with nipped-in waists and padded hips. Chiuri’s version was more relaxed but maintained that hourglass shape.

In today’s fashion landscape, as LVMH and its counterpart Kering manically reshuffle designers from house to house to inject a sense of excitement once sales begin to falter, the original identities of brands are being lost. Alessandro Michele’s Valentino looks suspiciously similar to his Gucci; likewise, I presume Demna Gvasalia’s Gucci will resemble his Balenciaga. At least Chiuri consistently paid homage to those who came before her.

There are other reasons, too, to admire Chiuri. The fashion consultant Mimma Viglezio posted a video last week calling the media’s treatment of Chiuri “disrespect dressed up as critique”. Her appointment was significant, Viglezio says, because of the lack of women in positions of power within the fashion world. It’s a good point: the fashion industry is designed primarily for women, and yet it is run mostly by men. According to the trade publication 1 Granary, while 74% of fashion students identify as female, only 12% of creative directors at leading luxury houses are women. Even fashion houses founded by women — Schiaparelli, Chanel, Lanvin — aren’t run by women. Chanel’s Virginie Viard was recently replaced by Matthieu Blazy; the heir to Dior is Jonathan Anderson.

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This gender imbalance is a big problem, especially given that some male designers don’t seem to care much about the comfort or tastes of the women they dress. Thom Browne, for instance, has been criticized for his treatment of models — in the past, he has tied models’ hands behind their backs or obscured their faces. “Sometimes I like it when my clothes negate the person,” he told The New Yorker.

Given the state of the industry, it’s a shame that Chiuri wasn’t more radical. At its best, women’s fashion can create revolutionary change. Coco Chanel is credited with liberating women from the corset; Claire McCardell created affordable but stylish outfits that could be worn in both the day and evening; Diane von Furstenberg’s jersey wrap-dress created a universally flattering silhouette, with the added luxury of being machine washable. Such designs tore down the physical or financial restrictions that women faced in daily life — and, in their own small way, drove real social change.

Chiuri’s designs didn’t accomplish anything like this. Her T-shirt made me feel like a punchline, not a person. A playful touch of insouciance in fashion can be refreshing, but these stale slogans were platitudinous gestures. But while I don’t mourn her designs, I do mourn the symbolic loss of yet another female creative director. One of the last women standing is now gone — but Chiuri’s hollow feminist branding was not the answer to a historic issue that requires corrections in hiring practices, not sloganeering. Fashion is already considered a frivolity by most; Chiuri’s reductive efforts did nothing to change this.

Rick Owens, the avant-garde goth designer, has legions of dedicated, cultish fans — informally known as the Tribe — who not only admire his careful balance of asceticism and esotericism, but embrace his aesthetic as a lifestyle rather than merely a fashion label. He is beloved by the fashion world too, with admirers including Anna Wintour, Vera Wang, and Bella Freud.

Perhaps the most famous of his disciples, however, is Kanye West, who once described Owens as “a major source of inspiration”. He even dressed his first wife, Kim Kardashian, in his designs: the sheer, cream two-piece ensemble she wore to the 2018 CFDA Fashion Awards accentuated her figure in a way that was both grungy and glamorous. Kanye clung to the aesthetic, but he took it in his own ostentatious direction, dressing his second wife Bianca Censori in ever more revealing outfits, where the clothes became secondary to the performance of wearing them — and ultimately wearing nothing at all. Whereas Owens’s designs always seem somehow fresh and cerebral, carefully balancing nihilism with a sense of mysticism, West’s project increasingly lacks any redeeming sense of subtlety.

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There was a crassness to Kanye and Bianca’s stunt at the Grammys, which was more jarring than the nudity itself. The spectacle was too contrived, too formulaic. If the intention was to titillate, somehow it failed. The stunt seemed, if anything, anti-erotic; it exhibited not deviance or innovation, but just a sense of trying too hard.

It also seemed to pierce the careful equilibrium between exploitation and consensual personal fetish. Soon after, Kanye bragged of “dominion” over his wife, then burst into a series of antisemitic rants and attempted to sell Swastika t-shirts on his website. Fashion and fascism became uncomfortably enmeshed. Whereas Owens once played with dystopian themes, West’s stunts seemed symptomatic of a real personal decline, his wife leaving him days later.

In the backlash that followed, it seemed for a while that Kanye had given kink a bad name. By sliding from a play of domination into full-blown Nazism in a few days, he confirmed the suspicions of BDSM-critics; an enthusiasm for fetish had just masked his more dangerous beliefs and desires. And yet it seemed unfair to conflate the issues too readily; one man’s affection for both kink and fascism did not marry the two.

That same week, I picked up a copy of Anastasiia Fedorova’s book Second Skin, which explains how kink is not just for show or exploitation, but is also a compulsive way to be intimate, to develop oneself, to explore for the sake of exploring. The erotic is “a way of seeing”, and her book is concerned with those for whom fetish is not just a passing fashion or a sly form of manipulation, but a mode of optimistic transformation. “I am not my usual self,” she writes. “I have stepped into unchartered territory, where I can temporarily embody something different.”

It doesn’t have to appeal to everyone: it is not for everyone, and that is the point. In this secrecy there is something rare and therefore covetable. Perhaps this is why the wider culture pays attention and seeks to monetize it; for every counter-cultural movement or community that comes to represent something desired, there is always the risk of dissolution and co-option.

As with Owens’s fashion, it is a challenge to be inclusive and subversive at once, to be successful without one’s aesthetic attracting strange interpretations. In the case of the London kink scene, many of the club nights Fedorova writes about were shut down due to complaints of obscenity, even as the wider culture seemed to embrace a tepid or brutalized version of the same aesthetic. There is a revived conflict over what is allowed and what is not, in clubs and in awards ceremonies, magazines and relationships. Can Censori be naked at a party? Is choking permissible? Can West sell Swastika t-shirts online? Must you scorn the man who licks spit off the floor, must you talk at all? It is apparently all up for debate.

What is accepted or not is constantly being challenged. As the psychoanalyst Darian Leader argues, we learn our romantic scripts not just from the people who have brought us up but also from the communities and culture around us, and even from particular partners. Our wider cultures determine our behavior in sex and love, and crucially what we do and do not allow ourselves and one another. The script can be revised. We need not get caught in repetitive cycles — though many, quite contentedly, do.

When it comes to BDSM, it would be naive to believe that personal sexual practices are contained from the outside world in every such relationship, or that sadomasochistic dynamics cannot be a front for deception and real abuse, or that communication may not always be clear enough to prevent true harm. Played out against a landscape of endemic violence against women and girls, even the most seemingly secure and intimate relationships can be vulnerable to the contagion of the outside world, not to mention the repressed or concealed facets of one another, whether BDSM is involved or not. But it is precisely because we are so influenced by the world around us that we must be honest in exploring our desires, as well as exploring what reviles us and why.

Many of us don’t want to bear witness to another celebrity’s exposure, whether sexual, or political, if it’s not in the script we have passively agreed to. West and Censori broke the social etiquette we were familiar with, and it hit a nerve. When we discuss whether a woman such as Censori could genuinely choose to be a part of a humiliating spectacle, perhaps we are really expressing an irritation that, with the prevalence of visual media, we cannot help but watch it. We, the audience, are part of the spectacle because we can’t stop consuming it. The voyeurism is no longer a choice, and there is no safe word, no exit.

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And this is why, conversely, kink is so popular: it offers a way out, new options, an alternative way to be and feel when the media bombard us with pictures of wars and fires, images that seem like it really is the end of the world. We might not really be free, or safe, but in the right light, in some playful unexpected moment, we may feel that we are free regardless. There may be some fleeting satisfaction in this self-awareness.

“Enjoy your symptom!” writes philosopher Slavoj Žižek. This, to me, seems to be at the heart of the rise of this particularly dystopian, hyper-visible brand of fetishism that characterizes our cultural moment. Owens captures a communal neurosis in a way that has garnered him loyal followers, who have found in his fantastical world a mirror of their anxieties, and a freedom from the real world. The fetishized sickness is a contained sickness, a controllable one — a sort of pain management. In this containment, contagion unites rather than alienates its patients.

In psychoanalysis, the “symptom” is a substitute for one’s instinctual impulse that, through repression, has become displaced and distorted, so that it resembles a compulsion or sickness. Noticing or treating the symptom may give some satisfaction, but it cannot fully cure the deeper issue. And yet we can enjoy the symptoms, in a sense; we can probe the things that attract and repulse us, we can understand ourselves a little better through our fantasies.

Owens presents a fantasy world where what we fear is turned into something not only attractive but shared; he takes the ethos of fetishist counterculture and creates a wider movement. But the key to its success is still a sense of mystery and containment, a holding back; too blatant, and at the wrong moment, the spell breaks. Something must always be left to the imagination; some things must stay repressed for others to be enjoyed.

The commercial attempted to tone down the porny aspects by also showing a woman on a park bench breastfeeding, or a woman lifting weights, but those moments were overwhelmed by the titillating nipple-probing, the barrage of boobs stuffed into tight, low-cut tops. Overall, the effect was striking: love porn or hate it, the total pornification of culture is complete.

This is only partially a story about the adult-entertainment industry, which is huge and growing, with an estimated $71 billion in revenue expected in 2025. Nor is it a story about porn serving as the true means for sex education, though the average boy or girl encounters pornography at age 13, according to the UK Children’s Commissioner. What does seem to be new is a cultural takeover that goes beyond adult entertainment.

We no longer lustfully and happily tit-stare, as has been the human way since time immemorial. Nor do we fantasize about breasts as something we might like to catch a glimpse of. Instead, they’re all dolled up and shoved in our faces, aesthetically sexualized but contextually neutered, no more or less an object of desire than a can of Bud Light. Keep your pharmaceutical company off our porn, please. There’s sexy, and then there’s breast cancer, and the two are not the same.

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How the world fell for ‘romantasy’

By Valerie Stivers

There are signs of this everywhere, in high culture and low, perhaps starting with the fact that the one of our most popular social-media platforms is now called X for no apparent reason. Beauty trends for young women on an even bigger platform, TikTok, are a driving force. Heavy makeup, exaggerated lips, breasts and butts, and long plastic nails that used to read “stripper” or “porn star” are now for everyone. The latex or leather dress paired with over-the-knee platforms and (of course) jet-black acrylic claws, the regalia of the high-end dominatrix, is now part of the Upper East Side mom’s humdrum repertoire, divested of erotic meaning.

“Clean girl”, one of the dominant makeup trends, might appear at first glance as a countervailing tendency. It’s “clean” in the sense that its adherents wear light eye makeup and a natural lip and cheek palate and dress classy or preppy. But the look relies on thick layers of “natural looking” foundation and is mixed up with porn tropes like huge puffy lips and perfect fake nails. Clean-girl influencer Frida Aasen Chiabra has 1.1 million followers on Instagram and got her start as Victoria’s Secret model. Her feed shows her spraying perfume on herself, frolicking on tropical islands, and routinely going about her “real life” in lingerie or offering a butt-shot. Porn users have taken notice. The No. 1 trending porn search term for 2024, according to statistics released by Pornhub was “demure”, up 133% year-on-year, along with “modesty” (up 77%) and “traditional clothes” (34%).

It’s perhaps no surprise that two actresses from the television show Euphoria, which depicted teens in hard-core sex situations as a matter of course, are also social-media influencers of this type, known for their assets. With Sidney Sweeney (23.5 million Instagram followers), it’s breasts; with Chloe Cherry, who had a role on the show’s second season, it’s lips. Sweeney, fresh-scrubbed and collegiate-looking in a turtleneck sweater, made a cameo on the Super Bowl’s When Harry Met Sally reunion ad for Hellman’s Mayonnaise — and delivered the famous line “I’ll have what she’s having.”

Chloe Cherry (1.1 million followers), whose lips are silicone-injected to alarming proportions, was a porn actress before her role on the show, and made a pornographic parody of the show with Jenna Foxx in 2023. The two actresses have notably different public profiles — to have surgery and implants versus “natural” attributes — telegraphs variations in social class to some extent. But both are defined by a body part — in the way porn-searches reduce our desires to a single anatomical feature or piece of apparel: “fake lips”, “big tits”, “high heels”.

The porn is unstoppable. Tradwife influencer? You wear a corset over your frills and also have enormous breasts. Trendy? You’re wearing cheetah-print and have “aura” pattern on your dagger acrylics. Sally Rooney heroine? You make your money on OnlyFans. French bad-boy writer anguished about your country’s relationship with its Muslim inhabitants? You made a porn tape. Married to Kanye West? You drop your coat on the Grammys red carpet, naked except for a transparent slip. Ye himself? You share videos of your favorite porn stars during the Super Bowl (and deactivate from X afterwards, after a flurry of anti-Semitic posting).

Female reader of mass-market fiction? You’re reading Romantasy, a genre that slips into graphic descriptions of penetrations and orgasms every few chapters. American teen? You routinely refer to glazing, which now means paying too much attention to someone, but whose etymology is the porn term for having someone ejaculate on your face.

The young-man version of TikTok is probably rap music, where a similar dynamic unfolds: everything is sexualized, and none of it means a thing. The graphic description of sex acts in rap has been happening since at least the 1990s. The direct pipeline to young children, however, is a Zoomer phenomenon, and the normalization may be newer yet. My 13-year-old son, three seconds after the Netspend lyric “shut up, bitch, I need some spit” comes out of his phone, assures me that “all rappers respect women” and that they wouldn’t consider doing otherwise, because it would damage their careers.

To take Kendrick Lamar and Drake — he’s right. Both say they respect women, and have made extensive public comments on it. Another example that’s currently popular and apropos is the rapper J. Cole’s song “Wet Dreamz”. The song has more than 1 billion streams on Spotify and describes the rapper’s desire to lose his virginity: “hadn’t been in pussy since the day I came out.” When the song’s narrator and the girl he likes get into bed, Cole says, “And most of all I’m praying, ‘God, don’t let me bust quick’ / I’m watching pornos, tryna see just how to stroke right / Practice putting condoms on, how it go, right?” The song endorses porn as sex ed, comes from a person who “respects women,” and bows to convention and popular morality with contraception. All good!

