Who Gets to Raise the Flag: Real England or Fake London?

In England today, to hang a flag is to take a side. Union Jacks tied to lampposts, St George’s crosses painted onto roundabouts, and flags fixed to rooftops all serve as declarations of allegiance. Thirty years earlier, those same symbols carried a very different charge. In the mid-90s, Spanish-born designer Desirée Mejer cut them loose under the label Fake London. Bulldogs, crowns, and Union Jacks were turned into fashion playthings: irreverent, unstable, and unowned.

Fake London: a patchwork of Thames outlines, bulldogs, and lions rampant.

Symbols up for grabs

DIY football shirts and terrace gear: parody royal warrants and European cups stitched into everyday wear.

This was a brief moment when British symbols were unmoored. Detached from the politics of left and right, they could circulate as irreverent signs without being policed for meaning. Fake London thrived in that looseness, producing garments that refused to settle into patriotism or parody.

Cut loose from meaning

Sweater with “Riot 1985” motif, collapsing protest, politics, and fashion into a single emblem.

The clothes didn’t mock the symbols so much as unmoor them. The bulldog was both fierce and fake, the crown at once reverent and counterfeit, the map of Britain turned camouflage. It was a style built on overload: the more icons stacked together, the less any one of them could hold a fixed meaning.

In place of a single Real England, there were only endless remixes.

This echoed the cultural shift of the 1990s. Music no longer arrived as one definitive single but as endless reworks: white labels, bootlegs, radio edits, club mixes. Fake London followed the same logic: bulldogs, crowns, and crosses sampled, spliced, and distorted until their meaning dissolved.

Fake London jumper — the map of England reworked as decoration.

Irreverence as strategy

Knits in formation: slogans, skulls, crowns, numbers. Heritage was pulled apart and restitched as product.

What made Fake London radical wasn’t shock value but refusal. Refusal to let symbols stabilise, refusal to obey heritage logic, refusal to treat them as untouchable. A royal warrant embroidered on a football-style shirt was neither loyalist nor subversive; it was a remix that unsettled both readings.

This irreverence gave the clothes their energy. They didn’t propose an alternative politics of Britishness so much as deny politics its monopoly on symbols. For a moment, British iconography floated free of ownership.

Game Over

Liam Gallagher on stage, 2002. Robbie Williams in Feel, 2002. What once looked rebellious was now part of the show.

By the 2000s, that looseness collapsed. National symbols hardened along partisan lines: the Union Jack absorbed into Cool Britannia and then Brexit, the St George’s Cross into football populism, even the crown re-entrenched by monarchy marketing. The overload that once made symbols slippery became impossible; everything was read as a statement.

Looking back, Fake London marks the last time those icons could be worn with humour, contradiction and irony. It was fashion as cultural free play, before the symbols became locked down.

Everyone a winner?

Rosettes for all: no hierarchy, no exclusivity, no fixed meaning.

In today’s polarised landscape, where every flag and emblem feels like a declaration of allegiance, Fake London’s refusal looks newly relevant. Its irreverence wasn’t escapism but a form of resistance: keeping symbols unsettled, unowned, and unstable.

That’s why the contrast with today’s flag politics feels so stark. Union Jacks, St George’s crosses, and flags on rooftops no longer wave freely; they are read as fixed allegiance. In the 1990s, Fake London pulled those same icons apart instead, refusing to settle into loyalty or parody.

Fake London didn’t just destabilise the symbols; it exposed that they were never stable in the first place. In doing so, it reveals a greater paradox: where Raise the Flag attempts to fix these symbols into one meaning, Fake London kept them unsettled — and in that instability, enabled everyone to claim them for themselves.