Civilization: Is the West History? (2011) s01e05 Episode Script

1
ln 1 909, a millionaire French banker
called Albert Kahn
set out to create what he called
an archive of the planet.
The 72,000 colour photographs he collected
reveal a dazzling variety
of costumes and fashions.
All over the world, it's clear
that clothing defined national identity.
To a truly astonishing extent,
people were what they wore,
from Tunisia to Mongolia,
from Morocco
to lndia.
But today, a century later, Albert Kahn's
project would be more or less pointless
because these days
most people around the world
dress in pretty much the same way
the same jeans, the same T-shirts.
ln other words, the West's way.
In this series I'm identifying
the six unique factors -
I'm caIIing them the kiIIer appIications -
that ensured
that the West dominated the rest.
And I'm asking,
if we Iose our monopoIy over these things,
couId Western civiIization itseIf
be consigned to history?
The first four killer apps
were competition, science,
the property-owning democracy
and modern medicine.
Yet in the first half
of the 20th century
despite the dominance
these killer apps had brought it
Western civilization managed
to tear itself apart in two world wars.
It took the speciaI magic of the fifth
kiIIer app, the consumer society,
to turn the West from unbridIed
destruction to rampant consumption.
All around the world, fashions
are converging on a Western template.
Just what is it about our cIothes
that peopIe can't seem to resist?
Are they dressing Iike us
because they want to be Iike us?
Because, after aII, this is
about much more than just cIothes.
It's about a whoIe popuIar cuIture
that extends through music and movies,
and that cuIture carries with it
a subtIe message.
It's about freedom,
the right to wear whatever you Iike,
even if it is
what everybody eIse is wearing.
It's about democracy,
because onIy those movies and songs
and cIothes that peopIe actuaIIy want
get made.
And, above aII, it's about capitaIism,
because, after aII, corporations have to
make money from seIIing stuff Iike this.
ln the second half of the 20th century,
the only real rival to Western
civilization would be communism.
So, which would win -
socialism or shopping?
By 1 900, the world had been economically
integrated in a way never seen before.
The different bonds
that linked it together -
railways, steamship lines and telegraphs -
were almost entirely Western invented
and Western owned.
But perhaps the most remarkable expression
of this first globalization was sartorial.
With extraordinary speed,
a mode of dressing that was distinctly
Western swept the rest of the world,
consigning traditional clothing
to the dressing-up basket of history.
This picture, taken in 1 921,
shows two royal heirs,
Crown Prince Hirohito of Japan and Edward,
Prince of Wales, the future Edward Vlll.
The thrones they stood to inherit
could scarcely have been
further apart from one another.
But here they both were in London,
dressed by the same Savile Row tailor.
This is Henry PooIe's Iedger
from the earIy 1920s,
and you can see
the absoIuteIy huge order of cIothes
that the Japanese pIaced
for the Crown Prince Hirohito
when he visited Europe in 1921 .
They ordered everything under the sun -
uniforms, waistcoats, fIanneI trousers.
Here's just a singIe Iine -
a fancy cashmere suit, a bIue cIoth suit
and a striped fIanneI suit.
This was a comprehensive attempt
to give a Western makeover
to a future OrientaI emperor.
And Hirohito wasn't the only
foreign dignitary queuing up
for an immaculately tailored English suit.
Preserved in the basement here
are thousands of suit patterns
for customers from all over the world
who came to get the Western look,
from the Emperor of Ethiopia
Haile Selassie
to Buffalo Bill.
Hirohito's desire to wear
the Iatest Western styIes
was part of a standardizing trend
that was sweeping the worId.
The Crown Prince couldn't exactly turn up
for golf at Gleneagles dressed like this.
lf you wanted to look the part
in a Western-dominated world,
then you had to dress like
Well, like this.
British cIothes, of course, were about
much more than just economic modernity.
Nowhere were the subtIe gradations of
the cIass system more cIearIy articuIated
than in carefuIIy taiIored cIoth.
