Monday 4th May 2026
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Right-wing dark money comes to Oxford student politics

Ben van der Merwe
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Right-wing dark money comes to Oxford student politics

A reactionary American group with millions of dollars from undisclosed donors is branching out to the UK. Cherwell can reveal it claims to already have chapters at eight universities including Oxford.

Turning Point USA aims to shift student politics to the right; its tactics have included intimidating academics and covertly funnelling thousands of dollars into student political campaigns.

The chairman of Turning Point UK, former Oxford student and Bullingdon Club member George Farmer, told Cherwell that the group’s main objective would be to “reverse the direction of travel in a lot of these universities, where left-wing academics are broadly filling young minds with cultural Marxism.”

Cultural Marxism is a conspiracy theory popular with the radical right, which states that multiculturalism, feminism and LGBTQ+ rights are part of a conspiracy by Marxist intellectuals that aims to undermine Western society.

Turning Point UK employs several paid full-time staff and is currently soliciting donations. Farmer refused to elaborate on the identity of donors and told Cherwell that they would remain anonymous for the foreseeable future.

Farmer, son of former Conservative party treasurer Lord Farmer, is a former social secretary of the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA). In 2012, OUCA was forced to disaffiliate from the University after it was revealed that Farmer and the club’s treasurer had failed to pay a £1,200 restaurant bill.

Turning Point UK plans to officially launch with a series of controversy-generating debates at the universities of London (10th March), Cambridge (11th March), Sheffield (12th March) and Sussex (13th March).

Farmer told Cherwell that the group currently has chapters at the universities of Sussex, Oxford, St Andrews, York, Warwick and Nottingham as well as King’s College London, University College London, the London School of Economics and University of the Arts London.

The group was launched last month by Turning Point USA leaders Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens at the Royal Automobile Club, a prestigious London private members’ club.

The launch event was attended by a number of figures from high society as well as right-wing pro-Brexit figures. Andy Wigmore, who ran the Leave.EU campaign alongside Nigel Farage and Arron Banks, attended the launch event, as well as Steven Edginton, chief digital strategist for Leave Means Leave and digital campaign manager for the TaxPayers’ Alliance.

Also present at the launch was alt-right social media personality Paul Joseph Watson, editor-at-large of conspiracy website InfoWars, whose anti-Islam writing was cited by prosecutors as an inspiration for the Finsbury Park Mosque attack.

Breitbart London editor James Dellingpole was also in attendance, along with pick-up artist and anti-feminist Peter Lloyd. Oxford student Daniel Mcilhiney, who studies theology at Wycliffe Hall, was present but declined to confirm his role in the organisation.

Farmer told Cherwell: “You can see [cultural Marxism] in institutions across the United Kingdom. There’s a whole variety of institutions which are being filled with left-wing academics, with left-wing thinkers who basically are telling people the only way they can think is along the lines of the left.”

Turning Point UK’s emphasis on combatting what it sees as left-wing propaganda in universities echoes the focus of its parent organisation. Turning Point USA has attracted notoriety for its website Professor Watchlist, which carries profiles of left-wing academics. Professor Watchlist accuses those on its website of attempting to “advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”

A number of professors have received death threats after being listed on the website, but Turning Point USA denied any responsibility. Founder Charlie Kirk has said of the threats: “We do not call for any of that sort of harassment. We don’t condone it, we don’t try to facilitate any sort of cyberbullying or harassment, and just because you put up the words, or another article that’s been written about a professor in an aggregated format, does not mean we should be held responsible for what other people do.”

When asked whether the UK organisation would attempt to create its own Professor Watchlist, Farmer said: “That’s not really been on my agenda yet. It might well be down the line but not at the moment, no.”

Turning Point USA attracted fresh controversy in 2017 when it was revealed to be covertly funnelling thousands of dollars into the student election campaigns of conservative candidates. A leaked phone call recorded TPUSA’s Heartland Regional Director saying: “A huge part of what Turning Point does — that’s really important to donors — is student government races.”

Turning Point UK was also asked whether it would be involved in funding student union election campaigns, Farmer laughed and told Cherwell: “I don’t think we have the money to do that, so that would be a no.”

Parent organisation Turning Point USA claims to have raised $5 million in 2016. Major donors include the Lyne and Harry Bradley Foundation and the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation, who also fund anti-Muslim hate groups such as the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the Middle East Forum.

Raf Simons: short-lived brilliance

Skye Humbert
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Raf Simons: short-lived brilliance

In recent years, Raf Simons has shown both his versatility and transience.

It was announced in December 2018 that Calvin Klein and Simons were ‘amicably parting ways,’ after almost two years working with the brand as Chief Creative Officer.

The Belgian designer had another successful but short-lived career as creative director at Dior between 2012-2015. The iconic 2014 documentary Dior & I follows his process during his first collections as the creative director. Yet his parting from the LVMH family was somewhat more amicable than what has occurred at Calvin Klein, with Simons offering no further comment upon leaving the brand.

