Ann "Babe" Huggett
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
By Ann "Babe" Huggett
Over the years I've always made sure to purchase the September issue of Vogue and did so for more decades than I care to admit. I finally dropped Vogue in favor of Harper's Bazaar when women of my age started disappearing from Vogue's acknowledgement as savvy fashion consumers to be replaced with fashion-masquerading pro-leftist commentary. The conspicuous consumption and luxury-addicted Vogue never did catch on that the romance of revolutionary thought was just a façade to hide a grasping, murderous and rapacious political system based on greed and envy. In fact, the editors of Vogue still haven't figured it out and even Harper's Bazaar is guilty of it although to a lesser degree. At least with Harper's, I can still find "women of a certain age" held up as fashionable icons but that's about it.
However, women's magazines in general and fashion commentary in particular are a surprisingly accurate means of forecasting who will be the winners in political elections. I've often written that if you want to know who will win American elections, look to the catwalk and check out the zeitgeist of the collections. When I saw even Madonna picking up the Wild West vibe of the runways by sporting her cowgirl hat and boots before the November 2000 elections, I knew George W. Bush would win despite the frantic efforts of the Al Gore camp to continue challenging the results until enough fraudulent votes could be manufactured by Democratic operatives.
It didn't take a genius to discover that Obama was destined to win the 2008 elections either. All you had to do was see all the pro-Obama message tees on the runway to figure that one out. It was so blatant, it was depressing. The runways right now for Fall 2010 are full of Post-Apocalyptic wear featuring rips, tears, disjointed and mismatched patterns, and hard, funnel-necked leather jackets vying with cantilevered, architectural reinterpretations of the human form in such a way that has not been seen since the Mannerist fashions of the first Queen Elizabeth.
The models seem mostly to be sporting blackened, smoky eyes and ratty, messy hair. It's like fashion has lost its collective mind and is simply waiting for the conservative triumph at the voting booth bombs to drop for the final touch to Mad Max fashion wear just right for that Saturday night punch-up in the parking lot behind Democratic Party headquarters.
A presage of what we can expect in November 2010 will be the elections over in the UK where Tory Party leader, David Cameron, will beat the pants off Labour Prime Minister, Gordon Brown in May of this year. How can I be so sure? Well, my fashion radar picked up a little blip the other day from the style magazine, Tatler, where David Cameron's wife, Samantha, beat out France's former high fashion super model First Lady, Carla Bruni Sarkozy in a celebrity survey for the best dressed woman in politics category. Evidently Tatler is picking up on the extreme disgust Brits have for the grotesque and ruinous mishandling by New Labour of the country over the past 12 years to the point where ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair's "Cool Britannia" has now morphed into "Cruel Britannia."
And, let's face it: when an iconic and hip magazine like the Tatler titles an article, Is it rude to vote Labour...& other social dilemmas resolved, in its January 2010 edition, the jig is definitely up for the Red Rose socialists of the Labour Party.
However, don't let the interchangeable title of Tory and conservative fool you for David Cameron. As much as the UK would be better off with a real conservative as Americans understand the term, Tory/conservatives in the UK are more akin to center-left Democrats here in the US. Occasionally the British version of a blue dog democrat within the Tory Party might sneak into office but if anyone is hoping for the return of principled men and women in the Thatcherite mode, well, leisure suits will make a fashion comeback before they will.
Cameron is an eco-greenie character responsible for switching the Tory Party's traditional hand bearing the Torch of Liberty to a politically correct Ecology tree. His elitism is such that he refused a reporter's request to use his powder room after his interview was over because he didn't want the reporter to "dirty" the facilities. He's all for the harsh Nanny State type legislature currently ruining Brits' lives and thinks the most pressing thing facing his country is not the unrestrained and refusing-to-assimilate masses of hostile immigrants hitting UK shores but AGW.
Like Brown, Cameron will also be hamstrung by EU rules and regulations coming out of Brussels so if Brits think that things will change for the better under the Tories, they will be in for a sad disappointment. Disappointment is the name of the game in politics on either side of the Atlantic when you put, "...your trust in princes" as American conservatives learned when Republican Scott Brown's Massachusetts election to the US Senate wasn't even days old before he announced that he wanted to act in a bipartisan manner.
Oh, and remember that Tatler survey about the best dressed women in politics? Michelle Obama and her boob belts didn't even place and if that isn't a sign of things to come, I don't know what is.