As these wonderfuI iIIustrations
from the 1920s show,
this was a time when you reaIIy
couId judge a chap's status
by the cut of his suit.
Unfortunately for Hirohito,
and for the Japanese in general,
it was also a time when it was no less
natural to judge a person's worth
by the colour of his skin.
WhiIe Hirohito headed back to Japan
with his bespoke Western suits,
the future King Edward VIII
set off for a fancy-dress baII
with his chum ''Fruity'' MetcaIfe.
They were both dressed
as Japanese cooIies.
As far as they were concerned,
that was just about as absurd as Japanese
dressing up in Western cIothes.
Indeed, Edward wrote to his mistress
that Hirohito was a ''prize monkey''
and that the Japanese
were prone to ''breed Iike rabbits''.
Oh, dear.
(SPEECH DROWNED OUT BY DRUMMING)
Since the time of the Meiji Emperor,
the Japanese had been striving
to leave behind their traditional culture
so they would no longer be treated
like second-class citizens.
But donning Western clothes
just wasn't enough.
To be treated as an equaI, it seemed,
Japan wouId have to acquire the uItimate
Western power-dressing accessory -
an empire.
ln 1 904, Japan launched a surprise attack
on the Russian fleet
at Port Arthur in Manchuria.
Four decades later, its imperial ambitions
culminated with another surprise attack -
on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor.
The outcome was defeat, humiliation
and occupation by the American victors.
But the occupying forces in post-war Japan
weren't interested in the traditionaI
taiIoring of SaviIe Row.
What they wanted was
a more democratic styIe of dress,
the kind of gear a guy couId work in.
By the end of World War ll, the look
of the West was no longer European.
ln this photo, Emperor Hirohito is still
dressed pretty much as he was in 1 921.
But he's no longer standing next
to a member of the British Royal Family.
He's standing next to the victorious
American General Douglas MacArthur,
who's in standard duty uniform.
No tie, no formality.
Now peopIe who aspired to dress and Iive
as Westerners no Ionger Iooked to Britain.
They Iooked to America
and a new re-cIothing of the worId.
After the Second World War,
the image of Western civilization
was made in America, not in Europe.
The American ideal of ''smart casual'' -
unfussy, convenient
and comfortable off-the-peg clothes,
ready-made for everyone -
goes right back to the
American War of lndependence.
Before the American RevoIution,
Iuxury cIoth and cIothes
were imported from Britain,
but during the RevoIution
Americans were discouraged
from emuIating British fashion.
The new United States wouId weave
its own cIoth, make its own cIothes,
design its own fashions.
SheItered behind
a protectionist tariff waII,
the American textiIe industry
wouId become one of the foundations
of an extraordinary economic miracIe.
To an extent that's often overlooked,
the United States was a country
built on cotton and cloth.
Southern cotton fieIds
provided the raw materiaI.
African-Americans,
Iike the ones who toiIed here
on this pIantation near CharIeston,
provided the Iabour,
and Northern textiIe miIIs did the rest.
For a time, cotton was king
of the US economy.
Pretty soon, every major American city
had its own garment district.
Then US manufacturers
made the crucial discovery
that the range of human proportions
is rather smaller
than you might have thought.
lf you could standardize sizes,
then you could make clothes cheaply,
on an industrial scale.
The idea swept America,
and it didn't just apply to clothing.
You could have a standard house,
and a standard car, as well.
The whoIe idea
of the American consumer society
was that everybody
shouId have a piece of this action.
Everybody shouId have a car,
everybody shouId have a garage,
everybody shouId have
consumer durabIes, a big fridge,
everybody shouId have a Iawn
that they couId mow on Sunday
and, of course, everybody shouId have
a desirabIe suburban residence.
That mass consumerism
and standardization
could somehow be reconciled
with rampant individualism
was one of the smartest tricks
ever pulled by Western civilization.
And the key to understanding how it was
done lies in that very word - Western.
