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.’