"In 1 909, a millionaire French banker called Albert Kahn set out to create what he called an archive of the planet." "The 72,000 colour photographs he collected reveal a dazzling variety of costumes and fashions." "All over the world, it's clear that clothing defined national identity." "To a truly astonishing extent, people were what they wore, from Tunisia to Mongolia, from Morocco to India." "But today, a century later, Albert Kahn's project would be more or less pointless because these days most people around the world dress in pretty much the same way the same jeans, the same T-shirts." "In other words, the West's way." "In this series I'm identifying the six unique factors " "I'm calling them the killer applications - that ensured that the West dominated the rest." "And I'm asking, if we lose our monopoly over these things, could Western civilization itself be consigned to history?" "The first four killer apps were competition, science, the property-owning democracy and modern medicine." "Yet in the first half of the 20th century despite the dominance these killer apps had brought it  Western civilization managed to tear itself apart in two world wars." "It took the special magic of the fifth killer app, the consumer society, to turn the West from unbridled destruction to rampant consumption." "All around the world, fashions are converging on a Western template." "Just what is it about our clothes that people can't seem to resist?" "Are they dressing like us because they want to be like us?" "Because, after all, this is about much more than just clothes." "It's about a whole popular culture that extends through music and movies, and that culture carries with it a subtle message." "It's about freedom, the right to wear whatever you Iike, even if it is what everybody else is wearing." "It's about democracy, because only those movies and songs and clothes that people actually want get made." "And, above all, it's about capitalism, because, after all, corporations have to make money from selling stuff like this." "In the second half of the 20th century, the only real rival to Western civilization would be communism." "So, which would win - socialism or shopping?" "By 1 900, the world had been economically integrated in a way never seen before." "The different bonds that linked it together - railways, steamship lines and telegraphs - were almost entirely Western invented and Western owned." "But perhaps the most remarkable expression of this first globalization was sartorial." "With extraordinary speed, a mode of dressing that was distinctly Western swept the rest of the world, consigning traditional clothing to the dressing-up basket of history." "This picture, taken in 1 921, shows two royal heirs," "Crown Prince Hirohito of Japan and Edward, Prince of Wales, the future Edward Vlll." "The thrones they stood to inherit could scarcely have been further apart from one another." "But here they both were in London, dressed by the same Savile Row tailor." "This is Henry PooIe's ledger from the early 1920s, and you can see the absolutely huge order of clothes that the Japanese placed for the Crown Prince Hirohito when he visited Europe in 1921 ." "They ordered everything under the sun - uniforms, waistcoats, flannel trousers." "Here's just a single line - a fancy cashmere suit, a blue cloth suit and a striped flannel suit." "This was a comprehensive attempt to give a Western makeover to a future oriental emperor." "And Hirohito wasn't the only foreign dignitary queuing up for an immaculately tailored English suit." "Preserved in the basement here are thousands of suit patterns for customers from all over the world who came to get the Western look, from the Emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie to Buffalo Bill." "Hirohito's desire to wear the latest Western styles was part of a standardizing trend that was sweeping the world." "The Crown Prince couldn't exactly turn up for golf at Gleneagles dressed like this." "If you wanted to look the part in a Western-dominated world, then you had to dress like..." "Well, like this." "British clothes, of course, were about much more than just economic modernity." "Nowhere were the subtle gradations of the class system more clearly articulated than in carefully tailored cloth." "As these wonderful illustrations from the 1920s show, this was a time when you really could judge a chap's status by the cut of his suit." "Unfortunately for Hirohito, and for the Japanese in general, it was also a time when it was no less natural to judge a person's worth by the colour of his skin." "while Hirohito headed back to Japan with his bespoke Western suits, the future King Edward VIII set off for a fancy-dress ball with his chum "Fruity" MetcaIfe." "They were both dressed as Japanese cooIies." "As far as they were concerned, that was just about as absurd as Japanese dressing up in Western