© Ann "Babe" Huggett
February 4, 2010
Over the years I've always made sure to purchase the September issue of Vogue and did so for more decades than I care to admit. I finally dropped Vogue in favor of Harper's Bazaar when women of my age started disappearing from Vogue's acknowledgement as savvy fashion consumers to be replaced with fashion-masquerading pro-leftist commentary. The conspicuous consumption and luxury-addicted Vogue never did catch on that the romance of revolutionary thought was just a façade to hide a grasping, murderous and rapacious political system based on greed and envy. In fact, the editors of Vogue still haven't figured it out and even Harper's Bazaar is guilty of it although to a lesser degree. At least with Harper's, I can still find "women of a certain age" held up as fashionable icons but that's about it.
However, women's magazines in general and fashion commentary in particular are a surprisingly accurate means of forecasting who will be the winners in political elections. I've often written that if you want to know who will win American elections, look to the catwalk and check out the zeitgeist of the collections. When I saw even Madonna picking up the Wild West vibe of the runways by sporting her cowgirl hat and boots before the November 2000 elections, I knew George W. Bush would win despite the frantic efforts of the Al Gore camp to continue challenging the results until enough fraudulent votes could be manufactured by Democratic operatives.
It didn't take a genius to discover that Obama was destined to win the 2008 elections either. All you had to do was see all the pro-Obama message tees on the runway to figure that one out. It was so blatant, it was depressing. The runways right now for Fall 2010 are full of Post-Apocalyptic wear featuring rips, tears, disjointed and mismatched patterns, and hard, funnel-necked leather jackets vying with cantilevered, architectural reinterpretations of the human form in such a way that has not been seen since the Mannerist fashions of the first Queen Elizabeth.
The models seem mostly to be sporting blackened, smoky eyes and ratty, messy hair. It's like fashion has lost its collective mind and is simply waiting for the conservative triumph at the voting booth bombs to drop for the final touch to Mad Max fashion wear just right for that Saturday night punch-up in the parking lot behind Democratic Party headquarters.
A presage of what we can expect in November 2010 will be the elections over in the UK where Tory Party leader, David Cameron, will beat the pants off Labour Prime Minister, Gordon Brown in May of this year. How can I be so sure? Well, my fashion radar picked up a little blip the other day from the style magazine, Tatler, where David Cameron's wife, Samantha, beat out France's former high fashion super model First Lady, Carla Bruni Sarkozy in a celebrity survey for the best dressed woman in politics category. Evidently Tatler is picking up on the extreme disgust Brits have for the grotesque and ruinous mishandling by New Labour of the country over the past 12 years to the point where ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair's "Cool Britannia" has now morphed into "Cruel Britannia."
And, let's face it: when an iconic and hip magazine like the Tatler titles an article, Is it rude to vote Labour...& other social dilemmas resolved, in its January 2010 edition, the jig is definitely up for the Red Rose socialists of the Labour Party.
However, don't let the interchangeable title of Tory and conservative fool you for David Cameron. As much as the UK would be better off with a real conservative as Americans understand the term, Tory/conservatives in the UK are more akin to center-left Democrats here in the US. Occasionally the British version of a blue dog democrat within the Tory Party might sneak into office but if anyone is hoping for the return of principled men and women in the Thatcherite mode, well, leisure suits will make a fashion comeback before they will.
Cameron is an eco-greenie character responsible for switching the Tory Party's traditional hand bearing the Torch of Liberty to a politically correct Ecology tree. His elitism is such that he refused a reporter's request to use his powder room after his interview was over because he didn't want the reporter to "dirty" the facilities. He's all for the harsh Nanny State type legislature currently ruining Brits' lives and thinks the most pressing thing facing his country is not the unrestrained and refusing-to-assimilate masses of hostile immigrants hitting UK shores but AGW.
Like Brown, Cameron will also be hamstrung by EU rules and regulations coming out of Brussels so if Brits think that things will change for the better under the Tories, they will be in for a sad disappointment. Disappointment is the name of the game in politics on either side of the Atlantic when you put, "...your trust in princes" as American conservatives learned when Republican Scott Brown's Massachusetts election to the US Senate wasn't even days old before he announced that he wanted to act in a bipartisan manner.
Oh, and remember that Tatler survey about the best dressed women in politics? Michelle Obama and her boob belts didn't even place and if that isn't a sign of things to come, I don't know what is.
© Ann "Babe" Huggett
The views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)