(CATTLE MOO)
Because it was here in the Wild West
that the ultimate
universal Western garment was born -
jeans.
They started life as the
no-nonsense clothing of cowboys
riding hard through big country,
and gold-digging miners.
For Americans
they symbolize a frontier lifestyle
of raw freedom and boundless opportunity.
(INDISTINCT)
But how did these denim waist overalls,
as they were originally called,
come to be so globally popular?
BIue jeans are cheap to make,
comfortabIe to wear,
easy to cIean and very hard-wearing.
What's more,
virtuaIIy anyone can get into them.
But then so are workmen's overaIIs of
the sort that we used to wear in Britain,
not to mention farmers' dungarees.
Why was it American cowboys'
work trousers
that came to dominate
the worId of fashion?
WeII, the answer Iies in two of the 20th
century's fastest-growing industries -
movies and marketing.
ln trailers for movies like Giant,
screen icon James Dean advertised
Western civilization's new look.
Since anyone could afford a pair of jeans,
you too could be Jimmy Dean.
And thanks to good marketing,
these all-American clothes appealed
just as strongly to non-Americans.
Even those on the other side
of the lron Curtain -
or rather, the denim curtain.
Teenagers in the Soviet Union
and its satellites in Eastern Europe
were crying out for jeans.
The really puzzling thing
is that the United States'
principal rival in the Cold War
couldn't replicate these
supremely simple items of apparel.
Just why was it that Russians
couldn't make jeans?
You might have thought
that the transformation of jeans
from work cIothes into fashion items
wouId have heIped the Soviets.
After aII, the Soviet Union was
supposed to be the proIetarian paradise,
and jeans are rather easier to make
than, say, a three-piece suit.
Yet it turned out
that, in the fashion stakes,
the Soviet Union wasn't so much the
Eastern enemy as the West's ugly sister.
Ugly and dumb.
Because somehow the Communist bloc
failed to grasp the appeal
of an item of clothing
that could equally well
have been made to symbolise
the virtues of the hard-working
Soviet proletarian.
lnstead blue jeans, and the pop music
with which they were inextricably linked,
became the quintessential
symbols of capitalist superiority
and Western freedom.
Forget nuclear warheads.
Jeans were the ultimate Cold War weapon
because they actually got launched
against the Soviets.
(SIRENS)
lf you were a student living behind
the lron Curtain in the 1 960s,
you wanted to dress
like all the young dudes in the West.
You really didn't want to dress
as a Young Pioneer.
(IN GERMAN)
Stefan WoIIe was an East German student
at the time.
(TRANSLATION)
Throughout the Eastern bloc,
black marketeers sprang up
who would exchange jeans with visiting
Westerners for fur hats and caviar.
The communist authorities
were only too aware
of the threat that the jeans genie
posed to their system.
But what could they do?
This rather hideous buiIding used to house
the worId's most boring media outIet,
Neues Deutschland,
the officiaI East German party newspaper.
Now, the onIy interesting thing
about Neues Deutschland
was the way
that it used to represent the West,
which was as a den of iniquity,
of unempIoyment, of crime,
and of course of grinding poverty,
aII direct consequences
of the internaI contradictions
of capitaIism, you understand.
The troubIe was
that every time they ran a picture
of the oppressed proIetariat of the West,
they were aII wearing jeans.
Now, Western civiIization
couIdn't be aII bad
if even the proIes got to wear Levi's.
Such was the desirability
of this simple article of clothing
that Soviet law enforcement officials
coined the phrase 'jeans crimes'',
which referred to ''law violations
''prompted by a desire to use any means
to obtain articles made of denim''.
lt was as if the heirs of Lenin
were more scared of Wrangler's
than of the US Air Force.
The French Ieftist phiIosopher
and comrade-in-arms of Che Guevara,
JuIes Regis Debray,
once said, ''There's more power
in rock music and bIue jeans
''than the entire Red Army.''
