At the time of writing Keir Starmer’s Labour Party had just won a landslide victory, overturning fourteen years of increasingly toxic Tory government and bringing in a majority state-school educated cabinet, more accurately reflecting the general population. This should hand them carte blanche for a total political reset. A new start, new hands on deck: in theory we could be looking at utopia, after more than a decade of division, hostility and rage. So what to wear, for the Brave New World?
There have been various versions in literature of what to wear in the ideal society. In his original Utopia Thomas More, a man not much interested in fashion – indeed, positively hostile to it – specified home-produced durable uniform garments “homely with leather or skins that will last seven years”, all of one style that never changes, and the whole covered with an undyed woollen cloak whenever a citizen steps out. No labour-intensive ornamentation, no waste, no showing-off.
The original solution, a day or two older than Original Sin, in fact, might be a paradise in which all men and women are equal: namely, to leave off apparel all together. A hundred years ago, between two world wars and when the world needed setting to rights arguably more urgently than it does now, there was a great flowering of English nudism, embraced by such as the Bloomsbury group, theorising that the answer to all society’s problems might be to go bare.
American philosopher and writer Henry David Thoreau, who created his own micro-paradise when he retreated to live in nature and evangelised about it in Walden: Life in the Woods (1854) famously declared “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes”, a motto echoed by husbands down the ages. But Thoreau’s ideal world was an idyll for one: clothes are easier to abjure when there’s no-one else around but ducks, there’s the climate to consider – and nudism didn’t stop another world war, when it came to it.
To turn, then, to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which might have offered physical pleasure and gratification for all, but love and art were banned, and worse still a rigid caste system specified the colour citizens were to wear according to their position in the social hierarchy. As an Alpha, one might be happy enough in grey, but a Beta is obliged to wear mulberry, colour of dismal school uniforms down the ages. I for one would be tempted to bypass Gamma (green) and Delta (khaki) and dumb right down as an Epsilon, just for the right to be a brave new Goth in black.
The answer to all society’s problems might be to go bare
So far, so Handmaid’s Tale: it soon becomes clear that these utopias were nothing but repressive totalitarian regimes, using uniforms to keep citizens in their allotted place. Practicality in dressing, however, of the homespun Amish sort, could easily be the keynote for a new New Labour regime. Public investment and an awful lot else are going to be rationed, and whether the Treasury calls it by the A-word or not, we are going to have to knuckle down and hark back to the post-war years of Austerity Britain. And when inequality has never been starker, with townhouses going for tens of millions at one end of the country and families eating from foodbanks at the other, surely only the most copiously body-guarded among us can afford conspicuous consumption, whether it comes in the form of jewel-encrusted bodysuits or the no-longer-quite-so-invisible (since Succession) stealth wealth of Loro Piana cashmere baseball caps.
Margaret Howell would be the go-to, of course, for serious austerity fashion: handsome and British-made drill trousers and smocked shirts that might have been lifted from the back of a constructivist comrade, not to mention excellent for repairing a tank in. Even Thomas More would have been impressed by how long an MH shirt will last, but she doesn’t come cheap. Perhaps the new regime will mark the revival instead of true workwear shops such as Millett’s, or market stalls will pop up with whole outfits in bleu ouvrier, and the long defunct Laurence Corner, legendary army surplus store beloved of punks and outcasts, will spring back to life.
I did worry for a while that the pollsters were living in Cloud Cuckoo Land and, by the time you read this, the Conservative Party might have been returned to power. In that dark scenario, you would have seen me clad in full Mad Max crossed with Boudicca: a warrior queen in leather chaps, bronze breastplate, and spikes on my wheels. Dystopia here we come.
Christobel Kent is a Gold Dagger-nominated author. Her latest novel “In Deep Water” is out now
