Why 1980s fashion firebrand Hamnett binned beloved CBE
SHE HAS readily acknowledged that she was overjoyed to be awarded the CBE — conferred on her at Buckingham Palace by the late Queen Elizabeth.
But fashion designer Katharine Hamnett, who had previously declared that she was ‘holding out to be a Duchess — with a castle’, has apparently tired of being a mere Commander of the British Empire and consigned her insignia to oblivion — or, worse, one of her dustbins.
Staging the sort of protest that’s been her stock-in-trade since 1984, when she met Margaret Thatcher at a Downing Street reception wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with an anti-nuclear slogan, Hamnett has posted her latest revolt on social media.
A video clip shows her descending the steps from her house, wearing a black T-shirt on which are imprinted the words: ‘Disgusted to be British.’
Just in case anyone’s in doubt, Hamnett, an alumna of £45,000-ayear Cheltenham Ladies’ College, says: ‘I’m disgusted to be British for our role in genocide in Gaza.’
Then, lifting the lid of a black bin with her left hand, and holding the light red ribbon of the CBE in her right, she adds: ‘This is my CBE. It belongs in the dustbin, with Sunak and Starmer.’
With a deft flourish, the 76-yearold flips the ribbon — and the cross to which it is attached — into the bin. Closing the lid, Hamnett turns to the camera once more. ‘Go to this site,’ she instructs admirers, directing them to a website which helps the uninitiated discover who their MP is.
‘Tell them you’ll never vote for them again unless they support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.’
Finally, in a demonstration of the trading instincts that propelled her to immense commercial success, she says: ‘Go to this website and get the T-shirt.’
Hamnett has been cleverly in line with metropolitan style for decades. ‘I had to tone down my accent a bit,’ she has recalled of her time at art school in London in the 1960s, describing the era as ‘the first time the working class had mixed with the upper class’.
I wonder what her father’s advice to Israel, striving to free its hostages, would have been?
He had been a prisoner of war of the Japanese.