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The logical endgame of the sexual revolution has been to turn sex into a recreational activity whose only meaning is defined by the people experiencing it, and whose only moral issues center around consent. By these standards, there is scarcely any reason for consenting adults not to make porn, if that’s their choice, and it’s equally OK for other consenting adults not to enjoy their solitary pleasures while watching it. Equally, it makes sense to export porn’s tropes into the mainstream and enjoy them, if that’s what we’re doing. Most of us have certain squicky feelings when it comes to kids viewing porn, but large-scale cultural pushback against these images entering our homes is only just beginning. The age requirements for porn access currently being enacted by 19 states will be an interesting test case.

There are cracks in the façade: a loneliness epidemic, statistics that this generation of oversexualized teens is having less sex, an increasing prevalence of porn-addiction and erectile dysfunction in younger and younger men. Also, the acts seem to grow more extreme and less desirable the more we get used to them.

The great and much maligned anti-pornography activist Andrea Dworkin has been having a bit of a renaissance lately. She has received some semi-positive tributes in the press, including on the right, and Picador is reissuing three of her books on this month, including Pornography: Men Possessing Women. Dworkin was a brilliant extremist and a wonderful writer, and though most of her conclusions are utterly wrong, she’s fun to read. Some lines from her fiery, man-hating pen will go down in eternity. And oddly, despite how wrong she was on almost everything, it has turned out the way she thought it would with porn and mass culture—they’ve become one.

Those iconic names thrust me back to 2003 or thereabouts, where — fag in hand on the sofa, bootcut trousers flapping round my ankles — along with much of the country I would find myself raptly watching two posh birds on telly, nominally talking about fashion. Each had a resting bitch face, stripy hair, and anhedonic drawl. In my memory, one of them is jabbing the other’s arm fat aggressively and saying her bracelet makes her look like a Roman Centurion going into battle. It really is true that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.

The news stories this week — in the vaguest sense of “news” — were about the respective 20-something daughters of former What Not To Wear presenters Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine. Lyla (Trinny’s daughter) and Esme (Susannah’s) are apparently good pals, jointly occupying Tatler’s latest cover and giving an interview together. 

Displaying the slavish respect for social etiquette we have come to expect from members of her generation, Lyla said of the pair’s more famous mothers: “I think they would be cancelled if the show was made now. You can’t really speak to people like that anymore and say things like, ‘You’re so ugly.’” She’s probably right, though. It certainly was a different time. Back then, we even called them Trinny and Tranny and nobody lost their jobs.

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Checking in with the internet to remind myself of the details, I found myself gasping with laughter at the two presenters’ brutal summations, coming thick and fast as they comment on the secret filming of some poor schmuck before that week’s redemptive fashion makeover. Take Trinny to a sartorially challenged Church of England vicar: “Just because you wear a dog collar during the day doesn’t give you an excuse to look like a dog’s dinner at night.” Later on, Susannah tells the same woman that she looks like “Robin Cousins about to go onto the ice rink in those trousers”. 

In another episode, Trinny says of an admin manager attempting to use quirky prints to distract from her large bosom: “To have a skyscraper on your left tit and a bridge on your right does nothing to detract from the size of your breasts.” But then again, they are just as critical about themselves. Susannah frequently unveils her wobbly tummy in order to poke and berate it for the benefit of viewers. The skeletal Trinny gamely does her bit too, persisting in the fiction that she is a “saddlebagger” with “thick calves” and “stumpy legs”.

As each presenter receives soul-crushing feedback from the other with serene equanimity, one wondered how they are still standing, let alone positively rocking a floaty skirt and knee-high boot. In one clip I watched, Susannah appraises a dress of Trinny’s thus: “Oh my god, I can’t bear to see it… look at your bottom… your bottom is just dribbling down the back of your legs, so we really are seeing the shortness of those little stumps.” Later on, Trinny tries to get her revenge, leaping on her co-presenter’s crop top: “You turn round and you see the tummy and you think urgh, that’s actually disgusting.”

The canonical story about What Not to Wear — emerging towards the end of its run and barely challenged since — was that the programme was viciously cruel and intensely classist, teaching a generation of young women to hate themselves. The sociologist Angela McRobbie has even written about its “post-feminist symbolic violence” towards working-class women, in the form of “public humiliation of people for their failure to adhere to middle-class standards in speech or appearance”. 

She lists a number of the presenters’ most judgemental moments, describing them as “reminiscent of Fifties boarding school stories where the nasty snobbish girls ridicule the poor scholarship girl for her appearance, manners, upbringing, accent and shabbily dressed parents”.  These include: “‘what a dreary voice’, ‘look at how she walks’, ‘she shouldn’t put ketchup on her chips’, ‘she looks like a mousy librarian’… ‘your hair looks like an overgrown poodle’, ‘your teeth are yellow, have you been eating grass?’ and ‘Oh My God… she looks like a German lesbian’”. Put like that, it does seem McRobbie might have a point. 

And yet, viewed with the luxury of hindsight, more redeeming features of the programme emerge — especially when we think about what has come since. For one thing, it isn’t true that Trinny and Susannah were only savagely rude about working-class women. Middle-class and upper-class women would get the hose too; see the aforementioned vicar. The transgressively unrestrained jibes were equally distributed, it seemed to me.

Meanwhile the crudest caricatures, as the programme-makers plainly realised, were Trinny and Susannah themselves. Even McRobbie was forced to acknowledge the “degree of self-conscious irony” with which the pair lounged around, faces guarded and contemptuous, spitting out their damning verdicts in cut-glass tones with an air of pernickety feudal lords, assessing local girls with an eye to droit du seigneur. We were supposed to laugh at them rather than with them, and they knew it, hamming up the cold fish poshness to often hilarious effect.

But more than this: the conceit of the show was not that its hosts were perfect while other mere mortals were flawed. It was understood that every woman had “problem areas”, Trinny and Susannah included. Their big idea was that you didn’t need to change yourself by diet or exercise; all you needed was a bit of tailoring or strategically placed ruching to make the most of what nature gave you. Women are all in this together, was the underlying subtext, and every imperfection can be disguised with artful tricks. If you have big hips, relax; get a jacket that covers them and not a short one that cuts straight across. If you have massive knockers, lucky you; just step away from the polo necks and get something with a scooped front instead.

At base, Trinny and Susannah were exhorting women to face their fears about bodily imperfection and decrepitude, in the manner of psychoanalysts forcing a patient in denial to name out loud what scares her and so relieve it of its power. In later seasons, this tendency reached its peak with the concept of the 360° mirror. Before its pitiless gaze, some mortified woman would be unceremoniously deposited in bra and knickers, taking the hit for all of us as the hosts commented, poked, and prodded, before inevitably suggesting a trouser with a side zip.

I have no doubt that the women concerned absolutely hated it, but I don’t buy the wider complaint that the wrong message about size and shape was thereby sent to viewers. On the contrary — I think that most of us looked on with sympathetic fellow feeling, and came away with some relief and even hope. Instead of private, shame-filled self-chastisement about a particular problem area, perhaps we could just accept that everybody has one or two of the blasted things, then go shopping to celebrate.

Since then, officially sanctioned attitudes to female physiques have been revolutionised, with body positivity and self-acceptance the new bywords in places such as the BBC. For at least a decade, our progressive overlords have been furiously pretending that beauty standards for women are just radically contingent cultural norms; that if we all act like anything goes, then soon enough, it will. 

Yet strangely, this doesn’t seem to have made women any more content. Cosmetic surgery is a growing trend even in the young, and there has been a recent large increase in the numbers of hospital admissions for eating disorders. We have invented a whole new set of fashionable ways for women and girls to punish themselves in the quest to meet, or escape, standards of physical perfection: chopping old bits off as well as inserting new ones, chemically removing appetites, fasting for days, or doing CrossFit ‘til you’re sick.  

At the same time, evolving social mores have deprived us of the vocabulary to describe what it is we are running towards, or from: the basic knowledge that some faces and bodies are just more symmetrical, well-proportioned, and generally pleasing than others. Perversely, in well-intentioned attempts to deny this point, all we have managed to do is lose opportunities to cut its relative importance in life down to size.

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By Kathleen Stock

After the demise of What Not to Wear, the televisual theatre of cruelty didn’t disappear, it just changed tack. Instead of watching a woman’s appearance being bitchily appraised for the purposes of cathartic female team-building, we started watching more fundamental aspects of people’s characters being demolished. Delusional would-be pop stars with no talent would be humiliated to tears by a pompous Simon Cowell; desperate and chaotic restaurant owners were screamed at by a psychopathic Gordon Ramsay. Instead of the jolly, bawdy identification of relatively trivial problems, fixable by a side zip or a bit of clever fabric-gathering, we got vulnerable people’s deep-seated character flaws and weaknesses, mercilessly exposed. But that’s progress for you.

Knowing their time was up, Trinny went off and founded a make-up empire — apparently succumbing to the lure of the plastic surgeon in the end, and thereby negating the central message of her old programme in the process. Susannah, meanwhile, has become a fabulous all-natural dowager-type on Instagram, grumpily hawking supplements on the balcony of her Greek villa and delivering vaguely depressive rants from the bath about the poor quality of M&S pyjamas. Her followers plainly adore her. What with Jilly Cooper’s Rivals now in vogue, and outrageous toffs apparently in the ascendancy once again, she should be resurrected as a national treasure forthwith.

But still, to me her golden age will always be alongside Trinny in the early Noughties, forming a comic televisual duo to rival the great Fanny and Johnnie Craddock in their campy hauteur. Search it out now: the perfect refuge from the boredom and oppression of today’s What Not to Say.

There is, however, something different about this evening’s show. The Costume Institute’s spring exhibition, “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion”, focuses on 50 historical pieces from its collection that are too fragile to be worn again. So far, so haute couture. But while the dress code for the Gala follows the same logic, it also takes inspiration from an unlikely source: guests are invited to take their lead from “The Garden of Time”, a 1962 short story by J. G. Ballard.

It is impossible as a Ballard fan not to be excited by this unexpected turn of events. One imagines that it would have delighted such a close student of contemporary culture and keen analyst of celebrity. And, though hardly a style icon (he dressed generally like the Surrey dad he was), Ballard took fashion seriously. In his autobiography, Miracles of Life, Ballard praised the social revolution of the Sixties for, among other things, “the use of fashion as a political weapon” (as well as for “the youth cults and drug culture”).

Nor is this the first time the fashion world has taken an interest in Jimmy’s work. In fact, he contributed to British Vogue himself twice in the late Seventies. During that period, Vogue employed a literary editor, Lucy Hughes-Hallett, and Ballard, seen as something of a provocateur following his “urban disaster” trilogy of novels (Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise), was well-connected in literary circles. The resulting collaborations, “The Future of the Future” and “The Diary of a Mad Space Wife”, were speculative futurological pieces, containing the vivid insights for which he continues to be renowned, alongside some predictive misses.

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So, the recreation of Ballard in the unlikely guise of a fashion guru is a cause for considerable celebration. But how might those lucky enough to attend the Gala respond to the theme? If you’re on the list and need some last-minute inspiration, read on. You’ll want to be fully Ballard-conversant, so scroll down for the deep-cut style tips. (A shortcut for anyone wanting to pay tribute to the man himself: think gin o’clock vibes — cream linen suit and striped shirt — and you won’t go far wrong.)

The obvious place to start is the story itself. “The Garden of Time” imagines an aristocratic couple, Count Axel and his wife the Countess, living a life of luxurious leisure in a beautiful villa with terraced gardens nearby a lake. While they spend their days in the library, or drawing room, reading rare volumes and playing Bach on the harpsichord, a mob approaches across the plain beyond the low garden walls: “a vast throng of people, men and women, interspersed with a few soldiers in ragged uniforms, pressing forward in a disorganised tide”. By picking the time flowers in their garden, the Count and Countess can turn back the clock for the period of time it takes for a bloom to shed its petals. The time flowers, though, are running out, and the mob draws ever closer. On the night the Countess picks the final bloom the mob flood over the wall to discover two stone statues in the garden.

As a parable for the times in which we live, it’s hard to beat. As parts of the planet become uninhabitable, and the movement of people across the globe breeds new conflicts, the super-rich are noticeably retreating to islands, gated communities, and the bunkers on their New Zealand estates. But in the context of the elite Met Gala, the choice of this story is ambiguous at best: is the fashion world trolling those of us too poor to buy Stella McCartney? The 99% of us excluded from the A-list events?

Those who want to show they’ve done their homework can take pointers from the Count and Countess. Axel is “a tall, imperious figure in a black velvet jacket, a gold tie-pin glinting below his George V beard, cane held stiffly in a white-gloved hand”. The Countess, meanwhile, wears a brocade dress. “Her face was serene and intelligent, her hair swept back behind her head into a jewelled clasp, touched with silver. She wore her dress low across her breast, revealing a long slender neck and high chin.” It’s easy to imagine Ms Wintour’s attention caught by these details as she leafed through Ballard’s Collected Short Stories.

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But in the context of Ballard’s larger oeuvre, “The Garden of Time” isn’t actually the obvious choice for inspiration. Intriguingly, there is a much more fashion-focused option from Ballard’s short fiction, concerned almost entirely with futuristic speculation. The Seventies story “Say Goodbye to the Wind” is set within Ballard’s imagined Vermillion Sands resort, whose “spiritual home lies somewhere between Arizona and Ipanema Beach”, and which was Ballard’s “guess at what the future will actually be like” when “work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work”.