His appointment at Calvin Klein brought much excitement as Simons’ European influences entered the classic American brand. His first collection seamlessly mixed chic, tailored blazers with bold colours for a smart-casual American vitality. He captures the essence of the brands he works with, whilst updating the collections to suit modern trends. Overall, Simons was remarkably successful with the brand – dressing Saoirse Ronan at the Academy Awards, winning three CFDA Fashion awards and bringing new energy to the New York Fashion Week. Yet PVH, the company that owns Calvin Klein, showed disappointment in the current sales.

Working with both Dior and CK and Jil Sander before that, as well as releasing his own label, are indicators of Simons being a kind of ‘chameleon designer.’ He easily utilises a variety aesthetics and visions – but such a repertoire eventually begs the question, why so many fashion divorces?

His predecessor at Dior, John Galliano, was creative director for 14 years, devouring Simons’ three-year span with the company. Now with this departure from Calvin Klein in under two years, one has to wonder if there are more creative differences than meets the eye. With creative successes at both brands, and some saying he’s even reinvented the tired classics, why such short-term love affairs?

There is, of course, huge amount of pressure on new creative directors and chief designers on where they intend on taking the brand. With many fashion houses no longer being run by their original creators: take Valentino’s retirement in 2008 and Yves Saint Laurent’s death that same year for instance, budding designers take on a huge amount of responsibility. They are expected to uphold the brands classic themes and quality, the same levels of popularity and genius without copying previous work and making their own mark on the brand, and answering to the die-hard fans of the brand and their executive employers. The pressure must be enormous.

Simons’ journey into fashion was a slow one, his interests in techno music and furniture design holding precedence in his early 20s. In an interview with Jan Kedves, Simons commented: “The whole idea of the individual performing towards his own image and performing towards other people. I find this question eternally fascinating: how will another person perceive me and how do I want to perform towards another person?”

Perhaps, Simons is keen to test a variety of brands and therefore a variety of images, proving his capability in each new challenge. He’s certainly up for it, but maybe not for very long…

 

Create and destroy

Sophie Haldane
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Create and destroy

What do we think when a child destroys the block tower they have just created? Does this opinion change when the creation is someone else’s? What if – instead – the tower was a 2000-year-old vas? Would we call this art? The boundary at which our negative connotations of destruction turn into admiration of conceptual art is being pushed and toyed by artists such as Banksy, Rauschenberg and Weiwei.

Banksy self-destructed his piece, Girl With Balloon, posting the video under the caption “the urge to destroy is also a creative urge’. Art becomes performative when pushed into this destructive dimension; it no longer remains just a picture, but instead transforms into an event. The piece is no longer able to be seen in the flesh by the private bidder or gallery visitors, but is now only accessible through the video of the event – just like any social media post – everyone sees it in the same way. There are no special privileges or excludable access. This relates to the whole purpose of Banksy’s work the accessibility of art, whether it be on the street or online. At one auction for Banksy work, just as soon as the million-dollar bid was secured, the painting itself plunged through the bottom of the frame, being shredded to pieces in the process. To be bought at such prices and celebrated by art critics is the dream of many, yet Banksy robs the elite of claiming ownership to his art. Instead his work becomes a performance, it becomes the shock on the faces of the bidders and the rumours circulating over how someone could do such a thing to their own creation.

In the case of Rauschenberg, the erasure of the drawing by the celebrated artist de Kooning antagonises the viewer. In Erased de Kooning, we are left with a blank page with faint traces of what once was. The detail which we normally use for formal analysis has been stripped from the viewer. Yet when faced with these faint outlines, we are forced to consider what had been – not what could’ve been – in effect a reversal of the creative process that the artist faced. But plunged into this process we are forced to analyse what isn’t there. The urge to destroy isn’t just a creative urge on the part of the artist, but also for the viewer, who is placed in the artist’s shoes and becomes a part of the process. Unlike Banksy, this work hasn’t been completely destroyed – the blank page is left as an indication that this work isn’t just destruction but devotion to the wider creative process.

Banksy self-destructed, and Rauschenberg destroyed the work of a fellow artist, but what about the destruction of a 2000-year-old culturally significant antique? When Leo Steinberg asked Rauschenberg whether he would erase a Rembrandt painting, Rauschenberg replied no. This was interpreted by Steinberg as due to the fact that to do so would be to vandalise the creation by one of the greatest – instead of destroying the work of a living artist who consented to the process. Yet Ai Weiwei took a different stance in his Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995). After having paid several thousand dollars for the ceremonial urn, from a period often considered as quintessential in Chinese history, Weiwei made a three-part photo series documenting him dropping the urn. Whereas with Rauschenberg and Banksy people were simply shocked, in this case people were genuinely offended and outraged at the destruction of a cultural heirloom. However, instead of being simply a reckless act, this destruction reflected the cultural revolution within China under Chairman Mao where the Four Olds (si jiu) – customs, culture, ideas, habits – were instructed to be destroyed. Instead of destruction being merely a creative urge, it was necessary in which to build a new creation. As the artist himself states “Chairman Mao used to tell us that we can only build a new world if we destroy the old one”. This piece leads us to question how we attach significance and value to inanimate objects and ultimately question the meaning of value itself.