WeII, he was right in the end.
A Iater generation
wouId overthrow the Soviet system
with a veIvet revoIution
and a rock'n'roII soundtrack.
But 20 years earIier,
young peopIe on both sides of the Iron
Curtain were aIready thirsting for change.
The year was 1968, and it was time
to unzip the denim revoIution.
1968 was a year of revoIutions
in many ways and in many pIaces,
from Paris to Prague, from BerIin
to BerkeIey, and even in Beijing.
But the common factor
in aII these disruptions
to the CoId War duopoIy of power
was youth.
As the post-war baby-boomers
became teenagers,
they yearned to challenge their fathers'
stiflingly standardized order.
WOMAN: A Iot of peopIe want revoIution.
They want a change of the system.
The onIy way they think they can do it
is by revoIution, and that's a fact.
It is the onIy way they can do it.
(CHANTING)
But this was a very strange
kind of revolution,
in which style - boy,
did the young Parisians have thatl -
counted for a lot more than substance.
On 22nd March 1 968,
French students occupied the university
administration building in Nanterre,
''mad Nanterre'' as it became known.
(SHOUTING)
By May, tens of thousands of students
were clashing with police
on the streets of Paris.
Strikes swept the country.
So, what was it aII about?
WeII, if you'd asked the student Ieaders,
they wouId have said
it was about red revoIution,
insurrection in the centres of capitaIism.
''Humanity won't be happy,'' they said,
''untiI the Iast capitaIist is hung
with the entraiIs of the Iast bureaucrat.''
The Situationists went even further. They
wanted the aboIition of Iabour itseIf.
''Ne travaiIIez jamais'' - never work.
That's the sort of thing you'd have seen
sprayed on the waIIs here at Nanterre.
But there was one demand
that trumped aII the others,
and that was for unIimited maIe access
to the femaIe dormitories,
hence the revoIutionary sIogan,
''Unbutton your mind as often as your fIy.''
As one graffiti artist put it,
''The more l want to make love,
the more l want to make revolution.
''The more l want to make revolution,
the more l want to make love''.
Women were encouraged to experiment
with hitherto taboo degrees of exposure.
This was as much a sexual and style
revolution as a social revolution.
The irony is that the '68-ers,
who routineIy denounced
American imperiaIism in Vietnam,
and symboIicaIIy smashed the windows
of the American Express offices in Paris,
were themseIves chronicaIIy addicted
to American popuIar cuIture.
BIue jeans and rock'n'roII
suppIied the costumes and the soundtrack
of the so-caIIed revoIution.
But these were among the most successfuI
products of Iate 20th century capitaIism.
The French Situationists might heap scorn
on the consumer society,
with its cuIture of crass materiaIism
dressed up in spectacuIar advertising,
but those who rioted
against capitaIism here in Paris
were wiIdIy underestimating the benefits
they themseIves reaped
from economic and poIiticaI freedom.
Give or take the occasional baton charge
by policemen
who despised privileged middle-class kids
with long hair and flares,
the authorities in the Western world
generally allowed the students
the freedom to protest.
This ability to absorb dissent
gave the West another crucial advantage.
Behind the lron Curtain, however,
it was a very different story.
The year 1 968
saw worldwide student revolution.
Dressed in their jeans,
the baby-boomers challenged the authority
of their parents and their rulers.
ln France, students proclaimed themselves
Marxists and anti-imperialists,
even if they did buy their jeans
from the best capitalist retailers
America could produce.
The contrast when you crossed over
to the other side of the lron Curtain
couldn't have been greater.
lt was like going
through the looking glass.
For here the same things,
even the same clothes,
could have diametrically
opposite meanings.
So, in 1967, Levi's organised trade fairs
in Moscow, Warsaw and here in Prague.
The Czechs caIIed jeans ''Texasky'',
Texan trousers.
Born in the WiId West,
these pants were gaIIoping eastwards
to turn comrades into cowboys.
The demand for Levi's soared.
