There was – for a brief moment this weekend – a sense of optimism to life in the United Kingdom. In the past fortnight alone, the malign rule of a 14-year-long Conservative government has come to an end – taking with it the regressive Rwanda plan and a ban on onshore wind licences – while the English football team entered the final stages of the European Championships.
Things were so hopeful, in fact, that Doja Cat’s performance at Wireless Festival was brought forward so as to not clash with the match. “I heard there was a game?” the musician announced mid-set, bringing an official Euros football onto stage and lobbing it into the crowd before letting out a blistering “Go In-ger-land!” (We, of course, lost to Spain just a few hours later.) But England is more than just disappointing football results, and Doja Cat’s patriotism mercifully extended to a not-so-subtle homage to the Spice Girls: a custom Dilara Fındıkoğlu corset bearing the Union Jack and a red-headed wig that drew immediate comparisons to Ginger Spice’s now-iconic Brits dress.
The story behind that look is, at this point, pop cultural legend. “It’s 1997 and we were going to be performing in front of everyone. I remember thinking, ‘Maybe I could just put on a British flag’,” Geri Halliwell said in her British Vogue Life in Looks video in 2020. “At the time, the stylist said to me, ‘I don’t think you should wear that’. I got a very inexpensive tea towel – it was probably about five pounds – and I said, ‘Let’s place it on this Gucci dress’.”
I’d like to think the flag-emblazoned Hattie Crowther corset that Tolami Benson – a woman who brought it home on the fashion front – wore at the Euros final was a descendant of that precise moment. Read more about that here.
