Berry at the Council: The Burgundy Smear That Arrived Believing Itself a Statement
I have covered this council for three seasons now. I have witnessed Lemon arrive yellow and unrepentant. I have watched Fig present itself as though wrinkles were a design choice. I have, on one memorable occasion, seen Mango. And yet Berry — Berry — has managed to locate an entirely new register of wrongness, one I did not know existed until last Thursday, when it waddled through the chamber doors and I was forced to reckon with it.
The look, such as it is, can be summarised thus: a deep, self-congratulatory burgundy, applied without restraint across the entire body, with a surface sheen that suggests Berry moisturises and considers this sufficient. It is not sufficient. The sheen reads as effort. Effort, in a room of professionals, is the most embarrassing thing one can broadcast.
What offends me most — and I say this as someone who once made Pomelo cry with a single raised eyebrow — is the clustering. Berry did not arrive as one. Berry arrived as many, pressed together into a collective silhouette that the rival rag's editorial team apparently considers a personality. It does not. Aggregation is not architecture. A crowd of errors is still, I must insist, errors.
There were no accessories. There was no structure. There was no apparent awareness that the council chamber has windows and that light, merciless and democratic, would fall upon all of this. Sloe, seated beside me in the press gallery, said nothing. Sloe rarely does. But I saw the look on her face, and I am prepared to testify that it matched my own.
Berry submitted a statement afterward claiming the aesthetic was "intentional." So is a bruise, darling. That does not make it fashion.