Helga and Eva, twin 24-year old Austrian fashion designers, have hit upon the perfect fashion idea at just the right (uh, left?) time: Nazi regalia chic! And as Andrew Stuttaford writes in The National Review, the overseas press is simply blown away by it!

The London press seemed to like what it saw [during a runway show during London’s Fashion Week]. A commentator in one leading daily said that Helga and Eva had brought the old despotism’s fashion sense ‘in from the cold’, while another newspaper ran a friendly piece in which the writer noted that the twins’ collections were available at a number of expensive British stores. American fans of designer tyranny will be thrilled to know that these clothes can also be found in New York, Boston, and LA.

All well and good. But I like my Nazi fashion authentic. None of those cheap Polish knockoffs for this fashionable Hitlerite on the go!

So, will I be pleased by the quality and comfort of my new Third Reich knits? Can I rip the gold teeth out of the head of dead Jew without that uncomfortable binding in the crotch — or crush the throat of a gypsy with my boot heel and still be polished up enough for a night on the town?

The collection featured designs based on both the industrial and political aesthetic of the former dictatorship. On display that Wednesday were cloaks and knitted sweaters, all, naturally, in parade-ground brown, and often emblazoned with the regime’s most famous symbol, the swastika. In a neat touch, jackets and dresses were edged with little Iron Crosses.

Well, I’m sold! But tell me, where can I get a belt made out of human skin? An outfit’s not an outfit without accessories, after all…

[Okay, so Stuttaford was joking. The chicks are Natasha and Tamara, and they’re from the former Soviet republic of Georgia, not Austria. And while they aren’t peddling fascist chic, they are peddling Communist chic — no better, to Stuttaford’s (and my) way of thinking:

Fascist fashion would shock. Communist chic does not. To wear the swastika has become, quite rightly, a taboo, but the hammer and sickle is, in the hands of Tata-Naka, no more than a vaguely ‘daring’ image, a mark of Cain reduced to a potentially lucrative logo. Quite why this should be the case is difficult to grasp. The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were as bad as each other. Trying to find a moral distinction between those two charnel-house states is a pointless exercise in political theology