Anyone who goes to Madrid ends up on the Gran Vía, sooner or later. A broad, bombastic avenue, it ploughs a six-lane furrow through the core of the Spanish capital, bounded by 1920s skyscrapers whose art-deco spires soar into a cloudless Castilian sky.

All day and all night this pulsating heart of the city is a flurry of people; apart, that is, from the hours of one to four in the afternoon, when every self-respecting Madrileño is having lunch. But duck down one of the inconspicuous alleys that slope down to the thoroughfare from the north and you find yourself in a different world. You find yourself in Old Madrid. You find yourself on the Calle de Desengaño.

It would be a crime to attempt a direct translation of the Spanish word desengaño – like joie de vivre or Weltschmerz, it is one of those phrases whose comprehension requires an understanding of the psyche that conditioned it. Imagine a conflux of ‘disappointment’, ‘disillusion’ and ‘eye-opening’ and you get the general idea, but the legend behind the name of Desengaño Street says it all.

The story goes that once upon a time, back in Madrid’s imperial heyday, two gentlemen agreed to fight a duel for the love of a beautiful lady. They had had just crossed swords when the ghostly figure of a woman dressed in black came past them.

Putting their dispute on hold, the two followed her curiously up the street until she came to a wall, where she turned around, and facing them lowered her hood to reveal the rotting face of a corpse. Both men were shaken to their senses and, recognising the transitory nature of superficial appearance, cast aside their quarrel, exclaiming ‘what desengaño!’

Indeed, this concept is a central theme of the literature of Spain’s 17th century ‘Golden Age’. As the sclerotic Habsburg behemoth, crippled by debt and bureaucracy, coasted into decadent disarray, its writers and dramatists immortalised the zeitgeist.

The Jesuit Baltasar Gracián exemplified the trend in his allegorical epic El Criticón (The Critic, 1651) in which the eponymous cynic, Critilo, introduces the optimist Andrenio, a noble savage, to the disillusionment to be found in the world.

When they jump ashore at the start of the book Critilo remarks ‘it pains me that you are here, because I know that you won’t like it one bit.’ The wise narrator adds that on one’s arrival in the world, ‘what can one do but make landfall, and try to make the best out of a bad situation?’ – for Gracián and his contemporaries, cynical desengaño was a wise and healthy response to an illusory universe.

Enshrined in the works of Cervantes, Quevedo, Calderón et al. is a rational distrust of the worldly, a zeal to root out the true nature of things and a basis for much of the doubting, sceptical thought of the modern era.

And so it was that many an enlightened cynic had cause to gasp at the prospect of Henry Porter, usually a dependable advocate of such humanist values, calling for ‘an end to this age of cynicism’ in the comment section of May 4th’s issue of The Observer.

In the offending article, Porter criticised the media establishment for ‘a gritty modern “realism”, forged by luxury, not by hardship and insight’ and asked ‘what right have these people got to be so disappointed?’

The flaw in this argument lies in its stated targets: ‘popular culture’, stand-up comics and in particular television shows such as Mock the Week and Have I Got News For You.

The affected world-weariness of the protagonists of these institutions, far from being cynical in the original sense of the word, is comprised of feigned disenchantment and the tacit reassurance that, for all the follies of Fleet Street and Westminster, all can be reconciled by a banterous 30-minute treatment of the status quo.

Light satire in the 9pm slot, a mug of cocoa and so to bed… the world is put to rights. Solemn realism? Hardened cynicism? Hardly.

Porter must surely know that true ‘cynics’ do not ‘believe with a vigorous but untested faith that we are doomed and that nothing can be done.’ So why does he tar a 2500-year old tradition of pragmatic moderation, one that spans Ancient Greek, Baroque and Enlightenment thought, with such unimaginative application of terminology?

Does he not recognize that this is counter-productive? The responses to his article certainly imply that it is. In the five letters that were published on Sunday, May 11th, cynicism was associated with sterility, scorn and tedium.

It is ironic that in an era increasingly defined by extremes of faith and nihilism, the media establishment should abnegate the value of such a reasoned mindset. Rather than demeaning or adulterating, real cynicism questions that which should be questioned – the ephemeral and the superficial.

It is only a value judgement in as much as it exalts the truth (the disordered nature of the transient world) and a cynic only suffers ‘disappointment’ if this truth contradicts a coexisting and mutually exclusive belief.

Yet cynics everywhere are seeing the name of their distinguished and laudable philosophy dragged through the mud and unthinkingly appropriated to describe any piece of indulgent pessimism. This has to stop.

