Razer’s Class Warfare: have the Emmys presaged an end to delightful bad taste?

Bourgeois pretensions to the Good Taste of an imagined ruling class have all but erased chicken tikka spray tans and Gabi Grecko bustiers. You could argue that's a good thing. Except it definitely isn't.

Helen Razer

Writer and broadcaster

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Ours is an era of ghastly good taste and within it, a fool and her clothing are soon parted. In 1994, the ingenue Melissa George could wear the garb of an Elizabethan fool to receive her Best New Talent award at the Logies. These days, she’d fill her round hose with the ordure of shame rather than reprise that look.

Thanks to the efforts of stylists in an age that has no serious room for camp, kitsch or cleavage, the worst-dressed lists (so long a staple of entertainment journalism) can barely be distinguished from the best. It’s a good thing that Mr Blackwell, the father of the worst-dressed form, did not live to see this decade of decency. Then he would never have said, as he once did of Martha Stewart, "She dresses like the centerfold for The Farmer's Almanac".