Random reminder

Press, 11 June 1979, Page 24

Random reminder

FASHION NOTE An intriguing news item from China leaped to our consciousness the other day. After the death of Mao, fashionconscious young Chinese cast off years of inhibitions and regimented clothing, the item said, only to be plunged into gloom when a spate of newspaper articles termed long hair and bell-bottoms as bourgeois and representing a decadent Western lifestyle. The magazine “China Youth” announced that it was because of the “all-round dictatorship” of the “Gang of Four” that people were made to wear baggy Army uniforms, cut their hair and shun high-heeled shoes. We would certainly like to have been present when these fashionconscious young Chinese cast off their regimented clothing. That must have been a great moment of liberation and probably fairly erotic as well. Certainly it must have had the Gang of Four keening impotently in their cells. Oddly enough, wearing baggy Army uniforms is something that I decadent Western youth used to do 1

quite without any compulsion from the Gang of Four, but of course there is a great difference between wearing ’ baggy Army clothing because you want to, and wearing baggy Army : clothing because four members of a gang tell you to. Anyway, the point is that there I must be a great market opening up i here for our clothing manufacturers, and more particularly our boutique : proprietors. The Chinese will have had little or no experience in the proper promotion and management of boutiques. We should send a trade deputation of boutique proprietors to Peking straight away, armed with authority to enter into all sort and manner of joint venture boutiques. Just think of some of the splendid titles available: “Snob of the Thousand Suns,” “The Mighty Chinese People’s Mighty Gear,” and “I Was Chairman Mao’s Batman.” It makes your mouth water, doesn’t it, if you like eating 'clothes, at any rate.