Meanwhile, in clubs and bars
throughout the capital,
Czech bands tried to imitate
the new musical trends from the West.
(IN CZECH)
The most popular Prague band of the '60s
were Olympic, the Czech Beatles.
Lead singer Petr Janda recognised
the political impact of popular culture.
(TRANSLATION)
As in Paris,
universities became flash points
for a clash of the generations.
ln April 1 968,
President Alexander Dubcek launched
his action programme of liberalization.
Significantly,
his economic policy shifted the emphasis
from heavy industry to consumer goods.
But the Soviet leadership in Moscow
saw the so-called Prague Spring
as an unacceptable threat.
When talks failed to resolve the crisis,
the Soviets sent 200,000
Warsaw Pact troops to the border.
ln the small hours of 21 st August 1 968,
tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia.
By the time dawn broke,
the whole country had been occupied.
This buiIding used to house the CentraI
Committee of the Czech Communist Party.
At four in the morning on August 21st
1968, it was surrounded by Soviet tanks.
(SHOUTING)
Threatened by an angry crowd,
the tanks opened fire,
kiIIing at Ieast one young man.
And aII of this was watched
by Dubcek and his coIIeagues
from up here on this baIcony.
They were watching the death of a dream.
At around 9am,
troops stormed the building.
Dubcek was flown to the Soviet Union.
A focal point of resistance
was Wenceslas Square,
where Czechs gathered daily around
the equestrian statue of Wenceslas,
the saintly Duke of Bohemia.
Here on 1 9th January,
a Czech student named Jan Palach
doused himself in kerosene
and set himself alight.
Three days later, he was dead.
In the West, students induIged themseIves
with Marxist rhetoric,
but what they were reaIIy after
was free Iove.
On the other side of the Iron Curtain,
the stakes were higher.
Here what was at issue was freedom itseIf.
And the biggest threat to that freedom
was posed by the custodians
of Marxism in Moscow.
After 1 968,
the Czech communist regime
required all professional rock musicians
to sit a written exam in Marxism-Leninism.
(BAND PLAYS)
The avant-garde Plastic People
Of The Universe hit back
with songs like 100 Points,
which very pointedly asked why the party
was so scared of freedom and democracy.
In 1976, aII of the members of The PIastic
PeopIe Of The Universe were arrested.
Two were put on triaI,
charged with ''extreme vuIgarity,
antisociaIism, nihiIism and decadence.''
They were sentenced
to 18 and 8 months in jaiI.
Never in its history has pop music been
more poIiticaI than it was here in Prague.
So, just what were
the Soviet authorities so afraid of?
Why not just let Prague's students have
all the jeans and rock'n'roll they liked?
The answer is of course
that the West's kiIIer app,
the consumer society,
posed an existentiaI threat
to the Soviet system itseIf.
The consumer society was market based.
It responded to signaIs from consumers
about their preferences,
for bIue jeans over fIanneI trousers,
or Mick Jagger over Burt Bacharach,
and it devoted an increasing share of
resources to satisfying those preferences.
This the Soviet system
simpIy couIdn't do.
Their entire system was based
on centralised planning.
The party knew, or thought they knew, what
everyone needed - brown polyester suits,
and they placed
the factory orders accordingly.
They had no clue
what anyone actually wanted.
Communists did rockets,
not retail therapy.
Tanks had to take precedence
over tank tops,
strategic bombers over Stratocasters.
One Soviet critic opined
(RUSSIAN ACCENT) ''Every ounce
of energy expended on dance fIoor
''is energy that couId
and shouId have been invested
''in buiIding a hydroeIectric pIant.''
Here in Berlin, the division
of the city into East and West
looked like a permanent fact.
With the crushing of the Prague Spring,
the communist system in Eastern Europe
Iooked once again unassaiIabIe.
But whiIe the communists were extremeIy
good at crushing poIiticaI opposition,
their resistance to the West's consumer
society was aItogether weaker.
