Given the number of recruitment firms offering advice about the importance of looking groomed during a recession, it was only a matter of time before fashion created an up-the-Establishment riposte. Which it’s done, with gusto.
It’s not grunge exactly, but it is worn-in. It starts with ripped denim, something you may well have thought had been laid to rest with Depeche Mode. But DM are having a bit of revival, so why not ripped denim – along with those other Eighties miscreants, stonewashing and big, tufty, bend-down-and-brush-your-hair-backwards mullets.
Being children of a boom, this ripped-denim trend originally came to us at the dawn of the year courtesy of Balmain, a brand that has spectacularly defied the global economy’s laws of gravity by managing not just to sell ripped denim at a time when we’re meant to be investing in built-to-last classics, but selling it for upwards of £1,000 (for the jeans; a ripped-denim Balmain jacket would have cost £6,500, had you managed to get hold of one).
Spending six-and-a-half grand on a ripped jacket might seem a vivid manifestation of advanced psychosis. But it’s not exactly without precedent. When Marie Antoinette tried out her version of grunge – “peasant”-style dresses, as recommended by Jean-Jacques Rousseau – she obtained them not from an actual peasant, obviously, but from her favourite dressmaker, Rose Bertin, who did not come cheap, let me tell you. Old habits die hard.
So Prada’s crumpled collection this summer costs a bomb. And Marni’s new collection-within-a-collection (featuring pieces that look like clothes you have already worn and loved) is cheap only by designer standards. This yen for the familiar and faithful has trickled down the high street, too. Like ripped denim, faded prints are all around us. Topshop has gone one further with a matt sequined jacket that looks as though it’s peeling, a sort of psoriasis technique. It’s much prettier than it sounds, by the way.
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The lived-in, ripped-up, rotting-sequins look probably thinks it’s anti-bling. But it isn’t quite. Those Balmain jeans are almost baroque in their detailed fronds, and those patchy sequins are still sequins. The lived-in movement is more about wanting to plug into the frugal, recycling mood – without having to do either.
That makes it sound contemptible, but there are positives. The current move towards bashed-up classics is sweeping aside the dolly prettiness that has become a bit of a fashion disaster. Probably £6,500 is too much for the Balmain jacket, but not because it’s denim, but because it’s so distinctive and photographed it will be more pass? than a creative MP filling out expenses forms come September. What it does prove is that if something’s well-designed, the fabric can be as humble as it pleases; that where fashion is concerned right now, the “right” price is in the eye of the beholder; and that something that’s worn but well looked after still has a lot of miles in it.