This week I get cross with Chanel, adopt a Cannes-boo attitude and take a tipple with the be-turbaned Bo-Jo
Oh no, Boris you buffoon
IN an effort to boost the election campaign of wannabe Tory MP Theodora Clarke, do his bit for community relations, allay suspicions the government hasn’t a scooby about post-Brexit trade negotiations, prove once and for all that he isn’t a gaffe-prone incompetent, and sportingly participate in the best The Thick Of It scene Armando Iannucci never wrote – pause for breath – Boris Johnson donned an orange turban and visited Bristol last week.
Oh dear. In every way imaginable. Including the one where it’s all filmed and posted online.
Speaking at a Sikh temple in the city’s St George’s district and trying to big up the prospect of a free-trade deal with India, the be-turbaned Foreign Secretary said: “Whenever we go to India, to Mumbai or to Delhi, we have to bring clinking – clinking! – in our luggage. We have to bring Johnnie Walker. We have to bring whisky … There is a duty of 150 per cent in India on imports of Scottish whisky. So we have to bring it in for our relatives duty free. Imagine what we could do with a trade deal with India, which there will be, because then the tariffs would go.”
On the footage you can hear a siren outside at this point, which should have alerted Johnson to the fact that someone was about to kick the door in – a someone in the shape of Balbir Kaur, an irate Sikh woman who took him to task for talking about a tipple that is forbidden in her religion. “How dare you talk about alcohol in a Sikh temple,” she said. “No way am I going to vote Tory.”
Job done, Boris. Big tick. That’s Bristol East in the bag.
Tssssss! Hot jackets
FASHION Is Baffling: Part One. Apparently the must-have style item of last summer was a yellow DHL T-shirt very like the ones worn by employees of the international delivery company. So like them, in fact, that the only way you could tell the difference was if the price tag said £185 and the label said Vetements, a French fashion house, and not Fruit Of The Loom.
Now the only people I saw wearing yellow DHL T-shirts last summer definitely did not pay £185 for the privilege and definitely did work for company, so maybe the trend didn’t make it this far north. Or – call me a cynic – maybe it only became last summer’s must-have item when it suited someone to say so this summer.
Similarly, this summer’s musthave item is most likely a figment of some style blogger’s over-active imagination. Still, it’s worth noting because once again it’s to the gig economy that fashion is allegedly inclining its expensively-coiffed head: in particular to the reflective grey and teal jackets worn by Deliveroo riders.
If you haven’t encountered the species, they’re the ones who cycle at terrifying speeds on pavements with huge black boxes on their backs. If you ever order the world’s biggest Rubik’s Cube, this is how it will arrive, though the Highway Code-defying dudes and dudettes of Deliveroo are more commonly loaded with pizzas.
Whatever. It’s their jackets that are highly prized, not them. According to the news website Business Insider these have “quietly developed a reputation in some circles as a niche fashion item, and are being traded online on streetwear forums”. It’s all to do with the jacket’s reflective qualities, you see. “When the lights are on you, it looks pretty sick,” one seller told the website.
Expect a rash of muggings – only with the jackets nicked and the pizzas and bikes left behind.
Cannes it be happening?
IF I was a studio exec and someone pitched a movie to me along the lines of: “There’s this young South Korean girl who’s friends with a huge mutant pig and Tilda Swinton tries to steal it and it has a guy who used to date Taylor Swift in it – the film I mean, not the pig – plus Moaning Myrtle from Harry Potter”, I’d roll my eyes and go: “Not another mutant porcine kidnap flick co-starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Shirley Henderson. Next!” But I wouldn’t boo. Audiences at Cannes, which is to cinema what the Braemar Gathering is to caber tossing, are made of sterner stuff, however. They did boo when the film, called Okja, screened at the festival last week. To be fair – and I hate having to be, but I don’t want any of that “fake news” jazz heading my way – it wasn’t the plot that was the cause of the boos, nor the performances of Swinton, Gyllenhaal or Henderson.
Depending on who you believe, it seems to have been either because the film was initially screened in the wrong aspect ratio, or (the version I like) because the logo that flashed up at the beginning belonged to Netflix, the on-demand TV channel which is quietly taking over the world and which, having made hit drama series such as House Of Cards, is currently moving into film production.
Okja is one of two Netflix films screening at Cannes, but the company isn’t releasing either of them in cinemas. That’s not what they do, you see, and French cinema purists don’t like it. So they boo. As for the technical malfunction, The Hollywood Reporter noted that some audience members “were overheard speculating that it was intentional and a conspiracy to sabotage Netflix”. Oui? Non? Who knows.
The film, for the record, has been warmly compared to ET, which I imagine to have had an equally outlandish pitch. Something along the lines of: “Alien crash lands, drinks beer, makes friends with Drew Barrymore, goes for a bike ride, phones home and never makes the sequel everyone wants.”
Boomer-wrang
HERE’S a sequel you don’t want but are getting anyway: Fashion Is Baffling: Part Two. For £0.17 a unit, and with a minimum order of 100 units, you can have your own set of branded plastic boomerangs. In six standard colours. I know, I know. I can barely resist the temptation either. And if anyone from marketing is reading this, you can expect to see some Sunday Herald-branded ones landing in picnics and thwacking off kids’ heads in the park pretty soon.
Shift the decimal point a bit to the right – no, further than that, so it reads £1,100 – and you can even have a boomerang with the Chanel logo on it. The item is billed as an accessory in the fashion house’s springsummer pre-collection, whatever that is, and is made from wood and resin rather than plastic. But even so, £1,100 is a little steep for something you’re just going to have to keep throwing away.
But it’s not the price tag that has landed Chanel in the soup. It’s mostly because it’s a boomerang, a cultural artefact commonly associated with Aboriginal Australians.
“It’s 2017 and people haven’t worked out yet that appropriating another culture’s artefacts and putting your brand on it is offensive,” said Alison Page, an Aboriginal Australian artist and designer, echoing the thoughts of many who took to social media. “It is appropriating our culture and commodifying it without reference to its origins and where it is actually from. Will they bring out a Chanel stone axe next? The Chanel Indian headdress?”
Shhh. Don’t give them ideas. We don’t want Boris Johnson turning up anywhere in a Chanel-branded turban. Or do we?