I did a training morning at Harvey Nichols today. Nice bunch, full of smiles. Suzan - the godmother of men’s contemporary - asked me afterwards why we have so many guns on our jackets. She said that she had had a couple of customers in who had asked her the same and that she wasn’t sure what to say. She said that they had been a bit upset; accused us of glorifying guns.
I told her this. You can’t have a debate about something if you’re not willing to talk about it; you can’t face a problem if you look the other way; and you can’t see what to do if you’ve got your eyes closed. We - Social Suicide - make clothes for debate, for comment, to open peoples eyes. The guns that we use are all there as comments on different aspects of ‘Us’ - you, me, everybody. The things/ideas/motions that make us ‘Us’. As it happens, we only have three guns in the collection.
Firstly ‘Armed’: a revolver embroidered on the right hand pocket and a bloody great logo across the shoulders - ‘ARMED’. It’s about the way a suit arms you for the battle of the boardroom. How we power-dress. How we are defined by our clothes. The gun is symbolic.
Secondly’ ‘The AK’: An AK47, embroidered in black on black, slung over the right shoulder. It’s about the primeval inside. A suit is a covering of fabric over a very human frame. In the same way, our upbringing, education, situation is a patina of civilisation over a very animal instinct. Take a perfectly civilised country boy, put him in Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, Poland, Sudan and, exposed to the wrong circumstances, he can turn into an animal - doing all sorts of nasty shit to other people. To a lesser extent, someone cuts you up on the motorway and you can turn into and irrational apoplectic mad man. The violence is inside all of us; a dark shadow superficially concealed; black on black.
Thirdly, ‘The Xray’: The x-ray of a pistol is embroidered on the inside pocket of the jacket. It’s about concealment. Similar to the Dury (Razzle magazine in the same place) we all have secrets hidden in our past. Violence, sex, etc. Again, the gun’s symbolic.
I could go on but I really can’t see the problem. In fact, I can’t imagine that anyone carrying a gun is likely to have one embroidered on their jacket. Can you?
Glorifying guns, my arse.