clothes." "Indeed, Edward wrote to his mistress that Hirohito was a "prize monkey"" "and that the Japanese were prone to "breed like rabbits"." "Oh, dear." "(SPEECH DROWNED OUT BY DRUMMING)" "Since the time of the Meiji Emperor, the Japanese had been striving to leave behind their traditional culture so they would no longer be treated like second-class citizens." "But donning Western clothes just wasn't enough." "To be treated as an equal, it seemed," "Japan would have to acquire the ultimate Western power-dressing accessory - an empire." "In 1 904, Japan launched a surprise attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in Manchuria." "Four decades later, its imperial ambitions culminated with another surprise attack - on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor." "The outcome was defeat, humiliation and occupation by the American victors." "But the occupying forces in post-war Japan weren't interested in the traditional tailoring of SaviIe Row." "What they wanted was a more democratic style of dress, the kind of gear a guy could work in." "By the end of World War ll, the look of the West was no longer European." "In this photo, Emperor Hirohito is still dressed pretty much as he was in 1 921." "But he's no longer standing next to a member of the British Royal Family." "He's standing next to the victorious American General Douglas MacArthur, who's in standard duty uniform." "No tie, no formality." "Now people who aspired to dress and live as Westerners no Ionger looked to Britain." "They looked to America and a new re-cIothing of the world." "After the Second World War, the image of Western civilization was made in America, not in Europe." "The American ideal of "smart casual" - unfussy, convenient and comfortable off-the-peg clothes, ready-made for everyone - goes right back to the American War of lndependence." "Before the American revolution," "luxury cloth and clothes were imported from Britain, but during the revolution" "Americans were discouraged from emulating British fashion." "The new United States would weave its own cloth, make its own clothes, design its own fashions." "sheltered behind a protectionist tariff wall, the American textile industry would become one of the foundations of an extraordinary economic miracle." "To an extent that's often overlooked, the United States was a country built on cotton and cloth." "Southern cotton fields provided the raw material." "African-Americans," "like the ones who toiled here on this plantation near charleston, provided the labour, and Northern textile mills did the rest." "For a time, cotton was king of the US economy." "Pretty soon, every major American city had its own garment district." "Then US manufacturers made the crucial discovery that the range of human proportions is rather smaller than you might have thought." "If you could standardize sizes, then you could make clothes cheaply, on an industrial scale." "The idea swept America, and it didn't just apply to clothing." "You could have a standard house, and a standard car, as well." "The whole idea of the American consumer society was that everybody should have a piece of this action." "Everybody should have a car, everybody should have a garage, everybody should have consumer durables, a big fridge, everybody should have a lawn that they could mow on Sunday and, of course, everybody should have a desirable suburban residence." "That mass consumerism and standardization could somehow be reconciled with rampant individualism was one of the smartest tricks ever pulled by Western civilization." "And the key to understanding how it was done lies in that very word" " Western." "(CATTLE MOO)" "Because it was here in the Wild West that the ultimate universal Western garment was born - jeans." "They started life as the no-nonsense clothing of cowboys riding hard through big country, and gold-digging miners." "For Americans they symbolize a frontier lifestyle of raw freedom and boundless opportunity." "(INDISTINCT)" "But how did these denim waist overalls, as they were originally called, come to be so globally popular?" "blue jeans are cheap to make, comfortable to wear, easy to clean and very hard-wearing." "What's more, virtually anyone can get into them." "But then so are workmen's overalls of the sort that we used to wear in Britain, not to mention farmers' dungarees." "Why was it American cowboys' work trousers that came to dominate the world of fashion?" "well, the answer lies in two of the 20th century's fastest-growing industries - movies and marketing." "In trailers for movies like Giant, screen icon James Dean advertised Western civilization's new look." "Since anyone could afford a pair of jeans, you too could be Jimmy Dean." "And thanks to good marketing, these all-American clothes appealed just as strongly to non-Americans." "Even those on the other side of the iron Curtain - or rather, the