Perhaps the nadir of Porter’s article is the comment: ‘Optimism is still held to be the preferred tipple of unrealistic fools; the optimist is still seen as Pangloss.’ What is this supposed to mean? Is the message of Candide no longer valid? Is now the time for blind faith?

Wearisome though the pseudo-cynicism of some elements of the entertainment world may be, there is no need to blame Voltaire. Indeed, a cursory glance at the work that he references would have shown Porter all he needed to know about the meaning of real cynicism.

At the end of the novella Candide and Pangloss return home and visit their neighbour, ‘a famous dervish who passed for the best philosopher in Turkey.’ When he is asked about his farm, the wise Turk replies ‘I have no more than twenty acres of ground, the whole of which I cultivate myself with the help of my children; and our labour keeps off from us three great evils – idleness, vice and want.’

It is therefore no coincidence that after his experiences of all the disillusionment that Europe has to offer, Candide brings the book to a close with the famously pragmatic philosophical maxim, ‘il faut cultiver notre jardin.’

Porter’s article is symptomatic of a sidelining of cynicism by the very agenda that he, as a progressive journalist, can usually be relied on to oppose: anti-Enlightenment dogma. All ideologies and beliefs need limits: all must be conditioned by a realistic assessment of the truth. After all, to be cynical is to courageously seek the bigger picture, to accept weakness and deviation, to be reasoned, liberal and modern.

Cynics of all countries, unite! We must reclaim the word ‘cynicism’, rescue it from semantic doom, stray off the bustling Gran Vía of illusion… and onto the Calle de Desengaño.

A few days ago, I had the opportunity to meet with Claire Wilcox, Senior Curator for the 20th century and Contemporary Dress Collections at the V&A. The creator of four seminal exhibitions including, most recently, ‘The Golden Age of Couture,’ Wilcox’s innovative ideas over the last decade have significantly restyled the Victoria and Albert.

Having created a brand-new approach to exhibition, with informed and exciting portrayals of fashion, Wlicox’s work begs me to ask the question: why choose a museum, in particular, as the site for a fashion revolution?

‘It wasn’t about working in fashion, it was about working in the V&A,’ Wilcox tells me as our interview takes off. ‘My passion was to work in a museum. I really liked the idea of working with textiles, but I just wanted a job there… to be part of a group of people who believed in the preservation and study of objects, and to understand cultural-social history.’ I soon realise that far from fashion alone, it is a love of pursuing and preserving knowledge that has inspired her.

The V&A, it seems, has always been something of a symbol to Wilcox. What seems to have really drawn her are its attitudes and values: a place founded for preserving knowledge and for housing the past, but also with the capacity for inspiring new generations in a community of learning.

Her exhibitions since 1999 have demonstrated the museum’s potential as a creative space: full of the past, yet ready for new interpretation, for re-fashioning. Wilcox’s ideas of exhibition as a moving, thinking, phenomenon, and a performance, remain intact today: bringing to our attention the importance of context and the interaction of objects in use; placing fashion not only in motion, but also amongst its cultural ancestry, as well as outside it.

It seems that knowledge for Wilcox is something that you can hold in your hands, examine, and perhaps reshape. She tells me, ‘I believe very very strongly that for the curator, the object is the beginning.’ And as with all objects, there is provenance, which as Claire enthuses, ‘is all’. She tells me about a Dior dress, ‘Zemire.’

It was already an exciting dress – made in scarlet, comprising a bodice, skirt and jacket, and discovered, after fifty years, in a cellar by the Seine. But Wilcox was absolutely intrigued by ‘looking closely’: ‘the more I looked, the more I saw. I found clues: hidden labels, evidence of alterations, and mysteries about fabric and watermarks.’

Describing how she worked on and prepared the dress for the exhibition, she tells me, ‘I worked on the history and our conservation department worked on the condition of the dress, and between us we put together an absolutely fascinating story… we even found the person who’d worn it and their descendants.’

So she recreated a history, a narrative, from one object. Now that the V&A is recognised as an institution interested in fashion, it acquires pieces from important collections more easily. In the past, however, curators had to be reactive, and wait to be offered clothing – not by the designers, but by a wealthy benefactor or other important individual.

The importance was primarily seen as lying in the fabric, and latterly in who had worn the clothes, but now that the item itself is primary, the design and the designer – those crucial elements in the selection purposes – have to come to the fore: a rearranged system that Wilcox is considerably responsible for.

Wilcox’s tale of ‘Zemire’ demonstrates that within history there is also ideology, and clothing is evidently interesting not simply visually, but also because of what it stands for.