Through examining these artists, we see that destruction is in fact a creative urge, changing art from a picture to an event and toying’s with the viewer’s imagination in ground-breaking ways. By destroying the picture, we no longer need to see the art work in order to analyse it, instead it is in our minds and stays with us to be accessible anytime we wish.

The Human Impulse

Jacob Verrey
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The Human Impulse

The earliest expression of human art can be traced back to cave painting such as those discovered in the Spanish Monte Castillo cave complex dating back to over 65,000 years ago. The mysterious painting depicts a series of red lines organized into a geometric pattern. A crimson animal-like figure features with an unnatural amount of legs and a fainted red humanoid to the right of him. Studies into our initial ventures into art as a species are widespread alongside what it really means to create art. Are we driven by biological or social imperatives in this urge to create?

Taking the perspective of evolutionary anthropology, a pattern of art as a mechanism of social cohesion becomes apparent. In the case of hunter gatherer communities this was especially the case as survival depended even more heavily on group social bonding. Art thus became a powerful tool to create and shape values, ideas, and cultural identity. Take, for example, an earlier piece of art like the Lascaux cave paintings from over 19,000 years ago. This impressive cave art illustrates with fluid lines a series of animals running along the walls of the cave. The vividness and richness of this scenes might suggest that this drawing had a highly symbolic value. One could imagine that these cave paintings served as a sort of gathering point in which a community of early humans listened to stories of their ancestors, shared common mythologies, and perhaps even participated in adding drawings of their own to the cave wall. In this way, these cave paintings as noted reinforced a necessary shared identity. A more modern example of this social bonding effect of art can be found in national monuments like Michelangelo’s David. The sculpture reminded the Florentines that they shared the common biblical story of David and since it. was placed in the governing centre of Florence it also served as a fantastic manifestation of Florentine power – united under the aegis of their city state. Thus David, similar to the Lascaux cave paintings, can be said to have had a similar functional purpose to unite their population. In other words, whether it be the hunter-gatherers of stone age Lascaux or the 16th century Florentines, works of art and the urge to maintain and create them could have arisen out of the desire to unite humans under common systems of belief or tradition.

Yet while the explanation thus far reveals perhaps a conscious reason behind our urge to create art, there are also reason hidden inside the brain itself – the thing that drives us to create in the first place. Neuroscience posits that there are two main brain systems (“neural networks”) that are triggered whenever we engage in creativity. The first system is known as the default network (the area that is active whenever we zone out) in charge of consolidating memories, creating fantasies, and imagination among others. The other brain region is known as the attention network (the area of the brain that allows us to focus) interestingly however, these two areas do not activate simultaneously, expect in creative endeavours. This peculiarity could explain why artists are urged into making art. The urge to create art stems from an affinity towards entering fantasy-like states in which individuals twist, bend, or exaggerate reality. However, rather than forget their daydream, artists take the next step to record these experiences into their work. This mechanisms behind the urge to create, while strange, is seen frequently. For example, in the dreamlike landscape of De Chirico or Dali that often depict a hyper and bizarre version of reality. These painters are characterized by their ability to create strange and imaginative works, but also to record them with profound precision and accuracy on their canvases. Even on a subtler level, an artist’s interpretation and recreation of the world around them illustrates this process. These explanations ultimately offer intriguing explanations behind why we are gifted with the urge to make art.

Sexualisation in music: liberation or objectification?

Tara Mewawalla
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Sexualisation in music: liberation or objectification?

Many have argued that it is the nature of music, as a form of artistic expression, to be related to human emotions and sexualities. Art and creative expression have always made up our social and sensitive nature, from telling stories, to performing primal dances, to painting scenes of human experience on cave walls. Pablo Picasso claimed that ‘sex and art are the same thing’ while Sigmund Freud’s Sublimation theory suggested that ‘true’ artists made artwork out of an excess of sexual energy.

Charles Darwin highlighted the link between music and sex, arguing in The Descent of Man, that ‘musical notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male and female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex’. Along the same lines as the male peacock’s colourful feather tail, the male songbird develops a large repertoire of (technically useless but attention-catching) songs in order to best attract a mate.

Interestingly, Benjamin D. Charlton released a study in 2014 with evidence which suggested that women’s sexual preferences for composers changed during their menstrual cycle, depending on the complexity of the music; when the women were at their most fertile, they were attracted to the composers of more complex music.

Historically, music has not always been explicitly sexual, in fact most Western music in the Middle Ages was practiced by monks. However, as a natural part of being human, it can and very often is, especially in modern times, associated with sex and sexuality. Brian McNair’s essay ‘Striptease Culture’ highlights the paradox between the intimate and private nature of sex and how it has increasingly become part of the public domain, and this is largely due to mass and social medias, such as music videos.

At the same time, music alongside other mediums such as film and visual art have huge cultural and psychological effects on society. Elizabeth Wollman illuminates that in the 1970s, adult musicals portrayed the “country’s rapidly changing, often contradictory, attitudes about gender and sexuality at a time when the sexual revolution had given way to the gay and women’s liberation movements”. Music and performance are a space where gender and sexuality have been debated. As such it is important that the music industry is constantly aware of how they present sexuality, especially since music videos are so accessible to those who are young and easily influenced.