denim curtain." "Teenagers in the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe were crying out for jeans." "The really puzzling thing is that the United States' principal rival in the Cold War couldn't replicate these supremely simple items of apparel." "Just why was it that Russians couldn't make jeans?" "You might have thought that the transformation of jeans from work clothes into fashion items would have helped the Soviets." "After all, the Soviet Union was supposed to be the proletarian paradise, and jeans are rather easier to make than, say, a three-piece suit." "Yet it turned out that, in the fashion stakes, the Soviet Union wasn't so much the Eastern enemy as the West's ugly sister." "Ugly and dumb." "Because somehow the Communist bloc failed to grasp the appeal of an item of clothing that could equally well have been made to symbolise the virtues of the hard-working Soviet proletarian." "Instead blue jeans, and the pop music with which they were inextricably linked, became the quintessential symbols of capitalist superiority and Western freedom." "Forget nuclear warheads." "Jeans were the ultimate Cold War weapon because they actually got launched against the Soviets." "(SIRENS)" "If you were a student living behind the iron Curtain in the 1 960s, you wanted to dress like all the young dudes in the West." "You really didn't want to dress as a Young Pioneer." "(IN GERMAN)" "Stefan WoIIe was an East German student at the time." "(TRANSLATION)" "Throughout the Eastern bloc, black marketeers sprang up who would exchange jeans with visiting Westerners for fur hats and caviar." "The communist authorities were only too aware of the threat that the jeans genie posed to their system." "But what could they do?" "This rather hideous building used to house the world's most boring media outlet," "Neues Deutschland, the official East German party newspaper." "Now, the only interesting thing about Neues Deutschland was the way that it used to represent the West, which was as a den of iniquity, of unemployment, of crime, and of course of grinding poverty," "all direct consequences of the internal contradictions of capitalism, you understand." "The trouble was that every time they ran a picture of the oppressed proletariat of the West, they were all wearing jeans." "Now, Western civilization couldn't be all bad if even the proles got to wear Levi's." "Such was the desirability of this simple article of clothing that Soviet law enforcement officials coined the phrase 'jeans crimes", which referred to "law violations" ""prompted by a desire to use any means to obtain articles made of denim"." "It was as if the heirs of Lenin were more scared of Wrangler's than of the US Air Force." "The French leftist philosopher and comrade-in-arms of Che Guevara," "jules Regis Debray, once said, "There's more power in rock music and blue jeans" ""than the entire Red Army."" "well, he was right in the end." "A later generation would overthrow the Soviet system with a velvet revolution and a rock'n'roII soundtrack." "But 20 years earlier, young people on both sides of the Iron Curtain were already thirsting for change." "The year was 1968, and it was time to unzip the denim revolution." "1968 was a year of revolutions in many ways and in many places, from Paris to Prague, from berlin to berkeley, and even in Beijing." "But the common factor in all these disruptions to the cold War duopoIy of power was youth." "As the post-war baby-boomers became teenagers, they yearned to challenge their fathers' stiflingly standardized order." "WOMAN:" "A Iot of people want revolution." "They want a change of the system." "The only way they think they can do it is by revolution, and that's a fact." "It is the only way they can do it." "(CHANTING)" "But this was a very strange kind of revolution, in which style - boy, did the young Parisians have thatl - counted for a lot more than substance." "On 22nd March 1 968," "French students occupied the university administration building in Nanterre," ""mad Nanterre" as it became known." "(SHOUTING)" "By May, tens of thousands of students were clashing with police on the streets of Paris." "Strikes swept the country." "So, what was it all about?" "well, if you'd asked the student leaders, they would have said it was about red revolution, insurrection in the centres of capitalism." ""Humanity won't be happy," they said," ""until the Iast capitalist is hung with the entrails of the Iast bureaucrat."" "The Situationists went even further." "They wanted the abolition of labour itself." ""Ne travaillez jamais" - never work." "That's the sort of thing you'd have seen sprayed on the walls here at Nanterre." "But there was one demand that trumped all the others, and that was for unlimited male access to the female dormitories, hence the revolutionary slogan, "Unbutton your mind as often as your fly."" "As one graffiti artist put