The story is centred on a boutique that sells bio-fabric fashions: “Clothes are no longer made from dead fibres of fixed colour and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure, but from living tissues that adapt themselves to the contours and personality of the wearer.” Many of the beach designs sold at the boutique are in op-art styles, so vintage Quant might be one way to go. And while we haven’t yet quite cracked bio-fabrics, any panicked and underdressed celebs might try a call to Polish fashion designer Iga Węglińska, who made two tops in 2021 designed to change colour or flash with lights in response to feelings of stress or anxiety.

All this is well and good, but seasoned Ballard watchers will be wanting his waspish attitude to pierce the apparently sophisticated veneer of style. In the second of his novels to fictionalise elements of his own life, The Kindness of Women, a sequel to Empire of the Sun, Ballard commented wryly on the tendency within fashion to épater les bourgeois. It was a tendency he recognised well: “One of Cleo’s fashion magazines showed some models prancing about in front of a blow-up from the Zapruder film – the Kennedy assassination as a fashion accessory?”

His later-period work further satirised this inclination towards fashion edginess. In the novel Millennium People (2003), a middle-class terrorist militia movement based in south-west London becomes a fashion inspiration: people wear “camouflage fatigues and military webbing, part of the new guerrilla chic inspired by Chelsea Marina that had already featured in an Evening Standard fashion spread”. A bit too street for such a glitzy event? Perhaps. In which case, the statement offering suggested in the short “The Object of the Attack” (1984) might be a bit more to your taste: “Already the disguised fashion-accessory holster worn by Princess Diana has inspired a substantial copycat industry, and London is filled with young women wearing stylised codpieces (none of them realise why).”

These deadpan satirical flourishes do pose a number of questions: what are we to make of the fact that the work of a writer who so surgically anatomised contemporary culture’s celebrity obsessions from his suburban home has now become fodder for the ultimate red-carpet event? Do the notoriously enervated and excessive doyennes of the fashion world see themselves in Ballard’s visions of hyper-aristocracy? Do they “feel seen”? There is something delicious and ambiguous about the Ballardian Met. The author who began playing with his own fictional representation as early as Crash and who took great delight in a walk-on part as John Bull in Spielberg’s adaptation of Empire of the Sun would surely have watched with great relish to see how the current crop of Liz Taylors and Jayne Mansfields interpret his early work. “Nothing is real, everything is fake.” He has strolled into the heart of the gated community.

One of the holy sacraments of Ballardian mythology surrounds his notorious story “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”, a Crash-era piece in the style of a scientific report acutely describing psychosexual responses to the then California governor’s subliminal appeal. It is rumoured — possibly apocryphally — to have been circulated under a Republican Party letterhead at a Republican conference in 1980, where it was taken for what it appeared to be: “a position paper by a renegade think tank”. Ballard always aimed for ambiguity and this has always entailed the possibility of, shall we say, distinct readings. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that tonight’s attendees who have read it will be likely to empathise with the Count and Countess in “The Garden of Time”. But for how long can they keep the hordes at the other side of the garden wall by pulling on just one more fragile frock?

The original Teds were the pioneers, denounced from pulpits and by politicians as little more than a hooligan mob. Originating in Blitz-damaged working-class districts of London such as Elephant & Castle and the East End, they began dressing in the Edwardian-style: long, velvet-collared jackets, narrow trousers, flashy waistcoats and crepe-soled shoes. The loss of countless young men in the war meant that jobs were now plentiful even for 15-year-old school-leavers, who had spare cash to go dancing, to the cinema and to order custom-made Ted suits from local tailors. And when authentic US rock’n’roll first broke into the British charts in late 1954, the Teds embraced it wholeheartedly. But it was only a few years before they grew up, and the mods and rockers came in to take their place as the moral panic of the day.

From the Fifties through to the end of the Eighties, this informal system of creative destruction roughly held. But then something went wrong. Though certain styles have a vague Noughties aura, there is little to fundamentally distinguish the way a teenager of today might dress from in 2004, or even earlier. And music is now consumed and sought out in a radically different way. A friend of mine who has been a well-known goth DJ for some years, told me that he was recently spinning records at Slimelight in London, a fixture since 1987, the “world’s oldest dark scene club playing ebm, electro, goth, futurepop, dark techno & trance, industrial”. The description itself is a measure of how much music scenes have fragmented into micro-categories. A young person came up to the booth and requested some “rock” music: when he asked her to be more specific, it turned out that she couldn’t name a single group or even a song she might prefer. She even seemed unclear as to what exactly rock might be in the first place.

It’s the sort of thing to give an old NME rockist an aneurysm. But it also marks a fundamental cultural change from the 20th century, when the category of “genre” was a fierce battlefield. Even “fame” has become compartmentalised. In their day, the Rolling Stones and the Sex Pistols were catapulted onto the front pages of newspapers and broadcast into millions of homes. A pensioner in the Sixties would have heard of (and probably loathed) Mick Jagger. But in our own time, acts can rack up colossal download figures while remaining almost completely unknown to anyone outside their own particular fan base.

Someone my age knows exactly what it feels like to be swept up by the new wind of a subculture. In 1976, punk rock hit Britain with the first Ramones LP, followed a few months later by the debut singles by the Damned and the Sex Pistols. The music and the clothing seemed the logical heirs to the stripped-down Fifties rock’n’roll I already loved. In our part of the country, you couldn’t yet walk into a shop and buy a punk t-shirt — such things were still the preserve of McLaren and Westwood’s wildly overpriced Seditionaries shop. But simple things — straight jeans rather than flares, skinny ties, short, spiky hair, combined with a scattering of badges — were enough to mark you out as some kind of a punk. And these standards were strictly policed. One of the best bands of the era, The Only Ones, were heckled at early gigs by their own crowd, who yelled “flared trousers, flared trousers” at them in protest at their failure to toe the sartorial line.

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By 1977, I was regularly walking the night-time streets of my home city, Portsmouth, in DIY ripped-up and stencilled clothing. You quickly became used to running the gauntlet of other youth tribes who felt duty-bound to criticise your tastes by the application of fists or boots. But I cared enough about the music that it seemed worth the risk. And the music itself was a liberation, the sounds that I heard on John Peel’s evening Radio One show, and read about in the NME, inspiring me to form a band with some friends and start playing live, frequenting some of the city’s less salubrious pubs. Yet the tabloid newspapers of the day did everything in their power to promote the idea that punk musicians were little more than violent oafs: Bernard Brook-Partridge, chairman of the Greater London Council, famously declared that “most of these groups would be vastly improved by sudden death”.

It was certainly an identity that many were willing to scrap for. I was one of around 50 Portsmouth teenagers who showed up in October 1977 to see X-Ray Spex. One particularly brazen punk had scrawled “I’m Glad Elvis Died” across his torn white t-shirt: this was a provocation too far, given that Presley had been gone less than a month. A sizeable contingent of local Teds were waiting outside the venue when the gig finished, looking for an excuse to give some punks a hiding. (I was never much good at sport, but I ran off pretty swiftly before things spilled over into violence.) The media delighted in these scenes, deliberately pitting one group of young people against another. At the height of the Queen’s official Jubilee celebrations that year, Ian Glover-James from the London Evening Standard, accompanied by a photographer, rounded up a group of second-generation Teds and followed them as they set off down the King’s Road looking for punks to attack:

“It has been going on for a month or more. Gangs of Teds, teenage imitators of the 1950s originals, on search and destroy missions looking for the enemy, driven by a bond of brotherhood and intolerance for anything more bizarre than themselves. Their motive? Over to the leader of the pack, 19-year-old Rockin’ Mick from Brockley: ‘We hate punks,’ he stated simply. ‘By Christmas they’ll be wiped out.’”

The streets are far from safe for young people now, with parts of big cities governed by the anonymous threat of random knife crime. But this sort of passionate, identitarian — almost sectarian — violence between subcultures has largely disappeared.

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In 1979, hot on the heels of punk, young people looking for a scene could choose between three separate revivals that year: ska, rockabilly and mod. The turn of the decade brought the New Romantic movement, the psychobillies who combined rockabilly and punk, and the Goths, whose major bands were often products of the original Seventies punk scene. Yet by the early Nineties, despite the fondness of the music press for hanging labels like grunge, shoegazing or Britpop on certain bands, it had become ever more difficult to tell an individual’s taste in music simply from the way they looked. A sea of shapeless t-shirts with band logos ruled the day. Scenes blended into each other, and people who attended a Pulp gig one evening might go to a Cramps gig the following night, all wearing the same clothes.

Today, in the age of the big flat now, the era of the animal-print onesie, fashions may fluctuate but are no longer a signifier of cultural identity. And, if you do feel the need to walk around dressed up as a leather-and-studs punk rocker or Vlad the Impaler, it will probably just be assumed that you’re on a stag or hen night. So much of youth fashion in particular has stood still. One of the most common streetwear styles today dates from 1986, when the pioneering New York hip-hop outfit Run-DMC sang about “My Adidas”, leading to a lucrative sponsorship deal with that corporation. The group’s essential look of clothing, headgear and trainers would not seem out of place worn by later hip-hop performers or fans over the succeeding decades.

Musical taste itself has mutated, becoming more all-encompassing and less partisan as the internet gave access to a far greater array of recordings from all periods and cultures than ever before. In the Seventies, Britain could support five national music papers selling hundreds of thousands of copies each week. Now, even their names — Record Mirror, Disc — sound like anachronisms. Such cohesion and shared experiences slowly became a thing of the past with the great proliferation of terrestrial and satellite channels over the following decades, and with it, that sense of belonging which is essential to nurturing a subculture. Common ground has given way to individual choice, and no-one seems to think that you can bring down the monarchy by singing a song anymore.

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My uncle was a teenage Teddy boy in the mid-Fifties, growing up in a council house in Slough. He had the clothes, the haircut and the textbook James Dean-Presley moody expression which he could put on for the cameras, even in my parents’ wedding photos. During my punk days, I once asked him whether he and his friends had run into difficulties from differently-dressed groups, and he said no, it was just the Teds, the vanguard of youth rebellion, against the straight society.

Today, instead of that binary division, there are a multitude of available identities to try on and discard at will, while social media and the need for “likes” and approval reward those who fit in rather than kick out at the system. Of course, the system itself has also long since mutated, and the spectacle of former would-be rock singer and guitarist Tony Blair inviting Noel Gallagher to Downing Street in 1997 only showed how far the old battlelines had been erased. The title of one of Noel’s songs famously referenced Angry Young Man John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, the 1956 play that declared that “there aren’t any good brave causes left”. In our time, plenty of young people march in the streets and protest about everything from wars to climate change, but the flags they fly are social and political, and what unites them is the individual cause they are fighting for, rather than any subculture.

For those too young to have witnessed the great metrosexual panic of the late Nineties and early 2000s, it’s hard to explain just how worked up we all were by the realisation that there were men out there who conditioned their hair and moisturised their faces and wore clothes that actually fit, and yet who were somehow — and here, the mind boggled — not gay. In 2003, “metrosexual” was Word of the Year; in June, it was subject to a writeup in the New York Times Style, under the winking headline, “Metrosexuals Come Out”. By December, it was showing up in everything from celebrity profiles to book reviews to think pieces pondering whether the metrosexual was definitionally metropolitan, or whether men in the suburbs could get in on this new brand of masculinity too. Threaded through it all was a sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop: the metrosexuals were into women, or so they said, but they obviously weren’t straight in the same sense as the cowboys, lumberjacks and plumbers of the world.

Like many Style-section pieces, the struggle to define the boundaries of metrosexuality was ultimately more about marketing than identity: “Along with terms like ‘PoMosexual,’ ‘just gay enough’ and ‘flaming heterosexuals,’ the word metrosexual is now gaining currency among American marketers who are fumbling for a term to describe this new type of feminized man,” wrote the New York Times. Then, as now, we weren’t quite sure how men should be; the metrosexual was an early hint that one possible answer was: more like women.

Today, metrosexuals are recognisable as an early prototype of affinity-based identities, the kind that describe how you present yourself instead of what you do (see: the straight-married women in their thirties who have never slept with a woman but self-identify as “queer“). Although some metrosexuals of the early 2000s dabbled in gender nonconformity — with painted nails and skirts and such — in a way that might now be referred to as “queerbaiting”, metrosexuality wasn’t ever really about who these men wanted to have sex with. It was about masculinity, and what that was supposed to look like, and particularly about how this new breed of man would be received by women.

As for this, feelings were mixed. For some women, perhaps the kind who perk up at the phrase “couples spa trip”, a metrosexual boyfriend represented the best of both worlds; for others, these men invited comparisons that tended to make us feel, if not unfeminine, then at least like slobs. In my early twenties, at the peak of the Metrosexual Discourse, I won a trip for two to a ranch in Texas after entering an essay contest in which entrants were asked to describe why their metrosexual boyfriends needed lessons in manliness. I gamely joked about how my boyfriend’s predilection for pink shirts and casual use of the phrase “mani-pedi” were becoming relationship dealbreakers, but looking back, what strikes me is that this was less about masculinity than a bad match. The poor guy didn’t need manliness lessons; he just needed a different girlfriend, ideally one who shared his interest in nail care.

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But the is-he-or-isn’t-he jokes among women also masked a quiet sense of desperation. Most straight men had come to approach matters of grooming and culture with an aggressive indifference: an approach that flew in the face of historical norms. It wasn’t just that the metrosexual had an obvious precursor in the fashionable dandy of yore; being mannered and being marriageable had always gone hand in hand. Jane Austen’s eligible bachelors dressed for an occasion, and even the hyper-masculine James Bond was fussy about the cut of his tuxedo. But sometime in the mid-20th century, those associations began to shift, perhaps fuelled by a Sixties protest culture that recast civilised norms — things like haircuts and suits — as tools of oppression. The masculine ideal morphed from Cary Grant in North by Northwest to something far scruffier, unshaven and untucked.

And once caring about your appearance became square, it was only a matter of time before it also became (homo)sexually suspect, culminating in the Nineties nadir wherein every sitcom couple included a schlubby man paired with an impossibly hot wife. Straight men asserted their straightness via a sort of peacocking in reverse: whoever wore the worst outfit was probably the most heterosexual. Not even the sexiest man alive could make these terrible clothes look good.

One can detect a confluence of factors at play here, including the downstream effects of tech replacing finance as the nexus of male power and influence. Suddenly, the biggest boss in the room wasn’t a Wall Street VP in a three-piece suit, but a gawky geek who had never been interested in clothes nor looked especially good in them. For these guys, disentangling basic male fashion and grooming standards from male sex appeal may have functioned as a sort of revenge — not just against the preppy bullies and jocks of high school, but against the oppressive notion that appearances should matter at all. At the same time, the increased visibility of gay men in elite cultural spaces — art, fashion, food — combined with the casual homophobia of the era to create a visceral sense that culture itself was “gay”, a word that became synonymous with “uncool”.

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And so the heterosexual man of the moment was identifiable not only by his Seinfeldian pairing of ill-fitting jeans and chunky white basketball shoes, but by an adolescent distaste for anything more highbrow than a Die Hard movie. These guys didn’t dance, didn’t cook, and definitely didn’t care about art or films or music. If metrosexuality was about straight men who didn’t mind seeming a little bit swishy, it was arguably an overdue response to straightness having become synonymous with having the sartorial and cultural tastes of a five-year-old. At a moment when raunch culture was on its last legs but the soft boy had not yet made his debut, metrosexuals were like a gateway drug to a new, more mature, sensitivity-trained brand of masculinity.

And once men started to care what they looked like, a massive vibe shift ensued: more stylish clothing, for instance, meant slimmer silhouettes, which meant more time at the gym, which meant that metrosexuals were targets for not just fashion and grooming but fitness and nutrition products as well. We think of them as a sociological phenomenon, but as the New York Times pointed out: they were a marketing demographic first. You can practically see the dollar signs flashing in the eyes of a marketing executive quoted in the original writeup on this emerging category of man: ”The guy who drinks Grey Goose is willing to pay extra,” he said. ”He does it in all things in his life. He doesn’t buy green beans, he buys haricots verts.”

First you make a person believe that spending $40 on shampoo isn’t vain or frivolous; then, you convince him that actually, the shampoo is a form of self-care. This is the logic that has long persuaded women to spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars a year on skincare, makeup and beauty treatments; but it’s also a logic that persuades men to adopt the same neuroses women have long struggled with around fashion, aging, and physical fitness.

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And persuaded they are: men are now seeking out tweakments in record numbers, and suffering from body dysmorphia at greater rates than ever before. TikTok “looksmaxxers” trade tips on proper skincare; Twitter accounts scold men for sartorial crimes like improperly matching a formal tie with a rugged sport coat. Caring about how you look has been fully recoded from a niche, suspicious twist on traditional masculinity to an obligation, as it has always been for women. The sexual suspicion surrounding men being effeminately preoccupied with their faces has disappeared. Indeed, a key tenet of looksmaxxing is that the young men who do it make themselves more attractive to women — and why not, when there’s no perceived paradox between wanting to be desired by women and wanting to behave more like them?

The past 10 years have not only encouraged men to adopt the same neuroses as women about what other people think of their skin and hair and bodies, but to constitutionally reorient themselves toward the feminine. Consider how often are men instructed that they need to be more feelings-oriented, less assertive, more empathic, less status-seeking — or how male sexuality, or even just sexual interest, is increasingly understood as inherently predatory and dangerous. Consider the 2018 American Psychological Association press release which declared that “traditional masculinity — marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression — is, on the whole, harmful”, and all but announced the profession’s intent to wage war on manhood, one 50-minute therapy session at a time. Consider the summer blockbuster Barbie, in which the previously effeminate Ken’s newfound masculinity is presented as both a profoundly malevolent force and an absurd punchline.

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Replacing old-school masculinity with metrosexuality may be the least objectionable way in which our concept of ideal manhood keeps tipping incrementally toward the feminine. Certainly, as a straight woman, I’m in no hurry to return to a time when men proved their heterosexual bona fides by competing to see who could dress (and sometimes smell) the most like literal garbage. But if boys and men are in crisis, as we are repeatedly and reliably assured they are, I’m also not persuaded that recalibrating the entire world toward a more feminine baseline is the best way to avoid that outcome.

The arc of the metrosexual holds lessons here: we have seen the backlash to a world in which being a man becomes synonymous with being a boor, but we have also seen what happens when that backlash curdles into a sense that masculinity and boorishness cannot be disentangled, and hence should both be rejected wholesale. In a culture that can’t conceive of healthy masculinity — a culture that instructs men that the best way to be is more like a woman — some men will conform. But others, finding nothing they can emulate and nothing to aspire to, will revolt — and it will be ugly.

The curators of the V&A’s new retrospective have done a superb job of assembling the things. The suits, shoes, scarves, perfume and jewellery; so much in the show looks as chic as it did when it left Chanel’s studio. Yet the exhibition claims to give us “a window onto the life”. And, having spent more than four years immersed in that life researching Chanel: An Intimate Life, I left feeling that the woman at the centre has just slipped quietly out of the room.

The show fails to capture Chanel’s most crucial motivator, which was not her sex but her class, or lack of it. Her early years were defined by deprivation. She was the daughter of street vendors, and after her mother died, her semi-pauper ratbag of a father dumped her in a convent orphanage. Subjected to humiliating charity for seven years, she fled at the age of 18, later saying: “I knew no father, no mother, no home and no love.” Sustained by enormous pride, her drive to succeed was ferocious; it turned her into a revolutionary.

Unfortunately, Chanel has become better-known in recent years as a Right-wing collaborator. Space is given at the V&A to certain false arguments, popularised by Hal Vaughan’s book, Sleeping With the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War, which accuses her of being a Nazi spy. It’s true that Chanel’s record during the war was appalling: she was brazen enough to live in the Ritz, which had been requisitioned by Nazi officers, with a German lover who definitely spied for the Nazis even if he wasn’t an officer.

But Hal Vaughan claims that Chanel was a code-named active agent of the Abwehr. He doesn’t have paper evidence for this — there is only interpretation and guilt-by-association. He doesn’t recognise that, as Serge Klarsfeld, the well-known Nazi hunter, said, just “because she had a spy number doesn’t in any way mean that she was involved personally”.

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The exhibition does at least tell the other side of the story, highlighting new evidence that Chanel was, in fact, working for the French Resistance. That we cannot say which side she was more sympathetic to is typical: Chanel was a shapeshifter. Even though she was claimed by the establishment long ago, her image becoming synonymous with conventional elegance, she was actually a radical, mysterious outsider. Her friends and lovers were the modernist artists hellbent on disrupting social norms: Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Diaghilev. Chanel, like them, was out to undermine the old order, the suffocating social hierarchies, which had put her, the illegitimate, dirt-poor country girl, at the bottom of the pile.

At the V&A, an exquisite long, red evening dress gleams in the dark, both fitted and flowing. But it’s not the silk of haute couture; it’s the humble cotton velvet of working women’s clothes. Chanel’s jersey sweaters are decorated with fur — that traditional status marker, the rarer and more expensive the better — but it is the fur of the downmarket rabbit. Her rich clients scooped them up. She devised poverty for billionaires, unable to resist playing the game of social subversion. This notion of dress is now popular: these days, it’s all about “Stealth Wealth”. But it was Chanel who taught us to think like this. “People,” she said, “confuse poverty with simplicity.”

In my favourite photo of her, she wears a cream, slouchy jersey top. With one hand jammed into a large patch pocket and informally done-up dark hair, her only decoration is a flower pinned at the waist.  This was 1913, when the undyed, utilitarian jersey she used for these long, V-necked “sweaters” was unheard of in fashionable society. Rich women soon queued to buy them. Pockets were considered unladylike, largely confined to working women. But Chanel defiantly slapped them on and into her clothes. Black dresses had hitherto been worn only by servants or for mourning, but Chanel’s iconic designs were quickly copied and became an essential in every woman’s wardrobe. American Vogue named one black dress “The Ford”, because it was as ubiquitous as the model of car.

Haute couture is by definition exclusive, but deep down Chanel never forgot that, unlike all her clients, she was a woman of the people. Nor was she allowed to forget it: in 1923, when the vastly wealthy Singer heiress, Winaretta, was asked why Chanel wasn’t invited to a party she was throwing — at which guests included Chanel’s friends Stravinsky and Diaghilev, and the whole of the Ballet Russes — Singer said: “Oh, I don’t entertain my tradespeople.” Chanel was a dressmaker, not an artist.

She got her revenge. By the end of the Twenties, her enormous creative success, and dazzling charisma, had made her one of the most sought-after figures in Parisian society. Her friend Paul Morand remembers what came later: “those supper parties at La Pause” — Chanel’s country home — “without servants, at which one served oneself from plate warmers lined up on the game table. Never was snobbery better directed against oneself.”

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But Chanel was forever riddled with class anxiety. She loathed actual selling; it brought out her well-hidden, deep insecurity. From the outset, she found a way around this, one that doubled up as a method of preserving her mystique. She stayed off the shop floor, saying that, “every customer seen is a customer lost”, and persuading others to sell what she produced.

By keeping herself at a distance, Gabrielle helped construct the myth of Coco Chanel. It helped that she was an inveterate fantasist about her past and her present. When she told the story of her life, her father’s unbearable abandonment didn’t happen. Her shameful incarceration in the convent became a miserable stay with old aunts. She never admitted that she was addicted to morphine. She distorted the truth to survive psychically. As her biographer, I had to learn how to read between her lines.

More than 50 years after her death, the Chanel Corporation seductively perpetuates the Coco myth. Every new piece is a homage to the original. Each season, there is the quilted bag, the suit, the jacket. These are altered, added to, made more “now” — but are always recognisable. Karl Lagerfeld, for instance, made a classic Chanel jacket, and then replaced the demure skirt with a full tulle one, placing it over bovver boots and holed tights.

Chanel always said: “I am against fashion that doesn’t last.” Unlike most of her fellow designers, she always thought that any fashion not adopted by the majority of women was a failure. I think if Chanel were to walk, inevitable fag in her mouth, through the V&A’s exhibition, she would feel again the tension that motivated her whole body of work. On the one hand, the rebel would delight to see that she’d irrevocably destroyed so many of her era’s established precepts of good taste. On the other, she’d be triumphant that this beautiful temple of the establishment, one of the great museums of the world, is honouring that very destruction. Accepted as part of our culture, we no longer notice her innovations; but they endure, and continue to be made new.

What we need, then, is something that both binds us and shines to the world: a new Cool Britannia to resurrect the “swaggering sense of national self-belief” we have lost. The problem here is that our former bluster was powered by the fundamental belief that Things Can Only Get Better. Today, most of us simply hope that Things Can’t Get Any Worse. Liz Truss’s short-lived Big Bang 2.0 and Rishi Sunak’s Californian techno-utopian dreams of a start-up Britannia have failed to provide any sense of collective belief in a better future.

Cool Britannia’s optimism was turbocharged by an onslaught of aspirational cultural production that gave Britain a joyous vibe of buzzy creativity and irreverence. We had Blur, Oasis, The Spice Girls, Suede, Massive Attack and Pulp. Our fashion industry was trailblazing with Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood, Paul Smith, Ozwald Boateng, and John Galliano. The YBAs made British art the talk of the planet. Hugh Grant looked fabulous.

We still have star power. The problem is that so many of our icons — consider Harry Styles, Adele and Daniel Kaluuya — have a British-accented charisma that feels more Hollywood than Blighty. They are too geographically and thematically distant and mainstream to build a new national myth around.

So, what do we do? The answer can perhaps be found in Tara Isabella Burton’s latest book Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. Here, Burton explores how figures through history have mastered the art of self-creation to fulfil their wildest dreams. From Renaissance Italy to Instagram, Burton reveals the dark arts of building a hypnotic brand that bends an audience to its will. From narcissist painter Albrecht Dürer and Regency dandy Beau Brummell to the proto-fascist Giovanni D’Annunzio and Paris Hilton, each character offers a playbook for how Britain can build a brand that delicately synthesises a new inspirational self-image.

Burton’s theory is simpler than you might expect: concoct a cocktail of mesmerising vibes and fake it until you make it. Quoting Baldassare Castiglione’s 1528 handbook The Courtier, she explains that the best brand-building comes from going “about selecting this thing from one and that thing from another. And as the bee in the green meadows is ever wont to rob the flowers among the grass, so our Courtier must steal this grace from all who seem to possess it”. Castiglione’s methodology is captured in the mysterious concept of sprezzatura — translated as nonchalance or lightness. Sprezzatura, Castiglione explains, “conceals design and shows that what is done and said is done without effort and almost without thought”.

Burton says that this can be achieved by “lying, at least the delicately artful ‘little white lie’ kind, is integral to self-making”. To become who we want to be, “we first have to convince other people that we are what we are not”. In other words, modern Britain might be far from a fountain of relentless creativity, but if we take on the sprezzatura mindset of Castiglione’s honeybee, perhaps we can begin to give the impression that we are. After all, it is also the case that everything was not fine in the Nineties — no matter how much Blair wandered around pretending to be Jesus in chinos.

One bee who is already busily buzzing about is Daniel Lee, Burberry’s new Chief Creative Officer. Lee, a 37-year-old working-class Bradford-born designer, has been working in the shadows cultivating a Cool Britannia 2.0 that is both scintillatingly hot and British. Only five years ago, his predecessor Riccardo Tisci torched Burberry’s classic crusader knight logo and replaced it with an Instagram-friendly orange monogram. Trampling over a century of heritage, he turned Burberry into yet another bland cosmopolitan luxury brand. Yet, this year, Lee launched a whipsaw reversal. Not only has he restored the knight, but he has revived an even more ornate version of the logo from 1901 that emphasises the Latin prorsum slogan, meaning “progress”.

