Magdeburg l There are a lot of stereotypes about British people, but I’ve never been convinced by many of them. People seem to think that we are all posh, for instance, but we really aren’t. British food is a lot better than it gets credit for. And, contrary to what you may have heard, many of us actually have perfectly decent teeth. But I have always thought one cultural stereotype about the British was completely true: that we are not a country blessed with fashion sense. We believe that France is, and Italy too, but Britain? We like fake tan, dressing for summer too early in the year, and wearing socks with sandals. We’re not fashionable – so the British cliché goes.
You can imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered a German shop catalogue for a product range called ‘Brit-Chic’. Goodness gracious, I thought! Another country thinks we’re chic! I almost spilled my cup of tea. But my surprise quickly turned to disappointment. Really? An umbrella stand? A set of whisky glasses, next to the phrase ‘Gin o’clock’? Please, at least get the spirit right.
The accompanying photos were surreal. A woman walks down a stone-paved street with her Jack Russell. It’s clearly not raining, but she has her tartan umbrella out anyway – a tartan umbrella that matches her shirt. Is that another British stereotype? That we care so much about our umbrellas that we have a different one for each outfit? In another shot, a man wearing a woolly hat leans casually against a train. Steam billows mysteriously around his ankles. Where is he going? Milton Keynes? Leeds?
But the most depressing shot displays the catalogue’s bedroom collection. A bearded man in a dark jumper sits, on his own, on the arm of a grey armchair. He is drinking a glass of whisky (even though it’s meant to be gin o’clock) while staring wistfully at his bed. The bed is all grey: grey headboard, grey pillows, grey duvet cover. Even the towel, messily flung against the duvet and now falling slowly to the floor, is grey.
‘DIE FEINE ENGLISCHE ART’, declares the text that accompanies this image, on top of the union jack. Is this irony? Surely there is nothing fine about it. British culture, this picture suggests, is a man drinking alone, too weary even to sit down properly or put his towel away, longing only for the embrace of his grey bedsheets.
How did this end up in a fashion catalogue, I wondered. Then I remembered what country I was in. At the risk of sounding less polite than British people are meant to, I suspect that Germany might have a relationship with style at least as complicated as our own. To be fair, you buy your clothes and bed linen from a coffee roastery. And I’d be lying if I said I’d never seen a German wearing sandals with socks – something which, I’m told by friends from other European countries, is a faux pas
Curious, I asked some German people if they thought that British people had no sense of style. Not at all, they said. Germany, on the other hand…
It seems that believing in our own unfashionableness is something the Germans and the British have in common. I guess it’s a matter of opinion whether either of us are correct. But we probably shouldn’t ask each other for tips.
Eine deutsche Version des Artikels gibt es hier.