In 2011, Jennifer Stevens Aubrey and Cynthia M. Frisby published a study analysing sexual objectification in music videos, which they defined as the process of valuing a body, or body parts, primarily for its use and consumption by others. Looking at 147 music videos, they found that female artists revealed significantly more body parts on average and played primarily decorative (rather than instrumental, or useful) roles.

Laura Mulvey’s 1975 concept of the ‘gazer’ and the ‘gazed’ is important here as it shifts the power dynamics of the sexual situation. In music videos, as in TV and film, the viewer is in the position of ‘gazer’ while those performing are being ‘gazed’ at, but within the videos, characters can take on these ‘gazer’ and ‘gazed’ roles as well.

While Aubrey and Frisby proved there was no significant difference in the amount of times male and female singers were subjected to the gaze, they did reveal that men were much more likely to be the perpetrator of it than females. This means that men generally take on more voyeuristic roles where women take on more performative ones.

The study went on to discuss the negative implications of female over-sexualisation, including self-sexualisation which can lead to lower body confidence and even mental illness such as depression and eating disorders.

Music videos generally tend to sexually objectify women more explicitly and to depict them as objects to be consumed. When female artists, however, decide to sexualize themselves they have more autonomy over their role as the ‘gazed’ or the ‘gazer’. While sexual objectification can be harmful whether it be orchestrated by men or women, when a woman is performing, and is in the ‘instrumental’ role, explicitly controlling her own sexual image, it sends a more positive image to young girls than the sight of women as adding to a purely male hareem or ‘collection’.

Take the two most watched music videos on YouTube by a male artist and a female artist respectively. Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s Despacito comes first with over 5 billion views and features two men explicitly watching and appreciating the body of one woman in particular. She is objectified most directly by the cinematic division of her body into parts with the camera focusing at intervals on her legs, bum and chest, next to the men who mainly have their faces videoed.

Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off is the ninth most viewed and while it does feature sexual dancing and objectification, it incorporates more varied forms of performance and more often displays women dancing alongside men on the same level.

Sexuality is inextricably linked to music and performance, especially in our consumeristic and commercial society. With the ever-increasing sexualisation of these mass forms of media, it becomes imperative that we pay attention to the way all genders are portrayed and call out when the power dynamic is unbalanced and could fuel the fire, or be even more damaging, to cultural and social perceptions of gender roles. As a dynamic and evolving art-form, music has the great opportunity to spark debates about sexuality, relationships and gender dynamics; while sexuality in mainstream music is presently one-sided, it is not the sexual nature of music that is damaging but the way this is often manipulated and made to reinforce male-female stereotypes.

 

 

Why do we write?

Alison McArthur
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Why do we write?

As I sit down to write this article, I am struck by the realisation that I have never properly examined my own motivations behind wanting to write – why, in the face of reading lists, deadlines and various other commitments I have volunteered to write 1000 words on a subject that is unrelated to my degree. Usually in this sort of situation – that is, where I am unsure of my own thoughts on a subject – I tend to just start writing and trust that the writing process will reveal them to me.  If I am lucky, my thoughts will organise themselves into some semblance of order that will convey an element of insight or understanding.

I believe that this is true of writing in general. At the outset, we do not know exactly what the finished product will look like. We may have some idea of what we want to say – the more practical among us may have sketched out a structure, the main points and the central argument – but we don’t know what nuances we may discover, the links we might make, and how the thread of the argument will wind its way through the prose.  In that sense, a piece of writing is a route to understanding.

This applies to fiction, too. Often novelists will claim that their characters took on a life of their own, and that they just had to follow them through the pages to find out what happens in the book. Obviously, the novelist is aware that the character comes from her own imagination, but this implies that writing is a process of discovery – whether it is how a story will unfold, what we think about something, or how we feel at a particular moment in time.

As such, it is easy to see why an individual can personally benefit from the process of writing. Much of our writing, however, is not kept to ourselves – it is released into the world, to be read by others. Despite the technological ease with which we can converse remotely using dialogue and images, writing remains a key method of communication between individuals. Even though letters are no longer the only means of communication between separated lovers, friends or family, card shops are still a booming business; somehow our sentiments are made more meaningful in written form.

Writing is also a powerful way of conveying a message to a wider audience.  People have always been moved to write on issues that they feel passionately about. The adage ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ has persisted due to its empirical truth, and has been used to great effect by writers over time, from the New Testament to contemporary writers such as Margaret Atwood, whose dystopian fiction has made an important contribution to the feminist movement, showing us that (in her own words) “a word after a word after a word is power”.

George Orwell once claimed that “no book is genuinely free from political bias”, citing a “desire to push the world in a certain direction” in every person. Writing has always responded to what is happening in the world. It can initiate discussion, create solidarity and provoke social movements. We have never been more interconnected and aware of the problems facing humanity.  The current political, social and environmental climate has instilled in us a sense of urgency that change needs to be made. With the advent of blogging and social media, many people have taken to writing as a means of joining the conversation.

