Mittilkless Hamallagnifest update: The Grand Salon for Costume, Fashion and Film

So Michelle Muscat’s dream of setting up a ‘museum of fashion’ is to come to fruition, thanks to her inappropriately privileged status as the Spouse of the Prime Minister (when she is not, that is, the Friend of the Deputy Commander of the Armed Forces).

Her pretentious naffness is hallmarked all over the selected name: The Grand Salon for Costume, Fashion and Film.

The media coverage has centred on the fact that Justice Minister Owen Bonnici has given ex Labour Party election candidate Martin Debono a direct order of €36,000 “to manage and coordinate consultants’ drawings into a comprehensive document for the tender stage and for the EU funds application for the project”.

My older readers will remember that Martin Debono was tasked by Prime Minister Alfred Sant in 1997 with constructing the one thing he achieved in 22 months, other than freezing Malta’s EU membership application and sending the economy down the tube by ‘removing VAT’: constructing his Bugibba promenade.

This time around, the incoming Labour government put him on the state payroll at €27,000 a year as assistant to the chairman of the government’s Building Industry Consultative Council, and now this.

But the contract which Janice-whipped Owen gave Martin Debono is a footnote to the real story, which hasn’t been covered at all. And that story is: why is the government going to spend €5 million in EU funds (if it gets them) on fulfilling Michelle Muscat’s fashion dream?

Museums of fashion, costume and film belong in centres of fashion, costume and film and not in sequined backwaters of Lycra leggings where Sunita Mukhi beaded clutches are celebrated by all the regiments of Labour nouveaux riches while their tal-pepe Old-Mintoffian-But-Pretending-To-Be-Switchers-For-Joseph new friends and allies fuss, flap and have palpitations over the elaborate barbizzal in the Marchesa‘s portrait.

In fact, I rather suspect that a project people assume is being driven by Michelle Muscat in collaboration with her naff ‘dress designer’ and ‘fashion show’ friends from the demi-monde is actually a mutually self-serving plan hatched up between Mrs Muscat and a couple of her new friends from the ancien regime who have long had dreams of a costume museum.

Oh, and incidentally, do watch this video interview with Michelle Muscat from three years ago, at the height of the electoral campaign.