That the mayoress of Barcelona is not interested in fashion is an accomplished fact, and the matter, far from seeming inconsequential, casts itself like a shadow over the city of prodigies. “I dress as she pleases me,” she replied like a disdainful teenager to the question of a journalism student. She asked him a pertinent question about the political symbolism of clothing. And although Colau said that she would not answer, attributing a gender bias to the question, she ended up doing it her way: “You wouldn’t ask a man,” she wielded in her reprimand. Well done wrong. At this point, no serious person ignores the non-verbal language of our politics, in which the clothes frame the character, be they red ties, dreadlocks or Balinese shirts.
When postmodernism deified design, Jack Lang or Pasqual Maragall were among the first to soften their shoulders with jackets by Thierry Mugler and Toni Miró, respectively. Both were interested in fashion: they knew that, in addition to being a powerful means of expression, it is the skin of every civilization. Fashion at the same time as mirror and loudspeaker, tyrannical and liberating. Because, among many other things, it is a political statement; a story that weaves aesthetics and ethics.
If Colau had been asked about soccer, he probably would have smiled instead of violating the young journalist, to whom he later apologized. The role of frivolous fashion in political debate continues to be taboo for some prejudiced people, when the issue is more pertinent today than ever. As the French sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky points out, “just as political engagement is now glamourized, militant fashions defending visible minorities have emerged in our time.” Let’s think about ecology, feminism, the fight against racism or sexual fluidity. Positioning itself on the side of a fashion made with sustainable fabrics and produced in small local workshops –as Yolanda Díaz does with Galician firms– helps to open the pending conversation about the meanings and signifiers of fashion. Because for a politician it is not so important to find out the brands of the clothes he wears, nor their price, but where and how it is made and how polluting it is.
Returning to Barcelona, ??despite its historical heritage –from a Phoenician port where silks and gold threads arrived to a large nineteenth-century bourgeois boulevard with well-dressed flâneurs–, the city has lost its pedigree, message and strategy in its position as the capital of fashion . And, thus, today the memory of a long textile tradition that implied work, wealth and progress fades. Also style. It is not necessary to go far to find it again, in the Pertegaz salon, the fashion house of the visionary Carmen Mir or the photographs of Leopoldo Pomés, premiering the sensuality of the white light of the afternoon.
Five years ago I asked Ada Colau – in the supplement to this newspaper Fashion