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But Lee’s new Burberry is far from jingoistic heritage maximalism. With adverts that feature foxes, corgis, swans, rabbits, Vanessa Redgrave, Raheem Sterling and Skepta, his rebrand captures the timeless equities that Britain has leveraged in our greatest moments. Lee recognises the dynamic contradictions that underlie the nation’s soul: the heritage and the zest for innovation, the aristocratic and the punk, the local and the global. Harmoniously resolving these tensions is the key to driving modern Britain forward — and making it sexy.

Of course, the quiet revolution triggered by Lee must not solely be led by a fashion brand; Burberry’s Britannia is not a substitute for a whole nation’s hopes and dreams. A national mythology cannot be driven by adverts alone, it should be accompanied by a wave of art and culture that transmits something new.

Moreover, if Cool Britannia 2.0 is to thrive, it needs a conductor. In the Nineties, that role was partly filled by Tony Blair. And he was desperate to make sure everybody knew it, constantly orchestrating photo opportunities that placed him in the thick of it. Comparably, despite an equivalent lead in the polls, Keir Starmer is the antonym of Cool Britannia. Not even a photoshoot in a Stone Island polo shirt next to a graffitied wall in Berlin would convince Britain that we are entering a new dawn of cool. Nor will his faux-nostalgia for football, the smell of hamburgers and horse shit.

This leaves a vacuum, a gaping hole awaiting a Arch-Sprezzatura Honeybee who will come out of the shadows and deliver us this hallowed new Cool Britannia. They must have the stature of a statesman, the respect of the masses, and the nonchalance that makes the nation gush and gasp. With Starmer and Sunak ill-equipped for the role, and King Charles now 74, the throne lies empty.

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Princess Kate, Britain’s most popular royal, may stake a claim with her Vampire’s Wife dresses, misspent youth, and ketamine-fuelled-rave attendance, but ultimately she is too above culture to really drive it. Stormzy, the rap phenomenon and emerging national treasure, has signalled a willingness to wear the weight of the crown. In his Banksy-designed Union Jack stab-proof vest, he has demonstrated pedigree in wrestling with Britain complex modern identity. Perhaps more importantly, he is also on Burberry’s roster. However, as an already iconic creative powerhouse, he seems better suited as the first violin.

Noticeably lurking is Manchester mayor Andy Burnham. The bookies’ favourite to succeed Starmer has already signalled his honeybee credentials. After two failed leadership bids, Burnham has rebranded from strait-laced Blairite Westminster drone to a laid-back-but-serious, 24-hour-partying King of the North. In October, he will launch his new SXSW-inspired Beyond The Music festival and conference in Manchester — the originator of so much of Britain’s cool. The event, Burnham claims, will be about building “a creative alliance for the future” that brings together music, tech, gaming, brands and more.

Amid the pessimism, however, the prospects of a Cool Britannia resurgence feel dim. Yet consider this: in the age of self-making, the currency of vibes trumps stark realities. The ultimate heroine of Burton’s book is Caroline Calloway, the audacious Scammer Priestess. Despite squandering a half-million-dollar book advance and selling Snake Oil, Calloway has thrived by distorting reality. From faking exam results to get into Cambridge to selling fake workshops and proudly buying Instagram followers, every lie she tells sees her soar to new heights. Her audacious approach, an intoxicating dance with risk is the brand-building equivalent of Bazball. She throws everything at the wall and does not care what sticks. She’s the master of fucking around and finding out. Perhaps Britain’s path to rediscovering its swagger lies in harnessing the spirit of Calloway, simply ignoring the gloomy reality and playing without fear.

Maggie Bullock, author of The Kingdom of Prep, on the other hand, went all-in on style after she left the American South to attend boarding school. In her book, which covers “the rise and fall of J.Crew”, she examines the history of the company that enabled her to quickly dress in the preppy style of her classmates: flat-front trousers, polo shirts, roll-neck sweaters. A well-worn roll-neck sweater, Bullock writes with nostalgic affection, “had social acceptance knit into its very fibres”.

Like America, J.Crew sold a paradoxical dream: the top tier of society is exclusive, but anyone can reach it. Its products aped those of Ralph Lauren, Brooks Brothers, and J.Press — whose name J.Crew emulated — but retailed for a fraction of the cost. The clothes were still pricey, but could be thought of as an affordable investment; the company was aspirational, certainly, but it wasn’t exclusionary. That is, unless you happened to be a woman who wore a size larger than 12 or a man who wore “XXL” shirts, although the company redressed its skinny-bias in the more obese world of the 2010s.

Indeed, what J.Crew was selling evolved in tandem with American society. At its point of inception, in 1983, clothing retailers played a critical role in the capital-powered construction of self. And J.Crew offered a ready-to-wear identity: a beginner’s guide to prep for those who quickly needed to ingratiate themselves to the establishment. Initially, the company was catalogue-only, but during the late Eighties, founder Arthur Cinader’s daughter Emily steered its expansion into the indoor mall — the place of American identity creation during this period. Being able to buy the prep look straight from a catalogue had been an innovation, but taking it to the mall, where you could browse identities between stops at the food court and the arcade, was a critical next step in expanding J.Crew’s reach.  

But the early 2000s saw the beginning of the end of the American indoor mall — with many older malls built in the Seventies and Eighties being abandoned — and so, too, the decline of this iteration of J.Crew. As the company struggled with its identity, young consumers turned elsewhere, particularly to Abercrombie & Fitch. In 2002, I was hired to manage an A&F store at the Streets of Southpoint Mall — one of the elaborate, indoor-outdoor mega-malls that appeared during this period of rapid mall consolidation. At the time, A&F was doubling down on a truly exclusionary aesthetic, marketing clothes solely to people hot enough to wear them. Only a very particular kind of cool young person belonged in our clothes; I was exhorted not to hire anyone who didn’t fit the bill. (When the tide turned, a swarm of online identities — pro-social justice, pro-size acceptance — made A&F something of a punchline.)

The American Dream is a constant quest for an identity that is both recognisable and exceptional, and the divergent paths of J.Crew and A&F expose this seesaw between inclusivity and exclusivity. The Ronald Reagan-overseen Eighties, the true heyday of J.Crew, still held the promise of upward mobility and material success for all. Everyone was invited. Meanwhile, the 2000s were a time of economic retrenchment, eventually leading to the major recession of 2008. The elite felt threatened, and needed to differentiate itself, even superficially, through something like the vision A&F was selling. The effect of economics on the identity of Americans played out through off-the-rack fashion; it seems as if Americans are forever in high school, anxiously buying new looks to fit in with whichever lunch table they find themselves sitting at. This never-ending quest for identity and belonging speaks to a deep-seated, uncomfortable need to navigate the complexities of American society, where class, race, and personal identity intertwine and continuously evolve.

This incessant buying and selling of the product-mediated self fascinated me long before I entered a high school refectory. It probably began with my father, who wore the same half-dozen ill-fitting Brooks Brothers Number One Sack Suits all through his four-decade career as a car dealer. He considered anyone who linked their identity to branded material goods — whether Ford, Chrysler or J.Crew garments — to be susceptible to manipulation by the rapacious, advertising-driven economy. What he sold were ephemeral dreams: were you a Chevy man, an Oldsmobile man, a Cadillac man? The answer didn’t matter to him — they were all quick-to-depreciate “hunks of junk” — but it was this question that could motivate uncertain people to fork out their life savings. Everyone in America wants to be someone else, someone different and better; we can be easily convinced to invest hard-earned money in ourselves.

J.Crew experienced a revival in the mid-2000s and 2010s, when it became the preferred clothing brand for Barack and Michelle Obama. It had managed to successfully blend its old Ivy League staples with hipster trends, but this was J.Crew’s last big money: where could identity formation go in post-racial, post-class, post-patriarchy America? The answer, we would eventually learn, was online, where the process of branded self-differentiation was able to remain in dizzying flux.

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I never imagined — and neither, apparently, did the executives at J.Crew and A&F, even as their billion-dollar brands began to struggle — that high-quality clothing would cease to play such a fundamental role in defining a person. The internet introduced a thousand new ways to form an identity, with Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok allowing users to continuously evolve. Some retail companies kept up, at first. Fast fashion companies such as Zara and H&M fuelled a retail apocalypse by churning out new wearable identities in response to viral articles and much-liked Instagram posts. By the end of the 2010s, if a certain influencer was wearing a particular designer shirt, Zara could have a cheap equivalent in its stores a week later.

But eventually, material possessions like clothing became less important in shaping identity, as digital profiles and online avatars took centre-stage — especially with the advent of lockdowns, Zoom meetings and fully remote existences. In this world, upon encountering someone else’s identity marker, the desire to adopt it as part of one’s own “personal brand” could be instantaneously satisfied; adding pronouns to one’s online “bio” is even faster than Amazon Prime. Even the speediest fast fashion purveyor can’t construct you an identity as quickly as a few mouse clicks or carefully angled selfies.

And material products are vulnerable. They rip, and tear and shrink in the wash. Pronouns endure, until the split second you decide to change them. The countless “skins” that can be purchased for your League of Legends characters won’t fade, but can be easily swapped on or off. Each signifies something supposedly unique about the skin buyer, who might have spent hundreds of dollars on these trifles. Pronouns are free but increasingly, in the virtual world, as in the material one, identity is for sale. And clothing companies like J.Crew and A&F cannot compete. While a garment may convey a message, its impact is limited, compared to a video of your freshly-filtered face that gets thousands of likes, or an announcement of your new pronouns that is met with widespread yet ephemeral approval.

Our pursuit of branded identities is a curious one: we are seeking uniqueness in the context of comfortable conformity, looking for the “right stuff” to distinguish us enough to join the clique of our choice. By providing affordable, aspirational style, J.Crew may have democratised fashion to some extent, but even when worn by the Obamas, it also subtly reinforced the class distinctions that are so deeply ingrained in American society. The wearers we are seeking to emulate are, in turn, seeking to appear more like us. But they are in fact part of an American upper class whose true markers of distinctions are subtle or deliberately obscure. A&F, at least, was frank about the existence of an obscure qualification to enter the elite that some will never attain. But online, it’s easy to forget that the carefully-curated versions of ourselves are often amplifying social divisions, pre-existing biases and class structures — rather than challenging them.

What the story of J.Crew teaches us is that our constructed styles, and by extension our constructed selves, are always on the way out. Their expiration dates are getting closer, and the periods of planned obsolescence shorter. The time-limited high school experience serves as an apt metaphor. Individuals strive for both self-expression and acceptance by conforming to an accepted aesthetic, and hundreds of high school movies have ended with characters achieving this tightrope walk. But in reality, it’s impossible to simultaneously break out as a unique individual and be accepted by the masses for adhering to a specific set of rules. Ultimately, our continuous reinvention of style highlights the fact that social politics always reduces, as in high school, to perpetual insecurity.

Recently, the label has made multiple forays into the gothic, not least by mining the aesthetics of climate collapse for several recent shows. (As one women’s magazine enthused: “Balenciaga brought the apocalypse to Paris and we’re here for it.”) So perhaps brand managers expected the disturbing imagery of young kids surrounded by bondage gear to be treated as just another subversive juxtaposition in the service of selling things. This time, however, the bourgeois were not so much thrillingly épaté as absolutely bloody incandescent — because they assumed that childhood itself was being sold.

Internet sleuths quickly tracked down details of an earlier Balenciaga campaign, in which background props had included a Supreme Court ruling on the illegality of child pornography, as well as a book by an artist controversial for depicting tortured children in his work. The two separate campaigns were quickly conflated by commentators, jointly presented as a case of paedophilic imagery gloating lasciviously in plain sight. Some observers went further, interpreting the placing of lettered packing tape in the most recent campaign as spelling out a reference to Baal, the Canaanite god who demanded child sacrifices.

In some quarters of the populist Right, where the legacy of QAnon still looms large, Christmas had come early. Tucker Carlson weighed in, bravely putting his own history of joking about child rape behind him, to connect the incident to groomer discourse and admonish the world to “stop sexualising kids”. Creepy geezer-bro Andrew Tate argued that Balenciaga was being deliberately open and explicit about paedophilic sympathies because the “people who are in charge of these brands, and of the Western world” are “Satanists” who deliberately “tell you what they are doing” in order to avoid karmic retribution for their sins. (Any reflection by Tate on earlier frank admissions of his that “I am absolutely sexist and I’m absolutely a misogynist” went unrecorded.)

Though — of course — I don’t know the truth of what actually happened at Balenciaga, it seems to me that the “deliberately paedophilic” interpretation is probably wrong. But that doesn’t mean the whole thing was an accident. As others have suggested, rather than acting as a direct manifestation of a paedophile conspiracy, it seems more likely that the campaigns were offering knowing nods to the aesthetics of paedophile conspiracies. Viewed in this light, the problem is not so much the imagery but that the proles on the internet hadn’t done a Masters in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths.

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This interpretation is in keeping with the modus operandi of high fashion. The higher the couture, and the more luxurious the brand, the more effort must be made to signal this status to the world. One traditional way to do this is by using hand-embroidered silks and other gorgeous fabrics to make clothes. But a reality-transcending brand image can also be achieved by dressing women up in totally impractical garments they can’t walk or get through doors in, or — as Balenciaga also recently did — by inducing a celebrity such as Kim Kardashian to wear ridiculous facemasks in public on a number of occasions.

As Louise Perry has argued, fears about paedophilia are often viewed by liberals as classically low-status, and associated by them with the “ignorant and credulous working classes”. And so, ironically sneering about low-status cultural fears about paedophiles, in a way only detectable to a few knowing onlookers, is automatically high-status. Job done. Or it would have been, had it not proved understandably impossible for most onlookers to tell the difference between representation and reality.