Having asked Claire how she chooses what to exhibit, what is important, and why she should put on these exhibitions at all, she tells me about Radical Fashion, her 2001-2 exhibition which installed tableaux from twelve contemporary designers, including Comme des Garçons, Jean Paul Gaultier, Helmut Lang, and Azzedine Alaia, and which, in Claire’s words, ‘plotted the extremities of fashion.’

Significantly, she tells me that ‘the message from Radical Fashion is that fashion has the potential to be expressive, inventive and empowering,’ and this draws attention to the importance of fashion as art.

Drawing from her exhibitions for examples, she tells me how Vivienne Westwood’s confrontational and anti-establishment clothing was reactive as well as responsive to the times, ‘provocative’ by confronting and opposing the contemporary state-of-play and yet responding to sub-cultural antipathy: ripping it up and opening it up, ‘changing the mood of how people dressed.’

Whipping through fashion history she comments, ‘if you go back to the 1820s, neo-classical fashion was incredibly provocative and caused outrage… Channel’s early designs were very boyish; they’re quite asexual and that was seen as provocative. Flapper dressers were received by the establishment with horror.’

Yet Christian Dior’s New Look of 1947 was an example of fashion’s particular power to change the norm permanently. ‘It was a radical change to the fashionable silhouette.’

The New Look not only challenged the more masculine wartime fashions, glorifying the female form, but also confronted the contemporary situation itself, using lots of fabric when there was very little, and subverting the notion that clothing should be primarily functional – that attitudes should put extravagance and glamour in second place in the context of a contemporary wake of horror.

As The Golden Age of Couture pointed out, the New Look transformed society’s attitude towards clothes, particularly female clothes; an idea shared by Vivienne Westwood, that ‘clothes can be heroic’. ‘Vivienne was intellectually ambitious’ and ‘it wasn’t just about dressing up, it was about ideology’ she expands. ‘She genuinely believes clothes can make you a better person. You can have a better time if you wear fantastic clothes.’

I ask Claire whether mainstream fashion is still creative today. ‘I believe very strongly that every individual wearer, every body who gets dressed in the morning, everybody who chooses what clothing they’re wearing and what they wear together is in some sense curating their own appearance’ she says. But she extends this idea very specifically into the present, ‘the mass marketing of clothing, the influence of sports wear and casual dress and the cheapness of clothing has affected us’ she suggests.

‘The way you tie your laces has become a subtle sartorial code and that’s very much a youth driven way of customising readily-available clothing.’ This idea of possession and the continual human need for asserting our identities seems to lie at the heart of fashion’s fluidity.

We have talked about objects, and the preservation of the past, but by the close of our interview we are onto the present and the anticipation of the future. Wilcox talks of the creativity and the inspiration in fashion, its backbone which, by some unconscious chord, resonates with us as the physical embodiment of a moment, becoming a statue of history.

‘It seems incredible’ she tells me, ‘that given the relatively limited vocabulary in scale for clothing, that people could find such infinite subtle variations as to delight and surprise us and make us want it. Fashion’, she says, ‘is very powerful. Fragile, but powerful.’

Back when we were kids, most of us would have spent Saturday mornings in front of the television, probably either watching ‘Rugrats’ on Live and Kicking or ‘Recess’ on Diggit, back in the days when Fearne Cotton was less famous than that Des bloke and we were still struggling to adapt to the change of names of Ant and Dec from PJ and Duncan.

The benefit of such cartoon shows from a studio viewpoint was one of practicality; toons don’t grow up. They don’t demand wage increases, develop drug habits or expose themselves outside a nightclub at four in the morning after befriending Paris Hilton. They are forever innocent, a quality which current studios would surely kill for if only they could transfer it to their real-life stars.

Instead, they must find a new individual to exploit every time their current little tykes get too big for their boots or – worst of all – get fat. The difficulty of course is what to do if your Christmas bonus is being paid for by the success of these children’s careers; do you sack them anyway, send them home to their mummies with a pay cheque and a lollipop?

Or do you tolerate all of the ego and the aggravation and continue to milk the little money-trees for all their worth? I think we all know how a true businessman would answer.

The issue of problems facing child stars has had some column inches dedicated to it recently. This is something undesired by studios, Hollywood publicists and middle-class parents all over the world.

The studio which has had particular difficulties in 2008 is that bastion of innocence, Disney.

Much to their horror – perhaps balanced by the frantic pleasure of every fourteen year old boy with an internet connection – the company’s two most profitable, saccharine-sweet franchises have been tainted by the inevitable passage of time which reminds children and adults alike that the innocent will never stay so for long.

If you have younger siblings or a bizarre fondness for the Disney Channel, you will know all about the Hannah Montana phenomenon. What started off was a fairly pleasant, if entirely moronic, children’s sitcom based around a seemingly normal high-school girl called Miley who, by night, is a singing superstar struggling to protect her true identity.

