For someone who blogs about fashion, I own some actually awful clothes. Presently I'm using a giant egg-shaped shirt that overloads the body and comes pre-disheveled-- extremely Worzel Gummidge. I've matched it with a fit coat with Herman Munster shoulders. My jeans are some strange hybrid, made, like Frankenstein, from various different cast-offs.
Abhorrent is so hot today. My colleagues nod in approval as they shuffle by in their ₤ 500 Gucci gardening clogs.
Is it me or has style end up being incredibly ugly? "Definitely, absolutely," says the 74-year-old shoe designer Manolo Blahnik, whose fragile crystal-embroidered stilettos and rainbow-coloured court shoes exhibit the essence of loveliness. It ought to go beyond fashion and trends."
It wobbled and flapped its way down the runway: trousers puddled at the ankles at Y/Project; round tumour-like productions prolapsed from seemingly normal garments at Rick Owens; Christopher Kane, the designer accountable for rehabilitating the Croc as a style declaration last year, provided shoes that looked like cleaning mops. Every catwalk appeared to use a giant, clumpy fitness instructor, large fleeces or coats wrapped in plastic like wipe-clean couches.
Menswear is equally difficult: believe biking shorts used with uncomfortable shirting or coats that might have been bought from the outside specialist Millets. The style muse of the season was the "average daddy"-- a point made most explicitly at the Balenciaga show, where designs used uncomfortable sports jackets and carried children down the runway. It's becoming incredibly difficult to tell if a man is really, truly geeky, possibly an IT support worker, or just exceptionally fashionable.
Paul Surridge, the freshly appointed creative director at Roberto Cavalli, thinks the trend for awful clothes is a reaction to an excess of artifice and "perfection" projected through advertising and social media. This epidemic of deliberately awful or awkward pieces is about challenging this obsession with the artificial lifestyle.
Surridge isn't following match with Cavalli, the Italian home known for flesh-baring frocks and sensual gowns, for which he showed his first collection in September. He says: "I think the Cavalli woman desires to feel gorgeous."
Stunning is uninteresting, state numerous of today's designers. Alessandro Michele of Gucci likes his models to look like private eccentrics rather than the Italian seductresses of yore. "I like my casting to be unpredictable and as diverse as possible," stated the designer shortly prior to a SS18 program in which he dressed women in Lord Farquaad-style chinstraps and helmets and males in tight 1970s-style track shorts, Chelsea boots and-- wait for it-- long beige socks.
There's a long-held theory that ugliness and development go hand in hand. As Miuccia Prada said in 2012: "Ugly is appealing, awful is exciting. Possibly since it is newer."
She has likewise based collections on things she hates-- she once did a whole collection based on golf-wear. Dries Van Noten works the very same way, typically beginning a collection with a colour he loathes as motivation. I choose awful things, I prefer things which are unexpected.
