Vivienne Westwood‘s menswear show on Sunday featured models in frostbitten makeup carrying bed rolls and pushing shopping carts down the runway. It also made us ponder the evolution of the curious (and strangely recurrent) trend known as “homeless chic.”
Westwood may not have been aware that little-known German designer Patrick Mohr had already upstaged her — he showed his last collection on a group of models that included actual homeless people. (One, says an observer, muttered as he walked the runway.)
Why is it that fashion seeks to glamorize society’s poorest members? Is it considered “edgy”? Has fashion lost touch with the reality of poverty as a social issue, and is it this lack of perspective that allows poverty to be reborn as just another “reference”? Is it simply, as others have argued, that appropriating poor people’s “style” of dress is another way to highlight their social status as something lesser? Is this just for lulz?
Whatever the case might be, it has a long history.
Though he was not the first designer to aestheticize poverty — “It’s terrible to say, very often the most exciting outfits are from the poorest people,” Christian Lacroix once told Vogue — John Galliano‘s spring 2000 couture collection for Christian Dior is the commonly-given point of origin for the “homeless” “trend.” This was only Galliano’s seventh couture collection for Dior, and the designer explained he had taken his inspiration from the street people he’d begun noticing along the banks of the Seine after taking up jogging. The collection was crafted from a specially-designed newspaper-printed silk, as well as other luxury fabrics that were ripped, aged, and abraded so that they would appear dirty, and worn with laddered tights.
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