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As with Balenciaga’s attraction to the gothic, the fashion world more generally has long played about with savagery and psychic darkness for the purposes of selling people things they don’t need. In practice this often means glamourising various terrible things done to women. Alexander McQueen’s first two (visually stunning) collections were called “Jack the Ripper and his Victims” and “The Highland Rapes”. A 2007 Dolce & Gabbana ad campaign was highly suggestive of gang rape, and a 2003 Sisley campaign of bestiality between a woman and a bull.

Generally speaking, the fashion industry is littered with pictures of young women with a sexualised, exploited, fetishised, or downright quasi-paedophilic vibe. And female consumers apparently lap it up — perhaps because they tell themselves, accurately, that promoting abusive sex is not the direct point. As with everything else in the fashion world, nothing is positively asserted, but only referred to obliquely or quoted in order to generate interest in the clothes.

Yet when you look at some of the blank-eyed skeletal young models who still tend to be preferred by designers, it’s impossible to maintain that the casual brutality dished out to women in the representational realm of fashion doesn’t have consequences for the real one. Models are treated by the fashion world as living dolls you can pick from a book purely on the basis of appearance, then dress them up, choose their poses, control their food intake, and fly them around the world to serve you, until you don’t want them anymore. Granted, not every model is skinny or young these days, but even those who aren’t are just as heavily objectified — every personalised aspect of them being diminished to a commercially favourable appearance, interchangeable with some other commercially favourable appearance, should the originally-booked girl have a breakdown or get a breakout.

But at least most models are adults, technically anyway. For me, an under-explored aspect of the Balenciaga scandal is the apparent fact that parents somewhere have let their very young children be photographed in these campaigns. It is bad enough to represent grown adults as slack-jawed, vacant children, but a lot worse to turn children into slack-jawed, vacant little adults. Generally speaking, I marvel in horror at parents who use their children to make money by modelling or acting in adverts. No matter how much fun children allegedly have doing it, or how much money goes into their trust funds because of it, there is nothing about having one’s appearance objectified by strangers for money that’s compatible with healthy childhood development.

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And of course, it’s not just commercial modelling. Famous for admonishing us against using other humans as mere means to our ends, Kant also warned that “parents cannot regard their child as, in a manner, a thing of their own making”. Then again, he wasn’t on Insta. The internet is full of influencers using their own children for likes and clicks. If social media has turned many of us into narcissists, then it seems to have turned our children into narcissistic extensions of ourselves — only there to say something flattering about who we are. A generation of kids are growing up, made supremely conscious of how their bodies and faces look as they go about their daily lives, before they really know anything else about themselves. And we made them that way.

Moral panics get off the ground partly because they pick up on unconscious forces genuinely rippling through a culture. It doesn’t seem to me a coincidence that there’s increasing prurient interest in paedophilia and grooming at the moment, when at the same time there have never been so many culturally acceptable ways to objectify your own child. Paedophilia — which of course exists, and nobody should pretend different — involves the egregious and permanently life-changing treatment of a living human child as a sexual object. But there are subtler ways to use children as means to adult ends. We can sign them up to a modelling agency. We can put them in a beauty pageant. We can upload their pictures with amusing captions on Facebook, in a way that makes us look like good parents.

So the original fear about Balenciaga — that they are selling kids — was perhaps not entirely wrong. If not kids, then collectively we are at least selling childhoods. And the hideous teddy bear fetish bags highlighted in the doomed ad campaign now seem to me to be an uncannily apt symbol of what we are doing. A much-beloved figure, originally invested with so much innocence, joy, and love, now turned into something to be used.

Fashion is generally seen as a frivolous and simultaneously dangerous industry, populated by airheaded Marie Antoinette-like characters wearing £10,000 hats, and malevolent figures intent on spreading eating disorders across the land. Over the years, I offered up various arguments in fashion’s favour: it’s a billion-dollar industry, it reflects the culture around us, everyone gets dressed and therefore engages with fashion on some level, and it is populated by hugely ambitious and successful women.

None made much difference, and the high-ranking women within the fashion industry — Anna Wintour, Isabella Blow, Donatella Versace — were snickered at as cartoonish stereotypes. It often struck me that the journalists who covered film (in which enormous expenditures and egos are the norm) or sport (hello, unattainable perfect physiques) never had to begin their articles by justifying their industry. Was this, perhaps, because fashion — unlike film and sport — is largely for women, and one of the last bastions of journalism dominated by women? Or did the fault lie with fashion itself?

I’ve been pondering these questions again over the past week as I’ve read the adulatory press around Edward Enninful, the editor of British Vogue for the past five years and Vogue‘s European editorial director for the past two. Enninful’s memoir, A Visible Man, is being published today, and it comes festooned with quotes from Salman Rushdie and Kate Moss (“What fun!”) The reviews have been determinedly positive, albeit in a glass-half-full kind of way (“Happily his book is better than his interviews” – The Times). He scored the double whammy last weekend of being the cover interview for The Sunday Times Magazine (“How Edward Enninful became the king of fashion”) and The Observer Magazine (“The most important man in fashion”).

He is, as all the press has taken pains to stress, the first black and gay editor of British Vogue. He is also — although this has been less commented upon — the first man.

Coverage of Enninful has focused almost entirely on who he is rather than what he does. He was born in Ghana, moved to London as a child and was hired as a model in his teens. He became fashion editor of i-D when he was only 18, much to his family’s horror, and now here he is, editing one of the most important fashion magazines in the world. It’s an extraordinary story, but not a wildly unimaginable one in the fashion industry. John Galliano is another gay working-class immigrant who made it big in London fashion at an early age, Alexander McQueen was a gay East-Ender who did the same. Naomi Campbell is the daughter of a single mother from Lambeth. Alek Wek moved from South Sudan to London in 1991 and was soon after hired as a model.

As Enninful writes in his memoir, “Fashion is a borderless industry that is powered by immigrants. As I looked around New York Fashion Week in early March, I saw how 90 per cent of my colleagues living and working there were originally from other countries.” None of this detracts from Enninful’s enormous achievement, but fashion, and particularly British fashion, has been better at embracing immigrant, gay and working-class kids than outsiders give it credit for.

The little discussion there has been about what Enninful actually does has focused on how he has improved diversity in fashion. There is no doubt there are more black models and features about race and LGBT issues than ever before in Vogue, and this reflects the time as much as it does Enninful himself. There has been much comment on how different his Vogue is from his predecessor Alexandra Shulman’s, which was largely, and even infamously, white and posh. (I was briefly a contributing editor to Shulman’s Vogue, although she then let me go, so I have no loyalty to her.)

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Enninful has brought identity politics to the magazine, but it’s always interesting which parts of someone’s identity count and which don’t. For example, Vogue now features models such as Cara Delevingne and Adwoa Aboah talking about, respectively, sexuality and race, and Meghan Markle edited a special issue. Quite how much of a change these women are from the posh ones of yore is a debatable issue, given Delevingne and Aboah are descended from aristocracy and Markle is married to a prince. And of course, the models are just as skinny as they ever were, and the clothes just as expensive. Last month’s cover celebrating Pride featured LGBTQ young people, but it was indistinguishable from any other Vogue cover, given they were all beautiful and thin. The current cover features Linda Evangelista, airbrushed to near unrecognisability and almost entirely covered, lest anyone be offended by her 50-something flesh.

It must be a strange time to be a fashion editor. We are entering the worst cost of living crisis in most people’s living memory. The mental health of girls and young women is notoriously precarious, with rocketing rates of depression, body-hatred and self-harm. When Shulman was editing Vogue during the 2008 financial crash, every interview she gave included questions about what possible relevance Vogue had now, and I doubt she got through a single day in which she wasn’t asked by a journalist whether she felt responsible for anorexia. None of these subjects has been raised in the press around Enninful, who — lest anyone has forgotten — edits a magazine that exists to sell expensive clothes and feature very thin and beautiful women. The coverage has been entirely about him and his triumphant story. It has barely mentioned who Vogue is actually for.

In his memoir, Enninful recalls the speculation about whether he would be made editor of Vogue: “The fact that I was Black and gay was a big focus. My even being considered was presented as shocking. Hard not to see the connotations: this one doesn’t belong. I was well used to it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt every time.” And of course, that’s true. But it’s a lot more likely that he was seen as left-field choice because of his sex rather than his race or sexuality. After all, the fashion industry is not exactly short of gay men, and there have been high-profile black fashion editors before Enninful – although not at British Vogue — including André Leon Talley at US Vogue, Michael Roberts at Vanity Fair and Robin Givhan at The Washington Post, the first fashion writer to win a Pulitzer.

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Editing Vogue, though, had always been done by a woman. Not any more. You can argue that this is a good thing and jobs should be open to all genders. Yet Vogue is a magazine about women and for women, and now a man is in charge of it. Shulman edited GQ before she got the Vogue job and she was regularly asked how she knew what men wanted. When some wondered how he would know what women want, he said in an interview with the New York Times last month, he called his friends “Rihanna and Naomi, and they both told me, you just have to tune it out”.

After questions about skinny models, pricey clothes and fashion’s pointlessness, the fourth inevitable question was whether it was just an industry in which gay men dictated what women should wear. I always bristled at this, with its blaring overtones of homophobia. Enninful’s sexuality is not relevant to his ability to do his job. But his sex is surely a different matter, given he is editing a magazine for women. He has said “I never think in terms of sex or gender. I think in terms of what someone is bringing to the table.” This is the kind of statement only a man can make. In all the glowing press about Enninful’s identity, his sex — as a critique — is mentioned about as often as the fact that Delevingne’s godfather is Nicholas Coleridge, the former long-term chairman of Condé Nast. Which is to say, not at all.

Fashion is a joke. It’s an art, sure, and a hugely lucrative industry. But it’s also absurd: all these ludicrous clothes and accessories churned out month after month and then draped on bizarrely proportioned women in order to sell them to the trollish masses. Anyone who works in it knows that it’s a bit silly, which is why it’s so difficult to argue against the piss-takers. If fashion is referenced at all in the mainstream, it is usually done so sceptically and satirically, Devil Wears Prada-style.

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But there is no satire in the coverage of Enninful, even though his book offers plenty of opportunities for it, with his talk of “intelligent” dresses and his gush about Beyonce (“I can’t help thinking how all these walls that we perceive Beyonce putting up don’t exist to facilitate ego”). He is surely the only fashion editor in existence who is not snarkily asked in every interview about the prices of the clothes and the waist measurements of the models in his magazine. Instead, the tone around him is hushed, earnest and reverent. Some will say this is fair enough, given his background; Wintour and Shulman are both posh and white and therefore able to take the barbs.

But you can’t have it both ways: saying Enninful is the king of fashion, but also so fragile he must be wrapped in cashmere. Also, he has been working in the fashion business for more than 30 years; he got married at Longleat with Campbell, Moss and Victoria Beckham in attendance. When the New York Times asked him for the names of five friends they could contact when writing a profile of him, his list was “Beyonce, Rihanna, Naomi, Imam, Oprah.” He is more ensconced in the fashion establishment than Shulman ever was.

When I used to insist that fashion reflected the times as much as film or art or literature, people would laugh: of what possible connection to the common man could a £12,000 dress by Armani have? And at times, I questioned this myself. But the coverage around Enninful takes it as a given that he is overhauling the culture through Vogue, producing “a massively visible new idea for what Britishness could mean”, as he puts it in his book. Enninful’s Vogue is only a force for good, whereas everyone else’s, it seems, was and is toxic. Maybe. Or maybe the only way people can take women’s fashion seriously is if the person in charge is a man.

It was the internet wot done it: as enterprising startups began to offer affordable, personalised underwear options that catered to customers of all shapes and sizes, Victoria’s Secret could only linger in the background like a reminder of the bad old days, with its narrow range of sizes, unimaginative designs, and bras aiming solely to shove the wearer’s breasts in the direction of her chin. “Lift and separate”? Strapless underwires? Okay, boomer.

But now, like so many 1990s-era properties steeped in cultural nostalgia, Victoria’s Secret is trying to reboot itself for a new and enlightened age — clipping the wings of its Angels and hiring a new cadre of spokesmodels who better represent the diverse tastes of the modern consumer. The new squad, who will not just model and promote the brand but serve as advisors to its majority-female board, includes actress and UNICEF ambassador Priyanka Chopra Jonas, plus-size model and activist Paloma Elsesser, and trans swimsuit model Valentina Sampaio. In other words, Victoria’s Secret has traded its stable of unattainably gorgeous models for a set that is no less gorgeous but also has the proper politics. Its most famous, and most unexpected, new model is Megan Rapinoe, the all-star soccer player who was named FIFA’s best player of the year in 2019.

For a brand that has always shamelessly catered to the heterosexual male consumer, strategically airing its runway show and debuting its new collections just in time for Valentine’s Day, as boyfriends rush to lingerie stores en masse in search of gifts, the hiring of Rapinoe as a spokesmodel is like a hot poker to the eyeball of the male gaze. The new face of Victoria’s Secret is a tough-as-nails athlete and longtime gay rights activist, married to a women’s basketball player. And while she did once famously show up to an award ceremony wearing formal shorts and an oversized blazer with nothing underneath, she’s not generally known as an icon of either fashion or femininity.

But of course, that’s the point: Rapinoe is as far as it’s possible to be, in aesthetic and public persona, from the leggy, lacey look of the Angels era. And she is therefore the perfect choice to spearhead Victoria’s Secret’s awokening, at a time when straight men — and, by extension, the women who want them — are being pushed to the cultural margins.

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In an interview with the New York Times, Rapinoe decried the old Victoria’s Secret for being “patriarchal, sexist, viewing not just what it meant to be sexy but what the clothes were trying to accomplish through a male lens and through what men desired.” Worst of all, Rapinoe said, the brand “was very much marketed toward younger women,” which she described as “really harmful.”

Rapinoe, for obvious reasons, does not particularly care what guys think about her underwear (or, one imagines, anything else.) But the young women who desire men — as in, the vast majority of young women — might question the notion that they were harmed by the existence of lingerie designed to appeal to their intended sexual partners. If you want to attract men, it stands to reason that your choice of undergarments might be at least sometimes influenced by what they consider sexy. (And vice versa; one might even argue that buying your underwear with an audience in mind, if you have one, is only polite.)

