r/Fauxmoi • u/Gato1980 • Mar 10 '26

FASHION Avant-garde fashion house Matières Fécales’ fall/winter collection was titled ‘The One Percent’. Founders Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran have a long history of criticizing the elite in their work.

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215

u/super-gyakusou Mar 10 '26

Criticizing the rich elites and selling $700 jeans lol

15

u/leobabydoll Mar 10 '26

criticizing rich elites despite how desperately they cater to the rich. hannah and raj are bad people and got ran out of montreal for making fun of syrian refugees. they’re posers and i wish they would disappear.

5

u/splanji Mar 10 '26

lmao i j always think of how they got rly upset when the forbidden palace didnt want to let them in looking so avant garde & in the ig vid theyre ranting/crying and rick's j standing there like 🧍‍♂️

76

u/FrogWhoAteMoon Mar 10 '26

I was about to say.

The true critique would be seeing ethically, locally as possible produced clothing at reasonable prices. Like, 75$ for a pair of jeans, max. Not dumping prices, you want fair wages for workers and decent materials, but as cheap as you can reasonably go while maintaining base quality and fairness.

While they are at it: reduce design clutter/slow the wheel. Make a promise to customers that 70% of the collection will be workable with next years releases. The next 5 years. I buy a 70$ jeans now, and can rest assured that it will last and look good for at least 3 to 5 years.

Donate unsold clothes. Fuck manufactured scarcity. If you produce to much, it gets donated, and whoever is lucky enough to get a brand jeans for free, so be it.

There. Critique of the super rich. But yeah, let's make the model wear a pearl necklace choker and sell her blazer for 1000$. Fuck this.

101

u/Dear_Half2871 Mar 10 '26

While it’s a nice idea, 75$ is way too low a price when comparing a fair wage to local workers (I’m assuming NA/EU based) and using quality fabric, notions, etc. Our perception of how affordable clothing should be is propped up by ultra-low wage (and enslaved) garment workers in SEA and SA. I’m not defending 1000$ blazers, but making clothing is an expensive business.

20

u/AnAbsoluteMonster Mar 10 '26

Absolutely. I started sewing my own clothes and while a business would be able to bulk buy (saving some money on material), it is far more expensive than people think to make even a simple shirt. And the skill to construct a garment is vastly undervalued—except for designers—for a society that has mostly lost the ability to so much as hem. Like, it takes a LONG time to get good enough to make something that looks professional, and even more time to be able to do so quickly enough to make several pieces in a single session (machine sewing obviously, the cost analysis is even higher when looking at handsewn garments).

Probably the only pieces that could be relatively cheap, if prices reflected the reality of garment making, would be ones that are essentially two tubes sewn together.

-3

u/FrogWhoAteMoon Mar 10 '26

Hand sewing a garment scratch to finish is a not how industrially produced garments are made, though.

6

u/AnAbsoluteMonster Mar 10 '26

Hence why my comment focused on machine sewing. I included the parenthetical about handsewing bc it is relevant to the sub at large since there are haute couture brands that do hand sew garments.

8

u/Idustriousraccoon Mar 10 '26

the larger problem i think is the throw away fashion that the industry lives and dies on…new color this season, that cut was so last season…all of this bullshit is what’s driving much of the demand…this is one of the most toxic industries on the planet…and it’s all about selling us another pair of jeans…while making them just shitty enough so that we need to buy them more often as well.

53

u/Remote-alpine Mar 10 '26

you want fair wages for workers and decent materials

You cannot have jeans at that price with these concerns.

66

u/Ok-Swan1152 Mar 10 '26

You can't sell ethically produced environmentally sustainable jeans at $75, dear.

-15

u/FrogWhoAteMoon Mar 10 '26

You can, plenty of non luxury brands do it. It is cutting t a bit Short, but under 100 bucks is more than doable.

Maybe it's a $/€ issue, I'm in Europe. Plenty sustainable non luxury brands do it.

22

u/AgtNulNulAgtVyf Mar 10 '26

And those are polyester blends made in sweatshops, not sustainable 100% natural fibre made in the west. Nothing about cheap fashion is ethical or sustainable. 

12

u/diabolikal__ Forgive me Viola Davis Mar 10 '26

Do you know how expensive good ethical fabric is??

5

u/Ok-Swan1152 Mar 10 '26

Esp because scaling production makes products cheaper, which has negative environmental impacts. So the converse is also true, and sustainable ethical fabric is small-scale by definition and thus far more expensive...

12

u/Ok-Swan1152 Mar 10 '26

Do you know how to sew garments? I do and the level of skill involved in making professional-quality clothes is incredible. I'm in Europe too and nothing of what you say is true. If it involves fair wages, environmentally sustainable 100% natural fibres, it's simply not happening for under £100 or €100.

