The problem is essentially a British one. The French value the creative and cultural importance of their fashion industry too much ever to entrust it to amateurs, no matter how lustrous their names might once have been. That we view things differently is to do with a sense of inferiority, which induces a cultural cringe in fashion folk.

Bryan Palmer (Letters, 3 January) complains bitterly about the involvement of the Queen in the issue of a new Australian service medal. He seems to think that it is an example of a foreign monarch interfering in our domestic arrangements, the cultural cringe at its worst.

Australians, in those days, used to suffer dreadfully from what Hughes calls "cultural cringe."