Why is fashion so ugly?
Gucci Fall-Winter 2018 Runway Show, Milan Fashion Week
Neon yellows, reds, and vomit greens are lathered on their socks, shoes, and jumpers. Oversized jackets, overcoats, and blazers with wide-cut shoulders ungainly drape over their skinny frames. Their struts, constrained by chunky dad sneakers and flowy, unhemmed trousers, are awkward. Nothing about this hints at high fashion, yet this is the mise-en-scène at the Balenciaga fall-winter 2019 show.
Since the beginning of the avant garde — a period of radical fashion upheaval inspired by the likes of Martin Margiela and Rei Kawakubo — fashion has fragmented itself into two artistic categories: the first being the theory of fashion as a traditional medium of form-fitting art. This is what fashion was before the 1980’s, where the elite classes of society were the target audience of fashion houses. The second, and more nascent transformation of fashion, is more unorthodox. Traditional elements of beauty, proper tailoring, and intricate detailing were eschewed for dark colours and bold statements. Ugly fashion arose out of the latter part of fashion’s history; therefore, it’s largely misunderstood, even by the capital-F fashion crowd.
Ugly fashion is an emerging strain of fashion design that prioritizes stark utility or dysfunctionality. Garments may purposefully be made to look out of place or uncomfortable — see Balenciaga’s 6-inch crocs or Vetements’ upside-down parka. An ugly garment may have wonky proportions, tacky colours and prints to draw attention, and any semblance of proportioned tailoring is thrown out the window.
The ugly fashion wave isn’t slowing down; in fact, it’s become much larger in recent decades. From brands like Undercover to Gucci, ugly fashion has now overtaken the traditional sphere of fashion, bringing it to the mainstream. It’s so prominent, in fact, that those outside the fashion bubble have begun to point fun at it. The common narrative now is that fashion is so bizarre and twisted that it’s pointless to try to understand it. If fashion is an art form, and art is meant to be visually pleasing, why has fashion become so dismembered from traditional norms of beauty?
The first answer we have is a reality check: fashion is commerce, not art. A brand’s success is no longer, and frankly has never been, defined by anything other than growth and sales figures. To understand why let’s characterize the industry as a whole. Fashion has always been controlled by a larger force, largely invisible in the public eye. This force is the dominance of large corporations and conglomerates who care more about their bottom lines and profits than about the creativity and beauty of fashion. Luxury conglomerates Kering and LVMH control more than three-quarters of the industry’s most influential high fashion labels, including Yves Saint Laurent, Gucci, Balenciaga, Dior, Givenchy, and Louis Vuitton. All the decisions they make about production methods, appointing directors, and creative direction are strategically poised to make them more money.
Now that’s out of the way, let’s understand the force of ugly fashion. Before the present era of fashion, luxury goods were European-centric commodities. Luxury brands operated within Europe and marketed themselves to the European and American upper class. Core consumers of luxury labels had lots of capital coupled with expensive taste. Ergo, luxury brands based their business models around them by providing high-quality goods for high-quality prices. For decades, this strategy worked; until one day, it didn’t. Two things changed: firstly, the structure of the industry changed. Globalization brought commercial designs to an international audience, and it was no longer profitable to sell high-quality goods with expensive production costs. Moreover, consumers were able to find similar designs for affordable prices at smaller boutiques and fast-fashion retailers. Secondly, the culture around high-end fashion changed. As consumers found trendy and expensive-looking clothing for less, we began to value quantity over quality. Over the decades, households began to buy more clothing each year. In 1930, the average American woman owned 9 ready-to-wear outfits; today, that figure has tripled. Now, the democratization of wealth has made it more profitable for luxury brands to sell to the lowest common denominator.
Luxury brands made a key transition into a new period of design. If consumers preferred choice and variety over quality, brands supplied it. Thus, brands put out everyday goods with designer labels on them. Branded caps, socks, and glasses were marked up hundredfold the production value. Selling cheap trinkets like accessories and small garments marginally increased the profits of luxury brands, but the most lucrative decision they made was in the design, not the production. They hired young designers to design for the youth. With our social-media dominated world, anything that disrupts the industry or causes controversy is immediately popular. Anything a brand did that was contentious put them right into the spotlight and gave them free advertising. Ergo, the era of bold changes and radical moves from luxury brands was in full swing: Louis Vuitton appointed Virgil Abloh, founder of streetwear label Off-White who has no fashion design training, to head their menswear line; Balenciaga made Demna Gvasalia, a man who spent two years disrupting the fashion world with ugly designs and edgy commentary, their creative director; Hedi Slimane dropped the “Yves” in YSL, radically changing the house to fit his monochromatic punk-rock aesthetic. The goal of a brand nowadays is to start controversy. Controversy promotes dialogue, and brands almost always benefit from the attention.
Drawing on this idea, ugly clothing is one of the quickest ways to get those outside the fashion circle to care about fashion. When Moschino releases a full SpongeBob runway outfit, everyone wants to make fun of it. The problem is, all the media attention around ugly fashion plays right into the hands of the labels, incentivizing them to create even more outrageous clothing. Further exacerbating this trend, when one brand benefits, all other brands race to do the same thing. When the largest industry players begin to catch on to the wave of chunky dad trainers and ugly sweaters, lower and mid-tier labels do the same. In 2019, anything ugly has made its way to the forefront of fashion.
Calvin Klein 205W39NYC Fall-Winter 2018 Runway Show, New York Fashion Week
The second prevailing reason we might have for why fashion is so ugly is the antithesis of the former. It posits that fashion has become more diverse and artistic over time. True art and aesthetic beauty is deep and up to interpretation. Unlike a shallow view of art as simply something that fulfills our visual cravings, true fashion should provoke deep and buried emotions. Life is ugly, and our most painful experiences often provide the inspiration for our artistic expression. Simply put, what the mainstream might consider to be ugly fashion has emotion and meaning. Consumers are attracted by meaningful art, and thus ugly fashion has quietly made its way to the top of the fashion world.
Rick Owens, John Galliano, Alexander McQueen; designers who have been tormented by illness and darkness. Not all designers explicitly document their torment through their art. The former, Rick Owens, suffered from alcoholism and drug addiction. Being on death’s door on more than one occasion, he turned to exercise for self-help. His designs now reflect a monochromatic look that he swears by. His aesthetic rejects the human form, but rather models the individual around the clothing. It is, by many accounts, ugly; however, his designs remain pure and profound. Galliano fell to the never-ending cycle of fashion, and all the trauma it can cause. The latter, and perhaps the greatest tragedy in the world of fashion, was the suicide of Alexander McQueen. His history of self-harm and drug use pointed to a dark and troubled mind, further worsened by the passing of his mother. Nevertheless, his deeply artistic collections seemed to belie his inner mixture of negative emotions.
It’s more than likely that ugly fashion is a combination of several cultural and economic factors. The industry as a whole is not monolithic, and neither is art. Designers have more freedom to play with our conceptions of fashion than they did fifty years ago. It’s unlikely, then, that the wave of ugly fashion is going to go away. It’s not just a passing trend, it’s a sign of industry-wide change. Consumers are looking for something new, something exciting. As Demna Gvasalia puts it: “I started Vetements because I was bored of fashion and against all odds fashion did change once and forever since Vetements appeared and it also opened a new door for so many.” As long as newer generations are looking for more, huge players like Gvasalia and Vetements will succeed for years to come.
