Fashion Victims

National Review Online, February 26th, 2002

Over 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 frivolityand 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?