Derelicte - Homeless Chic

It can sometimes be difficult to really appreciate fashion without wondering if knowing that those exorbitant price tags could be put to much better use elsewhere. On the other hand, I think fashion is the closest thing to art without actually being art - interestingly enough, I read a lot of press last week about the brouhaha created by the latest biography of Yves Saint Laurent, written by a Frenchwoman called Marie-Dominique Leliévre. Expressing her reservations on the widely accepted view that Saint Laurent was an artist, she writes: "An artist recreates, reinvents the world, a couturier only dresses it."

I'm not sure how much I agree with her, since great fashion designers change the way the world looks at clothes and their wearers, which makes them creators and perhaps, using Madame Leliévre's definition, artists in their own right.

Regardless, there are times when the boundaries between art, fashion and sheer ludicrousness get a bit blurry, especially when it comes to quotidian outfits using everyday materials to make products that are more often than not factory produced in China. Gawker seems to share my views and has put together a visual of what one could purchase for $15,000 in the quest for homeless chic (a concept I would find hilarious if it weren't a sartorial reality).

What do you think? Is spending almost $3,000 for a threadbare, geeky, falling-apart-at-the-seams sweater fashion, art, or just a subversive statement?