Ordinary people simply improvised
their own Western-style clothes.
Wannabe designer Anne-Katrin Hendel
even stitched together her own jeans.
(TRANSLATION)
Some still say that
Mikhail Gorbachov or Ronald Reagan
caused the collapse of communism.
But maybe it really was
blue jeans and rock'n'roll.
I was Iiving in BerIin
in the summer of 1989.
In those days, if you were British,
you couId traveI pretty freeIy from
the West of the city to the East and back.
But when you got on at Friedrichstrasse
in the East of the city,
you'd be the onIy person on the train.
It was quite an eerie journey
going back from one worId to another,
past the oId, diIapidated Reichstag
buiIding, through the waII - IiteraIIy.
And then in the summer of '89,
things changed.
I was no Ionger
the onIy person on the train.
In fact, I was surrounded
by Hungarians and by PoIes,
because their governments had,
for the first time,
given their peopIe
freedom to traveI to the West.
WeII, I got quite excited about this.
In fact, I wrote a newspaper story
for one of the British papers
and I wanted it to have the headIine
''The BerIin WaII is crumbIing''.
Just imagine if they'd pubIished it.
I wouId have prophesied the coIIapse
of communism. But they didn't.
The editor said I'd been Iistening
to one too many RonaId Reagan speeches.
Oh, weII. That's Iife!
(IN GERMAN)
On 9th November 1 989,
a bemused press corps was informed
that travel across the border
would be permitted,
prompting a flood of East Berliners
to the border checkpoints.
Unprepared,
the guards chose not to resist.
By midnight, all the checkpoints
had been forced to open.
(CHEERING)
With the faII of the BerIin WaII,
the CoId War was over.
For some, it was the end of history.
For others, the triumph of the West.
ActuaIIy, I think
the ItaIian company got it right
that started marketing a Iine
in skin-tight ''perestroika jeans''.
The Western way of dress
had done for Soviet communism.
Now only one challenge seemed to remain.
The most populous
and worst-dressed nation on Earth.
A people whose egalitarian leaders
required them to wear
a billion pairs of matching pajamas.
ln the wake of the Mao Tse-tung's
Communist Revolution in 1 949,
China had become
the world's drabbest society.
Gone were the last vestiges
of imperial silk.
Gone, too, were the Western outfits
favoured by the nationalists
between the wars.
ln the pursuit of strict equality,
everyone was issued with the kind
of clothes only convicts wore in the West.
WaIk down a typicaI street in China today
and what you see
is a veritabIe kaIeidoscope
of Western styIes of cIothing.
And not a singIe of pair
of Mao pajamas in sight.
What a difference three decades of reform
can make to the way a society Iooks.
lt's as if the Chinese
are competing to see
who can look most like they've just
come back from a shopping expedition
to 5th Avenue or Oxford Street.
Like aII industriaI revoIutions,
China's began with a massive investment
in textiIe production.
Factories Iike this one
aII over the Eastern seaboard
became unbeatabIe competitors
when it came to exporting cheap cIothing.
But now the question for China is this.
With Western economies
depressed by a gIobaI financiaI crisis,
is there enough domestic demand in China
itseIf for aII this Western-styIe kit?
WeII, the answer seems to be
an emphatic yes.
Judging by what l've seen in China's
big cities, they're getting there.
Now they make the clothes
and buy the clothes.
All the West supplies are the brand names.
With Russia converted to Gap
and China worshipping Armani,
you would think the triumph of the West's
consumer society was complete.
Well, not quite.
As we'll see, there's a growing
movement in the world today
that rejects the dress code
of Western civilization altogether.
Welcome to lstanbul, a cosmopolitan city,
where the outward trappings
of Western civilization
are immediately apparent in the streets.
(TRAM BELL RINGS)
Take a tram ride though IstanbuI's
main shopping centre
and you couId be aImost anywhere
in the Mediterranean.