In that sense, writing can imbue the writer with a sense of purpose. We find it hard to accept the idea that our lives are largely dictated by chance, luck (or lack of), and a variety of externalities. Philosophers throughout the ages have used writing to give meaning to our existence, from Aristotle to Alain de Botton.  This is of particular importance in today’s increasingly secular society, where we can no longer rely on religion to give our lives significance. Large cities remove the sense of community that we once took for granted, and our jobs often do not give us an outlet to express a personal identity. The memoir is probably the most obvious contemporary example of the human need to impose a sense of narrative on our lives, though this practice has existed in one form or another for thousands of years.

We also have a tendency to apply this self-deceptive rationalization to current events, even those that seem to defy sense or logic. Journalists are quick to provide an analysis of the causes, contributing factors and the lessons that can be learnt. By participating in this process, we both seek to understand and to protect our pre-conceived notions of humanity. Writing gives us back some power; we have total control of the words that we write onto the page, and how we shape our thoughts.

Words can also provide a refuge. Fiction writing in particular allows us to enter a world of our own making, where we have control over the outcomes. It is no coincidence that the fantasy genre increases in popularity in times of economic and political struggle.

After the gloom of the previous paragraphs, it seems appropriate to mention one of the most important reasons we write: for the joy of it. I am writing this article because I love the process of getting words onto a page, and the way it allows me to delve into topics that I am interested in. And I am not alone: many people dream of writing a novel or having a career as a writer. It is certainly not for money – writers are notably poorly paid – so it must be providing some other sense of fulfilment.

Writing is as important now as it has ever been. While forms and styles of writing have evolved over the centuries, they all stem from a human desire to express our feelings, seek understanding, and give meaning to our lives. We are driven to write about the same subjects that we have always have – love and hate, life and death, good and evil and everything in between, from the macro to the minutiae, the serious to the trivial. We write for ourselves, for the reader, and for wider society.  And I think that’s probably a good enough reason to write an article for Cherwell.

Simply the breast: fashion frees the nipple

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Simply the breast: fashion frees the nipple

In the 2018 US Open, French player Alizé Cornet was penalised for removing her shirt, revealing a momentary flash of sports bra after realising her top was on back-to-front. In December 2018, Tumblr announced a blanket ban on pornographic content, including, specifically, any content displaying ‘female-presenting nipples’. Although the prospect of ditching one’s shirt and merrily heading off into town isn’t necessarily my idea of a comfortable day out, the controversies surrounding female toplessness certainly beg the question – just why is the female nipple quite so offensive?

Delve through the Instagram of just about any former Love Island contestant and you’ll be sure to find at least a few snaps where a faint outline of nipple can be detected (and this isn’t limited to the women: ‘cool Paul’ loves a tight t-shirt). On the men’s posts nobody seems to bat an eyelid. On the women’s? One uncovers hordes of comments reading some variation of ‘bit nippy love? *Insert wandering eyes emoji.*’

Now, more than ever, increasing numbers of women are giving ye ol’ trusty middle-finger to the notion that bras are a compulsory element for any outfit. For many, they are a means of practicality and comfort – for others, they are a needless inconvenience. Celebrities and mere mortals alike have continued to declare themselves in favour of ‘freeing the nipple,’ a campaign born out of Lina Esco’s 2014 film (entitled, as you could probably guess, Free the Nipple). So where does fashion, an industry that’s entirely centred around its relationship to the human body, come into play in all of this?

Put simply, fashion has always been a huge fan of boobs. The 90s saw a young Kate Moss posing fresh-faced and bare-skinned, smoking on the beach – more recently, Kendall Jenner took to Marc Jacobs’ runway in a sheer top that left little to the imagination. Predictably, the following day saw uproar across the Internet, partly in response to the very presence of nipples on the runway, and partly in light of Jenner’s adolescent age. Plenty of other labels regularly make nipples a focal point of their fashion shows: Anthony Vaccarallo’s inaugural Saint Laurent collection and Jean Paul Gaultier’s AW18  #freethenipple show in Paris are but two examples.

Could it be that fashion is normalising exposure to the female body? The whole purpose of the runway is to inspire and predict trends before they occur in the ‘real’ world; in dissociating breasts from a pornographic or erotic context and resituating them within daily fashion, arguably designers can help to dismantle the idea that female toplessness holds exclusively sexual connotations. This movement away from conservative fashion is already evident in consumer behaviour: underwear has become outerwear, sheer tops are no longer feared, and one underlying message is clear – the way a woman dresses need not be a marker of her behaviour or worth.

Equally, we must recognise the darker side of designers’ fascinations with the female body. Upon a simple Google search of ‘kendall jenner nipple controversy’ (top-notch investigative journalism), I was met with news that I hadn’t banked on: the fact that women across the globe are getting plastic surgery to make their nipples look like Kendall’s. It’s easy to say that KenJen’s statement look can inspire boldness in other women to do the same. But such a simplification ignores the fact that Kendall embodies what is deemed ‘conventional’ beauty. The glorification of her body does nothing to honour the average woman, who in reality encompasses a whole range of different sizes, races and ages. As is so often the case with the fashion industry, displaying only a single body type can in fact do far more harm than good, and cause young girls (and even grown women) anxiety over not fulfilling conventional standards of beauty.

Kate Moss has spoken out about her early experiences in the modeling industry, revealing that she often felt uncomfortable when being asked to pose topless. Whilst photos display a carefree, seemingly liberated young woman, the bitter reality is that she felt peer-pressured into nudity in order to be successful. With recent allegations of sexual misconduct filed against photographers such as Mario Testino and Bruce Weber, Moss is certainly not alone in her experiences.

Looking to the future, then, is it naïve to believe that the fashion industry can ever remedy the issue of female objectification? Whilst breaking taboos is admirable and ought to be celebrated, let’s not lose sight of the fact that this is just one tiny part of a whole host of gender-related issues affecting both men and women in the world. Moreover, designers have a responsibility to think about the wider implications of what they choose to cast a spotlight on. By all means, let’s support any movements towards a more a liberated, open-minded runway. But if you’re looking for real, concrete examples of female empowerment, however, you’re probably better off looking elsewhere for now.

Enron Preview – ‘financial collapse made tangible’

Cesca Echlin
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Enron Preview – ‘financial collapse made tangible’

It’s 2001. A Texas-based company worth more than a hundred billion dollars has declared bankruptcy. This move will unveil the corporation’s systemic accounting fraud and corruption, and will lead to the imprisonment of multiple employees. ‘Enron’, this high-flying company, hailed for being forward-thinking at the turn of the twentieth century, would fall.

Fast-forward to early 2019 and the tale of Enron’s unravelling is being brought to the Oxford Playhouse in a vibrant and slick new production by Theatre Goose and Sour Peach Productions. The twelve-strong ensemble cast engage in a performance by which the audience bear witness to an overwhelming barrage of multiple connections and networks, painting a portrait of the corporate world with all of its flaws.

Lucy Prebble’s play, Enron, premiered at the Chichester Festival Theatre in 2009 to glowing reviews when the playwright was only twenty-eight. Prebble’s play traces the rise and fall of Enron frontrunner and eventual CEO Jeffrey Skilling (Jamie Murphy) in a narrative not dissimilar from a Classical or Shakespearean tragedy.

The succession of scenes I watched in the preview for Enron began at the play’s start. Director Emma Howlett creates the corporate world through ensemble work. One minute actors bunch together, chatting viciously in crowds, the next they are darting across to the other side of the room to find the next person. Such imagery of groups has the effect of making a lone actor on stage appear even more prominent – reminding the audience that, amongst the mass, there remain individuals with individual agency.

Such an individual begins the play: ensemble member Lee Simmonds performs a monologue, declaring that he is a “lawyer” who is “one of the few who makes money in times like these.” He explains to the audience how Enron’s story will be told: “you should you know it could never be exactly what happened. But we’re going to put it together and sell it to you as truth.” Their task of story-telling is overt, and Simmonds’ monologue gets the ball rolling with a captivating start.

We are introduced to the leading characters at a party in the offices of Enron – Howlett optimises the entirety of the stage to focus our attention on certain figures. Individuals dart from the background into the foreground, making their presence known both to their colleagues and to the audience. It is at this point we are acquainted with our leading man: Jeffrey Skilling. Jamie Murphy brings to the role a charm and restlessness that marks him as the golden boy one should look out for. We are also introduced to Andy Fastow (Alex Rugman), Skilling’s partner and Enron’s eventual CFO. Rugman’s awkward and eager-to impress Fastow excellently contrasts the polished and perfect corporate world he inhabits.

Skilling and Fastow are newer elements in the a much older equation, fronted by Enron founder Ken Lay (Jonny Wiles) and woman of the hour Claudia Roe (Abby McCann). Howlett informs me later that all of these main characters are portraits of the real people involved in, and some of them prosecuted for, the Enron scandal – except Claudia Roe. Through the character of Claudia Roe, Howlett continues, Prebble creates a “paradigm of what it means to be female” in the macho, hyper-masculine world of the Enron Corporation. McCann’s Roe is a force to be reckoned with – Skilling recognizes her from the pages of Vogue that she reminds him was “cropped from a profile in Forbes.”

A hotbed of competition and hunger, Enron also becomes a hotbed of sex. Soon enough, Skilling and McCann are in bed together. But just as Roe zips her skirt up, they are back to talking numbers: “I’ve been thinking mark-to-market,” Roe declares. A moment of possible emotional connection is conflated with matters of business – Skilling blurts out that he is leaving his wife, whilst simultaneously Roe declares that she might be getting a promotion. It becomes clear that these characters have real difficulty occupying any sense of self distinct from the one they occupy at work.

Together, Murphy and McCann have a chemistry that is electric, proving particularly intense in a later scene with Enron boss Ken Lay as they fight over the possibility of a promotion: each are sat at either end of a very long table, with Wiles as Lay sat in between them at the middle. Lay’s choice is obvious: go with the charismatic Skilling and change the future of Enron forever, or with Roe, her Texan drawl representative of the company’s roots in southern tradition. Skilling makes his last bid for power, selling Lay his modern outlook on the future of the company and its potential investment opportunities: “There’s a dignity to giving people something they can’t touch.”

This question of tangibility is one I am left thinking about long after the scenes are over. Despite what Skilling declares in the line above, what Prebble’s play makes possible is in fact tangibility: we, the audience, are able to see that at the root of financial failure is human decision-making. I myself find the world of finance completely alien to me at the best of times, but what Enron does is frame it in terms that we can all understand, and in fact, relate to.

I very much look forward to seeing the cast and crew in full force next week at the Oxford Playhouse.

Projections of time: film and fashion

Rosa Haworth
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Projections of time: film and fashion

With the release of Alfonso Cuarón’s latest film Roma, a vast amount of critical attention has been devoted to the autobiographical nature of the piece. The film, set
in 1970/1, chronicles a year in the life of the Cuarón family’s maid during his childhood in Mexico City, and Cuarón and his crew painstakingly recreated his family home.

Yet surprisingly little attention has been given film’s costume – given that they were made and sourced with an equal attention to detail. Cuarón’s devotion to recreating the fashion of 70s Mexico involved him ringing up childhood family and friends to ensure that every item of clothing used on set was as authentic. The crew even replicated the clothes of Cuarón’s old neighbours when dressing individual extras. The lack of discussion on the film’s costume may be due to the distinctive colour palette of the film: black and white, favouring very pale, almost luminescent shades of grey. The costume becomes entirely incorporated into this colour scheme – if the word ‘colour’ can be used at all – and so does
not stand out in any way. But it is by no means lost; this exact replication of an earlier fashion, from the knitted jumpers and cotton shorts of the children to the simple chequered
cloth apron of their maid Cleo, is vital in recreating such a vivid image of the past.

The artist Annabel Nicolson’s 1973 performance of Reel Time, which connected a film projector and a sewing machine through a loop of celluloid, provides a striking visual representation of the intertwined relationship between film and fashion; a relationship that has existed since the beginning of cinema. When cinemas began to spring up in cities, towns, and even villages in the early 1900s, high fashion suddenly became visible on a widely available platform; now they were seen by anyone who attended the cinema, with short fashion films being shown before other screenings. The 1913 Kinemacolor Fashion Gazette, produced by fashion journalist Abbey Meehan, for example, showed all the latest fashions modelled in colour with a musical accompaniment alongside each gown.

Fashion has even altered the pace of Hollywood film production: during the 1920s and 30s producer Samuel Goldwyn was forced to get rid of thousands of feet of film, as the fast-shifting waistlines and hemlines of this period meant that a film’s costume choices could become ‘outmoded’ before the film’s release. Goldwyn eventually hired Chanel in 1931, providing her with a workshop and fashion tools in Hollywood so that she could create the styles that she believed would be ‘in fashion’ in a year’s time. Initially, films were recordings of everyday events, and so their costumes typically reflected the fashion of the time. Yet over the next several decades, costume became a means of transporting an audience years into the past through the imitation of earlier fashions.

Gone With The Wind (1939) is commonly labelled as the birth of the ‘costume drama’ with its recreation of the elaborate gowns of the 1860s and over 5000 individual items of clothing. The costumes here take on a symbolic function, too, as Scarlet O’Hara’s famous first outfit is a ‘Southern Belle’ style gown – the buttoned neck and white fabric suggesting innocence, but red details hinting at something more rebellious. This latter idea is then developed with a more suggestive, vivid green dress later in the film. The heavy-handedness of such symbolism, along with the almost melodramatic colour scheme of the entire film is jarring compared to modern modes of costume design, and the use of costume was soon to become integrated into more finely tuned colour palettes.

In The Birds (1963), for example, following Hitchcock’s demand that Tippi Hedren should wear a green dress when being chased by crows, costume designer Edith Head created
outfits of only blue and green for the rest of the film. In Andrea Arnold’s American Honey (2016), set in modern day America, stark images of poverty are interspersed with beautiful shots of the sleepy, empty expanse of the American landscape, and through costume the two are linked. The costumes are a display of cheap, colourful clothes. The staple outfit of the 17-year-old runaway protagonist Star, for example, is a canary-yellow, baggy vest top worn over an electric pink bralette and paired with blue denim hot-pants. Yet the result is not garish, and the colouring of the scenery itself seems enhanced, everything becoming part of an almost nostalgic, sun-baked saturation.

American Honey isn’t an attempt to recreate the past but a comment on present-day America. What is therefore interesting is the fact that, in 50 years – or even 10 – the costumes of American Honey will become a fashion of a previous era, an indicator of this decade, where mass-produced, cheap clothing dominates. Whilst preserved in the film, these styles will become outdated in reality, and this is where the ‘reels’ of film and fashion begin to run at different paces. In sci-fi films, costumes are as vital as futuristic buildings
or technology in signalling to the audience that this is an imagined vision of the future. The early sci-fi film, Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (1902) features strangely dressed,
unhuman figures whose vivid coloured clothes are jarringly discordant with the background’s peculiar mix of clashing colours and sepia-wash. This was made before Technicolour, with the random array of colours being due to the lengthy process of hand painting the colours directly on to each copy of film stock.