it," ""The more I want to make love, the more I want to make revolution." ""The more I want to make revolution, the more I want to make love"." "Women were encouraged to experiment with hitherto taboo degrees of exposure." "This was as much a sexual and style revolution as a social revolution." "The irony is that the '68-ers, who routinely denounced American imperialism in Vietnam, and symbolically smashed the windows of the American Express offices in Paris, were themselves chronically addicted to American popular culture." "blue jeans and rock'n'roII supplied the costumes and the soundtrack of the so-caIIed revolution." "But these were among the most successful products of late 20th century capitalism." "The French Situationists might heap scorn on the consumer society, with its culture of crass materialism dressed up in spectacular advertising, but those who rioted against capitalism here in Paris were wildly underestimating the benefits they themselves reaped from economic and political freedom." "Give or take the occasional baton charge by policemen who despised privileged middle-class kids with long hair and flares, the authorities in the Western world generally allowed the students the freedom to protest." "This ability to absorb dissent gave the West another crucial advantage." "Behind the iron Curtain, however, it was a very different story." "The year 1 968 saw worldwide student revolution." "Dressed in their jeans, the baby-boomers challenged the authority of their parents and their rulers." "In France, students proclaimed themselves Marxists and anti-imperialists, even if they did buy their jeans from the best capitalist retailers America could produce." "The contrast when you crossed over to the other side of the iron Curtain couldn't have been greater." "It was like going through the looking glass." "For here the same things, even the same clothes, could have diametrically opposite meanings." "So, in 1967, Levi's organised trade fairs in Moscow, Warsaw and here in Prague." "The Czechs called jeans "Texasky", Texan trousers." "Born in the wild West, these pants were galloping eastwards to turn comrades into cowboys." "The demand for Levi's soared." "Meanwhile, in clubs and bars throughout the capital," "Czech bands tried to imitate the new musical trends from the West." "(IN CZECH)" "The most popular Prague band of the '60s were Olympic, the Czech Beatles." "Lead singer Petr Janda recognised the political impact of popular culture." "(TRANSLATION)" "As in Paris, universities became flash points for a clash of the generations." "In April 1 968," "President Alexander Dubcek launched his action programme of liberalization." "Significantly, his economic policy shifted the emphasis from heavy industry to consumer goods." "But the Soviet leadership in Moscow saw the so-called Prague Spring as an unacceptable threat." "When talks failed to resolve the crisis, the Soviets sent 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops to the border." "In the small hours of 21 st August 1 968, tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia." "By the time dawn broke, the whole country had been occupied." "This building used to house the central Committee of the Czech Communist Party." "At four in the morning on August 21st 1968, it was surrounded by Soviet tanks." "(SHOUTING)" "Threatened by an angry crowd, the tanks opened fire, killing at Ieast one young man." "And all of this was watched by Dubcek and his colleagues from up here on this balcony." "They were watching the death of a dream." "At around 9am, troops stormed the building." "Dubcek was flown to the Soviet Union." "A focal point of resistance was Wenceslas Square, where Czechs gathered daily around the equestrian statue of Wenceslas, the saintly Duke of Bohemia." "Here on 1 9th January, a Czech student named Jan Palach doused himself in kerosene and set himself alight." "Three days later, he was dead." "In the West, students indulged themselves with Marxist rhetoric, but what they were really after was free love." "On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the stakes were higher." "Here what was at issue was freedom itself." "And the biggest threat to that freedom was posed by the custodians of Marxism in Moscow." "After 1 968, the Czech communist regime required all professional rock musicians to sit a written exam in Marxism-Leninism." "(BAND PLAYS)" "The avant-garde Plastic People Of The Universe hit back with songs like 100 Points, which very pointedly asked why the party was so scared of freedom and democracy." "In 1976, all of the members of The plastic people Of The Universe were arrested." "Two were put on trial, charged with "extreme vulgarity, antisociaIism, nihilism and decadence."" "They were sentenced to 18 and 8 months in jail." "Never in its history has pop music been more political than it was here in Prague." "So, just what were