Queer Eye isn’t just great fashion TV – it’s the best show of the year

I grew up as a devoted fan of CNN’s Style With Elsa Klensch, but after Elsa hung up one of her 10m Geoffrey Beene jackets in 2001 I pretty much gave up on fashion TV. After all, it so often reduces fashion to the two-dimensional visuals, when the real joy of fashion goes much deeper than that – and I’m not talking about Trinny and Susannah insisting that all Britain’s housewives need to cheer themselves up is more colourful V-necks in their cupboards.

Well, colour me wrong, because – at last – a great fashion show has arrived. But this show is about so much more than fashion, as any great fashion show should be. In fact, it is definitely the best TV show to premiere so far this year and one of the most important TV shows for a long, long time. I speak, of course, of Netflix’s Queer Eye.

“What? A gimmicky reboot of an already gimmicky reality TV show? Important? You’ve lost your mind, Freeman!” I hear the readers cry as one. I, too, scoffed when I heard about Netflix’s revival of the show – yes, scoffed, I said. After all, I hate reality TV and my feelings about the original Queer Eye for a Straight Guy, which aired from 2003 to 2007 and was predicated on the stereotype that gay men are stylish and straight men are clueless schlubs, could largely be summed up as “meh”. Whatever charm the show had came entirely from the personalities of the five gay male presenters.

Source: theguardian