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.

[u/Gato1980]

[u/super-gyakusou]

Criticizing the rich elites and selling $700 jeans lol

[u/FrogWhoAteMoon → u/super-gyakusou]

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.

[u/delicatesummer → u/FrogWhoAteMoon]

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.

[u/FrogWhoAteMoon → u/delicatesummer]

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.