Anna Wintour

Source: Bigstock

There are Dames and there are dames. Dame Vivien, an old friend, became one for her philanthropy. Dame Edna, the creation of yet another friend, was damed for her middle-class morality and upper-class pretensions. And now we have Dame Anna of Vogue, honored for affecting a faux aristocratic grandeur to the peasants of the fashion world.

There is only one thing to say, and that’s “Gimme a break.” Here we have the last of the Dambusters crew members refused a knighthood, Nigel Farage ditto, yet a flatulent embarrassment like Victoria Beckham is rewarded for preening and sneering. As the mayor of Hiroshima was said to have asked on that awful August day in 1945, “What the fuck was that?”

Farage restored Britain’s sovereignty, and Johnny Johnson is the last airman of Dambuster fame alive, yet two increasingly simian-looking women get to be dames for services to cheap celebrity and very ugly fashion. Rewarding celebrities should be a no-no. Honors should go to those who work without hope of huge salaries or prizes.

Let’s face it: Fashion is an industry that is as frivolous as it is phony, an escape mechanism for the rich and wannabes and for those who really hate women. Have you seen what the mostly gay designers create in order to make women look ridiculous? Here’s a fashion writer, one Vanessa Friedman, writing about an Italian fashion editor who has just passed away: “Fashion should have a place at the political table, and it has earned one.” Nurse, help! (Now, look here, Vladimir—just lay off the Dior unless you want Chanel down your throat.)

“Fashion isn’t really about clothes, it’s about life!” Nurse, please, this woman really needs help. The only designer I know who creates dresses that flatter women is Carolina Herrera, but then I could be prejudiced. She’s a very old friend and one who doesn’t loathe the female sex. She’s also a grandmother many times over. In other words, she’s normal, and the only freaks she’s seen in her life were at the circus.

Ugliness, like ugly fashion, seems to be the order of the day, and it has left the world beauty-poor and deprived. Beauty was once what art and even civilization strived for; now things have been reversed. But what I’d like to examine are those unseen forces that actually run things, like the ones that decided Anna Wintour should be rewarded by Britain for living in America these past forty years and putting out a fashion magazine that makes lotsa moola for its American owner.

Here’s my friend Chilton Williamson: “[From] the 1980s forward…nice has evolved as the equivalent of liberal, and liberal has come to mean ‘nonjudgmental,’ ‘tolerant,’ ‘uncritical,’ and open to every new thing, every new value, every new standard approved by liberals as something every citizen has a moral duty to approve.” In other words, as yet another friend, Aaron Wolf wrote, “[No] culture, no religion, nor any human person may be said to be better than another….” Tolerance is in vogue nowadays—tolerance, that is, for things un-Western. Western culture is the enemy of tolerance and of voguish things, and, as a Marxist asked back in 1919, “Who will save us from Western civilization?”