Redress

For reasons that don’t bear dwelling on I have taken to watching Ugly Betty. It’s unusually exasperating in that it balances moralising with schlock, rather than trying to enliven either of those with levity (or the spurious reversal: grounding levity in morality). I don’t get this show - ham-fisted silliness with occasional, and neatly sealed off, packages of intelligent funniness. The latter deriving, of course, from the gay one and the hot one, especially their interactions with each other. I’m in awe of the writers. How do they do this? Clearly they’re smarter than we’re supposed to realise, though keeping up appearances will take its psychological toll: the cool likeability of the gay one’s likeable brainy slob boyfriend is an unsubtle, if unconscious, attempt to reflect his creators’ likeable coolness. But self-awareness in this context is, if at all, not especially useful; it’s other-awareness that is key. When in a singles’ bar, by inexact analogy, knowing the incorrect answer is ‘Moby Dick’ or ‘oh, anything tinged by Proustian melancholy’, is not the same as knowing whether the correct answer is ‘Tuesdays with Morrie’ or ‘Sagittarius’. In a recent episode, the gay one and boyfriend are renting a movie (I should learn the names, but that seems like too much commitment. I do know that the one with braces is called Betty). Boyfriend wants to get a Truffaut movie. They go to the adult section, where there is also a flick called The 400 Blows. haha! But who is this for? Surely there are dumber sources of cheap laughs. I guess this is the conscious wink to boyfriend’s (existence’s) unconscious nudge. But how do they know how to make the other stuff? How do they know what kind of silliness will work? How do they know what everyone wants? Anyway, our goal isn’t demystification but remystification, so I’ll leave that mystery hanging and creep towards the subject of this post.

A recent episode of Ugly Betty featured a fashion show for ‘real women’ (you know what that means). Presumably, they were supposed to look good. I don’t need to tell you that they didn’t. Then there was the newspapers’ fawning because Beth Ditto wore a dress. (Stella McCartney, I probably misremember. Googling Beth Ditto + Stella McCartney reveals nothing, other than disturbing insights into the Googler.) Apparently she looked fabulous. She didn’t.

Designers say they want models who make their clothes look good. In a sense, fair enough. And in a sense, they’re right about who makes their clothes look good. This sense is, inevitably, a sensibility: the guiding aesthetic of haut couture is the one to which the models conform. In other words, the criteria of judgment come pre-loaded with content. You can’t meaningfully ask whether ‘larger women’ are beautiful until you refigure beauty’s subsidiary terms. The defining sense of elegant or svelte or toned or chic been long set, it’s too late to unbeg the question of their application because these are too intimately tied into a given visual form.

Pace Germaine Greer (actually, pretending her excellent piece doesn’t exist) Victoria Beckham’s mad dress skills have as much to do with thinness (and richness) as anything else. So what to do? Dunno. Yes, wear more of the cool and unusual. But it’s considerably easier to pose as an avant-garde style icon when you’re the leader of nu-rock band. Otherwise the best way to look good in streetwear is to look great in Prada. For everyone else, ‘quirky’ is seldom a compliment. Whatever the practical solution, the key is that any democracy of style starts with a repudiation of high fashion, not in Quixotic attempts at its reform.