Country Estate Style in the Big Smoke

If you were to let folk singer Ralph McTell take your hand and lead you through his Streets of London you would expect to see a few fruity fashion statements around town. But those old, daft, ironic fashion movements faded when the UV shellsuits and high-tops appeared in High Street chains (a sure sign they’re not cool) and now even the ubiquitous, checked lumberjack shirts are looking a little passé. So what’s next?

No one tries to conceal that fashion is often brazenly arbitrary and runs on a lazy 20-year spin cycle, regurgitating whichever item or style has been gone just long enough to warrant plundering (regardless of any enduring sense of taste). But there are times when it responds to shifts in public consciousness and listens to the prevailing mood.

Now is just such a time. In response to our current sense of uncertainty, chaos, over-indulgence and subsequent frugality, fashion has literally run to the hills for safety. Where? Well, just look at what is being let loose on the catwalks. Have you ever seen a more conservative, reactionary and, frankly, scared set of ‘trends’? Head shawls? Tartan? Plaid? Has the world gone mad?

The obvious answer to this question is ‘no’, but to qualify that answer it is necessary to remember that fashion is not only cynical and vacuous but can also be, when forced to, cunning (in a lazy sort of way).

So when Dolce & Gabbana finally dropped the tired old shtick of leather, ripped jeans, oiled Italian bodies and cheap sex this year in favour of the kind of garb commonly worn by the Queen, the surprise should not be that they have finally had to get up off their backsides and do something a bit different, but that people actually swallow it, praise it.

It’s not even as if their offerings are modern or innovative – the colours are muted and traditional, with demure greys, blues, browns and greens: traditional materials, traditional palette, nothing new here. However, the current climate has changed the status of luxury and the designers simply have to follow, pardon me, suit.

No need to reinvent the wheel, the luxuries of our time are comfort, security and stability. This is not groundbreaking, it is simply pandering to our needs, commercialising weakness and vulnerability by shamelessly pillaging styles that already exist. It so happens that this is, ironically, being achieved through the mining of one of the few resources ideologically opposed to the vacillating shimmies of the fashion seasons, English countryside wear.

Although country clothing and its figurehead, the royal family, is not fashionable (it is based on years of practical evolution), it could be said to be stylish. And, while style is permanent, fashion is transient. So when the transient fairy, the fairy that is in its own way responsible for the whole house of cards coming down (and is most certainly a totem of it), scorches its wings, it sneaks back to solid ground, spying a way to keep itself flying and the wheels of consumerism turning. This is, of course, run-of-the-mill commercialism, but the obviousness and hypocrisy behind the whole farce should, perhaps, strike more people than it does.

Whether it looks good in either the town or the city is a question we could have decided any time in the last hundred years, given that we have seen it all before. However, the strange truth is that this fashion only works as a fashion within cities like London – if you wore these clothes in the country you would simply be wearing country clothes and nobody would bat an eyelid.

Conversely, those brave trendsetters who start wearing this clobber too soon may be mistaken for toffs from Henley on the way to visit a rich aunt in Grosvenor (for this reason, I also suspect that it will be impossible for people much over the age of 30 to pull it off). It will be interesting to see how much the image captures the public imagination, keep an eye out around London in the next few months. I suspect it may do rather well.

Regardless of their success, what is certain is that these collections are just another passing fashion-fart and will not debase the solid currency of country wear. However, the whole thing is so cheap and leeching that it is hard to understand how anyone can see it as creative or novel when, in fact, the jaded underlying instinct is evidence to the contrary. Show me something to make me change my mind.

Images courtesy of Catwalking.com