Miuccia Prada came up with the concept of "ugly chic", a superficially casual, but actually very studied juxtaposition of different ideas, colours, shapes and textures that does not respect conventional canons of beauty. Ugly chic is about combining together contrasting and at times undesirable designs, pieces that insinuate doubts and create cracks in our definition of "good taste", producing an innovative effect while challenging our preconceptions.
Alessandro Michele at Gucci took the concept further creating an aesthetic revolving around the concept of "buone cose di pessimo gusto" (good things in awful taste), to quote Italian poet Guido Gozzano, assemblages of layered fashion designs, conglomerates of colours and styles to create a supposedly geeky aesthetic, a mix of bohemian moods, librarian chic, glamour and grandma styles. Yet it should be noted that the sense of unconventional beauty in both Prada and Michele's collections for Gucci is still produced by combining a series of luxury items.
Younger generations of designers such as Demna Gvasalia at Vêtements and Balenciaga took the ugly discourse further with rather questionable experiments that combined not just unstylish shapes and silhouettes, but introduced commercial pieces not necessarily made with high quality materials or ordinary accessories reinvented in high-end materials. And so we saw on the runways the (now forgotten) DHL T-shirts, the horrific mammoth-like platform Crocs covered in decorative pins, bags with motifs of skylines ripped from kitsch souvenir bags and an Ikea's Frakta bag reinterpreted in leather and transformed into a luxury item. The prices for such "designer" products remained rather high.
But what would happen if tables would turn? What if, rather than having high-end pieces creating an ugly aesthetics that becomes acceptable as the fashion norm or taking a cheap product and transforming it into a luxury product, we would have a cheap product that would unexpectedly elevate itself and gain cult status? Well, don't waste your time making theories because German hard discount chain Lidl has just provided us with the answer.
A few months ago Lidl launched cheap sneakers in UK, Belgium, Germany, Finland and The Netherlands. A trend started and soon the limited edition sneakers in the blue, red and yellow combination of colours reminiscent of the hard discount logo, became a covetable product. Soon they went sold out, but expectations were high again when it was reently announced the sneakers were going to be released in Italy on 16th November.
The shoes were part of the "Lidl Fan Collection" together with pool slides, socks and T-shirts. We must use the past tense ("were") because, despite Italy is going through a second Coronavirus alert with many regions facing red zone restrictions and with a national curfew (from 10.00 pm to 5.00 am), the shoes went sold out all over the country in just a couple of hours.
People started queueing outside Lidl stores at dawn on Monday and by 7.30 am all the products were gone, something that genuinely puzzled Lidl shop assistants who obviously never thought they may have witnessed such frenzy for such an ordinary product. Soon memes spawned about the coveted sneakers that soon started appearing on eBay, at incredible prices. At the time of writing there is a seller offering them at €799 and another at €2,200. There are also bundles of Lidl branded products being offered on eBay, while the most astonishing offer sets the price at around €60,000 (or you can start bidding from €35,000...).
Now you may superficially justify the rush to buy the Lidl products with the fact that Coronavirus had an impact on the spending abilities of many consumers. We are definitely all on the lookout for a good bargain and surely Lidl's producs fit the bill (in Italy the shoes sold at €12,99; the pool slides €4,99 and the socks €2,99, while in other countries there were even lower prices with the socks being sold at €1 and T-shirt and slides at €3,99).
But in reality here we had a very different mechanism, worthy of an essay about fashion, consumerism and marketing strategies: the behaviour of these consumers was indeed more similar to that of streetwear enthusiasts who queue up in front of their favourite stores before a "drop" by a cult label such as Supreme. In this case, though, the "drop" focused on very cheap products that created a trend on their own. In a way, it was as if consumers, realising that fashion often engages in psychological and visual horror (hands up those of you who grew up between the '70s and the early '80s abhorring the then fashionable brown leather men's mocassins and now cringe at Gucci's nerds proudly wearing them?) producing garments and accessories sold at ridiculously high prices, decided to create their own horror trend with a satirical twist using a cheap fast fashion product, turning it into an exclusive must-have and selling it at Haute Couture prices.
In a nutshell, if fashion goes crazy and takes the piss out of consumers, then consumers for a Dantesque contrappasso-like punishment, are now taking the piss out of fashion by using its strategies and applying it to very unfashionable products sold next to compressors and cheeses rather than in painfully hip boutiques.
Therefore, the sneakers from the "Lidl Fan Collection" seem to act as a final leveller: a few years ago wearing a DHL shirt while not working for DHL meant you had status since you could afford an expensive designer piece. If you're wearing Lidl shoes, you may be doing so because you can only afford cheap shoes, because - bless you - you don't take yourself too seriously or because you are actually rich enough to buy them on eBay at extremely high prices. While Lidl has unexpectedly become the driving force behind a trend that reunites ordinary people and impenitent fashionistas, the most hilarious thing about this surprising story remains the fact that this wasn't a fashion collaboration and you know that somewhere in the world there are designers now banging their heads against walls, maybe realising you should never underestimated the potential of that fashion collab with Lidl.
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