Article excerpted from stylebubble.co.uk
I have to take a stand when one of the most unlikely designers is getting a battering. Some of you may have read about designer Peter Jensen’s current plight. Thirty or so women in Nuuk, Greenland took to the streets last week to protest against Jensen’s A/W 08-9 collection – more specifically the white leather thigh-high boots printed with flowers, inspired by Greenlandic Kamik boots. Jensen is accused of directly copying the country’s national costume and therefore somehow looking down on Greenlandic culture. As a result, Jensen is receiving death threats from these protesters.
Seriously? Jensen doesn’t deny that his shoes are anything more than an innocent loving tribute to Greenland’s national costume, and for that he’s getting death threats? Possibly he’s being punished for being Danish (Greenland was once a colony of Denmark).
Now, Jensen is just about the cutest designer you will ever meet – sweet, gentle and sincere in everything he does. Whatever the theme or season, he creates a world to support it in the form of a collection. In the case of A/W 09, it was his dear Aunt Jytte who lived in Greenland that inspired the pieces. Of ALL the designers to be protesting against, Jensen shouldn’t be one of them.
One look at the adorable Jensen in Greenland on his research trip last year and you simply have to scratch your head.
As Carola Long points out in the Independent, ‘borrowing’ from other cultures in fashion is so rife that if you’re going pick some bones, there are so many other instances and examples that are far MORE dubious than Jensen’s cute Kamik boots. Hows about the use of ‘ethnic’ as a general word used wherever and whenver we’re not exactly sure WHAT ethnicity we’re harping on about? Are the Japanese sending Galliano evils over his kimono-laden Dior couture collection? What about this season’s “tribal” trend – what tribe, where, when, how? Oh, this particular grey area of fashion would be pure heaven for a pedantic fashion killjoy indeed…
A wee note about the collection – I for one am glad Jensen has returned to what he does best, keeping things unabashedly cute and immersed in themes that are personal to him.
