Fashion, Theatre Nonsense, The Foreign Legion

                 Fashion and Environmental Damage

A Girl Sewing,
Philippe Mercier (1689-1760) 
Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND]

The Commons environmental audit committee has produced a report that outlines the environmental damage caused by fast fashion.

“We need to simply buy less, mend, rent and share more…To support this we recommend that lessons on designing, creating, mending and repairing clothes be included in schools at Key Stage 2 and 3. The creative satisfaction of designing and repairing clothing can offer an antidote to the growing anxiety and mental health issues among teenagers. The skills learnt can also provide a potential pathway towards job opportunities.”

Hang on. Isn’t needlework still on the curriculum under the term design and technology?

What evidence does the committee show that designing and repairing clothes contributes to the mental health of teenagers?

Burberry burnt £28 million of unwanted products last year.

The next day:

“The most joyless and stressed I have been in a classroom occurred during sewing lessons – worse even than chemistry, which I played the trombone for eight years to avoid.

 My ability to botch stitches, attach stuff to my skirt and irritate the hell out of the irascible Miss Grocott knew no bounds.

Finally let loose on an electric machine I fused first the needlework room, then the entire school. After this we reached an agreement: my grandmother would make all my creations while I sat discreetly getting on with my Latin in class, collective health and safety assured.”

(Hannah Betts, The Times, 2019)



Theatre Audiences

Despair, 

Eric Harald Macbeth Robertson (1887-1941)

Photo Credit: Glasgow Museums [CC BY-NC-ND]

The Donmar Warehouse theatre is to provide details of potentially disturbing content on its website.

…The policy will bring accusations of indulging politically correct, over sensitive parts of society, something denied by the theatre’s executive producer, Henny Finch. “I don’t think we’re pandering,” she said. “I think it is just about being considerate to all audiences, making sure everybody feels comfortable and making the theatre as accessible as possible.

…there are five specific advisories for its new production of David Greig’s Europe, which opened last week. They include: “In the first half of the play, a man repeatedly places his hand on a woman’s leg, to her discomfort.”

“In the second half of the play, a man beats up another man due to his status as a migrant.”

“in the second half of the play, a man describes a violent attack on a woman.”

”Hopefully, they give people enough information about whether they want to prepare themselves for a show, or decide whether or not they want to come,” she [Finch] said. “I think the world is changing and audiences expect different things, and we have to be responsive to that in the theatre.”

The move could be seen as mirroring the “trigger warnings” that are increasingly used by universities and colleges to warn or shield students from potentially disturbing content.

The theatre critic Mark Shenton, president of the Critics’ Circle said the move was a step too far. “Theatre is all about surprise, and by accommodating the sensitivities of some of its audience it could be ruining that surprise. You can’t protect people from everything. It will ruin the theatre.”

(The Guardian, 2019)

 Are we all sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. Trigger Warning. What I am about to say may well shock some of you so if you think you may be one of those sensitive individuals you may well want to stop reading now.

Are we going to put an introduction into every book, film play, TV and radio programme to warn individuals of the possibly disturbing content that may follow?  Are we, as adults, really in need of “trigger warnings”?  Despair.

*Theatre at its best aims to be entertaining, unpredictable and ground-breaking.

Unexpected moments and plot twists hold the audience’s attention, prompting people to ponder bigger questions and perhaps even shift uncomfortably in their seats as they do so. This must come as news to those running London’s Donmar theatre who see it as their role to guard against causing any potential distress to members of the audience or showing anything on stage that might trigger challenging emotions.

…But isn’t the point of a play sometimes to take people out of their comfort zone? Isn’t the surprise effect – an essential component of any good drama – ruined by such trailing of specific content?

…This pandering to the smallest likelihood of offence is blighting modern culture, with “trigger warnings” commonplace. Universities routinely use them to warn students of content they might find upsetting. Twitter is dominated by people expressing fake outrage over something because it is deemed to have hurt their feelings.

It isn’t the job of theatre producers to police everything for the audience, even in this hypersensitive age: causing offence is part and parcel of any good drama.

(Jawad Iqbal, The Times,2019)

 
The French Foreign Legion  

Michaelmas,

Benjamin Haughton (1865-1924)

Photo Credit: Atkinson Art Gallery Collection [CC BY-NC-SA]

The French Foreign Legion is never short of recruits. They come from more than 140 countries and join in the search for adventure, discipline and a new identity to put aside past troubles. But the French themselves seem reluctant to sign up to what is widely considered to be the toughest branch of the army… and less than 10 per cent of the 10,000 or so people who apply to join the legion every year are French.

Sergeant Major Sang-Jin Lee, who is involved in the recruitment drive on the beaches, said that the legion’s foreign recruits are no longer adopting French customs because of the absence of homegrown legionnaires to act as guides. He said that the problem was underlined recently when three foreign recruits put ketchup and mayonnaise on their foie gras. He said that the force, which was founded in 1831 needed French recruits to “transmit the language and the culture”.

… Only about 10 per cent of candidates end up as legionnaires. The force accepts people with a criminal record and – it has long been claimed – those fleeing prosecution. It says that murderers, rapists and drug-traffickers are excluded.

(Adam Sage, The Times, 2019)

Putting ketchup and mayonnaise on foie gras – odds on they’re going to be Brits.