How this year’s surrealist styles came to be
In fashion, it was a year of bags shaped like paint cans, pigeons, and potato-chip wrappers.
It was a year of R-rated skirts that barely covered your gluteus maximus; of shirts splayed, boorishly, from cuff to collar with fast-food logos. A year of shoes made from repurposed sex toys and sagging totes made from jeans.
It was a year, above all, of oddity.
“It’s definitely the year fashion got weird,” said Jian DeLeon, Nordstrom’s men’s fashion, and editorial director. “It’s the year we embraced the weirdness in a bunch of ways,” he said, ranging from Louis Vuitton’s $2,850 paint-can-shaped bag (which Mr. DeLeon happens to own) down to the kitschy, Granny-chic crocheted sweaters that became a surprise smash for small-scale men’s brands such as New York’s Corridor.
Fashion has been careening toward the kooky for years. Blame (thank?) Crocs. No brand has mastered the viral scheme quite like the purveyors of those squishy clogs. Since roughly the mid-aughts, Crocs’ manic models have included ones with faux grass on their tops, a fried-chicken print (plus a drumstick Jibbitz!) and an attached fanny pack that housed little more than a single ChapStick.
More, even, than moving units, these mules were perhaps designed to stoke maximum online virality. And they succeeded, spawning both aghast tweets and boastful Instagram posts from customers showing off just how deranged their shoes really are.
“Virality is basically free advertising,” said Jonah Berger, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and the author of “Contagious: Why Things Catch On.” “In some sense,” he said, “today the currency isn’t just money, it’s attention.”
It’s an eyeball-attracting trick that’s trickled upward to the luxury fashion world this year, giving rise to such items as a handbag shaped like a common Manhattan pigeon by JW Anderson ($890), a $1,073 Diesel miniskirt that is hardly wider than an ankle brace and $1,850 Balenciaga sneakers that (intentionally) look resurrected from a garbage dump.
“When we think about luxury, it is about aesthetics and beauty—and this [trend] is going against everything we thought a luxury brand should be,” said Ludovica Cesareo, an assistant professor of marketing at Lehigh University, who recently published a research paper titled “Hideous but worth it: Distinctive ugliness as a signal of luxury.”
Ugliness, is of course, in the eye of the beholder and Ms. Cesareo noted that distinction, more than disgust, is what many brands are aiming for. Items including Alexander Wang’s inverted jean tote bag or Loewe’s pumps with a faux crushed egg at the heel are more bizarre than grotesque. (The sex toy clogs by Los Angeles brand Rose in Good Faith, on the other hand, are minorly nauseating.)
For consumers, these items appeal in that they’re immediately legible as luxury. If you’re just wearing a solid black cashmere sweater, how will other people know you spent half a month’s rent on it? Items like a pair of Gucci sandals with a Gremlin’s face on them, however, or a woolly, nearly $3,000 dachshund-shaped bag by Thom Browne, are a fuzzy beacon of luxury to everyone you see on the subway.
But the shock-your-way-into-the-conversation strategy can backfire. The French fashion house Balenciaga has made viral-stoking a business strategy under its creative director Demna, releasing bulbous sneakers, garbage-bag shaped bags and four-figure jeans that look like they were run over by a semi truck.
In the final months of the year, when the brand released a marketing campaign that included child models clutching dolls in bondage gear, it drew widespread Backlash, spurring the brand to release apologetic statements and commitments to support anti-child abuse causes.
Even this cautionary tale is unlikely to slow the meme-it-till-you-make-it marketing strategy, which has become so commonplace that even brands well outside the apparel industry are employing it.
For several years around Thanksgiving, Stove Top Stuffing has released Thanksgiving dinner pants with an elastic waistband in the pattern of stuffing. “Those are literally pregnancy pants,” said one dumbfounded local news anchor when covering these pants.
They promptly sold out on Amazon.
Mildly more upscale are the Guy Fieri–esque flame shirts that the “Fast & Furious” movie franchise released this year in partnership with streetwear imprint Dumbgood, as well as the logo-heavy merch that chicken-finger franchise Raising Cane’s released with Anti Social Social Club.
One theory for the onslaught of offball apparel is that a more reserved crop of shoppers is aging out of luxury spending; clothing companies are now courting the TikTok generation.
“When we think ‘luxury’ traditionally, we have this vision of this older, very wealthy consumer. That’s not the case anymore, right? Luxury consumers are more and more younger millennials and Gen Zs, and they live on social media,” said Ms. Cesareo.
True to form, although it appeared during a men’s runway presentation months earlier, J.W. Anderson’s pigeon bag didn’t take flight until a few customers made some campy TikToks.
“The rise of novelty items just really is more of an indictment of how far internet culture and social media has influenced not just the discourse around clothing but how we wear clothes,” said Mr. DeLeon.
This reorientation, from clothes that make critics coo from the sidelines of a catwalk, to clothes that make a 20-something go “that’s fire” when staring at Instagram, is one enduring effect of the pandemic. In times of isolation, shoppers began to prioritise buying items for the short-attention span internet—for a static Instagram fit pic or a brief TikTok fit check. (Recall the phenomenon of ‘Bama Rush’ Tiktok.)
“People want to look cool in front of others,” said Ms. Cesareo. And at a moment when curious and cool have become synonymous, she said, “ugliness has kind of been unleashed.”
