#rob gallagher

“Ask someone else”

Anna Wintour on Kanye West’s debut womenswear show

William Acton’s sketch of Mary Lygon – note unwavering fixity of upper lip 

There’s an argument to be made that Britain’s greatest fashion export isn’t tweed or tartan, punk or sports casual but the stiff upper lip. The French may possess a certain chic insouciance, the Mediterraneans a devil-may-care brio, but when it comes to adamantine emotional continence this sceptered isle holds its own. 

Worryingly though, our tradition of repressed sentiment and callous indifference has never been more at risk  - a situation admirably detailed in media historian Adam Curtis’ terrific recent piece on the tyranny of televisual hugging. Liberally illustrated with clips from the hinterlands of the BBC archive, Curtis’ piece is particularly concerned with the case of Lillian, a stately ‘60s uberbitch (please note that, for Curtis, Lillian’s bitchiness is indissociable from ‘the particular and original characteristics that her quick thinking mind gave her’ ) who has to choose between attaining happiness and human community or remaining really fierce. Curtis seems rather upset that she chooses happiness.

L-R: Illustrations from Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals; the CG avatar used in Xunei Pan, Marco Gillies and Mel Slater’s study of blushing; Joan Collins’ first entrance in Dynasty.

Of course, Lillian could not have known that science would corroborate our innate suspicion of overt displays of emotions – or, to be more precise, that researchers at University College would discover test subjects were less patient with a virtual Chinese woman if she blushed.

Touchingly, a whole strain of British theatre scholarship is devoted to the question of whether performers can blush at will – and, thus, to the dream absolute power over the emotions. In 1888, having delved into Darwin, Ibsenite critic William Archer reluctantly concluded that ‘physiological records may furnish cases of a power to blush or blanch at will; but even if these exist they have not come to my knowledge) we can only regard such a faculty as a freak of nature, much more abnormal than (for example) the power of moving their ears that some people possess’. 

Of course, the face’s irritating tendency to convey emotional states can be gotten around by obscuring as much of it as possible – see the veil in which Joan Collins makes her Dynasty debut or Anna Wintour’s conjoined bob and shades, which, apparently made from the same impermeable, faintly nacreous material, concentrate the focus on her disapproving grimaces. (Anglobitch manqué Simon Cowell’s method of chemically immobilising his face works too).

In these financially straitened times we Britons should not be ashamed to fall back on our fathomless reservoirs of contempt, suppressed fury and paranoid shame. For, lest we forget, the consequences of being carried away by emotion can be disastrous: