Major British retailer Marks & Spencer (M & S) has launched a new lingerie range inspired by George Floyd.
This is a bit like Grand Theft Auto launching a new racing game inspired by Noddy and Big Ears. Or Zimmer launching a new series of walking frames inspired by Dua Lipa. Or Oxford University launching a new degree course inspired by Beavis and Butthead.
It’s so totally meaningless and off-brand that it will make absolutely zero sense to its core audience. It’s the purest woke gesture politics.
In a video about the launch of the retail giant’s Nothing Neutral About It range, M & S Lingerie Director Laura Charles says:
The horrific death of George Floyd and the global conversation on race, equality and unconscious bias really spurred us on to go harder and faster.
Did it Really?
Marks & Spencer is a bastion of bourgeois respectability. It has never been edgy or fashion-forward. Nor has it ever been political because the kind of people who go shopping in Marks & Spencer, people like my mother, don’t want to be lectured on the ‘correct’ causes of the day when they buy their underwear or their reasonably priced cashmere tops or sensible skirts or overpriced but excellent condition fruit. They just want to buy their food or their clothes, then go home, not to have their consciousnesses raised or to be made to feel mildly guilty about their white privilege.
Truly this desperate. Perhaps this outrageous insult to their loyal customers will backfire horribly.