the Soviet authorities so afraid of?" "Why not just let Prague's students have all the jeans and rock'n'roll they liked?" "The answer is of course that the West's killer app, the consumer society, posed an existential threat to the Soviet system itself." "The consumer society was market based." "It responded to signals from consumers about their preferences, for blue jeans over flannel trousers, or Mick Jagger over Burt Bacharach, and it devoted an increasing share of resources to satisfying those preferences." "This the Soviet system simply couldn't do." "Their entire system was based on centralised planning." "The party knew, or thought they knew, what everyone needed - brown polyester suits, and they placed the factory orders accordingly." "They had no clue what anyone actually wanted." "Communists did rockets, not retail therapy." "Tanks had to take precedence over tank tops, strategic bombers over Stratocasters." "One Soviet critic opined... (RUSSIAN ACCENT) "Every ounce of energy expended on dance floor" ""is energy that could and should have been invested" ""in building a hydroelectric plant."" "Here in Berlin, the division of the city into East and West looked like a permanent fact." "With the crushing of the Prague Spring, the communist system in Eastern Europe looked once again unassaiIabIe." "But while the communists were extremely good at crushing political opposition, their resistance to the West's consumer society was altogether weaker." "Ordinary people simply improvised their own Western-style clothes." "Wannabe designer Anne-Katrin Hendel even stitched together her own jeans." "(TRANSLATION)" "Some still say that Mikhail Gorbachov or Ronald Reagan caused the collapse of communism." "But maybe it really was blue jeans and rock'n'roll." "I was living in berlin in the summer of 1989." "In those days, if you were British, you could travel pretty freely from the West of the city to the East and back." "But when you got on at Friedrichstrasse in the East of the city, you'd be the only person on the train." "It was quite an eerie journey going back from one world to another, past the old, dilapidated Reichstag building, through the wall" " literally." "And then in the summer of '89, things changed." "I was no Ionger the only person on the train." "In fact, I was surrounded by Hungarians and by poles, because their governments had, for the first time, given their people freedom to travel to the West." "well, I got quite excited about this." "In fact, I wrote a newspaper story for one of the British papers and I wanted it to have the headline "The berlin wall is crumbling"." "Just imagine if they'd published it." "I would have prophesied the collapse of communism." "But they didn't." "The editor said I'd been listening to one too many RonaId Reagan speeches." "Oh, well." "That's life!" "(IN GERMAN)" "On 9th November 1 989, a bemused press corps was informed that travel across the border would be permitted, prompting a flood of East Berliners to the border checkpoints." "Unprepared, the guards chose not to resist." "By midnight, all the checkpoints had been forced to open." "(CHEERING)" "With the fall of the berlin wall, the cold War was over." "For some, it was the end of history." "For others, the triumph of the West." "actually, I think the italian company got it right that started marketing a line in skin-tight "perestroika jeans"." "The Western way of dress had done for Soviet communism." "Now only one challenge seemed to remain." "The most populous and worst-dressed nation on Earth." "A people whose egalitarian leaders required them to wear a billion pairs of matching pajamas." "In the wake of the Mao Tse-tung's Communist Revolution in 1 949," "China had become the world's drabbest society." "Gone were the last vestiges of imperial silk." "Gone, too, were the Western outfits favoured by the nationalists between the wars." "In the pursuit of strict equality, everyone was issued with the kind of clothes only convicts wore in the West." "walk down a typical street in China today and what you see is a veritable kaleidoscope of Western styles of clothing." "And not a single of pair of Mao pajamas in sight." "What a difference three decades of reform can make to the way a society looks." "It's as if the Chinese are competing to see who can look most like they've just come back from a shopping expedition to 5th Avenue or Oxford Street." "Like all industrial revolutions," "China's began with a massive investment in textile production." "Factories like this one all over the Eastern seaboard became unbeatable competitors when it came to exporting cheap clothing." "But now the question for China is this." "With Western economies depressed by a global financial crisis, is there enough domestic demand in China itself for all this Western-styIe kit?" "well, the answer seems to be an emphatic yes." "Judging by what I've seen in China's