Four years are not an extremely long period of time; yet many things can happen even in a relatively short time. In May 2017 we did a post about the poverty chic trend, mentioning Maison Margiela's "Future Destroyed" slashed and cut sneakers (retailing at the time at $1,425) and Golden Goose's "Distressed Superstar Sneakers" (retailing then at $585).
The former looked as if they had been fiercely attacked with a razor blade and then crudely reassembled with a stapler; the latter, alleged homage to the West Coast's rich skateboard culture, featured ripped laces and duct-tape reinforcements around the toe and looked pretty dirty and run down. The shoes were attacked on social media with many people accusing the brand of "poverty appropriation".
Rather than being the result of creative and rebellious vandalisation (imagine a teenager scribbling on their old shoes revolutionary slogans or colouring them in with contrasting patterns for fun...), the shoes were indeed conceived as designer items, representing the kind of faux-distressed luxury favoured by those ones wealthy enough to be able to pretend of being poor, but actually being able to escape poverty at any time.
The cringing "Poverty Chic" trend seems to be still fashionable and Golden Goose still produces its "pre-distressed" sneakers, but so many things changed since that post.
A global pandemic has radically disrupted and changed our lives, re-shifting our very distracted minds onto health; vaccines contributed to make the wide gap between rich and poor countries more visible. Coronavirus has also had an impact on jobs, making the rich richer, but also making a lot of ordinary people redundant. In some countries, such as Myanmar, where fast fashion companies produce their collections, when factory closed due to order cancellations, women turned to prostitution to feed their children. Besides, Covid-19 also fuelled child labour.
Climate change brought instead extreme weather, floods and drought, fire and water that left thousands all over the world homeless. At the time of writing this post, hurricane Ida is still raging in Louisiana.
We are going through new emergencies, while the old challenges remained unsolved: migrants keep on arriving, crossing the Mediterranean in search of a better and safer life; in the meantime, thousands of Afghan people fled their country, that fell back in the hands of the Taliban in August.
Most Afghan refugees arrived with nothing but the clothes on their backs, they left behind their families and everything they owned. Some of them were temporary relocated in emergency military camps like the one in Avezzano, in the centre of Italy, that can contain over 1,000 people. Local inhabitants collected toys for the children who arrived there in the last few days. Thinking about their needs and their mental and physical wellbeing, your mind wanders to poverty chic and pre-distressed shoes with dirty and broken laces that give the wearer that aura of having lived through a disaster of epic proportions, of being a cool survivor like the protagonist of a Hollywood movie about the ultimate Armageddon.
Poverty chic and artificially distressed luxury designs may still be popular, but at the moment this is not just embarrassingly uncomfortable, it is an inappropriate and utterly immoral trend with the power of distorting reality and turning serious modern socio-economic issues into a trend or a fad and wealthy wearers jumping on this bandwagon, into offensive cosplayers of people in need. The Afghan refugees that were evacuated to other countries, arrived with nothing but their dignity; it's about time the fashion industry regained its own dignity and made poverty chic untrendy.
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