Once the tween generation got hold of it however, Hannah Montana’s fate was sealed, and now the fifteen year old Miley Cyrus is everywhere, with CDs, a 3D movie, a clothing and accessories range and a sold-out 54-date tour currently taking the world by storm.

The success of this show and its young star relies on the fact that it is good clean fun, a feature which some Americans neglect to use to describe such classic youth’s institutions as Dawson’s Creek (underage sex), Barbie (slut) or even Harry Potter (black magic being tantamount to Satanism).

Such people will protect the virtue of their children with their lives, so the recent controversy surrounding Ms. Cyrus is, to them, a betrayal of trust by the free babysitting service provided by their television. During a recent photo shoot for Vanity Fair, photographic legend Annie Leibovitz captured images of Miley with a bare back, wrapped up in a bed sheet, thus giving an impression that she was posing topless.

Soon enough The New York Times, Disney, and half of the U.S. were up in arms, livid at the possibility that a young celebrity had been manipulated to sell magazines, while Miley herself avoided personal criticism by suggesting that she had been misled.

She has managed to avoid a backlash by playing the blame game, a clever move surely encouraged by her agents in order to make her appear even more innocent than before the incident. And yet, it is not always so easy to keep the halo on a child star’s head, as shown by the PR nightmare posed by Hannah Montana’s network buddy, the insipid and yet impossibly successful High School Musical.

With a third one due in cinemas in October, the production of the franchise has been plagued by hearsay regarding potential in-fighting amongst the cast, as well as the two words feared by child stars’ agents everywhere; ‘gay rumours.’

Amongst such sordid whisperings was a beacon of light to all adults everywhere, the best possible example for their impressionable little kids; a chaste couple in the form of film leads Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens, all-round good kids and advocates for the silver ring thing, an American movement which uses jewellery as a display of virginity.

And yet it wasn’t long before Ms Hudgens got frisky, taking photographs of herself naked in her trailer before sending them to her beloved teeny bopper. Of course, true love never runs smoothly, and within days these incriminating images were all over the internet, prompting parental outrage, the tabloid’s use of the term ‘Vanessa the Undresser’ (gold), and pressure from many to dismiss her from a project so loved by children, lest they take her snap-happy antics as acceptable practice.

The kids, however, were behind her, and yet Hudgen’s reputation has been soiled, perhaps beyond complete repair. To some she will now always be that girl who bared her soul – on top of a few other features – to a boy who, most probably, would have preferred another boy.

So why is it always such a surprise to discover that children in the showbiz industry are affected negatively by it? Hollywood is a town of vanity, cruelty and drug addiction, and so closing your eyes and keeping your fingers crossed isn’t going to stop the kids that other kids look up to from going off the rails.

Grabbing the pitchforks and flaming torches is probably not the best way to combat it, especially since, surprise surprise, kids aren’t all morons. Jamie Lynn Spears getting pregnant doesn’t mean that the country’s nine year olds are running out to find the means to procreate does it?

Parents also neglect to realise that a smiling face does not a happy showbiz child make. In fact, while the tween generation’s favourite figures, such as Cyrus and Hudgens, have been unlucky enough to have very public misdemeanours, our own ex-idols, the wide-eyed child stars of the nineties, were simply screwed up in private, with issues that escalate only to emerge to shock us long after.

Our generation of child stars have more swollen ranks than today’s due to the current monopoly by a select few, and yet there were some who stood out from the others, a troop of successful individuals who would have been the envy of their classmates if they hadn’t all been schooled on-set.

For us, the Olsen twins were the child stars of the ’90s, appearing on television from the age of just nine months before embarking on a career involving several shows and nine straight-to-video movies. They were the definition of the All-American girl, and yet were intelligent enough to keep their wits about them, making enough money in the process to render them self-made billionaires by the time they’d reached twenty one.

Their childhood lacked a single blemish on an immaculate record, and yet their post-teen careers have been a veritable checklist of rebellious behaviour, with stories of bulimia battles, car crashes, drug problems and even a reported liaison with famous cyclist Lance Armstrong.

It seems, therefore, that the long hours behind a job which begins before any of us had mastered potty training clearly had a detrimental effect on the Olsens, and yet the parents of America were happy to buy into the twin-thing because all seemed fine.

This is just one example of the see no evil, hear no evil principle, showing that when you’re relying on other children to pass on values to their own, ignorance is bliss.

Child stars are appealing because children can relate to them, and adults trust them as role models more than they would adult stars.