big cities, they're getting there." "Now they make the clothes and buy the clothes." "All the West supplies are the brand names." "With Russia converted to Gap and China worshipping Armani, you would think the triumph of the West's consumer society was complete." "Well, not quite." "As we'll see, there's a growing movement in the world today that rejects the dress code of Western civilization altogether." "Welcome to Istanbul, a cosmopolitan city, where the outward trappings of Western civilization are immediately apparent in the streets." "(TRAM BELL RINGS)" "Take a tram ride though istanbul's main shopping centre and you could be almost anywhere in the Mediterranean." "To the Ieft and to the right, it's the Western look that predominates, which gives you the impression that this is just another Eastern frontier that's been colonised by Western civilization." "(CALL TO PRAYER)" "But look elsewhere in the same city, and it's a very different story." "Here in Turkey there's been the most extraordinary backlash against Western modes of dress in recent years." "Western modes of dress for women, that is." "As far as many muslims are concerned, and the overwhelming majority of Turks are muslims, the Western style of dress exposes far more of the female head and body than the Koran prescribes." "And that's why I'm seeing so many more headscarves and veils than when I first came to istanbul 15 years ago." "Yup, even the burqa is back." "This represents a wholesale rejection of the policy introduced by the founder of the Turkish Republic." "In the 1 920s, Kemal Ataturk set out to Westernise the way Turks looked and banned religious forms of dress." "For 60 years his secular ideas flourished in Turkey." "(CHANTING)" "But in October 1 998, there was a backlash." "1 40,000 people protested against the long-standing ban on wearing headscarves in schools and universities." "In Istanbul, thousands of girls opted to miss classes rather than take off their headscarves." "Elsewhere there were even cases of suicide." "The whole controversy over the headscarf illustrates just the way our outer trappings can come to have a profound cultural and even political significance." "should we regard it as just an expression of personal religious faith, which a truly tolerant Western society should allow on the principle of freedom of expression?" "Or is it an antiquated symbol of a profound inequality between the sexes ordained by islam, which a secular society should prohibit?" "The headscarf issue is represented by Islamists as an issue of individual freedom and human rights." "To my eyes, it's more like the thin edge of a wedge designed to restore sharia law to Turkey." "It's not just a case of Western decadence against islamic puritanism, because here in headscarf heaven, as you can see, there's a whole plethora of different headscarves you can buy." "In fact, you can imagine young girls competing for the latest fashion accessory." "I've even spotted one down there with diamante." "Now, this is a really, particularly fine one." "could you show me how to put this on?" "Ah, that's...that's where you fold it." "beautiful!" "I suppose it just goes to show that the veil, the headscarf, is as susceptible to the vagaries of fashion as the kind of thing that sells in the typical Western high street." "Now, the Islamists can claim, you don't need to Westernise yourself to be chic." "In this film, I've tried to show that what we wear really matters." "The West's two great economic Ieaps forward, the industrial revolution and the consumer society, were both inseparable from clothes, making them more efficiently, and wearing them more revealingly." "The spread of the Western way of Iife has been inseparable from the spread of the Western way of dress." "But if some people today no Ionger aspire to dress in Western styles, that probably means they're rejecting Western values too." "The backlash against Western dress is spreading in the Muslim world as a symptom of a global Islamic revival." "Completely veiled women are now as common a sight on the streets of London as English Premier League football shirts on the streets of Shanghai." "Should we follow the French in banning the burqa?" "Or does the West's consumer society have an antidote as effective as blue jeans once were to Maoist pajamas?" "But maybe that's the wrong question to ask." "Is that what Western civilization boils down to?" "After capitalism, science, the rule of law and democracy, is all we've got left today just a spot of shopping?" "Is that what really lies behind the veil, our veil, the veil of our own superiority?" "Nothing more than retail therapy?" "well, in the final episode of this series, I'm going to ask if the real threats to our civilization come not from radical islam, or any other external threat, but from our own seIf-doubt, from our loss of faith in our Western cultural heritage."