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in Europe, as George Bush has been reminded only very recently,
the chattering classes are uncomfortable with the notion of evil.
As an idea it is just so, to borrow a word from the French foreign
minister, "simplistic." However, even allowing for the
old continent's tawdry attempts at world-weary sophistication, it
is disappointing, to say the least, that a disgusting event in London
last Wednesday passed with little notice, no criticism and, here
and there, some applause. It was a spectacle that combined shallow
frivolity and deep, deep moral relativism and, of all unlikely places,
it occurred at a show during the British capital's Fashion Week,
at the catwalk debut for a collection created by Helga and Eva,
24-year-old twins from Austria.
Helga and Eva
claim to find their inspiration in their country's past, including,
they say, the Third Reich. They have already enjoyed some success.
Their label was included as part of Fashion Week's "New Generation,"
a group of young designers sponsored by a leading British retailer.
In what was,
doubtless, intended to be a witty gesture, invitations to see the
twins' collection were based on Nazi-era passports. At the show
itself, the musical backdrop contributed to the totalitarian theme
with a soundtrack that combined classical tunes, Wehrmacht chants
and folk songs, all overlaid with Led Zeppelin. Jimmy Page's heavy
metal was included, apparently, as a gesture to contemporary western
culture.
The collection
featured designs based on both the industrial and political aesthetic
of the former dictatorship. On display that Wednesday were cloaks
and knitted sweaters, all, naturally, in parade-ground brown, and
often emblazoned with the regime's most famous symbol, the swastika.
In a neat touch, jackets and dresses were edged with little Iron
Crosses.
The London
press seemed to like what it saw. A commentator in one leading daily
said that Helga and Eva had brought the old despotism's fashion
sense "in from the cold", while another newspaper ran
a friendly piece in which the writer noted that the twins' collections
were available at a number of expensive British stores. American
fans of designer tyranny will be thrilled to know that these clothes
can also be found in New York, Boston, and LA.
Interestingly
enough, the prospect of Helga's and Eva's show did not seem to worry
Britain's Labour government, usually so sensitive to the slightest
hint of political incorrectness. The night before the collection's
launch, there was a party in honor of Fashion Week hosted by Tony
Blair's wife, Cherie, and the secretary for trade and industry,
a busy lady, who doubles up as the U.K.'s "minister for women."
To be fair,
these two grandees may have had no idea what would be strutting
down the catwalk the next day, and, so far as I know, there was
no foretaste of the totalitarian treat to come. It was an evening
of chandeliers, not searchlights, of velvet ropes, not manacles.
There were no guard-dogs, no watchtowers, no burial pits. The waiters
wore shoes, not jackboots, and carried drinks, not guns. Guests
were permitted to arrive by taxi rather than cattle truck. There
were no amusingly staged beatings or faux executions to sit
through. Best of all, everybody was allowed home alive at the end
of the evening.
How very different
it was 60 or 70 years ago, in that era desecrated by men marching
under the symbol now found to be suitable for an expensive knitted
sweater. The twins' art is, consciously or unconsciously, a celebration
of cruelty, an insult to slaughtered millions, many of whom ended
their lives dressed in the only real totalitarian style, the rags
and tatters of concentration camp clothing. That two designers can
borrow evil's insignia to make a fashion statement is yet another
dismal reminder of how little mankind has really understood the
nature of 20th-century mass murder.
At this point,
I should, however, admit that I have changed a few details in this
story, none of which ought to make any difference, but, strangely,
they seem to.
The twins'
real names are Natasha and Tamara Surguladze. They do not come from
Austria, but from the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Their Tata-Naka
label features designs inspired not by the Third Reich, but the
USSR.
Oh, so that's
all right then.
The London
Daily Telegraph described the scene:
Graphic prints
were based on original propaganda motifs from the "industrial
art" movement championed by Lenin and Trotsky. Others featured
the Cyrillic letters CCCP, which represented the former Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics. Sweeping cloaks and knitted sweaters
in "Red Square red" were emblazoned with the symbol
of the Russian revolution, the hammer and sickle, while glittering
Russian stars clasped the edges of jackets and dresses…The
"Mother Russia" theme was reflected in the invitations,
based on the old USSR passports…and in the music, a garage
mix of Shostakovich, Red Army chants and folk songs, overlaid
with Led Zeppelin.
And, no, this
is not all right.
Yet, somehow,
people think that it is. Fascist fashion would shock. Communist
chic does not. To wear the swastika has become, quite rightly, a
taboo, but the hammer and sickle is, in the hands of Tata-Naka,
no more than a vaguely "daring" image, a mark of Cain
reduced to a potentially lucrative logo. Quite why this should be
the case is difficult to grasp. The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany
were as bad as each other. Trying to find a moral distinction between
those two charnel-house states is a pointless exercise in political
theology — about as useful as debating how many devils can
dance on the head of a pin, and rather more dangerous (it is a partial
explanation for the failure to hold a Soviet Nuremberg). Nevertheless,
that is exactly what we tend to do — on those rare occasions
when the issue is discussed at all. And the usual conclusion, that
Hitler's Germany was easily the greater (and history's greatest)
horror, has developed into a part of our culture's conventional
wisdom, a facile nostrum that removes the need to ask the necessary
questions about other monstrous savagery.
It is an illusion
that soothes, and it accounts for the fact that most readers of
this article were, I suspect, more than a little relieved to discover
that the twins had taken their design hints from the creators of
the Gulag rather than the architects of Auschwitz.
Well, weren't
you?
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