THE RETURN OF UGLINNESS
This past summer a girl in her twenties I know cut her shoulder-length dark hair to military grade shortness, which made her look decidedly less attractive. When I remarked on this to another friend, also in his twenties, he said without hesitation that unattractiveness has become a trend among his peers. You can also see this quite clearly in fashion, especially in the rise of brands as seemingly disparate as Hood by Air, Vetements, Gosha Rubchinskiy, and Gucci, and their calculated ugliness and awkwardness.
This is not a new phenomenon – virtually nothing in fashion is new by now. One need not dig too far back in history, but simply look at the 90s – the decade constantly referenced these days – and see Kurt Cobain’s frumpy cardigans and messy hair and Winona Ryder’s outsider looks. It was only a matter of time before Marc Jacobs put grunge into a Perry Ellis show. Dig before that and you have the Pop Art movement championing, while at the same time aestheticizing, the commonness of life. Susan Sontag remarked in her essay Notes on Camp that the modern aesthete (she used “dandy”) finds a way to partake “in the coarsest, commonest pleasures, in the arts of the masses.” Jeremy Scott took this notion and has made a career out of this, beginning in the late 90s.What the above-mentioned brands do is not new either. Hood by Air started out by doing a ghetto version of Rick Owens’s sleaze. With Vetements we see the seemingly sloppy blue acid-washed jeans and oversized trench coats reminiscent of Martin Margiela. Vetements’ Demna Gvasalia put a floral dress in his first Balenciaga collection that’s not that far off from the one Kurt Cobain wore on the cover of The Face in 1993. And the whole deliberately awkward aesthetic mess at Gucci is not that remote from the ugly-made-pretty thing Miuccia Prada has been doing at Miu Miu for what seems like forever.
This is not a new phenomenon – virtually nothing in fashion is new by now. One need not dig too far back in history, but simply look at the 90s – the decade constantly referenced these days – and see Kurt Cobain’s frumpy cardigans and messy hair and Winona Ryder’s outsider looks. It was only a matter of time before Marc Jacobs put grunge into a Perry Ellis show. Dig before that and you have the Pop Art movement championing, while at the same time aestheticizing, the commonness of life. Susan Sontag remarked in her essay Notes on Camp that the modern aesthete (she used “dandy”) finds a way to partake “in the coarsest, commonest pleasures, in the arts of the masses.” Jeremy Scott took this notion and has made a career out of this, beginning in the late 90s.What the above-mentioned brands do is not new either. Hood by Air started out by doing a ghetto version of Rick Owens’s sleaze. With Vetements we see the seemingly sloppy blue acid-washed jeans and oversized trench coats reminiscent of Martin Margiela. Vetements’ Demna Gvasalia put a floral dress in his first Balenciaga collection that’s not that far off from the one Kurt Cobain wore on the cover of The Face in 1993. And the whole deliberately awkward aesthetic mess at Gucci is not that remote from the ugly-made-pretty thing Miuccia Prada has been doing at Miu Miu for what seems like forever.
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