What are we to make of the launch of Samantha Cameron’s fashion label?

Michael, by email

What indeed, Michael, what indeed? As you may or may not have heard, Samantha Cameron, née Sheffield, has launched her very own fashion label, Cefinn; an anagram, sort of, of her children’s names, which is sweet.

Cameron pitches her label as “sitting between Joseph and Whistles”, she told Vogue last month, which means dresses that cost about £300 ($370), tops at £100 and, from what we’ve seen of it, clothes that look vaguely reminiscent of the sort of stuff you find at The Kooples and Maje. And, as is the way in these kinds of articles about novice celebrity designers (see literally any fashion interview with Victoria Beckham or Alexa Chung), much time was spent telling the reader how, ACTUALLY, Cameron has always been “fascinated” by design. She understands what “normal” women need from their clothes, that this totally isn’t an ego thing but a calling, yadda yadda yadda.

In these articles, and in this one specifically, claims about how the aspiring designer really understands things like how skirts shouldn’t ride up when you sit down and blouses shouldn’t gape around the buttons are relayed as proof of the interviewee’s heretofore untapped design genius, as opposed to being the baseline minimum requirement for anyone wanting to work in fashion, but whatever. I would say these interviews write themselves, but I’d be putting myself out of a job.

I’ve thought about this issue a lot over the past few weeks, trying very hard to be reasonable. I have no doubt that Cameron is a nice person. God knows, articles about her tell me enough times she is and, heck, she looks it and I write about fashion so I’m clearly happy to go by surface appearances. I’ve also long argued that the sins of the husband should not be visited upon the spouse if she has stayed out of the issue. And yet. YET.

Even Cameron’s most loyal defenders who clamber over each other to give quotes about how Sam Cam is so aspirational-but-real-but-also-aspirational-but-in-a-really-real-way would surely concede that the only reason her label is getting any publicity – the main reason it exists, to be frank – is because of her husband. Contrary to what fashion interviews would have you believe, there are plenty of creative fortysomethings around who have had no experience in fashion design but understand how a dress should look – but only one of them is being gifted her own label. “When she decides to do something, there is nothing that will stop her doing it,” says one of Cameron’s friends in the Vogue article. To which the obvious response is, well, yes, good for her, but this has less to do with any extraordinary qualities within Cameron herself and more to do with the fact that she is – as Vogue put it – “almost indecently well-connected”. Achieving your dreams is not quite as difficult when your mother is an Astor, your father a baronet and your husband the former prime minister.

So posh people get ahead in Britain – not news, right? The real question is how to feel about Cameron launching a label, and, to be honest, it makes me want to move to the Hebrides and stick my head into a pile of wet leaves. Because the truth is, Cameron’s celebrity is, as I said, entirely down to who her husband is, and whatever else he achieved in office, his legacy will be that he needlessly gambled on this country’s future on the astonishingly foolish referendum, because he thought he could pull the result out of his back pocket, like an essay crisis at Brasenose College, Oxford, like a bit of bluffing in an Eton English class when you haven’t really read the set text. And when it all went wrong, he resigned with the hum of a jaunty tune. So here we are today, thanks to Cameron’s hubris, in a country riven by Orwellian prophecies, with experts derided as traitors if they don’t parrot Number 10’s line (not that even Number 10 knows what that line is). The elevation of the stupid: that is what the referendum has led to. And, like Anthony Eden and Suez, that is all David Cameron will be known for, and that’s how it should be.

Sam Cam the brand – what to expect from the Cefinn fashion label Read more

The Camerons are, of course, private citizens now, and free to do as they please. But I’m free, too, and forgive me if I don’t feel like bumping up the Cameron bank account by buying Samantha’s clothes, no matter how much she understands buttons. I’m not saying she should go into purdah, but maybe someone could have a think about the weirdness in her charging £300 for a dress when the country is about to enter a period of – to use the favoured euphemism – extreme economic uncertainty because of her husband’s arrogance. There’s something about watching all my money lose its value that really doesn’t put me in the mood for shopping.

I said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m sure Cameron is a nice person (it is a legal requirement that all articles about her include that claim at least 17 times.) Whereas I, by contrast, am a miserable remoaner. Or maybe I’m just stating the blinking obvious facts. Who knows? We’re in the post-truth world now, right?

Post your questions to Hadley Freeman, Ask Hadley, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Email ask.hadley@theguardian.com.

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