How much Christmas fashion kitsch is too much Christmas fashion kitsch?
S Claus, the North Pole
I’m pleased you asked this, Mr Claus, for it’s an issue that is especially pressing this week. The new issue of Vogue is specifically dedicated to people’s work wear: “I always enjoy trying to guess what someone does for a living from what they are wearing, and generally have a pretty good strike rate,” the magazine’s editor, Alexandra Shulman, writes. I reckon everyone has a great strike rate when it comes to guessing your occupation, Mr Claus, and while this might spare you some tedious small talk at cocktail parties (“What do you – oh, right”), I bet it raises other complicated issues, ones possibly not mentioned in Vogue, because life is complicated when Christmas clothes are your perennial personal style.
So, when is one reasonably allowed to start getting out the Christmas clothes without looking too much like a demon-eyed keenster? And when does enthusiasm tip into tacky embarrassment? To deal with the first issue, the definitive answer is: last Saturday. I’m not quite sure who decreed the first Saturday in December to be the official start of Christmas fashion (Mr Claus? Was it you, perhaps?), but judging from the plethora of Christmas clothing I spotted on public transport last weekend, including Christmas hats, Christmas jumpers and even Christmas gloves (woolly gloves with knitted antlers on the knuckles – I know), this seems to be a universally known and obeyed law. Nigel Farage dreams of coining a law so instantly popular with the populace’s basest desires.
Now to the nub of your question – how much is too much? Well, again going by my on-the-ground observations last weekend (the Guardian: celebrated for investigative reporting, from Snowden to Santa’s clothes), the answer this year is that there is no such thing. From teenagers to grandparents, it feels like the new label du jour is Christmas tat. Last Saturday I saw one young lady – mid-20s, I’d guess – wearing a Christmas-themed hat (reindeer), jumper (Santa), handbag (Christmas pudding) and gloves (the aforementioned reindeer), and, judging from the normal garb of her friends, she was simply hanging out with her pals on a Saturday, and they did not seem nonplussed by her outfit.
Obviously, some people (ie, everyone’s mum) have always embraced Christmas tat. But this year, it feels a little different – like it’s, well, trendy. As I discussed in a column last year that is doubtless studied in journalism schools to this day for the depth of its insight and the elegance of its prose, Christmas jumpers have, over the past two years, been deemed “ironically cool” by those who deem such things (Alexa Chung? Noel Fielding? One of the two, probably). No longer did the populace have to make do with annual striped jumpers from Gap: now we could wear snowflake jumpers! Reindeer jumpers! SANTA JUMPERS! High-street outlets such as Topshop and higher-end designers such as Markus Lupfer quickly and duly obliged. And this, I believe, opened the floodgates, the results of which are now flooding all over the streets of Britain.
The truth is it’s fun to wear Christmas-themed stuff. It just is. The only reason people sneered at it for so long is because they remembered their parents wearing it, and the reason their parents wore it is because it’s fun. I don’t want to sound like a Christmas dictator here (although if I were a dictator, I can’t think of a better one to be than a Christmas one), but I just don’t get people who claim not to enjoy Christmas. I couldn’t be more Jewish if I mainlined matzos balls and only had Fiddler on the Roof on my iPod, but even I love Christmas. It is just a happy-making, cosiness-inducing, food-embracing time of year, and wearing clothes associated with it gives one a hint of that feeling all day long. So once Alexa or whoever gave British youth around the world permission to wear Christmas jumpers without risking unacceptable comparisons with their parents, these same young people realised how totally awesome Christmas clothes are and, well, voilà, reindeer gloves.
Now, regular readers of this column might think this leaves me in something of a dilemma. After all, on the one hand, I have written at some length in the past about my abhorrence of knitted animal hats and other accoutrements that infantalise grown women. And on the other: Christmas. Well, dear readers, if you’re looking for consistency in a fashion column, a genre of journalism that is predicated on rules changing randomly every six months, the only confused person around here is you. But, more importantly, this is Christmas, and at Christmas all bets are off. Just as a mince pie is a totally acceptable healthy snack at 11am (I mean, it’s basically fruit, right?), so it’s completely fine to garb yourself in a jumper with a giant reindeer on the front with a flashing red nose on your belly button. Personally, I long been partial to a pair of Christmas tree earrings I bought from Topshop some time in 1997 and this year I have my eyes on a festive-themed handbag (Edie Parker and Charlotte Olympia make expensive ones, although I really can’t fathom the mindset of someone who would spend so much on something they can only use one month a year.) This is not infantalising – this is about celebrating Christmas, which is very, very different, and very important. But you already knew that, Mr Claus.
• Post your questions to Hadley Freeman, Ask Hadley, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Email ask.hadley@theguardian.com
