Are George Osborne's deathly pallor and Christine Lagarde's permatan the new index for fashion and the economy?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/fashion/2012/jul/09/george-osborne-pallor-christine-lagarde-tan

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<strong>What does it say about global finance that George Osborne is deathly pale and Christine Lagarde is permatanned? Is this the new index for fashion and the economy instead of the long-skirt/short-skirt analogy?</strong>

<em>Amanda, by email</em>

The answer to your latter question, Amanda, is, of course, yes, it is an index but it is not new. Tanning has long been indicative of one's personal financial situation, but the meaning has see-sawed more violently than the luck of a Barclays executive. Only a century ago, to be tanned meant one wasy a peasant, forced to till the fields while one's mistress sat inside her castle, powdering her face with arsenic. Then Coco Chanel, in between quilting handbags and hanging out with Nazis, reinvented the tan as something that proved one had the money and leisure to lounge about in St Tropez, ideally with those crucial Chanel accessories, a boater hat and a Nazi (hey, have I mentioned the Nazis?).

Now the meaning of tans is a movable feast, especially when the fake tan droplets move down and pool around your wrists, leaving you with orange palms. You see, the world is divided into two kinds of people: the kind who say, "You know, the world is divided into two kinds of people" and those who don't. And in that former group, there are many who believe that these two groups are those who believe a tan makes them look healthier and thinner, and others who think it makes them look like a reject from The Only Way is Essex and aim for a more "interesting but pale" look, à la Carey Mulligan and Michelle Williams.

Yet while the meaning of tans has become diluted in the era of EasyJet and self-tanning, the significance of the difference in pigmentation between Lagarde and Osborne is as thick and gloopy as the last dregs in a bottle of St Tropez Dark Bronzing Lotion.

The most obvious – and no less true for it – is that it suggests a confidence issue. Lagarde has the bold, burnished looks of a woman so comfortable in her bronzed skin that she can stoutly claim that the Greeks need to pay more taxes when she herself pays no tax on her comfortable IMF salary. Osborne, on the other hand, sports the bloodless pallor of a man so aware of his own ineptitude that he sends in the most junior of ministers to do his dirtiest work in the most brutal of news media bearpits.

But while this may be a fashion column, we do not get distracted by superficialities. No, we're going to make like those great 20th-century philosophers, East 17, and go deep – deep, deep down (like sleep, sugar, so rest upon my chest.) So, looking behind the confidence issue one finds, as one so often does when discussing this Conservative party, an issue of class. Osborne is – famously or notoriously, depending on whether you read the Telegraph or the Guardian – extremely posh. Damn, the man is so posh he has a baronetcy. Being an American, I don't know what that is exactly, but I like to fancy it's a long golden stick with a giant bejewelled orb on top that he totes everywhere he goes, grazing it adoringly on Cameron's shoulders and poking Vince Cable's arse with it when the fancy takes him. Now, despite Chanel's efforts, tanning is not seen as truly posh by the actually posh, which is just one of the myriad ways Pippa Middleton reveals her middle-class background, much to the Daily Mail's delighted horror. No, tans are what an elderly duke's much younger, former air hostess second wife might sport, but it is most definitely not favoured by the more beloved original, blue-blooded duchess.

Christine Lagarde, on the other hand, comes from an impressive but not posh family (her mother was a teacher – one can only imagine what HILARIOUS jokes Prince William's friends would make about that) and is now fond of such modern, unposh things as "vegetarianism" and "not drinking alcohol". Thus, one is tan and one is not.

And finally, one cannot discount the "cheap horror movie" factor. Simply, Osborne has seen the ghost of his own career and he knows the end will not be a pretty sight. He is Scrooge without the possibility of redemption via a chirpy cockney lad telling him it's Christmas Day. Ergo, he is alabaster. Lagarde, by contrast, knows that her future is rosy, and, since trampling on the carcass of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's career, she will travel ever further upwards. Even if it all went pear shaped for her, she could just return to her youthful career of synchonised swimming. Can Osborne say that? No wonder he's so pale with fear.