To the Ieft and to the right, it's
the Western Iook that predominates,
which gives you the impression
that this is just another Eastern frontier
that's been coIonised
by Western civiIization.
(CALL TO PRAYER)
But look elsewhere in the same city,
and it's a very different story.
Here in Turkey there's been
the most extraordinary backIash
against Western modes of dress
in recent years.
Western modes of dress for women, that is.
As far as many MusIims are concerned,
and the overwheIming majority of Turks
are MusIims,
the Western styIe of dress
exposes far more of the femaIe head
and body than the Koran prescribes.
And that's why I'm seeing
so many more headscarves and veiIs
than when I first came to IstanbuI
15 years ago.
Yup, even the burqa is back.
This represents a wholesale rejection
of the policy introduced
by the founder of the Turkish Republic.
ln the 1 920s, Kemal Ataturk set out
to Westernise the way Turks looked
and banned religious forms of dress.
For 60 years
his secular ideas flourished in Turkey.
(CHANTING)
But in October 1 998, there was a backlash.
1 40,000 people protested
against the long-standing ban on wearing
headscarves in schools and universities.
ln lstanbul, thousands of girls
opted to miss classes
rather than take off their headscarves.
Elsewhere there were
even cases of suicide.
The whoIe controversy over the headscarf
iIIustrates just the way
our outer trappings can come to have
a profound cuIturaI
and even poIiticaI significance.
ShouId we regard it as just an expression
of personaI reIigious faith,
which a truIy toIerant Western society
shouId aIIow
on the principIe of freedom of expression?
Or is it an antiquated symboI
of a profound inequaIity
between the sexes ordained by IsIam,
which a secuIar society shouId prohibit?
The headscarf issue
is represented by lslamists
as an issue of individual freedom
and human rights.
To my eyes, it's more like
the thin edge of a wedge
designed to restore sharia law to Turkey.
It's not just a case of Western decadence
against IsIamic puritanism,
because here in headscarf heaven,
as you can see,
there's a whoIe pIethora
of different headscarves you can buy.
In fact, you can imagine
young girIs competing
for the Iatest fashion accessory.
I've even spotted
one down there with diamante.
Now, this is
a reaIIy, particuIarIy fine one.
CouId you show me how to put this on?
Ah, that'sthat's where you foId it.
BeautifuI! I suppose it just goes to show
that the veiI, the headscarf, is
as susceptibIe to the vagaries of fashion
as the kind of thing that seIIs
in the typicaI Western high street.
Now, the lslamists can claim, you don't
need to Westernise yourself to be chic.
In this fiIm, I've tried to show
that what we wear reaIIy matters.
The West's
two great economic Ieaps forward,
the IndustriaI RevoIution
and the consumer society,
were both inseparabIe from cIothes,
making them more efficientIy,
and wearing them more reveaIingIy.
The spread of the Western way of Iife
has been inseparabIe from the spread
of the Western way of dress.
But if some peopIe today no Ionger
aspire to dress in Western styIes,
that probabIy means
they're rejecting Western vaIues too.
The backlash against Western dress
is spreading in the Muslim world
as a symptom of a global lslamic revival.
Completely veiled women are now
as common a sight on the streets of London
as English Premier League football shirts
on the streets of Shanghai.
Should we follow the French
in banning the burqa?
Or does the West's consumer society
have an antidote as effective
as blue jeans once were to Maoist pajamas?
But maybe
that's the wrong question to ask.
Is that what Western civiIization
boiIs down to?
After capitaIism, science,
the ruIe of Iaw and democracy,
is aII we've got Ieft today
just a spot of shopping?
Is that what reaIIy Iies behind the veiI,
our veiI, the veiI of our own superiority?
Nothing more than retaiI therapy?
WeII, in the finaI episode
of this series, I'm going to ask
if the real threats to our civiIization
come not from radicaI IsIam,
or any other externaI threat,
but from our own seIf-doubt, from our Ioss
of faith in our Western cuIturaI heritage.