When growing up, we grew to love these kids and, in the case of long-running television shows such as Boy Meets World and Sister Sister, we grew at the same rate as they did; Corey and Topanga’s wedding was a family event, and everyone at school had a crush on Libby Kennedy off Neighbours as if she were the girl next door.

For children like us, therefore, seeing child stars grow up and go off the rails ruins this façade, the imitation of reality is broken. Once we’ve seen Britney fall out of a car displaying her complete lack of underwear, we are forced to realise that she has grown up past pigtails and flavoured lip-gloss, and so must admit that we are now old.

The realisation that we are closer to having our own children than we are to actually being them ourselves is a conclusion met with dread by many.

When this is realised, and we get round to having these kids, there’ll be a whole new army of child stars for them to worship or, if we’re really unlucky, High School Musical IX will be arriving in cinemas for them to salivate over. Who knows how the young celebrities of the future will cock up, but however they do it the tabloid press and perhaps even some of us will undoubtedly be up in arms about it.

And why? Essentially for the same reason that we are uncomfortable with our TV bound peers growing up now; because once the child stars worshipped by the fruit of our loins cease to be innocent, it means that they’re closer to adulthood, meaning that our kids are too, which means that we are officially old and we’ll have to go out and buy a red sports car to make us feel better about it.
There’s also the idea that if we can’t trust other kids to teach our own what to do in certain situations, if asking ‘what would Hannah Montana do?’ results in a decision to strip off for Annie Leibovitz, then who is supposed to teach them the right thing?

The answer, being the parents themselves, is a conclusion which most of those who complain about seeing Miley’s Cyrus back or the Olsen twins’ escapades on the cover of People simply do not want to acknowledge.

Look how they’ve grown

Five of the kids who overcame their roots to become stable adult stars in their own right

Natalie Portman – Portman’s first role as a little girl taken in by an assassin in Leon caused some controversy due to claims that she was overly sexualised (note her best line in the film; ‘He’s not my father. He’s my lover.’) While still a child, Portman took roles in Heat, Mars Attacks and the Star Wars prequels

Charlotte Church – Church’s career began with classical music, taking her all across the world and making her a fortune. She has since launched a pop career, earning her great acclaim and a Brit award nomination, and has forged a successful television career

Drew Barrymore – After playing Eliot’s little sister in ET, Barrymore went off the rails for a bit, smoking tobacco at the age of nine, drinking at eleven, smoking cannabis at twelve and snorting cocaine at thirteen. Since then she has settled down and, with Charlie’s Angels, The Wedding Singer and 50 First Dates, is now one of America’s favourite commercial actresses

Christian Bale – Best known for the lead role in the reinvention of the Batman franchise, Welshman Bale has been in the business since 1986 playing Alexei in a biopic of the Romonov dynasty, but found most acclaim playing the lead in Empire of the Sun

Donny Osmond – Osmond may be the least credible inclusion on this list, but after a music career with his family band left him a has-been, he clawed his way back into the industry to carve a successful solo career, fitting in stints as a talk show and game show host, record producer, race car driver, author, and Disney voice-over artist

What went wrong?

The fates of some our favourite child stars who have gone off the rails or into obscurity

Mara Wilson – In days gone by, Wilson was the go-to girl for any role which needed a cute yet mature actress. She is best remembered for being the sweetest little thing in the history of mankind in Mrs Doubtfire, following that up with Miracle on 34th Street and the lead in the 1996 film Matilda. She now studies drama at NYU

Haley Joel Osment – He saw dead people. Osment received a level of critical acclaim unparalleled by his contemporaries, Oscar nominated for The Sixth Sense and finding a big fan in Steven Speilberg. After a drink and drug fuelled car accident in 2006, he is still under probation. His sister, Emily, has a role in Hannah Montana

Tiffani Thiessen – At fifteen, Thiessen was everyone’s favourite beauty queen Kelly Kapawski on the ultimate teen sitcom Saved By the Bell, the only girl of the group to move on to the follow up, The College Years and the subsequent made-for-TV films, where she finally married Zach Morris. She has remained in the business since the demise of the show but has never reached the same level of success

Macaulay Culkin – No one can die from a wasp attack like Macaulay Culkin, the child star who dominated the early nineties with My Girl, Richie Rich and Home Alone, the film which taught millions of children the importance of home security. After a nine-year hiatus from acting, he returned to film in 2003, and was charged with possession of drugs in 2004

Michael Jackson – Perhaps the quintessential example of child-star gone wrong, Jackson had it all, a massively popular family-orientated boy band followed by a solo career which saw the biggest album sales in history with Thriller. From then on he was the personification of weird, and while no one’s really sure where he is now, the consensus is that he should probably be in the loony bin