KEY POINTS:
Rudyard Kipling said if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you'll definitely ascend to manhood.
Alas for Rudyard I shall never be a man, as long as head-keeping is a defining trait of masculinity. I realised that this week as I variously and at length queued, moved, sat and stared on demand and in unison with my fellows.
Not once did I display an ounce of individuality, never once did I use my own judgment. I blindly and meekly did what I was told.
The reason was Fashion Week, but the herding was instinctual. What is it about a queue that immediately makes you surrender your individuality and do only what everybody else is doing?
There is something quite unique about the humiliation of standing in line behind one's fellow man in order to be serviced. And it's never for anything nice either. Dole queues, bus queues, waiting-to-pay-the-power-bill queues.
Queues are the format in which the quotidian comes.
I've never queued up to be kissed, or complimented, or given free shoes. But if you had to queue for lovely things, I suppose you wouldn't bother. You'd just get in there and the resulting melee would not be pretty.
I thought about this yesterday, as I took my place dutifully and waited for a fashion show in yet another benighted queue. As an Irish woman I'm a veteran of queues; we love queuing at home. In shops, at petrol stations, outside nightclubs. The Irish are good queuers.
Not so organised as the Brits, not as lackadaisical as the French, the Irish queue is an amorphous monster; it skirts and it snakes, takes on a life of its own sometimes, but it is always recognisably queue-some.
We've even been known to do it spontaneously. Any gathering of more than two people somehow takes on the life of a queue. A group of people waiting in line for something. Something that may or may not happen, but that is not the point. It's not surprising that an Irishman wrote Waiting for Godot. "Nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful." Samuel Beckett was well versed in the art of queuing, obviously.
In terms of solipsism, there's little to trump queuing for a fashion show. Waiting patiently in line for up to an hour in order to sit side of stage for what is, basically, a homage to oneself. If you're a designer that is.
Is it just me, or is there a perceptible lean towards sending models down the catwalk looking exactly like yourself when you make clothes in New Zealand? It's not necessarily narcissism, I'm sure; perhaps they're just "living the brand"?
Anyone who has been to Fashion Week this year has spent a long time waiting in line for 12 to 15 minutes of theatrics and indulgence.
That's nothing new; people have queued for centuries to be entertained, whether by the plays of Sophocles or a peek at a freak under a blanket.
The thing that confounds me is how well we do it, how meekly and quietly we fall into line. It shows that, however much you disdain it, there is a collectivity present in New Zealand. And, come November, if the queues at the ballot box are anywhere near as patient and enthusiastic as those in Halsey St this week, we're not in bad shape at all.
