Should Michelle Obama and Kate Middleton be patriotic about designers?

Flying the flag: Michelle Obama wears US label J Crew. 

My favourite and most frequently employed literary quotation comes not from Shakespeare, Jane Austen, or even Helen Fielding. Instead, it comes from Anthony Lane, film critic for the New Yorker. In the introduction to his book, Nobody's Perfect, Lane says that the best thing about moving from writing about films for a British newspaper to an American magazine was that he "no longer felt the slightest compunction to bang the drum for British cinema, an activity only slightly more useful than arguing the case for a fleet of Swiss submarines".

Unfortunately for wives and wives-to-be to be of famous people, there is no such exit strategy. Just as all British newspapers and their critics are duly, nay, legally obliged to support The King's Speech come Oscars time, so Michelle Obama and Kate Middleton are expected to wear clothes by homegrown designers.

Catherine – the girlfriend previously known as Kate – is, as you may have heard, about to be legally shackled to the Wacky Windsors. I mean, joined in holy matrimony to her fairytale prince. Naturally, speculation about her wedding dress is as fevered in the press as the meaning of life is in philosophical texts. Many names have been mooted, from the possible (Bruce Oldfield) to the totally not (Topshop) but one thing they all have in common is that they are British. That, with weary predictability, is a given.

Certainly after the drubbing Michelle Obama got for daring to wear a dress designed by the non-American label Alexander McQueen to the state dinner for China's president, Hu Jintao, two weeks ago, Middleton would be forgiven for considering cladding herself in the union flag.

"My understanding is that the visit was to promote American-China trade . . . Why do you wear European clothes?" fumed Oscar de la Renta with a moue of disapproval and stamp of his bejewelled foot (probably). Considering De la Renta had previously criticised Obama for wearing J Crew despite its American origins ("I think it's wrong to go in one direction only," he sniffed in 2009, that direction presumably being through the front door of J Crew), it is safe to assume that when De la Renta says "European clothes", he means "anything other than De la Renta clothes", and that this burst of patriotism was tinged with an emotion psychologists describe as "Wahhhh! Pay attention to meeeeee! My feelings have a big boo boo!"

The expectation that high-profile people and, in particular, women should support their country's designers is understandable. But seeing as most designer and high-street wares are manufactured in the far east, India and – at a push – Italy, clothes generally have about as much connection to the nationality of their designers as Apple computers have to fruit.

This whole schtick smacks of lazy patriotism, which slips easily into grating xenophobia. Designers and fashion editors who get in a huff when their nation's female figurehead dares to wear something from a separate shore sound distinctly like the relatives who come a-clamouring when you've won the lottery.

If you want her to wear something, make something she wants to wear. It's fashion. It's not complicated.

Posted in: kate middleton