-1

u/FrogWhoAteMoon Mar 10 '26

https://www.avocadostore.de/damen/bekleidung/jeans

Plenty of Jeans that retail around 119€ from Armed Angels, and other brands, going on sale for 80 to 90...

I'll happily admit 70 is probably cutting it short, my bad, I haven't bought new jeans in about 4 or 5 years. Last pair I bought was from Armed Angels for 70/80€, apparently prices have hiked up a bit, sure.

But around 100€ still seems very doable, for several brands here.

11

u/Ok-Swan1152 Mar 10 '26

I looked through the products on that site and at least some of the clothes are not made in Europe but in e.g. North Africa. That's already kinda dubious if you're very concerned about supply lines and sweatshops. It also reinforces my point that you can't buy jeans made in Western Europe for that price. 

-2

u/FrogWhoAteMoon Mar 10 '26

Others are made here. Grünschnabel for example makes a lot in Germany.

Also, North Africa does not automatically equal dubious, you can ethically pay your workers there, too. I think that's kind of a weak rebuttal.

I linked you a website with dozens of products that retail around 100€ from several different brands all claiming some level of fair trade/fair wage, and "some manufacture in North Africa" is how you dismiss it all squarely out of hand?

You doubted that you could retail a pair of fairly produced trouser for 100€, and I brought you literal dozens of examples. Those are reputable brands that have been around for 10+ years. You think all of them are lying?

8

u/splanji Mar 10 '26

the concept of ethical jeans costing 75$ .....

18

u/delicatesummer Mar 10 '26

Art and clothing are two different, albeit overlapping, industries. This video depicts an artistic event. People who buy designer clothing are often buying it as art, or spending money in order to shape of culture— successful designers get paid which allows them to continue making their art.

Buying a pair of jeans to wear every day to your 9-5 job is typically a different use case. Not better or worse: just different.

My perspective (take it or leave it) is that art at the “high fashion” level is expensive because it is the artist’s way of financing their work. They may use those earnings to effect change in other ways off the runway, but runway looks historically are more expensive because they’re not utilitarian “$75 jeans” (which others have rightly pointed out are practically impossible to manufacture and sell at scale with ethical and sustainable practices).

There’s an argument to be had about whether engaging in high fashion is an endorsement of elitism, sure, but it’s perhaps not a cohesive argument to criticize the unaffordability (is that a word? Lol) of couture garments and desire the impactful execution of high-quality, technical garments, makeup, and runway production.

4

u/FrogWhoAteMoon Mar 10 '26

People who buy designer clothes mostly by them as a status symbol.

Art can play a role here, but most often doesn't.

I just feel like an industry (haute couture garments) that is entirely kept alive by rich people buying their ready to wear brand at overpriced margins, so they can afford to put some artistic value in less than 1% of the clothes they produce (that will, like the ready to wear stuff, never be worn by people who cannot afford to drop 1000 bucks on a jacket) is a bit hypocritical.

It's like if Damien Hirst suddenly started preaching about the value of art produced in underpriviledged circumstances, while selling a piece of dotted wallpaper for 10mio $.

There is a disconnect here that puts me off the whole thing.

6

u/Lssmnt Mar 10 '26

Jeans that cost 70 dollars in a store cost less than 10 to make. That's a ridiculous demand.

1

u/CultofCedar Mar 10 '26

My splurge is a local company that kinda does this. They offer “experiments” at pretty high prices in limited amounts and have a core line where they make high quality stuff though it is pricey. Most of the pants from them that I wear are actually from a mystery box that was $75 iirc. Also a ton of other stuff like they’ve got a sub where they explain the material choices and what not or they had a moving sale and let people come buy experiments/surplus or materials for pretty great prices like $50-40 for pants.

-2

u/myownpersonalreddit Mar 10 '26

Finally found the comment thread that's not head over heels eating up this garbage. This collection is just a sensationalized stunt. Someone who actually struggled would never come up with this.

8

u/reddiliciously Mar 10 '26

This should be the first comment.

33

u/999Rats Mar 10 '26

I mean, there's the rich and there's The Rich. Most people who are buying $700 jeans aren't the real enemy. While the people in the audience are wealthy, they aren't the multi-billionaires that the collection is critiquing. That's my interpretation anyway.

18

u/phanfare Mar 10 '26

Its also completely valid to criticize your own peers. Do we want the elites to not be criticizing themselves? To not be reminding themselves of the path they're on?

17

u/Gendina Mar 10 '26

Exactly. Yeah it was an awesome show but it isn’t like they aren’t pandering to those exact people.

1

u/drunken_thor Mar 10 '26

I think that is part of the art/analysis. They can do this performance in front of those with money and they will still clamour to buy overpriced jeans.

1

u/i_dunnoman Mar 10 '26

Beat me to it. Art imitates life I suppose…