This slightly clumsy use of colour in costume has given way over the past century to something much more finely-tuned. Costumes in later sci-fi films are just as bold and exaggerated, but have become fashion, distinct from simply costume. Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic Blade Runner makes use of a very sparse colour palette, and instead of creating a
completely new imagined fashion of the future, costume designer Michael Kaplan instead used film noir as inspiration: the film’s wardrobe consists of an exaggerated, futuristic
take on tailored suits, faux-fur jackets and trench coats. By incorporating this, the costumes are not gimmicky attempts at predicting the future, but almost timeless. The costume design in Blade Runner had a direct effect on 80s fashion, with Kaplan’s designs inspiring wide-shouldered looks in women’s fashion. Futuristic fashions are therefore no longer so unfamiliar; they hold dual positions on fashion’s rapidly changing timeline, simultaneously in the imagined future and in the present.

Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky once said that “one cannot conceive of a cinematic work with no sense of time passing through the shot, but one can easily imagine a film with no actors, music, décor or even editing” – time is what is at the core of cinema. The same can be said for fashion; without its continuous state of change, fashion would not be ‘fashion’ at all – it would just be clothes. So for filmmakers, such as Cuarón with Roma, costume becomes the easiest means of time-travel. How this relationship between fashion and film will change with further advancements in film technology, and as the imagined future ages of old sci-fi films are reached in reality, is something that only cinema will be able to show us.

Restaurant Review: Pan Pan

Darius Parvizi-Wayne
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Restaurant Review: Pan Pan

In London, Korean food is truly having its moment in the sun. From street stands on Tottenham Court Road to the ever expanding chains of Bibimbap and On The Bab, Korean cuisine’s already significant position within the culturally diverse zeitgeist looks as if it will continue to grow in 2019. What about in Oxford? There is Jeong’s Dosirak, which, despite its pretty interior and authentic feel, is often overlooked within the maze of the Covered Market. So where in Oxford can Korean food really stand out and garner the acclaim it deserves? Simple: Pan Pan.

You may have not heard of it, and tucked away on St Clement’s Street in Cowley you may have not even seen it. I certainly had not, until one day I found myself critically hungover and craving Korean food. A quick Google search, and next thing you know I am stumbling into Cowley, alcohol steaming off my body. In the midst of my disorientation, I found Pan Pan to be a welcome refuge, and it’s Korean Fried Chicken to be ever so good. Crunchier than at Jeong’s, and packed with more flavour than almost anywhere else, my satisfaction at that moment was immeasurable.

Nonetheless, given that I was not in an appropriate psychological state to write a comprehensive review of Pan Pan back then, I decided to wait and then return. Slightly more clear-headed this time around, I discovered that, even if on that first occasion my brain was fuzzy, my taste buds had certainly not betrayed me. Pan Pan was and still is a fantastic little restaurant.

Firstly, let me explain that Pan Pan is not wholly a Korean restaurant. Part of its charm is its ability to harmoniously merge the foods of different nations into a long but relatively coherent menu.

From its splendid incarnation of a Taiwanese pork belly Bao to rich Japanese Yaki Udon, I was thoroughly impressed by the diversity on show.

However, since this review is inevitably based on my initial impression of Pan Pan, I had to make sure the Korean food would not let me down. Some Kimchi to start, a traditional side dish dating back around 2000 years. Nothing complicated: fermented cabbage, carrots, garlic and ginger, all lathered in spice. Tangy and punchy, 2000 years of tradition upheld.

Next, the main event: the Bibimbap. Bibimbap, like Kimchi, is a crucial staple in Korean cuisine, traditionally eaten on the eve of the lunar year.

A dish packed with ingredients, its very creation is symbolic of harmony. The darker elements, such as the shitake mushrooms, are representative of the North and the kidneys. The redness of the carrots and chillies symbolises the South and the heart, with the greenness of the cucumber represents the East and the liver. Finally the white of the egg is the centre, the stomach. Undemanding, unassuming and nicely balanced, Pan Pan did the Bibimbap justice. Crunchy carrots and cucumber, tender bulgogi beef and the heat of the chillies come together for a joyous combination. No petty refinement, no sprinkle of this or that, no huge flames erupting from charcoal grills that you may find in the capital where aesthetics occasionally supersedes flavour. Simple and, therefore, all the more fun, Pan Pan stayed true to a prolific culinary tradition that has often gone unnoticed in this country.

For a street loaded with real-estate agents and newsagents from the 1980s, Pan Pan is also miraculously intimate. Smiley staff, soft music, dim lights – I could have been here for hours. It really is a wonderful place, a restaurant where hangovers, rain and the general drab of winter can be put aside, supplanted by fantastically joyful food.

 

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