But the contemptuous dismissal of men, and their tastes and opinions and desires, is as trendy in our present moment as the lace bralettes that have replaced the underwire bra as the lingerie du jour (and like those bralettes, it doesn’t suit everyone.) The broader tendency is to treat any desire for men like a character flaw, a burden, an embarrassment. The writer Indiana Seresin invented the term “heteropessimism” to describe this phenomenon — an excellent coinage that’s nevertheless overbroad in its implied gender neutrality, when the sense of heterosexuality as something in between a cursed affliction and a personal failing is almost exclusively held by women. To be horrified by one’s own sexual orientation, and every possible expression thereof, is the side effect of a culture that flattens everything from personal relationships to aesthetic taste into a political framing: if you like men (as most women do), but men are trash (as every good progressive feminist must surely agree is true), then what’s a girl to do?

Whatever she wants, modern feminism tells us, as long as it’s not conventional. And so the new lingerie model is defined by how much she differs from the old, bad, “Angel” ideal: from the fresh-faced and un-photoshopped girls of Aerie to the 81-year-old bodybuilder featured on Athleta’s blog in a midriff-baring sports bra. It’s not just about smashing outdated beauty standards; it’s about rejecting an entire mode of feminine existence as embarrassing and passé.

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It’s not a coincidence that the hottest brand for young women by far is Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty line, where not just the models but the clothes themselves purport to be a flipped bird to all things boring, basic, and heteronormative. Its models come in every possible shape, size and skin tone. The lingerie evokes queerness and kink, bondage and burlesque; it’s daring and dark and occasionally bizarre; it wants to be something bigger and more important than just underwear. The Fall 2018 runway show was Fashion Week’s biggest bombshell event, heralded by critics as “moving, empowering — spiritual, even” in its “unapologetic celebration of women,” a claim echoed by the brand itself: “Savage X Fenty celebrates fearlessness, confidence and inclusivity,” says the website’s About section.

This isn’t about the products, which are not different by design than any other underwear; it’s pure branding, of the most persuasive sort. The Savage x Fenty wearer stakes a claim on a desirable, cool identity, one that makes her fundamentally more interesting than the boring straight ladies who wear other, more conventional brands (that the Savage x Fenty wearer may well be heterosexual herself is irrelevant.) If Victoria’s Secret catered to the male gaze, then Savage x Fenty explicitly rejects it: this lingerie, we are told, is not for men.

Men, it must be said, would be surprised to hear this. As much as the Savage x Fenty runway show might read as subversive to fashion insiders, it is still, at the end of the day, a bunch of beautiful women walking around in complicated, gorgeous lingerie; to imagine that straight men would not enjoy this is frankly ridiculous. They’re not that picky.

But men don’t matter; they are the subject but not the object of Savage x Fenty’s siren song. This message is for women, malleable and impressionable creatures that they are, who are expected to follow the latest identity directives just like they’re expected to follow fashion trends: heterosexuality is boring, heterosexual desire is embarrassing, and dressing with any thought of appealing to men is a gross offence against feminism.

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Never mind that these directives create their own set of pressures and impositions, or that what makes a woman (or anyone) feel sexy is inextricably bound up in cultural expectations and societal standards that govern our notion of what sexy is. Never mind that a woman who has dressed for herself is far more likely to be wearing comfortable underwear (or none at all) under her clothes than a complicated set of garters connected to a bondage corset connected to a pair of fishnet leggings with no crotch. What is the practical difference between this fearless, confident, inclusive Savage x Fenty body harness, and the 2003 Victoria’s Secret runway getup worn by Heidi Klum, featuring a “matching white choker, sort of like a dog collar,” which a scandalised writer at the New York Times described as “not just retrograde but practically unimaginable”?

The most obvious answer is simply that one of these items is currently on sale for $32 — from a company that knows the value of wokeness in a millennial consumer market. In a world where young women are particularly anxious not to be seen as less-than-perfectly progressive, Savage x Fenty is here to assure them that unlike the bad old offerings of its patriarchal forebears, this dog-collar-resembling piece of lingerie is fierce, feminist, and on the right side of history — and so are you.

This marketing model, which Victoria’s Secret now seems to be attempting to cash in on, may have begun as a needed corrective to the notion that a woman’s only value is in her sexual attractiveness to men — a poisonous idea that we were wise to dispense with. But lingerie is not just underwear; it is made to package a woman’s body in a way that is all form, no function. These garments serve no purpose but to make us pleasing to somebody’s eye.

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Who is served by the notion of underwear that rejects the male gaze, even when its wearer might like nothing better than to be seen wearing it by a man? Who is served by Megan Rapinoe’s assertion that marketing such a thing to young women is not just immoral but harmful, that it feeds an impulse which ought to be stifled? Who is served by the increased stigmatisation of male desire as inherently predatory, dreadful, traumatic in its very expression — and what are young women to make of the message that not only should they not want men, but that they should mistrust and fear them? Perhaps it’s no surprise that the current crop of young people are dating less, and having less sex, than the generations prior.

At a moment when the corporate world is plastering every available surface with rainbows to assert its support of sexual minorities, the world’s heterosexual women are getting a different message: that desiring men is not ordinary and healthy, not genuine passion stemming from an innate orientation, but something to be apologised for, and at least performatively resisted if not actively suppressed. The tragedy is that some will try to do this, and feel ashamed when they can’t. The irony is that what’s bad for us is very, very good for selling us things.

All of this is by design. Nobody makes an easier mark for the woke industrial complex than a young woman convinced that she’s bad and broken and can only get better — morally, spiritually — if she buys the right products. Our misery is their profit margin. The unhappier you are, and the bigger the void inside you, the more you’ll spend to feel validated — which the brands are only too happy to do for you, at an affordable price. Forget the male gaze; forget men, period. Forget the things you want, those frustrating intangibles, like intimacy and love. Just think, ladies, of how sexy and empowered you’ll feel when you’re sitting at home alone in your lingerie, buying still more lingerie to feel sexy and empowered in.

And wow, they could turn it on, selling that cabled jerkin with a dazzling smile and an elegant pose in the deeply undazzling, inelegant environs of a Bishops Stortford business park. I wondered whether they knew this was their reward for surviving the scrutiny of me and my colleagues in the office (“not sure about her nose”, “bit tacky looking”, “too booby”). I wondered whether I’d be able to lend quite the same chic to a sweater if I thought people were saying those things about me. That was when I had to accept that modelling is proper work.

But it isn’t going to be work for much longer, thanks to the rise of CGI models, who are nearly indistinguishable from the real thing and undeniably superior in many ways. It’s taken a few years, but finally the fashion industry has found a way to get women out the picture altogether. Not, of course, that the fashion industry doesn’t rely on women — it needs us to buy stuff — but women do have the unfortunate habit of messing up photographs of beautiful things with their icky fleshy bodies.

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Real women have dimpled thighs that need smoothing in post-production, unruly hair that needs tidying, blemishes that need editing. On shoots, they get tired and cold and they need the toilet and sometimes the clothes just won’t fit their inconvenient frames. How much more efficient to call up an agency like Brud, which specialises in producing virtual supermodels, and have your product displayed on one of their eerily plausible creations instead.

Brands including Fenty, Balmain and Swarovski have gone the CGI route, working with CGI creations such as Miquela Sousa and Shudu Gram. And Brud doesn’t stop at producing pretty faces: copywriters devise personas to match the looks, and the virtual models’ Instagram accounts have followers in the millions, commanding sponsorship fees to match. Their fakeness isn’t concealed, it’s celebrated — although the ubiquitousness of image processing means that the line between reality and unreality is surprisingly easy to drift over. The uncanny valley has been filled in.

Beauty has always involved artifice. Behind every perfect editorial look, there’s a hairdresser, a nutritionist, a personal trainer, an aesthetician, a make-up artist, an eyelash technician — all working to turn that woman into something worth looking at. Then there’s the stylist and the photographer, and after that the tweaks. But tweaking isn’t the preserve of glossy magazines any more: it’s built into your Zoom settings and your selfie defaults. Even those #nofilter pictures you see on the ’gram are the products of thousands of tiny digital decisions, none of which is going to have been programmed to make you look worse.

So virtual models are in a way nothing but a natural escalation, and they’re especially alluring in the Covid-era, given that the pandemic makes conventional shoots seem less like dream factories, more like superspreader events. The scope for them to muscle out humans in the “new normal” is obvious. If an online shop needs several thousand pictures to show off several thousand garments, why wouldn’t they skip the casting headache and the faff of the shoots, and use the digital option instead? If consumers don’t mind (and on the whole they don’t seem to), the only objections are likely to come from the human models losing out on work.

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I will miss them, though. Seeing a model really bring it is in the same category of wonder as watching an actor pull off a bravura performance or a gymnast nail a routine. At its best, modelling isn’t just a job, it’s era-defining art — if you love fashion, there’s a thrill in seeing how a Twiggy or a Campbell or a Moss can bring a different part of herself to different photographers on different shoots, a pleasure in the interaction between the images they make and their off-page celebrity. A really great model is the embodiment of her time.

Miquela and Shudu can’t personify a decade in the same way, because they stand outside of time. They’re not actually people. Then again, this is another thing to recommend them to corporations, given that models’ personalities can be more trouble than they’re worth: plenty of influencers have talked themselves out of a contract with a spicy opinion. Brand managers can sleep tight every night knowing that their virtual representatives aren’t going to have an inconvenient meltdown or start sharing — God forbid — her political views. Digital models are a caution for any woman who might throw around her own untidy thoughts.

And maybe it’s better that fake women take the brunt of modelling, when modelling itself — however much I like to romanticise it — is a grim old business. Bishops Stortford isn’t the half of it. It’s an industry where male photographers and agents have much of the power, and girls are the product. Predation is guaranteed. For years, the photographer Terry Richardson practised an overexposed irony-sleaze aesthetic that was the perfect cover for his real-sleaze habit of sexually assaulting models. Allegations dating back to 2010 went ignored because he had the blessed quality of hotness (he took Obama’s portrait), and only in 2017 was he finally disgraced enough to become a liability.

It’s not enough to see Richardson as one bad actor. It took an entire industry to turn a blind eye and go on serving up girls to him. The same industry, in fact, that allowed Elite Models boss Gérald Marie to allegedly run his agency as a trafficking ring, shipping young women wherever they were wanted and securing their compliance with promises about what he could do for their careers. It’s hard to feel huge regret for the demise of a job that’s been associated with so much abuse.

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Still, replacing real models with virtual ones is only a solution in the same way that you can “solve” your woodworm by burning down your house: yes, you’ve eliminated the exploitation of women, but you’ve done it by eliminating women. And that causes another, bigger problem.

It’s bruising enough to compare yourself to the deftly touched-up living representatives of beauty — so bruising, in fact, that an alternate ecosystem of imperfect influencers has emerged. Women who are willing to celebrate their fat, their stretch marks or their acne can win big social media followings with an audience that is relieved to simply not feel freakish for once, although alternative beauty standards are still beauty standards. Hence Cosmopolitan’s “This is healthy!” New Year covers, starring models who are fat but still able to do the dancer’s yoga pose (although it’s unclear why being overweight and bendy is any healthier than being standard-model underweight and bendy).

When CGI models eliminate even the tiny human happenstance allowed to models now, they also remove the last remnants of sympathy that a woman might afford herself. Judging yourself by the standard of a hipless teenager is one level of cruelty; judging yourself against what is, effectively, a drawing of a hipless teenager is a whole step beyond. Models tell us what society has decided perfection is. It’s a shifting standard, and those shifts say something about society’s desires.

The Sixties looked for youth and informality, the Eighties sought statuesque glamour, the Nineties wanted women who looked fragile and waifish. And the Twenties want women who don’t exist. It’s of a piece with a world that would write women out of reproduction through surrogacy, out of politics by declaring them not really a group, and out of language altogether by reducing the word to representing, at best, an “identity” rather than a sex. The ultimate in femininity in 2021 is to be nothing at all.

The jacket, for instance. In June 2018, Melania was photographed departing a Texas Air Force base after visiting a shelter for detained immigrant children. She was wearing a jacket, olive green, with stark white letters on its back, a message that looked like it had been dabbed on with a child’s paintbrush: I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?

What did it mean? Everyone had a theory, including Donald Trump, who tweeted that the garment was meant as a message to the “Fake News Media” — even though many believed that it was a message to Trump himself. Still others, the harshest critics, insisted that she meant to convey her disregard for the children; one imagined her strolling through a crowd of traumatised migrant kids with I REALLY DON’T CARE emblazoned on her back. (Don’t worry, she didn’t.) Whoever the intended recipient of Melania’s disregard, everyone agreed that the jacket mattered.

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By the end of the week, the jacket — a flimsy, $39 piece of fast fashion from Zara that had probably been purchased by some trollish GOP stylist rather than the First Lady herself — had been imbued with as many layers of symbolic meaning as a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Much less was made about the visit itself, despite its significance: Donald Trump signed an executive order to end his controversial family separations policy later that month, suggesting that Melania’s choice to involve herself in the issue was not just out of character but perhaps even influential.

But the jacket controversy was only a continuation of a well-established pattern. By the time the 45th president took office, we were already used to filling in the blanks where Melania might have been, but wasn’t. There was no place on Donald Trump’s campaign trail for a perpetually-present spouse, even if she’d wanted to be there; the thrice-married and notoriously philandering candidate made no pretence of being a paterfamilias in the tradition of family values Republicans.

When he did bring family onstage, it made for a striking portrait: Melania on one side, a passel of large adult children from his previous marriages on the other. And unlike other political wives, Melania’s appearances were sparing and strategic: popping up to dismiss Trump’s “grab ’em by the pussy” tape as “boy’s talk,” or delivering a rare 11th hour rally speech in PA (where her husband did in fact secure a surprise win.)

