Dior was in Tokyo last week for its Pre-Fall menswear show, while Chanel is getting ready for its Métiers d’Art show taking place tomorrow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Yet, while it's business, luxury and runway shows as usual for the two houses, in France, their home country, there's a social protest going on, symbolised by a functional garment, the fluorescent high-visibility yellow vest.
Protests against fuel taxes and a new green fuel tax (in 2018 diesel prices in France have increased by 16%, with taxes on both petrol and diesel increasing at the same time, plus a further tax increase planned in 2019) started a couple of weeks ago, but last Saturday a peaceful demonstration turned into a violent riot.
Protesters in "gilets jaunes" (yellow vests) arrived at the Champs Élysées to march, but, by early afternoon, the Arc de Triomphe was surrounded by masked protesters and the authorities suggested extreme-right and left militants and troublemakers were involved.
According to reports this was the worst violence seen in Paris for a decade, with people left injured, cars, banks and buildings set on fire while luxury department stores were evacuated. Barricades were built by protesters, splashes of yellow paint were thrown at the authorities and against buildings, while the police reacted with teargas and water cannons.
The Arc de Triomphe was vandalised as protesters smashed statues and sprayed graffiti reading "We've chopped off heads for less than this" and "Macron resign" While it started as a movement of protest against fuel-tax rises, the "gilets jaunes" currently embody political disillusionment and mistrust in the French President Emmanuel Macron.
The protest is at the moment expanding to schools and students while Macron asked Prime Minister Édouard Philippe to meet with protest groups and opposition politicians.
Protests are important events as they reveal how people feel about a government, a political leader or other specific issues and it is undeniable that fashion plays a role in such events. People taking part in a demo may want to wear something, from a garment to accessories, that can clearly show support to a cause and can be seen as a unifying symbol of belonging.
In 2017, for example, the pink pussyhat became the accessory of the year (appearing even on the cover of Time magazine in March 2017) when many protestors opted for this style choice during anti-Trump women's marches (chosen to represent femininity, pink was later on deemed as a non unifying colour as the hat does not represent transgender women, gender nonbinary people and women of colour, and quite a few people stopped wearing it at protests).
The high-visibility vest was identified as a symbol of the protest in France because it is an item required by law for all motorists, it is widely available and cheap.
Yet fashion has had a love affair with high-vis gear for quite a few years and has often appropriated safety gear, we have seen this with Ashish's A/W 13 and Moschino in S/S 16 collections, but also in more recent years and seasons with Off-White, Vêtements, Heron Preston and Raf Simons at Calvin Klein.
In Summer, fashion brand Pretty Little Thing even launched an ordinary high-vis jacket, remarketing it as an item for the festival season and selling it at £45 (it was obviously mocked on social media).
It looks like the journey of high-vis wear has been rather intriguing going from something usually employed by builders, airport staff and police officers for safety reasons to being appropriated by fashion and now by a protest movement.
"The yellow vests will triumph" protesters wrote on the Arc de Triomphe in black letters. Time will tell, but what's for sure at the moment is that we do have a new protest garment - the yellow vest - and, since there are only a few weeks left till the end of 2018, it is highly unlikely it will go out of fashion before the end of the year.
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