These appearances held all the more impact for how rare they were. Mostly, Melania was a non-entity, an inscrutable sphinx whose expressionless face betrayed nothing at all. The mystery was part of the allure, on both sides. For Trump’s supporters, Melania was part of the package that made him not just electable but aspirational: a gorgeous, glamorous, much-younger model, as much a symbol of his success as his solid gold bathroom appliances or luxury real estate portfolio.

But for his opponents, she was an intriguing cipher. There was her absence from the campaign trail and her apparent lack of interest in public life. There was the photo of her from election night — unsmiling, eyes closed in either an inopportune blink or a silent plea for strength — at the moment where Trump pulled ahead in the polls.

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There was the infamous moment at the Inauguration, a smile that flashed onto her face and then vanished the moment her husband stopped looking. The moment became a gif, and the Left became briefly obsessed with the notion that she was secretly One Of Us. #FreeMelania trended. Offers of salvation were extended. An article at the Atlantic explained that Melania’s fleeting smile spoke to something bigger: “The image seemed to reveal, in its frozen fluidity, an unspoken truth — about Melania, about her marriage, about all of us.”

When Melania remained in New York for months after Trump transitioned to life in the White House, speculation abounded that she was planning a divorce. Clearly, she wanted out; clearly, she hated him as much as we did. Armchair body language experts noted her obvious disdain for her husband. Armchair conspiracy theorists speculated that she’d simply opted out of the First Lady thing entirely, hiring a series of doppelgängers to take her place.

Of course, if people had given even half as much credence to the thoughts and feelings of Real Melania as to the fantasy Resistance Melania who lived in their imaginations, they would’ve realised their error. Long before she became the first lady, she made it clear that she wanted no sympathy: “People, they don’t really know me, people think and talk about me, like, ‘Oh, Melania, oh, poor Melania,'” she said. “Don’t feel sorry for me.”

That was October 2016.

By the time Trump had finished out his first year in office, the pity had evaporated — and evolved. Where Melania’s silence once seemed full of intriguing possibilities, now it became intolerable. Without any actual statements to parse, and with her public initiatives limited to a short-lived (and widely mocked) “Be Best” campaign against cyberbullying, we were forced to scrutinise her non-verbal forms of expression in search of secret messages, which is to say, we had to trash her outfits.

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That jacket was only the beginning; just a few months later, a weeklong tour of Africa culminated in countless headlines about Melania’s hats. Especially problematic was a getup that looked a little bit like the character Rene Belloq’s, from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Had Melania intentionally copied her outfit from a fictional Nazi in a movie from 1981? Had she ever even seen Raiders? Who knows? Who cares? What was important was that she did not explicitly deny it, and therefore, one could only assume the worst. As Allure noted, all this nonsense could’ve been avoided: if she’d just gone hatless, she “might not have caused the Internet to call her out for looking like a First Lady-shaped dog whistle.”

That’s right: Caused. Look what you made us do, Melania!

And in our minds, the First Lady’s transformation was complete. Before the reality of President Trump set in, she represented a sort of dark hope: a secret sympathiser, a saboteur, a Judith hidden in plain sight inside Trump’s political tent. But as denial gave way to disillusionment, and Trump himself proved not just uncontrollable but impervious to shame, criticisms of his presidency began to heap on the shoulders of his seeming enablers.

Melania’s lack of public presence started to look like not just complicity, but something more insidious, a pretence of powerlessness when she really had her hands on the levers. The one thing we know for certain about Melania is that she’s one of the few people whose opinion Trump cares about — so why wasn’t she leveraging that influence for good? Why couldn’t she just, like, do something about him?

When did we stop feeling sorry for Melania, and start to hate her instead? Why did she stop being a vehicle for the hopes of a fiery resistance, and start becoming guilty by association? Whatever the reason, it certainly wasn’t anything she did, because what Melania did was what she’d always done: nothing. Her presence in Trump’s re-election campaign, as in his White House, has been as sparse as ever. Even the inevitable book from a former advisor, Melania and Me, was less a blockbuster tell-all than a confirmation of what we already knew: that she never really wanted to be here.

And where her husband, facing likely defeat, seems determined to leave kicking and screaming, Melania’s impact will be most remarkable in its nonexistence. A stiletto heel print in an East Wing carpet here, a half-hearted rose garden renovation there: the leave-no-trace First Lady. We hardly knew her, and now, we never will. She’ll cross the threshold of the White House, get into the limo, and disappear — into the luxurious, comfortable, and above all, private life that was all she ever wanted. As for the rest of it, she just really didn’t care. Did you?

I was bored a decade ago when Julia Goldsworthy got told off for wearing formal shorts in Parliament. I was bored when Tom Brake upset Peter Bone by asking a question without wearing a tie. I was bored when Jeremy Corbyn was accused of disrespect for wearing a donkey jacket to the Cenotaph. I was bored when Theresa May was pilloried for wearing expensive trousers. And this week I am so much more bored by it all that I fear my head may explode simply because Tracy Brabin decided to reveal the scandalous truth that she has a shoulder underneath her clothes.

These are the people who run our country. They make decisions that matter. Their clothes do not matter. H&M or Hermès. Trousers or skirt. Shoulders bare or swathed in cashmere: clothes signify nothing about the content of your character. I would say I wouldn’t care if they turned up in a clown suit, except that I would care because the godforsaken newspapers would run pages and pages about who had the longest shoe or the best-applied lipstick, and I’d have to hide under a bush for a week just to escape it all.

And I’m sorry, I can’t even summon the energy to be feminist-ly outraged by the attempt to police Tracy Brabin’s fashion choices because, well, you know: the internet melted when Obama wore a beige suit, and you could probably cover Norfolk with newspaper photos of Dominic Cummings looking shabby, as if that affected the workings of his brain.

There’s only one solution to make all this stop. Uniforms.

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What I have in mind are jumpsuits, issued in party colours, made of the same thick polyester they make children’s school trousers out of, so they don’t need ironing or carry stains. They should be just ill-fitting enough to ensure no-one can look attractive in them, because there are several Parliamentarians who could probably rock the jumpsuit look. And we don’t want anyone looking attractive, lest it distract the public from hating their MPs, as they are supposed to do.

On the front would be a little name badge, like the ones janitors wear in American high school movies. This would be a huge benefit to news broadcasters and picture editors at newspapers: no more pesky mix ups between black women MPs who dare to have similar skin colour and hair styles to one another. (White male MPs have, of course, have had similar skin colour and hair styles to one another for hundreds of years, but inexplicably never got mixed up. Nevertheless, the name badges would help avoid future confusion even for them. Some are getting a little old, after all).

And we’d stick the constituency names on the back, like on a football shirt, to make it easier to remember who represents are — essential, given MPs are (bizarrely) still not allowed to refer to one another by name.

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Wearing party colours would also be a boon to MPs. No more would fellow MPs assume Kemi Badenoch or Bim Afolami are part of the Labour party, simply because of the colour of their skin. The radiant blue would announce their affiliation to the world. And no female or ethnic minority MP would ever again be mistaken for a secretary, because the jumpsuits would only be issued to the elected representatives, as a symbol of their high office.

Just imagine how gloriously colourful Parliamentary events would become. No more boring sea of charcoal and navy suits, enlivened only by the occasional bright dress. Instead, a surging sea of red and blue, with hints of yellow, orange, and green. A live action recreation of a Jeremy Vine election-night animation, played out daily for all to see. A source of bright light and optimism for the whole nation.

You may think this absurd. But judges wear uniforms. Police officers wear uniforms. Fire fighters, nurses, checkout assistants at B&Q. Black Rod wears a uniform, and hers includes knee breeches, which are several measures more absurd than a jumpsuit. So many of our fellow citizens consider a uniform routine that there’s even a dating site for uniformed professionals — surely many of our single MPs would be delighted to join their serried ranks, in search of love.

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By Peter Franklin

It shouldn’t have come to this. Human beings are smart, and capable. Why are we so easily distracted by the design of a collar? The cut of a coat? The colour of a pointless piece of fabric encircling someone’s neck? We’re rather like the dog in the movie Up: capable of thought and speech, but instantly bedazzled by a squirrel passing into view. We know we should care about the words, the meaning and the impact on lives, but if there’s a sequin in view, our frontal lobes shut off and the lizard brain responds: “Scandal!”

After all: can anyone tell me what question Tracy Brabin asked while wearing the offending item? It’s hard to pay attention when all you hear is outrage, pomposity and misogyny. Only uniforms can save us from our weak little distractible minds. In the Jumpsuit Parliament, we would be obliged to focus on what our representatives said. Instead of filling pages and pixels with fashion analysis and faux outrage we’d have to focus on the facts.

MPs might even have an incentive to spend their time on policy, not polish. Or is that the biggest fantasy of them all?

Not everyone bowed their heads for the 85-year-old fashion titan who worked right through his dotage while dressed like a be-pompadoured 18^th-century vampire. Ingrid Newkirk, of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta), sent this charmant tweet an hour after the announcement of the death of her, as she called him, “nemesis”: “Karl Lagerfeld has gone, and his passing marks the end of an era when fur and exotic skins were seen as covetable.”

Lagerfeld’s attitude to fur was pragmatic. “I hate the idea of killing animals in a horrible way,” but, “as long as people eat meat and wear leather, I don’t get the message.”

When he died, Kaiser Karl still held his 35-year-long creative directorship of Chanel, and also at the Italian fur house, Fendi, where he had run the show since 1966. Fendi furs can cost as much as a modest baronial hall and he never apologised for it; unlike his colleagues in high-fashion houses, who are in the grip of an epidemic of self-righteousness as fur phobia sweeps like a playground craze through the fashion industry.

Further reading

Teen Vogue's idiotic hypocrisy

By Douglas Murray

Even sober broadsheets will spin the fur-banning stories for maximum drama. Grave reports that Chanel had ‘banned’ exotic skins were fake news; the great fashion house actually – factually – stopped using snake, lizard and crocodile skins because the company had no access to the farms producing the best quality materials.

The opinion of the herd is forcing change elsewhere though. Last year Versace, Michael Kors, Burberry and Gucci joined the fur exodus. The latter made an especially odd announcement about dropping fur to focus on ‘sustainable’ fabrics. It’s one thing to frame the debate in terms of whether fur production can ever be ‘humane’ but to cite sustainability as your rationale is hogwash.

Fur, though, will last a lifetime, or two. I should know: I have one made in the Fifties. It’s closer to my mum’s age than mine. It’s dealt with rain and snow. I’ve slept in it a few times. It’s still in great shape. A coat made from the pelts of the many many thousands of culled coyote, say, is about as sustainable as it gets. What else to do with the pelts? Throw them in a pit?

Further reading

Consumer greed is making suckers of us all

By Giles Fraser

While the industry obsesses about fur, the greatest devastation it wreaks is through the accumulative damage of the 60% of fabrics created in factories from fossil fuels, that and mass market cotton. Cotton is such a thirsty and polluting business that it has left tracts of waterways dry or starved of oxygen and empty of life. In Central Asia, the Aral Sea has nearly disappeared because cotton farmers have bled the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers dry.

A report published by the Environmental Audit Committee on sustainability in fashion during London Fashion Week suggested that all new clothes be sold with a penny tax to cover schemes to manage all the waste the industry creates. But the swiftest way to be sustainable is to stop flogging us tons of stuff that by definition will go out of fashion in six months. The trouble is, that is where the industry’s profits lie.

So fashion’s focus is, instead, on things we can ban and feel nicely righteous telling the world about. The huge online fashion retailer, Asos, worked with Peta to create a corporate responsibility programme that includes banning all skins, teeth and horns, mohair, cashmere and silk. Even mother-of-pearl buttons are out. Save the bivalves, people!

Further reading

Under-reported: Plastic waste

By Ruth Valerio

Peta, meanwhile, lauded Boohoo, another British online retailer, for its decision to ban wool. That’s shorn wool – one of the most enduring and sustainable fabrics known to man – not sheepskins. Boohoo sells clothes so cheap there’s no way a noble fabric such as wool would make sound business sense.

So wool is verboten. But plastics and fake fur are fine, despite shedding microfibres that will take hundreds of years to degrade. Let’s not forget that last year, Britons sent 300,000 tonnes of clothing and textiles to landfill.

Nor are upmarket clothing brands blameless. They will throw good clothes away – or burn them, as Burberry did – rather than have their garments devalued by being sold at a discount. Vivienne Westwood has been shouting about “disposable crap”, waving her “Buy less, choose well and make it last” placard since 2013. But Vivienne Westwood Group was also ranked 0/36 “don’t buy” on the independent Rank a Brand website which “assesses and ranks consumer…brands on sustainability and social responsibility.”

Further reading

Liberal individualism is killing the planet

By James Bloodworth

Such greenwashing does not fly with Patrick Grant, creative director of the Savile Row tailors Norton & Co and the affordable sustainable fashion brand, Community Clothing. “Fashion is fundamentally at odds with good practice, which is to buy something of high quality and use it forever,” he says. Grant thinks cheap fur is disgusting; but when it comes to high-end farmed fur, he’s with the dear departed Kaiser Karl. European fur from Scandinavia lives a pretty decent life. The animals are not crammed into cages and tortured as Peta would have you believe.

Norway, however, is going to ban the production of fur by 2025. The virtue-signallers and hypocrites are driving its production from one of the most humane regions of the world. In the UK, fur production has been banned since 2000. Post Brexit, the UK government has hinted it will ban the sale of fur altogether. The irony is that these one-dimensional ethical campaigns are hounding the fur trade out of Europe to the lands that animal rights forgot, China and Russia.

In the meantime we are free to buy as much virtue-signalling clothing made from recycled plastic bottles as we wish, perched atop our moral high ground, clad in our microfibre-shedding garments.

Because the only thing more that stinks more than the stripped corpses of farmed mink is hypocrisy.